September 3^rd 2009.  That was the day I finally managed to convince Jamie to switch to an Apple iPhone!  We had been using Windows Mobile based phones (HTC Touch) for the past 18 months and were pretty pleased with them.  However in the past 6 months or so, many of our friends, family and more importantly customers have been upgrading to iPhones.  With each small snippet of use to setup their Microsoft Exchange email, I grew more and more impressed with the iPhone and quickly became convinced it was better than any other mobile phone on the market.  All I had to do was to convince Jamie!

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It’s been a long time since I've used Outlook and POP3 email delivery for personal use - I've been using Google Mail for a while now and can’t recommend it highly enough. Intrigued by the number of different area’s Google seemed to be getting involved in recently I wondered if they did domain hosting. A friend of mine mentioned Google Apps and I didn't really know what it was, so I decided to take a look.

In a nutshell, Google Apps allows businesses to deploy Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other web apps to its employees. Everything's hosted by Google, which is what really caught my attention once I started to think about it. Instead of purchasing the hardware and software for say a Microsoft Small Business Server (to act as a File & Print server and Exchange server) and individual Microsoft Office licenses, for $50 per user per year you can deploy Google Apps to each of your staff - effectively outsourcing your IT hardware and software. Now whilst I’m not entirely sure a lot of SME's are ready to embrace this kind of forward thinking technology quite yet, I can certainly see the immediate benefits - 99.9% uptime guarantee, effectively unlimited storage, no special hardware or software requirements and all for around 1/3 of the total cost of competing solutions.

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One of the first things I was tasked with back in 2007 when FIRST4TECH was founded was to create a company website. At that time I convinced myself that the best way to develop the site was in raw HTML/CSS code – to afford me greater flexibility and control. For the most part this worked out well, aside from the headaches and RSI!

Times have changed, website design has evolved and (like it or not) social networking is rife. So at the end of April 2009, we decided it was time to refresh both the design and content of our website. We wanted a cleaner, fresher look as well as updating the content now that have a few years of business under our belts and know what our existing customers appreciate most, and subsequently what sells our services effectively.

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