If you are in charge of IT policies at your office or even your work-at-home computer, this article is for you.

Every week I see computers in need of attention. Many of these desktops do not have what I consider to be the most basic of software to enable people to be productive and protect company assets. Here’s my list of software and some basic “To Do” items:

Office Suite: use Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. The latter is free, but it takes some getting used to and could be an issue if you send documents to other companies. I prefer the former.

Desktop Security (anti-virus, spam, etc): There are quite a few vendors in this category. We sell Sophos. You could use Trend, McAfee, Norton, AVG, and others. Buy the corporate editions — yes, free is nice, but you will be missing important features.

Web Browser: Internet Explorer and Firefox. I prefer Firefox.

Use password management software like Keepass. Its free and helps people use complex passwords regularly by providing a place to store all those passwords you should use like Hy7t$tgYT12[. Fun, huh?!

Configure the desktop so that all files created by the user and stored on the OS desktop, My Documents, bookmarks, and e-mail are backed up. This is probably the biggest “oops” issue I see.

Make sure the desktop is configured to automatically lock itself or logoff if no one uses it for 10 minutes. Why leave company information open to the public or unauthorized employees?

If you do it correctly, configure remote access so you can get to your files and/or help others. If its a Windows environment, you can use the Remote Desktop feature or a system like CoPilot, TightVNC, or GoToMyPC.

Finally, if you are in an environment with 5 computers or more, ask your IT service provider about “managed services”. It’s a new service for many of them and it’ll pay for itself in just a few months. More on this one later.

Good luck!

It’s not just Al Gore. We could all do a bit better with the environment. A big offender is the use of paper for printing.

Once its printed, we probably stack it somewhere so it can attract dust. Let no desk surface be uncovered!

Then, we wonder where that dang printout of the schedule went. Didn’t I print it just the other day?

Well, wake up! There are easier ways to manage your docs and then find what you need.

I learned my lesson when I decided to sell TransDigital. We accumulated paper in all forms: plain ol’ wasted paper, signed contracts, technical specs for projects, project status updates, and so on. The prospect of physically moving all of it was not enticing. So, right after selling, we bought an eFax account and faxed it all to ourselves. This allowed us to do the following:

• Recycle the paper
• Organize all our important company documents and quickly recall them
• Store all company documents electronically
• Quit worrying about the “act of God” issues: flood, fire, etc.

I still follow the practice of scanning all important documents (home and work). It’s simplified my life.

Your company can do exactly what I did or do it a little more professionally. There are companies that exist to scan, sort, and store documents. (If you are using them, then this post is skippable!). There is also software that can help you with this.

We sell a system called Teleform (retails at $8000/desktop scanning station). It helps companies manage documents and is one of the industry leaders. When you combine a system like Teleform with internal processes, you can achieve the type of benefits I did. We manage all our POs, signed contracts, policies, etc through scanning systems.

If you are growing rapidly, you should look into software to help you manage the paper, routing documents, and develop a retention policy. Otherwise, you’ll end up buying a lot of filing cabinets, wasting employee time looking for documents, and being frustrated.

Some resources:

Amdoc , Teleform, VeBridge

The latest CIO issue is out and it has a nice article about the “proper” amount of capital to spend on IT systems. The article does a very fair job of presenting the research. Instead of looking at a percent of total revenue or a percent of operating expense, the research details we should use a % of net revenue and % of operating expense.

Other highlights:

• There’s a finite amount that should be invested — beyond which are diminishing returns.
• This is about infrastructure — not software (typically viewed as an investment)
• There are examples by industry.

Enjoy!