BlackBerry – turning the MINUS part to a PLUS

Sorry, we’ve been gone for a week because of the large response to our recent posts about BlackBerry devices.  But we’re back and have some great experiences to share.

Those owning a BlackBerry device know the great PLUS – you have all your email immediately available, even when in motion; walking, driving, riding a train, bus or whatever. They also know the great MINUS, now having ALL that email on yet another device and needing to, check it, manage it, search it, clean it up etc – Yuck.

My email assistant ?

So when you are a SOLO Practitioner, without a support staff or IT department to help – what do you do? One option for parents is to hire the nearby help! But they can be a bit temperamental at times.  It seems an automated solution is still the better choice.  Lets talk about how to do this using a real life example. The answer is to have a email strategy and the right tool that allows you to implement that strategy.

Rob had a classic case of BlackBerry overload but converted it to a totally manageable benefit using a GAYFD.net solution.  Here’s the story.

• As a long time realtor he had an AOL.com address he was afriad to get rid of – but the AOL.com system had monthly cost, was rather limiting and was problematic if he wasn’t at his own PC.
• As a part of REMAX, the huge multi-national realtor firm, he gained email accounts from Remax International and his local Remax 100 office – each of which used different logins and systems.
• He also owns a company (with it’s own Domain name) for his specialty work in foreclosure properties.  This is another email address and includes CRITICAL property maintenance authorization emails, that must be saved forever and found instantly at a later date.
• Plus he’s a generous volunteer for a 500+ member sports club which creates another pile of emails from a Yahoo group the club uses.

That is 5 different “required” sources of email involving 100′s of messages (not to mention all the spam that may get through).  Sure it’s easy to get them all sent to the BlackBerry via forwarding and all but that’s not the issue.  What about backups and archiving?  What happens if you break or lose the BlackBerry? How do you keep deleted email synchronized between mobile, laptop and desktop computers?  What about searching for a critical email when you can’t even remember what inbox it originally came from?  How will you effectively brand your company domain when your email address is still a AOL.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com etc address?

Rob used GAFYD.net (Google Apps For Your Domain via Net) to gain both an email strategy and the tool needed to implement it

• outbound email is now always branded with his private company domain name (not AOL.com or anything like that).
• email associated with any source account now comes to his private post office which instantly filters and tags it as necessary – just before it goes to the BlackBerry.
• he gains the same powerful Spam Control over ALL his email, no matter what account it originates from.
• all email is archived in a manner that allows instant search across all accounts and all emails at one time.
• emails from critical clients are tagged, and can be immediately recalled and viewed from any PC he chooses (even if in the archives).
• he has the power to create Alias names or new email accounts as needed, that are all branded with his company domain name.

As a real plus we can even add synchronization of the “contact” address books.  Not through a manually hooked up cable but right over the wireless airwaves.  The contact address book will be automatically kept up to date with his master address book on his PC.  This also serves as a great disaster recovery and backup if he loses the BlackBerry.

So every PLUS often comes with an associated MINUS, there are ways to turn that minus into a plus. For information about the GAFYD.net / BlackBerry SOLO Practitioner solution call 303-932-8146.