While its understandable small businesses sometimes find skirting the rules to be more palatable than forking over thousands for more software, the true costs of piracy can be far greater.

The Business Software Alliance has been cracking down more on small businesses, particularly those in the 10-100 employee range. And the penalties can be quite stiff - six figure penalties plus having to buy the software at full price.

Software licensing is one of the great reasons to look at open source or managed systems with clearer, more reasonable pricing models. Rather than spending tens of thousands on Exchange and Office; alternatives like NitixBlue, Zimbra, OpenOffice, etc reduce TCO and reduce or eliminate licensing concerns.

The reality is auto-attendants are the fastest, least expensive, and most consistent way for a small business to greet and route inbound calls. While many small businesses like to have the “human touch,” it does come with a serious downside - people have bad days, get overloaded, or stay home sick.

Small businesses are ideally suited for auto-attendants - their short staff/department lists means auto-attendants are simple and quick to navigate. Auto-attendants give callers an impression of being established, organized, and substantial - usually good traits. Professional recordings cost just a few hundred dollars and ensure customers always get a helpful and pleasant greeting.

On the flip side, most small businesses without an auto-attendant have calls ring to a group of staff who then route the call. But having valuable staff regularly distracted routing calls just doesn’t make sense, these distractions add up to a serious loss of productivity. And lets face it, not all staff members are well suited to answering callers.

As for the callers, most don’t care if their call routing is human or automated - they just want to quickly talk to the right person to fulfill their need. Even some small business phone systems now support multi-language prompts (english, spanish, and french) making communicating with anyone in North America easier. Those who don’t like auto-attendants usually know to press 0 anyway, which can then go to a person to route the call appropriately.

I’m sure we’ll all had the experience of calling a company to be “greeted” unenthusiastically or incomprehensibly, or greeted only to be put immediately on hold. Auto-attendants never do these things, day in and day out (and night!) they answer your calls in an effective, efficient, and pleasant manner.

1) Cable and DSL have no SLA (service line agreement - an uptime and performance agreement). Though more expensive, a T1 can be be worth it.

2) If you run an in-house mail server, a backup mx record is a must to ensure no mail gets lost.

3) Knowing where each network device is located and how to power cycle/reboot it is important. I fixed many networks today just helping people reboot the right device.

4) Battery backups (UPS) can help for a while but ultimately a generator is needed if you want to stay up a long time with power loss.

5) Have an alternate location to work from. I went to the Columbia Tower Club to recharge batteries and get online the two days I was out.

6) Have a great back up system, many disasters cause data loss and losing data is far more expensive than just being down a few days.

Ultimately you should give the serious answer afterwards, but now the rate is a relief because their expectations were humorously set very high!