C2IT Blog
News, Resources & Links
Welcome to our blog. This is a place where we share our thoughts as well as links to great articles we hope you’ll find useful.
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How to Hire Your IT Guy
Last month I titled my column “How to Fire your IT Guy.” It was a catchy title I had on my mind for awhile. The world of technology consulting and IT support offers an almost endless variety of options to outsource your technology needs from the one-man-band to...
How to Fire Your IT Guy
“How to Fire your IT Guy” - sounds like a catchy title to me. It also sounds a little self-serving, since I’m the owner of an IT business that’s always searching for new clients. The truth is, my business has been “fired” before. It’s only happened a couple times, but...
Practice Makes Perfect… or at Least Prepared
My 7th grade son came home a few days ago and told my wife and I that they’d had a drill at school to prepare for an active shooter situation. The school had done a great job of notifying parents in advance that this drill was going to take place, so we weren’t caught...
REDUNDANCY – Finding Balance in Spare Parts
Two weeks ago a client called us with more than a hint of panic in his voice. “Everything is down. The only thing on the server is a message stating that hard drives have failed.” As you’d expect, he wanted us to come out right away. When our technician arrived on...
How Safe is the Cloud?
Backing up our critical files and email is something we’d all agree is important, but we often treat it like flossing our teeth. We know we should do it daily but it’s all too easy to take shortcuts or push it back until the next checkup. You never know when you’re...
Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery – Which are you preparing for?
As we enter a new year, many business owners do their best to step back and look at their business from the high level perspective that gets lost amongst the weeds of day to day operations throughout the year. One of the areas of technology that many businesses will...
Page Not Found – Friendly Error Pages and Missed Opportunities
My business has just moved across town to a new space that better suits our team’s work environment. One of the first things we did after moving was to get our mail forwarded. As part of that process, we’re building a growing list of everyone we need to communicate...
C2IT Consulting, Inc. opens new office to make room for growing team
C2IT Consulting, Inc., a full-service technology firm specializing in strategic IT management, mobile apps, and web development, announced that they are establishing a new office in Plainfield. C2IT makes this move during a continued period of strong growth as they...
Office 365 Email Server Settings
We’ve helped many businesses migrate from simple email systems to Microsoft Office 365. The migration process itself can be a challenging and time-intensive process, but once users are on the new system, it’s rather simple to set up email clients such as Microsoft...
Trends in Tech – Cloud-Based Team File Storage
Last year I wrote about how small businesses have been moving email systems to the cloud at an amazing rate. Expensive and redundant email servers are being tossed into recycle bins as systems like Microsoft Office 365 and Google Suite help businesses minimize their...
Life in our new office… Day 2
Well, we've made it through day #2. Things are starting to run smooth, and I've discovered that it's rather nice to have a door you can shut while you're on a phone call with clients and other conversations are happening throughout the building. We brought on a new...
Life in our new office… Day 1
Today was C2IT’s first day in our new office on Clark’s Creek Road in Plainfield. One of my employees commented, “this must be a pretty big thing for you,” and he’s spot on. We’ve been in business for almost 15 years now and in all that time, I’ve never had my own...
Moving Technology – Lessons Learned
We haven’t told many people yet, but we’re preparing to move our business to a new office space soon. It’s been just a short time since our last move, and as I look back, we’ve done a lot of moving over the past 7 years as our business has grown. The move we are...
Small Business Technology – “I Did It My Way”
Early this morning I talked shop with one our clients at our local gym. We’ve had a project on tap for several months and it’s been tabled here and negotiated there, but now it’s GO time… they’d like the job done yesterday, and they’d like to do some of the work...
Custom Software Development – Invent Your Own Wheel
Raise your hand if you’ve had a great app idea that no one’s thought of yet. Is there anyone among us who hasn’t hit our head on a wall trying to find ways to make technology work the way we want it to? If you’re like most, you’ve reached that point and said “fine…...
Integration – Connecting the Dots of Modern Technology
For the past few months, I’ve been writing about ways business leaders can build technology solutions that will help their business blossom. Last month we covered customization, which is where an off-the-shelf solution like QuickBooks is tweaked to meet specific...
Customizing Software to Meet Your Business Needs
Last month I introduced a short series of articles aimed to help business leaders like you and I evaluate the ways we can “invent our own wheel” in terms of technology systems, software, and mobile apps. I divided the paths forward into three categories -...
Am I Ready for Custom Software?
“There’s an app for that.” This slogan is the “Where’s the beef?” of our time - a marketing slogan so ubiquitous that it’s all over popular culture. There’s a lot of truth to this statement, whether you’re implementing a collaboration tool for your team or managing...
Digital Profiles – Trading Privacy for Convenience
What was the last piece of private information you posted online? Was it a PM on Facebook about problems with your boss? An electronic bill-payment to your mortgage company via your bank’s website? Maybe you journaled some private thoughts in Google Docs. The...
The “One Stop Shop” – A Rare Breed in Tech
I own a technology consulting business. I’m often asked, “What kind of consulting do you provide, exactly?” This has always been a tough transition to my elevator pitch because the answer of “almost all of it” doesn’t open the door to a specific, exciting, and...
Customizing e-commerce search results in WordPress
We recently built a WordPress / WooCommerce website for a client to help them sell their product online. WooCommerce does a great job at displaying groups of products in nice neat grids when you're looking at categories, but when you do a search, the system refused to...
Tying Up The Loose Ends of Technology
I was meeting a prospective client earlier this week and was early, so I stopped in to see friends who had recently moved their growing business from a shared office space to their own brick and mortar in the heart of downtown Plainfield. After the tour, we had a few...
Remote Access – What are my Options?
Here we are, deep in the midst of winter, and if your business is anything like mine, you’ve already had to declare at least one “snow day” for your team. Whether it’s a foot of snow or just an eight of an inch of ice, winter weather can wreak havoc on commutes to the...
Good Enough Is Good Enough
I’ve had this column on my mind for a few weeks now, but haven’t figured out how to get it “just right.” I laugh at myself as I write that, because the entire point of this column is that you don’t have to get it perfect to get it DONE. I’m reading a book right now...