SBC To Eliminate 7000 Jobs In 2005

SBC, the second largest telco company in the US announced it will cut 7000 jobs in 2005. Actually this is just an extension of its announcement in 2004 that it will eliminate 10,000 jobs. What's more interesting to me is that it lost 266,000 phone lines in the last quarter of 2004, a trend that started in 2001. I suspect many of those lines have been lost to VOIP (Voice over IP). VOIP is phone service over the Internet. I have been using it for about a year and its great. My cost is 50% of what SBC was charging. I am switching to a new VOIP vendor and my bill for unlimited calling will be $199.00 per year!

SBC's monopoly is on the telephone wire coming to your house. They are losing that monopoly because you don't need their wire any more. Now they must compete on the quality of their service. They are going to have a tough time. Just call for service sometime!

If you are an SBC stock holder consider this. I predict that within 10 years wireless high speed Internet will be widely available. Guess what? No wires. Think cable companies are immune? TVoIP (TV over IP) will enable television over high speed Internet and is being tested as you read this. What if you don't need the cable company's wire for your TV?

The next few years will be interesting to watch. This Internet thing just might be something!

I Love RSS!!

Do you have certain Websites or Blogs that you visit regularly to see if any new items have been posted? Wouldn't it be nice if the Website or Blog notified you when something new has been posted? Well that's exactly what RSS is designed to do.

RSS means Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication depending on which article you are reading. What RSS does is allow Websites and Blogs to syndicate their content. Then by using one of many RSS Readers a user can subscribe to syndicated Websites and/or Blogs and be alerted when the subscribed content has changed. This is really useful!

There are many RSS readers. I am using FeedDemon at home. It is a stand alone RSS Reader that is very easy to use. At the office I use Newsgator which is an Outlook add in. Newsgator adds another set of folders to Outlook that accept messages from my subscribed sites and lets me view the content changes.

Many Websites and Blogs have syndicated their content. All 3 of my Blogs are syndicated and our new SSGI Website will be syndicated when we go live with it in a couple of months. You can find a list of RSS Readers by clicking here. For more information on RSS click here.

You can check my SSGI Blog, SSGI HIPAA Blog, and Ed's World Blog by clicking on any one of them. Each of the Blogs is syndicated.

Time To Clean Out Email

We have been fielding a few calls regarding issues with Outlook and/or Exchange lately. In resolving these issues we are noticing that some users are becoming very lax in keeping their email folders cleaned up. In some cases users have over 15,000 messages in their folders.

With disk space becoming cheap a lot of users simply aren't taking the time to clean up. This is a bad idea. First, why keep old stuff? Evaluate how often you go back to find something that's 1 year or less old. How about 1 to 2 years old? How about 2 to 3 years old? If you really must get back to that stuff you should be creating yearly archives that will allow you to call things back while getting them out of your Outlook folders. Large Outlook mailboxes make things run slower and can cause you to receive various Outlook errors. If your Outlook is anything less than Outlook 2003, you can crash Outlook if the file gets larger that 2 Gig.

Organizing Outlook is another concern. Do you keep all your items in your Inbox or your Deleted Items folder? When was the last time you cleaned your sent items folder out? Creating a simple folder system for storing your email will save you lots of time when you are looking for things and keep your Inbox reserved for what it was intended - new items coming in.

Outlook is a great tool. However, it does require regular house cleaning. Give us a call if you want to know more.

Welcome to 2005

It is the end of one year and the beginning of a new one. This is always a good time to do some thinking about your IT assets. First, make sure you have created an End of Year backup and separate it from your normal backup media. If you ever need to be able to get back to 2004 you will be able to. Regarding backup, it's also a good time to cycle out some old tapes and insert fresh ones in their place. If you have tapes that are more than 18 months old you should phase them out. Also, check your backup. Make sure you are able to read tapes back and that everything is being backed up as it should. Have you added storage space this year? Is it included in your backup process?

This is also a good time to review the status of your servers, workstations and peripherals. Replace older machines that are slowing your users down or creating security risks. At the same time evaluate your software licenses. Are you legal? Should you be considering upgrades.

Evaluate how you might use training to help your employees be more productive with the software applications you are using. How about some training for yourself?

Make one of the resolutions you make for 2005 to be more productive with your IT assets!