One of the biggest myths that small business owners are bombarded with is that you need a copy of Microsoft Office installed on all your PC’s to be able to communicate with the outside world. This might have been true once upon a time, but is decidedly not the case now. Now there are several office packages out there that offer comparable features with Microsoft Office whilst being a lot cheaper or in  some cases free. We’ve picked three of the more convincing alternatives to Microsoft’s mammoth wallet drainer.

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I like working for small business. For me it’s satisfying to make changes that you can see have not only made a difference to people’s bank balance, but also in some small measure makes their life easier. Serenity IT is based around the idea that IT and technology should be easy to use and should add value to a business rather than adding frustration.

A small company can reap immense benefits from the proper use of technology. It can make it easier to track finances and orders, allow you to communicate instantly with customers, and enable you to advertise cheaply and affectively. And it can all be done without having to spend a small fortune and constantly upgrading your hardware and software.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to write some articles that will show you how you can be making better use of technology for your small business. These will range from the best way to back up your date, how to protect your computers from viruses and malware, through to how you can engage with your customers online. And it doesn’t matter if your business is building, tiling, selling pants, or trading in Elephants; they’ll be tips you’ll be able to use presented in an easy to digest form (We like lists!)

drop us an e-mail if you have something you’d like us to cover, and make sure you follow us on twitter for the latest small business hints and tips!

Well, it’s been a while since our last blog update; luckily we have lot’s to update you on!

First off we’ve been busy improving our hosting offering to you guys. After our last outage we sat down and thought long and hard about how we can improve our service, and we think we’ve come back stronger than ever.

Backups

We now do nightly backups of everything; your data, your backups and your E-mail. This is backed up to the server your account is on, a remote server, and just in case both are compromised a secure offsite location. If you need anything restored simply contact us and we can restore your data from the previous day.

Helpdesk

We take pride in the personal touch, and have been reluctant to move away from E-mail as a support tool, however we are also aware that this can cause things to be lost. As a result we’ve moved onto a helpdesk supplied by the guys at Zendesk. It’s simple, affective and easy to use. So, from now on we will be logging everything there and encourage you to do the same. You can find it at http://helpdesk.serenityit.co.uk.

Pricing

We’ve simplified our pricing somewhat. We now have three tiers of pricing available. The first two packages are straight up hosting packages, with the Personal package at £9.99  and the fully featured business package at £19.99. These are great packages at great prices, offering plenty of space, bandwidth and features, and of course our personal touch. We also offer the Simplicity package. This is a combination of Hosting and application support, so you can hand off support of both your hosting and your web app to one company. This is a snip at £49.99 per month, and combines our best Hosting features with expert support for your apps.

That’s a flavor of what we are up to. We’re also working on set of web apps that will be released later this year, so keep checking back for more excitment and really wild things from Serenity IT

Regards;

Michael Duffy

Last week we had an extended outage of service combined with data loss. This is something we bitterly regret, and we wanted to ensure that our customers both knew what had happened and how we are going to stop it happening again.

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