October 29th, 2009 by Alex Nozdrin 
Wireless networks (Wi-Fi) seem to be at every stop these days: at hotels, coffee shops, schools, libraries and airports. In fact, you can walk around for blocks in downtown Chicago and stay connected by roaming among multiple free Wi-Fi hotspots and office wireless networks. The technology’s great convenience drives many businesses to deploy their own Wi-Fi networks, and doctors are no exception. We are getting a flurry of interest in business-grade Wi-Fi from our healthcare clients, and a lot of it is driven by the deployment of Electronic Medical Records Systems (EMR). Since many doctors now maintain patient charts and records electronically, doing so on wirelessly connected tablet PCs and laptops offers great advantages in patient experience, portability and doctor satisfaction. If you’re thinking of deploying a Wi-Fi network for your office, here are some things you should consider:
Hardware:
The hardware you’ll need to set up a Wi-Fi network in your office is fundamentally the same as what you probably use at home now, but there are some differences:
- You may need a more powerful wireless router or a system with multiple access points to cover your entire office. Because of all the walls in your office (exam rooms, storage areas, etc), it takes greater signal strength to cover the same area. You also get a lot more interference from your office equipment and neighboring businesses that also use Wi-Fi. If one wireless router is not enough, you may need to install a system that has several access points and can manage connection hand-offs among them. It’s important to have good wireless coverage, since Wi-Fi significantly degrades in speed as you get farther away from the signal source. Calling up larger diagnostic files on a slow (or even intermittent) connection will drive you nuts fast.
Let’s face it, the iPhone may be the coolest piece of consumer technology you can get your hands on today. It looks great, has a user interface unlike anything else we’ve seen from mobile phones and packs a ton of features for a relatively affordable price (an 8Gig 3G model was $99 at the time of this post). The question we get asked a lot, though, is whether iPhone is fit for use as a true business device in a challenging environment like a law firm. Here’s a quick rundown of iPhone’s features across categories that our attorney customers say matter to them.
probably selected your first email service years ago when you started the business and didn’t touch it since. Email comes in, email goes out, why mess with it? Many reasons, as it turns out. Chief among them is the ability of a good email and collaboration solution to transform the way you manage business information, work together and communicate with your customers. From sharing your contacts and calendars to unlimited inbox sizes to easy scheduling of meetings and resources, enterprise class email solutions deliver high return on investment through increased productivity and better management of critical data. We aren’t suggesting that every company of every size should get one, but everybody would do well to perform a cost benefit analysis on this.
Voice over Internet protocol (or VoIP) allows you to use your broadband Internet connection for your phone service. Replacing traditional phone lines and plans with VoIP services usually results in lower calling rates, better features, more flexibility and lower management costs. Plus if you’re just now approaching the size when you need a phone system, hosted VoIP offerings can save you the initial expense of buying and deploying one.
If you use both Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook’s calendar function you are probably looking for an easy and automatic way to sync the calendars to access all information all the time without having to switch between calendars. The easie
st way to achieve this is to sync Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook . I just found a cool way to do this on 
Why It’s on Our Radar
