When the first responders at Georgia-based National EMS go to work, they save lives. They also produce a mountain of paperwork, all of which must be accurately managed and securely stored for a minimum of seven years. The storage of all these documents was a monumental task, requiring the company to use a large warehouse space to store it all. And the labor hours wasted in storing and managing it all, and retrieving documents as needed, was overwhelming the 12-person office staff.

To get all this paperwork under control, National EMS called Computer Troubleshooters NRD. We assessed the company's current infrastructure and came up with a solution that simplifies the process of managing all this documentation while meeting the stringent requirements of the Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act and other government regulations.

Businesses planning a move to Windows 7 need a more rigorous planning and assessment tool than the consumer-grade Upgrade Advisor. The early success of the operating system notwithstanding, you need to do some due diligence up front to determine if the existing hardware and software you rely on will work with the new operating system. If you only have a handful of systems to assess the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor should do the trick. For larger deployments, the more appropriate tool is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 4.0--or MAP.

MAP is a Solution Accelerator from Microsoft that allows you to inventory and analyze the systems in your organization without requiring any sort of agent software to be installed on the endpoints. MAP leverages existing Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory Domain Services, the Remote Registry Service, and the Computer Browser Service to gather information and produce informative reports to help guide your IT planning.

Windows 7 is doing much better out of the gate than Windows Vista did. As good as the OS roll out is going, there are still legacy devices out there that don't have drivers and software updates to work with Windows 7. The vast masses of users who have held on to Windows XP are particularly vulnerable to this issue which is why Microsoft created XP Mode virtualization to ease the pain of transition.

Now that Windows 7 is here, you have some decisions to make. Microsoft has a virtual smorgasbord of options to choose from and it can get a little tricky trying to figure out which flavor of Windows 7 you should choose. In particular, which version of Windows 7 is right for small and medium businesses?

If you look at new desktops and laptops available from Best Buy or Dell you can see that there are some de facto choices made for you depending on the class of the system. Consumer systems come with Windows Home Premium (mostly the 64-bit version), and business systems come with Windows 7 Professional. Large businesses fall into a whole different category with both Microsoft and vendors like Dell, and those systems would come with Windows 7 Enterprise by default.

Google Voice has been the subject of controversy and making headlines for all the wrong reasons since availability was expanded earlier this year. On the other hand, even with limited availability Google Voice has reached almost 1.5 million users, and half of them reportedly use the service daily.

The reason for its popularity isn't hard to see. Google Voice provides a plethora of call handling features at a price that can't be beat--free. For small and medium businesses, Google Voice is an opportunity to use advanced call management features typically reserved for expensive voice solutions in larger enterprises.

Microsoft's new flagship desktop operating system is here. The failure of Windows Vista, combined with the lengthy exposure the public has had to Windows 7 during the development process have resulted in a fairly successful launch of for Windows 7 (perpetual rebooting issues notwithstanding).

Because of the issues, both real and perceived, with Windows Vista, the vast majority of PC users have clung to Vista's predecessor, Windows XP. According to Net Applications, Windows XP holds a dominant share of the operating system market with 71 percent. That means that nearly 3 out of 4 PCs are still running the legacy operating system.

The countdown is underway to the Droid invasion. Verizon has unveiled the official specs and contract details, and pre-orders are already underway at Best Buy. By this time next week the Motorola Droid will be unleashed and we will find out if the reality can come close to the hype.

The Droid is the first device built on Android 2.0, the latest version of Google's open-source mobile operating system. Android is a capable mobile platform that offers benefits for any user, but small and medium businesses have even more to gain by embracing Android-based mobile phones like the Verizon Droid.

In 2007, travel booking and expense firm Concur Technologies was growing at a rapid clip, but maintaining the IT infrastructure to serve its customers travel-booking and expense-tracking needs required an increasing amount of manpower and time.

The company regularly pushed out changes to its software, issuing a major feature release, which often encompassed more than a week of preparation, every month, and smaller bug fixes several times a week. The updates required patching the software on each of the physical servers in the company's data centers, an activity fraught with the potential for manual errors.

Clarkdale Volkswagen, a leading car dealership in the city of Vancouver, is about to celebrate its 50th year in business. It goes without saying that an IT strategy was not in place when the dealership opened its doors in 1960, and the company's technology infrastructure has grown in an ad-hoc way over the years. To bring order to the chaos and streamline operations, Clarkdale called in Computer Troubleshooters Canada.

Clarkdale VW's last major IT overhaul was in 2003, but the outdated POP3 e-mail and decentralized network of desktop PC offered little communication between departments the 65 employees, made backups a sporadic hassle, and kept IT costs high by requiring excessive labor to maintain. Clarkdale was ready to hire a full-time IT person to manage this mess, but knew it would mean taking a big hit to the payroll budget. Computer Troubleshooters recommended a virtualization makeover to simplify the company's tech infrastructure and eliminate the need for full-time IT staff.

In recent years, Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis has experienced its share of technological growing pains. The business staff of ten serves the families of children receiving medical treatment for cancer and other serious illnesses by providing a home away from home while the children receive treatment at the local St. Jude's Children's Hospital.

To help visiting families keep in touch with family and friends back home during their time of need, the Ronald McDonald House desperately wanted to upgrade both its computers and its network. Executive Director Caron Byrd turned to my team at GHT Technology Group for assistance.