Entrepreneurship, technology and life

Going green to me means being easy on the environment, but whatever we are implementing must also make sense (it can't be too tedious for users) and cents (it has to be same or lower in cost).  Here are some "Go Green" strategies that we have implemented in the office: Office Printer When shopping for our new printer, the requirements are: Laser printer with separate drum and toner unit.   Laser toner is much more economic than inkjets and we also make sure the laser printer we are getting have separate drum and toner unit as the drum unit usually have longer life cycle than the toner. Duplex printing , so that we can save on papers by printing on both sides of the paper without manually flipping and re-feeding the papers. Extra tray for recycle papers (papers that have been printed on one side only).  Please note that we only feed the tray with recycle papers that do not contain confidential information. Scan-to-email function.   Together with a vir...

In my digital marketing company, we outsource a lot of the tasks in the office.  The following considerations are weighed before we decide outsourcing or hiring: Is this role a core competency of our business? If the answer is yes, we will hire if we have enough jobs to keep him/her busy.  If we don't have enough jobs yet, we will outsource until we can get enough jobs to hire one full-time. Photo credit: rawpixel.com Is there a career path and environment for this role to grow in our company? We would like all our team members to grow professionally and personally.  We may have enough jobs for a particular role to be more cost effective hiring in-house, but if we know that we can't provide the right environment for this person to grow, we will outsource the jobs. We outsource our accounting, payroll, systems administration and office boy (despatch) jobs.  There is pretty much no career path for an accountant, a systems administrator and an office b...

We need a phone number for the company for general inquiries, support and also as a back-up number just in case a particular mobile number is not reachable.  This number will be printed and published on all our marketing materials, including letterhead, business cards, website, invoices, etc. Photo credit: Joenibraw Challenges We want as minimal hardware investment as possible and we always have the idea of able to have the whole company work outside the office when necessary. Simple solution will just be getting another mobile phone number and a dedicated mobile phone, to be carried by whoever responsible to answer the incoming calls.  However, we are afraid that having a mobile phone number as our company number would give the impression of a fly-by-night company or a freelancer. Solutions that We Adopted We came across a radio ads from our local telco, Maxis, promoting Unity Hotline service, where we can get a 1-700 hotline number and all incoming calls will ...

I am putting together some tips on data security.  This is not the most air tight security setup, but it is good enough to protect against basic security threat and they are relatively simple to set up. Photo credit: Pixabay Strong Password Will not elaborate on this as there are plenty of articles out there on this.   My rule of thumbs is that the password is at least eight characters, with combination of alphabet, number, and special character.  I also suggest not to use the same password for all logins.  Example, don't use the same password for your Hotmail account, Skype and company online system, so that they don't all get compromised just because one does. Google Apps (Google Suite) We run a lot of our software in SaaS (Software as a Service) and most of them integrate with Google Apps authentication for single sign-on.  This would mean if someone gain access to my Google Apps login, he will gain access to a lot of my company data.  I enab...

I'm a strong supporter of open-source, freeware and SaaS (Software as a Service).  We have recently switched half of our company's computers into MacBook Pro.  Here are a list of software that we installed (or not installed, if we are using SaaS) for common office tasks on all MacBook Pro.  Most of them work on Windows as well since we were previously living in that world. Photo credit: Toni Cuenca Text document, Spreadsheet: OpenOffice  (Free) Presentation: Keynote  (USD19.99).   We previously used OpenOffice for presentation. E-mail, Calendar, Address Book: Google Apps  (Free for 10 users) Anti-Virus: None, however we do run as Standard User instead of Admin on our MacBook.   We previously used Avast on our Windows computers. I am a strong advocate for Google Mail (part of Google Apps) as I have used Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird and some webmail solutions, but nothing come close to Google Mail, in the se...

Background We need a file system to backup all our laptop data files in real-time manner.  We also need a file system to share files among team members.  In previous company, we set up a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and configured backup script that automatically run every morning to backup files from each laptop to the NAS.  We also set up shared folders in the NAS for file sharing purpose.  The shortcoming of the file backup system is that it is not so real-time and it can only run when the laptop is connected to the office LAN (Local Area Network).  The shortcoming of file sharing system is that we can only access the file when connected to LAN or via VPN (Virtual Private Network) when working remotely. Challenges Some of the policies that our company (team of seven as of writing, and we don't intend to get bigger than 30) follows when adopting a IT solution is that: a) Minimal setup cost b) Minimal, if not zero, hardware (disaster recovery and...

Has always been wanting to maintain a blog and finally get to actually do it. I am not sure if I'm a good writer but I figured topics like business, photography, IT and life may not need fanciful words. A little bit about myself: I run a digital marketing agency and I have been previously involved in a few start-ups, some make it and some don't, but I learnt and experienced different things from each and every one of them. By training, I am a programmer, hence the title of this post. Photo credit: Pixabay