Vision Without Converts

While studying philosophy and religion in college, I remember a very bright and incredibly relevant Jesuit telling the class that,”the only thing separating religion from vision is converts.” Religion has converts and a vision without converts is nothing more than a rant!

Perhaps we at OMBNexgen are converts; we have moved our IT infrastructure to the web. Our mission and objective is not simply a vision for us, it is our religion too. We converted and we are religious about using the Internet as our computer! I am guessing that there is a large community of people who don’t realize that they are converts too!

Let’s point out the ways you too are already using the Internet as your computer.
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Who’s Moving To Google Mail?

Every so often we get asked, “Who is moving their email to Googles hosted services?” Located on the right is a featured video of the Chief Information Technology Officer for ASU talking about their efforts to move all of their email services to Google Apps Hosted EMail. The complete and full article of ASU’s story can be found here. ASU’s announcement was as follows,

“Oct. 10, 2006 Arizona State University (ASU) makes Google Apps Education Edition available to 65,000 students. ASU configured and deployed Google Apps for Education, Google’s hosted email, IM and calendaring solution, in under two weeks, including integrating it with home-grown single sign-on and user provisioning systems.”  

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STICKK To Your Goal or PAY!

Ever wondered what it would be like to “put a contract out” on yourself? With the web service Stickk.com you can do just that! Only it is not a contract on yourself as you might imagine. Instead Stickk.com has developed an ingenious service that allows you to set a goal, set a price for failing to achieve that goal, and then setting up a contract to ensure you meet your goal or else pay the price you set for failing to meet that goal.

Stickk.com puts new meaning into the concept of overcoming inertia, which is often the biggest impediment to success, by using the web to create tools for helping you to achieve a goal. Users of the service set up a cash penalty for failing to achieve a goal and before starting the process of tracking the desired goal or objective, the penalty portion of the contract has to be funded first.

A contractual obligation is established for paying someone or some organization when desired milestones are not met. As part of the process a “referee” is selected to objectively assess that the stated goals and milestones are being met.

While each of us knows there is a real cost (with cost having all of the usual meanings) to failing to reach a goal, Stickk.com makes the cost part of failing much more immediate and motivating. Tired of wishing you would develop the new marketing program for your business, stop wishing and get motivated for success by using Stickk.com.

MTGM - What Is It?

Move To Google Mail (MTGM) is OMBNexGen’s premier product offering for getting your email moved to Googles commercial hosting services. Google offers the best email hosting services available. The hosting services are part of the Google Apps products.

OMBNexGen has developed, tested, and perfected a set of tools, implementation guides, and action plans to move you’re existing email infrastructure to Google Mail services. Why would you want to move your email to Google Mail services? You want to move your email to Google Mail services because Googles solution is better, cheaper, and more secure than any other email solution on the market! Google Mail is absolutely and without a doubt superior to Microsoft Exchange, Louts Notes, MDaemon, and or any other mail server you can list.

Using the MTGM product, OMBNexGen can cover every aspect of migrating you’re existing email services to Google Mail. This includes all server side data, domain, and component services. It includes client side, e.g., Outlook, components (address books, .pst files, etc), and all calendar and shared calendar components. The MTGM product ensures an orderly, comprehensive, and rapid transition to Google Mail. In effect, OMBNexGen will handle every aspect of moving your organization off your current email system and onto Google Mail.

Regardless of what you are currently using for email services, OMBNexGen believes the first and most important task an organization needs to perform is to get out of the email business. Self managed, self hosted, and self administered email solutions is costing your organization needless amounts of money.

Please contact us to get complete pricing for the MTGM Product as well as to get any further information that you may need. You can contact us by calling us @ 415.233.6856 or via email by clicking HERE.

The MTGM product can be deployed and used anywhere so don’t let geographic location be an impediment to getting the best product available for Moving To Google Mail.

JOTT - Can’t Live Without It!

Every so often I learn about a web based tool or service that is so compelling I often wonder how I ever lived without it. JOTT is one of those web tools. Currently in Public Beta mode, think Google Beta (wink wink), JOTT allows you to call a toll free number and send an email message.JOTT does this by transcribing the voice message you leave and then sending it to an email address.

I use JOTT frequently and the transcription effectiveness is great. I rarely have miss translated words and when I do it usually is a name.Over the course of time JOTT has continued to add features and services within the basic “free” product. There is an online email address book that allows me to associate a simple name with an email address, i.e., all I have to say is, JOTT My Client and it automatically gets the associated email address.Recently JOTT added an interface to Google Calendar (yet another reason to move one’s email infrastructure to Google Mail - see MTGM) and reminders that can be setup to send emails in the future.

JOTT supports JOTTing yourself so now when I walk out of a client meeting and I need to remind myself of some piece of information, I simply JOTT myself and I get both a voice message and an email delivered to my email address.If you have a cell phone, JOTT is a must have and is absolutely the best web based productivity tool I have ever used. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

MEDIAMAX - The Online File Server

We “tekies” @ OMBNexGen are frequently asked about the best external hard drives for extra disk space. Most people are completely surprised when we answer, none! Stop spending money on hard drives and invest in an Internet hard drive like MEDIAMAX! Getting an Internet hard drive from MEDIAMAX is a no brainer especially since you can get 25GB for free!

MEDIAMAX is an Internet company that offers online file storage that is easy and intuitive to use. For PC users there is small client piece of software that can be used to assist in moving files from you PC to MEDIAMAX. For those of us who are real tekies and use MACs, you really don’t need the client. To move files either up or down from MEDIAMAX all you have to do is drag and drop files onto a load screen and away they go.

MEDIAMAX provides all kinds of help screens to assist in getting files loaded and or downloaded. In addition they have organized the web application in a fashion that helps organize files by types and use. There are premium services that can be purchased for things like increased monthly disk space, additional bandwidth per month for loading files, and services to have shared files that can be used to exchange files with whomever you would like.

Buying any more external hard drives is crazy! They don’t really lend themselves to being truly external / portable. Worst of all to really be safe you have to buy two, one to store your data on and one to be the backup of the other. Hard drives are going to fail and they are going to make life miserable when they do fail. Go to MEDIAMAX today and get your own online hard drive!

MOZY On Line Backup Service

Looking for a solid on-line backup service, make sure to take a look at the product offerings from MOZY. Offering backup solutions for both PCs and MACs MOZY employs a relatively small downloadable and locally executed backup agent. MOZY can backup virtually any file / data type on your local system. Best of all the backup data is stored on the Internet and hence can be retrieved from anywhere.The MOZY offering comes in two flavors: There is the MOZYHome edition which is inexpensively priced @ $4.95 per month for unlimited backups and there is the MOZYPro edition which is for virtually any sized organization. Pricing for MOZYPro is $3.95 per system license and an additional $.50 per GB per month for storage space.Next month we will be providing a complete review of both the MOZYHome and MOZYPro editions based upon real home life and real business implementations of the two product offerings. In the mean time make sure to browse on over to MOZY and check out the offerings for yourself!

Move Your Business To The Web

Moving your business to the web today is more than possible, it is a reality that is costing you unnecessary expense by failing to do so! Using the business tenant that time is money, failing to move your business to the web not only costs you hard cash, it is costing you to waste time too.

Each time a business starts, or in the course of ongoing operations, or decides to upgrade to new software or hardware there is a one time customized event to create functional communications, financial management, and customer management and operations systems.  Once created those systems remain frozen in time as business owner fears changing it will disrupt the flow of business potentially angering customers and employees. The doing business as usual freeze even occurs if the status quo is inadequate and or costing too much money.  This is a completely inefficient method of doing business.

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