March Meeting Summary.

The March meeting topic was Research.  Interesting to see that most of us are on the same page as far as what magazines we read, e-newsletters we get etc.

Some of our favorite magazines were; PCWorld, Redmond Magazine, Disaster Recovery Journal and Accounting Today and The CPA Technology Advisor for those of us in CPA firms.  Some of these magazines are free.  Check them out.

We’re all getting a ton of e-newsletters.  Few RSS feeds but TechWire and Helpnet Security are probably worth getting.

LinkedIn groups we discussed were the CCH, a Wolters Kluwer Business Group, VMWare Group, Boomer Consulting, Inc. Group and several accounting groups.  LinkedIn groups are a great place to ask your peers questions. Several of us had posted questions and got good responses.  Including myself.  Interesting enough I had recently posted a question to the CCH group and 2 days later, a CCH Tech support rep called me and asked if I needed help with my issue, even though I had not placed a service call about the issue.  A little "big brother" but kind of cool to see they monitor that group and are being proactive.

Blogs we’re following were mostly accounting related, but probably good info for all of us.  Check out these;  Accountingweb, Rita Keller-Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders and Mark Russinovich’s tech blog (he also wrote a very good book,  called Zero Day, I finished it in 2 sittings).  All of these can be found with a Google search.

Everyone in the group is an avid Googled  search fan.  Though Jason Thompson (McCauley Nicolas) stated that many of the linked related to the disasters in Japan had viruses attached to them.  As always be careful.  Other popular sites for problem resolution, of course were support.microsoft.com and expert-exchange.com.

Twitter seemed the least used by the group, but we all agreed we're going to have to adapt to using it soon.  Or at least start following a few of the more important and knowledgable people in our areas.  I personally follow Jason Hiner and other Tech Republic staff as well as Roman Kepczyk, Rita Keller and Gary Boomer as leaders in the accounting field.

We also discussed the need to watch what is being said about our firms both on Twitter and Facebook.  While none of us have any practical experience yet, we did discuss that there are various tools to automate the search of both Twitter and Facebook for key words such as your firm name.  If you have experience with any of these, please post a comment and let us know what you think.

If I’ve missed any or you have any other good resources, please post a comment.