March Meeting Summary.

The March meeting topic was Research.  Interesting to see that most of us are on the same page as far as what magazines we read, e-newsletters we get etc.

Some of our favorite magazines were; PCWorld, Redmond Magazine, Disaster Recovery Journal and Accounting Today and The CPA Technology Advisor for those of us in CPA firms.  Some of these magazines are free.  Check them out.

We’re all getting a ton of e-newsletters.  Few RSS feeds but TechWire and Helpnet Security are probably worth getting.

LinkedIn groups we discussed were the CCH, a Wolters Kluwer Business Group, VMWare Group, Boomer Consulting, Inc. Group and several accounting groups.  LinkedIn groups are a great place to ask your peers questions. Several of us had posted questions and got good responses.  Including myself.  Interesting enough I had recently posted a question to the CCH group and 2 days later, a CCH Tech support rep called me and asked if I needed help with my issue, even though I had not placed a service call about the issue.  A little "big brother" but kind of cool to see they monitor that group and are being proactive.

Blogs we’re following were mostly accounting related, but probably good info for all of us.  Check out these;  Accountingweb, Rita Keller-Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders and Mark Russinovich’s tech blog (he also wrote a very good book,  called Zero Day, I finished it in 2 sittings).  All of these can be found with a Google search.

Everyone in the group is an avid Googled  search fan.  Though Jason Thompson (McCauley Nicolas) stated that many of the linked related to the disasters in Japan had viruses attached to them.  As always be careful.  Other popular sites for problem resolution, of course were support.microsoft.com and expert-exchange.com.

Twitter seemed the least used by the group, but we all agreed we're going to have to adapt to using it soon.  Or at least start following a few of the more important and knowledgable people in our areas.  I personally follow Jason Hiner and other Tech Republic staff as well as Roman Kepczyk, Rita Keller and Gary Boomer as leaders in the accounting field.

We also discussed the need to watch what is being said about our firms both on Twitter and Facebook.  While none of us have any practical experience yet, we did discuss that there are various tools to automate the search of both Twitter and Facebook for key words such as your firm name.  If you have experience with any of these, please post a comment and let us know what you think.

If I’ve missed any or you have any other good resources, please post a comment.

Welcome Vendors

The ITMA would like to welcome vendors to join our group.  However, we would like to set some guidelines to everyone's benefit.

If you're a tech related vendor and would like to join our group, get meeting notices and attend any of our meetings we'd be happy to have you.  Simply sign up on our ITMA_KYanna Yahoo group to be put on our list.  http://groups.yahoo.com/

We do ask that you respect our members and not simply make this a sales opportunity.  Our goal is to share information among our members and assist them in doing their jobs.  Obviously, as technology vendors you have much of the information and expertise we're looking for and we greatly appreciate the info you bring to our group.  And we are often in the market to purchase equipment and services.  So, hopefully this will work to our mutual benefit.

March Meeting Topic - Research

Our group discussion for the March meeting will be on research.  What magazines do you read? What web sites and/or blogs do you read?  Do you belong to any LinkedIn groups, follow anyone on Twitter? Have any cool news apps etc.?

We all Google, but what other tools are you using to keep up with the mountains of information our end users and bosses expect us to know off the top of our heads?

We will also have a short business meeting to decide the vendors as members question.

We will be meeting on March 17th (Thursday) at the offices of McCauley Nicolas & Company.  They are located at 702 North Shore Drive, Suite 500, Jeffersonville, IN.  Visit their web site at  http://www.mnccpa.com/ for directions.  The meeting will start at 11:45.

Please email James_Osborne@MNCCPA.com if you can attend.  Hope to see you there.

To Vendor or Not to Vendor.... That is the Question

Should we allow vendors (salespeople) to be members of our group and attend meetings?

Pro:  Since our group is fairly small and we rely on vendors for many of our presentation the advantage is that we build better relationships and our membership gets larger.  We  also have access to more information and vendors may have insight and/or perspectives we hadn't considered.

Con:  Since some of our questions to each other are about vendors, it might infringe on "free discussion" about those vendors.  No one wants to bad mouth a company while they're in the room.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.