2007 is coming to a close.  What a year it has been!  Hopefully everyone’s businesses have done well and you are ready to start 2008 with renewed vigor and enthusiasm as the calendar rolls over.

Its been a tremendous year for all of us at The Montopolis Group, Ltd. and we appreciate all of your business, trust and living through some of our growing “aches”. 

Speaking of “aches” I have been working on my list of 2008 goals for the last few weeks to start the new year off right.  That process always calls on reflecting on what has gone well, and wrong, and set reachable goals to improve both.

One of my professional major goals for 2008 is improved communication between us and our clients.  We do so much internally that we are just not effectively communicating.  I promise this will improve in 2008!

Thankfully, with the wonders of blogging, and a few other home-cooked tricks up our technical sleeves, we now have the start of a far improved way to communicate.

This year was our (and my) first year blogging.  I was hopeful when I started this project in January of this year, but now, 52 posts later, and every month of the year represented, and the impact to our business (more on this in a future post - or engage us if you can’t wait), I have to call this first year a success.  Here’s to an even better 2008!

MUCH more to come, including many new services and products we are close to “unveiling”, in all areas of our business (Systems, eBusiness and Hosting).  2008 is promising to be very exciting!

Happy new year!

I am happy to announce that we are now a Cisco Select Certified Partner and have attained our SMB Specialization!

While we have made quite a name for ourselves as a provider of Cisco services and consultation for almost 8 years now, Cisco never had the “right” vendor program that fit us and our clients.

Luckily we have enjoyed a VERY productive sales and technical relationship with our assigned Cisco Team mates for the last three years.

I look at our new relationship with Cisco as the long engagement that FINALLY resulted in a walk-down-the-isle! 

What does this mean to you?

It means that we passed the “test” with Cisco and they publicly acknowledge that we have what it takes to support clients with under 250 employees.  Of course you already knew that.

It means that we now have access to more tools, training and communication options with Cisco.  But you already know that we don’t stop until we provide the best solution for you.

Most importantly it means we will be able to bring you the most deployed, feature-rich, stable VoIP phone system solution available on the market!  No matter where you look, you’ll see more Cisco VoIP phones than any other.

Cisco’s new VoIP offering for small-medium businesses takes everything they have learned deploying millions of IP phones to the largest organizations in the world, and packaged it for our SMB clients.  Learn more about it here. 

Of course, we look forward to taking this platform and extending it in the all the ways our SMB clients need (because we can’t just leave well enough alone) to make VoIP a true leap-forward for their business.

We will be ordering our new Cisco Phone System as soon as all the ink dries and our accounting folks give the go-ahead.  We know this will be a fantastic solution for those considering a VoIP phone system for their small office (48 phones or less).  No better way to show you this than for us to implement it for ourselves!

And that’s just the start.  More to follow in 2008…

We appreciate your business and look forward to a prosperous and healthy 2008 for all.

If you’re a geek looking for a new LCD monitor for home, office, or print pre-production, you owe it to yourself to check out “The LCD Thread”. 

Its the best collection of LCD Monitor information I have seen in one place.

Of note is the section on correct Calibration of your LCD monitor.  I’ve been eyeing a Huey for months now, but after reading their recommendation, I think I need to upgrade to the Huey Pro instead. 

Here are the links to the latest updates to Microsoft’s Communicator 2007 and Live Meeting 2007 builds.  Communicator 2007 was updated today.

Communicator 2007 2.0.6362.36

Live Meeting 2007 8.0.6362.10

Conferencing Add-in for Outlook 8.0.6362.12

The only real puzzle I am having is getting the Communicator update MSP to apply successfully against the MSI.  It’s worked on every previous build, and lots of other apps, but not with this latest build.  I must be doing something wrong but I’ll be darned if I can figure it out right now.

If you are using Exchange 2007, I highly recommend you upgrade to SP1 AFTER you’ve read through all of the release notes.  This isn’t an upgrade you want to do blind :).