As part of our services, Flat Creek evaluates and purchases equipment for our clients. They rely on us to select quality products that will stand up to anything they can throw at it. What good is a $1,200 color laser printer if the output isn’t quality?

But selecting the right product isn’t rocket science. It really just takes some time - and that’s something very few of our clients have. But if you do have the time, here are some great resources to help you evaluate office technology products:

PC World - This page has a list of lists where they have evaluated computers, computer accessories, and home entertainment components. While the ranking system can be misleading, it’s nice to see what professionals think about a product before you go to Sams Club or Costco to buy it.

CNet - Similar to PC World, CNet provides professional reviews of products and gives a ranking or “Editor’s Choice” award to the best in class. Their site is more user-friendly than PC World, plus you get the added bonus of user reviews, which gives a more diversified perspective on your purchase decision.

Amazon - The traditional online bookseller has always made user feedback a centerpiece of its business model, and fortunately this has stayed true as they expanded to other product lines, such as electronics. While an Amazon.com product review is rare, the extensive user reviews can be very insightful.

Hopefully these sites will help you make better product decisions just as they have worked for us. But even if you decide on a product based on these reviews, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. How will it fit with what you already have? When you start putting pieces together, will they work? What’s the best way to buy and setup several units for a whole office? How long does it take to set up?

Well, in that case, I’d hope you’ll just contact us.

PC World has a nice round-up of inkjet and laser multifunction printers for personal/home office needs. These multifunctions can be a great workhorse as they combine several functions: printer, scanner, copier, and fax. As they saying goes, they can do all these things in one unit, but they can’t do them all well. For those who demand quality, I would suggest buying a separate scanner and printer, then using your PC’s modem to send faxes.

PCWorld.com - Top Multifunction Printers

Deloitte Consulting LLP released a study on April 19 with some interesting results… most notably that 70% of participants “have had significant negative experiences with oursourcing projects.” Add to that 44% “did not see cost savings materializing as a result of outsourcing.”

My take is this study shows that just as with the Internet, companies rushed in to this new idea of doing business that was supposed to change everything… and it hasn’t. Just as with the Internet, there are core business principles that have been ignored, and just as with the Internet that resulted in some good ideas gone bad.

Should we not outsource? Of course not, but we should do it smarter, looking at the long-term issues and looking more closely at keeping those functions onshore. We think it’s a great idea for companies to focus on their core compentencies to be more competitive and just enjoy work more. At the same time, moving sensitive operations outside the organization requires a lot of planning from a 360-degree perspective. It’s not just an IT decision to move the help desk overseas. That decision affects customer satisfaction and marketing, which affects stockholder confidence, and sales, etc, etc…

The Deloitte study also notes that 25% of the respondents have cutback on their outsourcing strategies because of - get this - cost and complexity. It doesn’t have to be that way, but maybe this is a good reality check for people drinking the offshoring Kool-Aid. The same work can be done stateside and while the first year costs may not be as cheap, the long-term stability and organizational impact should be well worth the effort.

Outsouring Falling from Favor with World’s Largest Organizations

Here’s a story fresh from India about several employees of an outsourcer who scammed Citibank, a client they were supposedly helping. I didn’t understand the money conversion at first, but News.com reports the call center employees made off with about $350,000 using login information from legitimate customers. That information is supposedly secret, but Citibank got a hard lesson in the trouble with offshoring…

There’s a good reason they are called “Crackberries.” The tiny black or blue devices with the handy keyboard keep us in touch even when we probably shouldn’t be reachable. My wife was only mildly annoyed by my addiction until the Sunday morning when I started replying to e-mails at church. I have since moved over to T-Mobile’s Pocket PC phone, which was really the only wireless data device besides RIM’s Blackberry that was on the market at the time. Since then we’ve seen an explosion of devices - the Treo, the XDA II, the Siemens SX66 (also known as the Audiovox XV6600), the Samsung phones, etc, etc. And of course, most are available from any carrier, which brings a new complexity to the purchase decision.

How does a small company decide where to go? Do you like the Blackberry’s keyboard? Do you like Pocket PC’s applications and storage? Do you like the Treo’s tiny hybrid of the two? Then once you pick a model, do you go with Verizon’s coverage or T-Mobile’s value? Cingular is the service of choice on Capitol Hill so you certainly have to take their plan into account… Arrrgh!

If you know where there is a good online tool to help with this decision making process, I would love to hear about it. CNET.com took a shot at analyzing several new convergence devices, but there’s got to be something better out there… something more like a Q&A wizard…

This has continually been a stumbling block as we try to help small businesses who need the functionality but are afraid to make a decision without knowing all the options. Thanks in advance for your help!

Once upon a time, we used a tool called eRoom in order to collaborate and share documents online. It worked in most situations but on a global scale it failed miserably. Then, we found the new tool out by Microsoft - SharePoint. This is a terrific online collaboration tool to share documents, calendars, contacts, tasks lists, etc. It takes tools that project managers need and puts them together and then puts them online. I know some people aren’t big fans of Microsoft and their products, but if you’re going to take a bite of the apple go ahead and eat the whole thing. That is to say, SharePoint integrates very nicely with Office 2003. You can view contacts, calendars and tasks from the SharePoint site in Outlook and manage document edits in Word and Excel.

To be totally honest, there are a couple of areas where the usability needs some help. For instance, in order to edit a document, you must first select to “check out” the file so it is locked from others who might make conflicting edits at the same time. Once you are finished updating the file, you then must select to “check in.” This seems straightforward but it never fails that someone checks it out, makes their edits, then fails to check it back in. Fortunately, an administrator can perform the check-in but at the risk of losing the editor’s changes. Also, there is no built-in function to send e-mails to the entire SharePoint site - the one useful thing that eRoom did. You can work around this by selecting all of the contacts from SharePoint in Outlook then sending an e-mail to the group.

We currently offer SharePoint services through a third party but hope to purchase the server solution soon in order to make this already inexpensive solution more cost-effective for our clients.

Since we’re on the topic, does anyone else have experience with SharePoint, eRoom, or any other online collaboration tool?