I have been nominated for the 2012 SMB150 awards. This award honors the top 150 Small and Medium Business technology experts, vendors, and partners. My nomination in the expert category reflects my growing reputation as an event speaker, trainer, and consultant to IT Managed Service providers nationwide.

Please vote once a day for Me!
http://www.smb150.com/search.php?search=matthew+adkins

I am now booking for speaking engagaments in 2012. To give back to our local area I will speak at your Chamber, association, or company event for free if you are in Northwest Ohio or Southwest Michigan. For more details call us at 419-269-9918.

Serving the Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan market for 10+ years, Matthew Adkins is the President of VanGuard Technologies, a Microsoft Certified Small Business Specialist. As an industry leader Adkins has appeared on numerous SMB IT service delivery and disaster recovery expert panels, spoken at various local and national events, been voted into the prestigious MSPMentor 250, and is a member of the Level Platforms Partner Advisory Council.

Recently my Droid began bugging me because I was low on memory. Even with deleting all the apps I could spare, moving apps to the SD card, and almost elminating text messages I still ran out of memory and was unable to receive new text messages or update applications. The cause? My e-mail application TouchDown.

TouchDown is a great e-maill app for those of us connecting to e-mail servers such as Microsoft Exchange who want a lot of control of our e-mail, the ability to download folders, and not having incoming e-mail wake us up at 3 AM. TouchDown can also use a lot of space – 45 MB in my case.

Fortunately, there is a solution. You can change the location where TouchDown stores the database to the SD card. They caution against it as there is a possibility of issues when accessing Exchange while the SD card is mounted on the PC. Since my Droid’s SD card is rarely mounted this shouldn’t be an issue.

How do you move your TouchDown database to SD card? “From the main Touchdown screen, press the Menu icon and choose More | Profiles and you will see the first screen above. Long-press the Default Account name, and you will see the second screen. You would choose Move to SD Card. It will give you a warning and then it only takes a couple of minutes and you are good to go. You can move it back at any time….” – The complete article with a screen shot can be viewed at: http://www.simplemobilereview.com/nitrodesk-touchdown-save-your-data-to-the-sd-card/.

If you have questions about this or any other article please give us a call at 419-269-9918 and we will be happy to speak with you!

With our new “Quick Ticket” option you can create tickets in Client Access Portal faster then ever.

Starting today, clients of VanGuard Technologies now have a simpler way to enter tickets into their Client Access Portal: the “quick ticket.” The Quick Ticket is a very simple form used to create and submit tickets via the Client Access Portal and Taskfire. Users will be able to create and submit tickets with only a ticket title and a description. To utilize this new feature you just need to login in to your Client Access Portal as usual. Once you log in to CAP you will see that a new icon has been added: Create Quick Ticket.  Click on the button, enter your ticket title and description and you are done. We hope this make the Portal easier for you.

Apple Founder Steve Jobs Dead at 56

Jason Mack of the Toledo Free Press wrote a wonderful tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in today’s web edition of the Toledo Free Press. In this article he weaves in reflections and comments from President Obama, competitors, and friends as well as from Toledo area tech personalites.

While I normally am happy to assist the Free Press, this is one quote I had wished I never would be asked for:

http://www.toledofreepress.com/2011/10/06/jobs-remembered-for-innovation-entrepreneurship/

Hanging on my wall in my office are my MCT certificate, my MCSE certificate, Bob Parson’s 16 rules of Success, and this:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you you do.”
- Steve Jobs

I love what I do because of what Steve Jobs created.

VanGuard Technologies recently attended the 2011 ASCII Success Summit in Chicago, IL. The SMB IT Success Summit provides solution providers business building activities, market intelligence and an array of partnering opportunities all in just a single day. While there we renewed acquaintances with friends from vendors and other IT service providers, attended training, and shot a commercial for one of our vendors. The event was made memorable by a power outage affecting 250,000 customers. All day Wednesday and most of Thursday the hotel had minimal power. One of our vendors was handing out flashlights with their logo on them – they were a huge hit!

Being a member of the ASCII group provides VanGuard with access to other IT service providers throughout the US and Canada allowing us to exchange information, share resources, and gives quick access to product experts. ASCII membership differentiates us from the competition. We were the only service provider form the Toledo area in attendance! More information on the benefits our clients gain from our ASCII membership can be found here: http://www.ascii.com/member. More information on VanGuard Technologies can be obtained at www.vanguardtech.net or by calling 419-269-9918.

We answered a few questions for Geek Squad while we were there.

VanGuard recently attended the Spring SMBNation event in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The event is held every year and features many seminars on the newest and best ways of providing quality, value-added computing services to small and medium businesses. Also included were technical overviews of various products designed for the small and medium business market. This year’s theme was on cloud computing and highlighted many Microsoft technologies such as Office 365. Hundreds of IT providers from around North America were in attendance (including Geek Squad agents attempting to understand how to service small businesses). VanGuard was the ONLY service provider from the Toledo area in attendance.

In addition to the main event, VanGuard also attended a full day’s training by Cisco on the new UC320 Business Phone System. This phone system is a digital system designed to bring the same high quality, feature rich, durable phone systems to small business that the big companies have. The twist here is the UC320 is very affordable with a suggested retail price of $999 and phones starting at under $100. In addition to affordability the system is also very easy to use and program using a simple web interface.
Cisco Phone systems as well as cloud computing services such as Office 365, hosted e-mail (Exchange), SharePoint, and spam filtering are available now from VanGuard Technologies at www.vanguardtech.net or 419-269-9918.

VanGuard President Matthew Adkins recently attended the annual Microsoft-Intel Training event held in the Chicago area. At this event Matthew attended presentations from Microsoft and Intel on their newest products. The afternoon session was composed of hands-on lab training with Microsoft’s newest sever for small and medium businesses – Microsoft Small Business Server 2011.  Small Business Server 2011 affordably provides e-mail, document management, and file services for up to 75 users while Small Business Server 2011 Essentials is designed for companies of up to 25 users and features employee desktop backup. Both products are available now from VanGuard Technologies, Toledo’s Premiere Microsoft Small Business Specialist. Call 419-269-9918 or visit www.vanguardtech.net for more information.

Happy Mother’s Day weekend!

I just returned from a speaking engagement in Chicago (see www.matthewadkins.com) and met an old friend and some new ones. I was thinking about how I need to do better to keep in touch when this e-mail popped into my box from Barbara Dove at the Dove Help Desk. How timely. I think it’s great advice and wanted to share:

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With LinkedIn, the go-to networking source for business people, you should be building your network by inviting and accepting invitations from business people you trust.  You may find these people to qualify to be in your network after only one meeting at a trade show for example. 

 To get better acquainted, though you should follow up with a cup of coffee, lunch, or meet at a follow-up event.  For that reason, a periodic review of your LinkedIn network on a name-by-name basis can help you remember the people you should be connecting with. 

You can send an e-mail right from the person’s LinkedIn profile, asking to set up a phone conversation (good) or meeting (better).  When you’re meeting, always remember to ask, “And how can I help you?”

—–

Learn more about how using new media such as LinkedIn can help you reach your long-term business planning goals by giving me a call. I will be happy to show you how you can use the power of the many free or affordable Internet services to expand your client base and get some great Raving Fan Testimonials.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com

Make it a great day.

-Matthew