Studio Technology - What are your Challenges?

[daveb]

This is mostly for full time studio operators but any feedback is appreciated

I am looking to expand some of my service offerings and I wanted some feed back from the community on what are the technology challenges and issues that you face as a studio operator and if a third party with knowledge of the business of photography can help support your technology issues.

What I am NOT talking about is creating actions or workflow or any of those types of things but management of the infrastructure that you use to run your business. Getting the computers to talk together correctly. Storage management (archiving), backup, web management, connectivity and security, email and issues like that.

the questions that I have are:

Do these issues effect the operation of your business?
What is your current method of manageing your technology?
Can you handle thees issues alone?
Would you consider partnering with a third party to manage your technology?
Would that partner have to be local to you or would you feel comfortable with remote management on everyday issues (couldn't really install a server remotely could we ???)
Could you run perfectly well with out all of this computer stuff? (what is your disaster plan?)

Thanks for your ideas and feedback !

Dave

[Outlaw]

Hey Dave! To answer your questions:

1. I'm pretty computer savvy, so I have never had any trouble keeping things running for my studio. We do pretty basic backup: card to hard drive, hard drive to DVD, hard drive to back-up hard drive. Our archive is just a tree of folders broken down by year, month, day, and job. Granted, we do very little commercial/stock work, mostly portraiture, so we rarely need to search by category or keyword beyond a last name or date.

2. Method of managing, as described above. Click, drag, click drag, burn, click, drag. I end up with three copies. I do not do off-site storage of any of my media. Not to say the worst cannot happen, but I have not lost one image in eight years of professional photography, and if I have a last name or date, it takes me about 30 seconds to pull an archived DVD.

3. Yes, we handle all of our archiving and backup in-house.

4. The most complicated technology we have in our studio is a wireless network, which basically set itself up. I would only use third party help if a repair or installation were beyond my ability to handle. Virii have given me absolute hell in the past, and would be more likely to pay someone else to clean that crud up than anything else.

5. I'll always prefer local, easier to check references and character that way, but I use enough Internet-based businesses to trust them. But very extensive references and access to other customers' opinions are necessities. I'll always buy from amazon.com before I buy from neverheardof.com, no matter what the price difference.

7. No computers? I'll admit, we would likely be shut down if we had no access to any computers whatsoever. However, with a laptop and home computer away from the office, an excellent library computer system, and many associates with computers, it would take quite a disaster to put us completely out of commission.

Hope that helps!