Scott VanDenPlas

About a month ago, Harper asked me to do a presentation with him at Ignite Chicago. It looked like fun, so I said yes. But then we failed completely at planning anything for it, and it came down to us throwing something together at the last minute today. We found out we would be third to last, and it was scheduled at Debonair, so we knew our slightly intoxicated crowd would be ready for a little break.

I threw together slides, collaborated with Harped via Google docs to work on them, and then just went over and talked. We never practiced or wrote anything to talk about. It was a ton of fun. We started it off with a SMS vote for the topic we would talk about.. but we put up Jason Rexilius’ cell phone number. We checked with him later, and for the record it looks like Mustache wins. I’m sure voting is still open though.

Watch the presentation here. They were taking video, so I’ll post it when I find it. Check out Harper’s post too.

IT infrastructure is my thing. Right now, I think there are 5 smart choices that any IT staff can implement with almost no effort at all.

1. Use Google Apps.

If you are using anything else for email right now, you’re losing out. If you are using anything else for calendaring right now, you are losing out. If you are using anything else for groups and mail lists, you are losing out. If you are using anything else for IM, you are losing out. Not to mention document sharing and plain old vanilla search.

Google Apps is hands down the best and easiest choice when it comes down to implementing small IT infrastructure today. Lets say you have 20 employees. Compare these costs:

Dell PowerEdge 2950 w/ Server 2003 (25 CALs) – $6,000
Exchange 2007 – $4,000
Office Standard – $400×20 = $8,000
Total – $18,000

Google Apps – Free.

2. Go wireless.

Copper is expensive and entirely unnecessary. Switches are expensive and entirely unnecessary. You can go with a super cheap mesh solution like Meraki. For something that doesn’t have a completely boned up security model or for that extra bit of speed go for something that supports draft 802.11n.

I personally recommend that you go with an Airport Extreme Base station. Not only does it support 802.11n draft, but you can also use it as a print server and DIY NAS device.

3. Buy cheap storage.

Western Digital MyBook II Pro Edition 2 TB (1 TB with RAID). Buy two of these, connect them to your Airport Extreme. Instant 2 TB NAS with RAID mirroring. Total cost is about $1500.

4. Go low cost and low powered.

Do not buy $2000 desktops. A Mac mini costs $600 and pulls 23-110 Watts of power. You can get a 22 inch LCD monitor for between $200-300 that uses 40-50 Watts of power. Small footprints for both the environment and your pocket book.

Or ditch all that and just use a MacBook for $1000. You can also find good deals on refurbs for less than $500. You do not need the biggest fastest machine to open a word processing app and check email.

5. Use Skype.

Forget phones. Skype Unlimited is less than $3/month, which is probably less than you pay for taxes on your wired line phone right now.

And of course, the unendorsed number 6: Steal your neighbor’s wifi.