Making a software change in your firm or recommending a change to a client can be a tricky process. If you’ve ever done this and who hasn’t, you know all you ever hear is what didn’t work, what they didn’t like or what wasn’t like the old program.
Michael Drury from Oasis (www.oasisky.com) specializes in helping clients choose the right accounting application. But whether it’s a new accounting application, time and billing or scheduling software making the right decision is critical. Michael will guide us through the process of researching, evaluating and helping your firm or client make the right choice, a choice everyone will be happy with.
We will be meeting at 11:45am on Thursday April 21st at the offices of DMLO at 9300 Shelbyville Road, Suite 1100, Louisville, KY 40222. Please email bdaugherty@dmlo.com if you can attend.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
IPads in your Enterprise Environment
What an exciting meeting. Nothing gets a bunch of techno geeks going like a new gadget. OK, so they're not so new, but the IPad is working its way into our business environments and we need to be ready for them.
Our topic of discussion was "IPads in your enterprise network". We were fortunate to have Bob Akridge (Netgain Technologies), Pat Moore (Netgain Technologies), Rodney Daugherty (Digital Solutions) and Eric Coble (Digital Solutions) join our discussion.
Gladys Smith's firm (McMasters Keith Inc.) is actually using IPads as laptop replacements,while most of the the rest of us are using them as convenience tools in addition to laptops.
Various applications were discussed that all seem to have their pros and cons. Some of the apps that were working for members of our group were the new Citrix Receiver (4.2.3), LogMeIN, iTap RDP, Cisco AnyConnect and the VPN tool withing the IPad. Check the App Store for info on these tools.
We also discussed the need to create a "NO iTunes" policy in our firms to prevent confusion of personal vs. business files on your firms equipment.
Other great tools we discussed were DropBox (which give you 2GB of free space) and Evernote which will sync files between computers and devices. Both great tools.
Eric (who previously worked with Apple) warned us to be careful of "jailbroke" devices. Apple may refuse you service and may violate your support agreement if you take them a "jailbroke" device. Many users may not realize their devices have been jailbroke. Watch out for the that "cool app" your brother-in-law or co-worker showed you. Check the web site carefully and be sure you know how to restore your device OS should you need to take your device in for service.
Bob Akridge says his firms uses Bomgar (http://www.bomgar.com/) for remote support and actually lets you remote to devices as well as computers to provide end user support. Very cool.
And thanks to Debie Bramble (Dean Dorton Allen Ford) for pointing out that Exchange (2003 SP2 and up) will allow you to force the pass code feature on any device trying to sync up emails. Great way to take that burden away from your end users. Mark French (Louis T. Roth) quickly used his IPhone to find the links. Here they are: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.01.staybetterconnected.aspx and for Exchange 2010 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997929.aspx. Thanks Mark French (Louis T. Roth) for finding the links.
And finally a couple of really cool apps discussed were a "Screamer" app that helped an end user recover a stolen device and my personal favorite this month is Hungry Shark. OK, not actually work related, but a great stress reliever (if you think of the swimmers as end user, annoying salesmen or the neighbor with the barking dog).
Submitted by: Bob Daugherty
IT Director at DMLO
Our topic of discussion was "IPads in your enterprise network". We were fortunate to have Bob Akridge (Netgain Technologies), Pat Moore (Netgain Technologies), Rodney Daugherty (Digital Solutions) and Eric Coble (Digital Solutions) join our discussion.
Gladys Smith's firm (McMasters Keith Inc.) is actually using IPads as laptop replacements,while most of the the rest of us are using them as convenience tools in addition to laptops.
Various applications were discussed that all seem to have their pros and cons. Some of the apps that were working for members of our group were the new Citrix Receiver (4.2.3), LogMeIN, iTap RDP, Cisco AnyConnect and the VPN tool withing the IPad. Check the App Store for info on these tools.
We also discussed the need to create a "NO iTunes" policy in our firms to prevent confusion of personal vs. business files on your firms equipment.
Other great tools we discussed were DropBox (which give you 2GB of free space) and Evernote which will sync files between computers and devices. Both great tools.
Eric (who previously worked with Apple) warned us to be careful of "jailbroke" devices. Apple may refuse you service and may violate your support agreement if you take them a "jailbroke" device. Many users may not realize their devices have been jailbroke. Watch out for the that "cool app" your brother-in-law or co-worker showed you. Check the web site carefully and be sure you know how to restore your device OS should you need to take your device in for service.
Bob Akridge says his firms uses Bomgar (http://www.bomgar.com/) for remote support and actually lets you remote to devices as well as computers to provide end user support. Very cool.
And thanks to Debie Bramble (Dean Dorton Allen Ford) for pointing out that Exchange (2003 SP2 and up) will allow you to force the pass code feature on any device trying to sync up emails. Great way to take that burden away from your end users. Mark French (Louis T. Roth) quickly used his IPhone to find the links. Here they are: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.01.staybetterconnected.aspx and for Exchange 2010 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997929.aspx. Thanks Mark French (Louis T. Roth) for finding the links.
And finally a couple of really cool apps discussed were a "Screamer" app that helped an end user recover a stolen device and my personal favorite this month is Hungry Shark. OK, not actually work related, but a great stress reliever (if you think of the swimmers as end user, annoying salesmen or the neighbor with the barking dog).
Submitted by: Bob Daugherty
IT Director at DMLO
Friday, February 18, 2011
First Post
This blog will attempt to give not only the members of ITMA information about our monthly meetings, summaries of those meetings, but also commentaries about equipment, cool tech stuff and what's going on in the CPA and Law firm industries (as well as a few other industries represented in our group).
We are open to anyone who has an interest in our group and attending our meetings as a guest or joining our membership. There is never a cost of membership, but our meetings are typically lunch meetings and there is usually a cost (currently $10) for attendance to cover cost.
Watch for more information in the next couple weeks.
We are open to anyone who has an interest in our group and attending our meetings as a guest or joining our membership. There is never a cost of membership, but our meetings are typically lunch meetings and there is usually a cost (currently $10) for attendance to cover cost.
Watch for more information in the next couple weeks.
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