According to many sources one of the best ways for businesses to stop the spread of influenza H1N1 is to encourage workers to stay home if they experience flu like symptoms. But how will you cope with the loss of potentially 20-30% of your workforce?

Reduced productivity is the last thing we need as we recover from this recession.

The traditional approach to IT is to wait until something breaks and then get it fixed.
This has worked for a long time but if you think about it, how much sense does it really make? Would you drive your car until the wheels feel off? Would you drive without an oil change until the engine seized? NO!! That would cost a lot more in the long run then getting the oil changed when you need it, not to mention the inconvenience of all that downtime to fix the car.

Xobni is an Outlook Plugin we came across courtesy of one of our client’s Dr. Bruce Rowat. www.xobni.com is the website. It’s easy to use and has some really neat features.

Stats: When you select an email Xobni will tell you how many messages you’ve sent and received from that person, show you a graph of the times you typically get those emails, a list of conversations with that person and much more.

Motorola’s T505 Rokr puts an end to expensive car hands free phone kits. What used to cost $500 or more and had to be installed by a professional and was vehicle specific is now available online for about $90, works great, is easy to use and portable from car to car.

In honour of earth day we thought we’d revisit the topic of going paperless. When computers were first entering the business world we were all promised the end of paper as we knew it. However as we all know, paper use is greater now then it has ever been in the past.

Conficker is not a new virus. It first appeared in late 2008, but has recently received a lot of hype including a feature on 60 minutes on March 29th, 2009. The hype is mostly because there are some unknowns about the virus and because some estimates put the number of infections as high as 15 million PCs. According to Symantec less then 1% of the total infections are in the US. Approximately 29% of infections are in China, followed by Argentina, Brazil, Russia, and India.

Have a look on your PC right now down on the right by the clock. How many icons are there? Did you know that EACH of those icons is taking up CPU power and slowing your computer down? Do you really need them to be running all the time?

You can often gain a significant performance increase just by preventing programs from starting up and running in the background.

Change the Philosophy from fire fighting to fire prevention. There’s no question that waiting until something breaks and having an emergency on your hands costs more. When you add up lost work from downtime, emergency service costs, rash decisions, expensive hardware, band aid solutions, not to mention the stress, planning your upgrades before the technology fails is far less expensive.

Mentioned in another blog post by DigitalFire Inc., Software as a Service and Open Source software can really revolutionize small business. The quality of software that the small business owner has access to is truly incredible these days. We’ve collected a few of our favourites here but there are many many more.