Document and spreadsheet composition.
Create your data with the best in office software from Microsoft and design software from Adobe.
Word processing
Use Microsoft Word and Office 365, the industry standard in composition.
Spreadsheets
Use Microsft Excel, the leading product in spread sheet creation and automation.
Graphic Design
Use Adobe products for all your graphic and PDF needs.
Word Processing with Microsoft Word
Writing letters and authoring documents is a primary task for most businesses. Your word processor should give you a wide range of fonts and formatting options, along with the ability to insert graphics and build charts and grids.
We offer Microsoft Office 365 for productivity, including Microsoft Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. You can buy Microsoft Office on a monthly or yearly basis at $11 per month, or you can purchase a single license for install on a single computer for $315 + tax.
Spreadsheeting with Microsoft Excel
Using spreadsheets to organize data is a fundamental requirement for most businesses. Your spreadsheet software should allow you to have multiple sheets in a book that can talk to eachother, and provide full formula support for scripting operations on data.
We offer Microsoft Office 365 for productivity which includes Microsoft Excel for spreadsheets. Excel is the industry leader in spreadsheet software offering a wide range of features and capabilities including Visual Basic programming and scripting for advanced functions. Microsoft Office is available as a subscription at $11 per month, or as a one time purchase with no upgrades for $315 + tax.
Graphic Design with Adobe
Being able to create graphics on your own will save you money on marketing and help you create more content for your brand. You should use a graphic design suite that allows you to work in video or photos or illustrations.
We offer Adobe software for PDF creation and editing as well as creative graphic design for content creation.
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Communication unified on one platform.
Email, voicemail, and text messages, recorded and centrally searchable on any device with internet.
Business class secure email and calendars with large mailboxes and unlimited addresses.
Chat
Persistent workplace chat with timestamps and searchable history across all devices.
Phones
Phone systems with video calling, conferencing, webinars, voicemail transcribed to email.
Business Email and Calendars
As a growing business having reliable email is only going to get more important. We recommend email server software that allows you to search across all the mailboxes in your company if you need to and lets you set up mailboxes for resources instead of users - also known as shared mailboxes.
We sell and service Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Exchange Online as an email solution. Microsoft Exchange requires a local on-premise Microsoft Windows Server instance to install on, and Exchange Online starts at $5.10 per user per month.
Business Chat
As your business grows, you will find you are using text messages to communicate more often, not less. Centralize your text chat with searchable time-stamped messages that are saved and backed up giving you the same reliability for texting as emailing.
We sell and service Microsoft Teams as a unified communications solution, including text and phone calls. Teams starts at $5.10 per user plus calling per minute costs, and may be less if you already have Office licensing.
Business Phone Systems
Phone calls, video calls, and meetings are critical tools for building and maintaining your business relationships, and it's important you can access those tools wherever you are.
We sell and service Microsoft Teams as a unified communications solution which includes phone calls, meetings, and broadcasts. Teams starts at $5.10 per user plus calling per minute costs, and may be less if you already have office licensing. We also offer FortiVoice turnkey business phone systems.
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Protect your business data and reputation.
Block intrusion and stop malware from bringing down production or damaging your brand.
Antivirus
Software that runs on your devices and supresses or reverses malicious activity.
Firewalls
Perimeter security on networks and devices that inspects and passes or drops network traffic.
MFA
Mitigate 99% of credential based attacks by implementing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
Business Class Antivirus
Virus protection software falls into two main categories for businesses:
- Centrally managed software that runs on each device and connects to an online server that maintains a list of known malicious programs. Effective against most 'shotgun' spam that hits your inbox as most of those links and attachments have been added to one of the big lists before it gets to you. Lag time between the first time a new virus is released on the internet and when it gets on the list can be days.
- Centrally managed software that runs on each device and connects to an online server farm to facilitate machine learning which drives an artificially intelligent software engine that profiles user and computer behaviour and notifies (or takes more advanced actions) when something is behaving abnormally. This approach is more effective than list based AV as it does not rely on having an up-to-date list and is far more effective at detecting attackers already inside your network to reduce dwell time.
We offer ESET and BitDefender for list based antivirus starting at $3 per computer per month. We offer SentinelOne End-point Detection and Remedy (EDR) as our AI behaviour security product, and pricing is determined per client for EDR so give us a call or send an email if you want more info.
Computer Firewall Security
In a similar way to how your alarm and locks protect the physical perimeter of your business, your operating system and network firewalls protect the digital perimeter of your business.
We sell Microsoft Windows 10 Pro for desktop firewall protection, Microsoft Windows Server for server firewall protection, and CISCO or Fortinet or Ubiquiti for network firewall protection. We offer configuration and support services for these products per hour, per month, or per project.
MFA
Help your users avoid password breaches by implementing Multi-Factor Authentication that requires tapping on a mobile app or using a keychain token to complete a login to a public company resource.
We offer Microsoft MFA and DUO MFA as enterprise options for secondary authentication. Protect your email and VPN from a hacker guessing your login over the internet using a password spray or brute force attack.
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Aim High and Keep Track of Your Business
Grow your business with Spire for accounting and inventory management.
Double Ledger Accounting
Industry standard double-entry accounting that provides a complete audit trail for your business transactions.
Inventory Control
Track inventory levels and generate purchase orders. Extend your inventory information to your website and other applications.
Sales Management
Generate quotes, invoices, and repeating orders. Email invoices to customers and track accounts receivable with customer statements.
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Testimonial
OTV Computer Store
OTV is a local business started in Saskatoon in the early 2000s. OTV was special because it was the first computer store in Saskatoon that sold retail computers and computer parts using a wholesale model with profit margins under 10%.
OTV grew from a small three-person office in Sutherland, to a slightly bigger office above Mother's Music on 8th Street, to a larger ground floor building on 8th Street with a showroom, to a large retail space with showroom and warehouse downtown on 24th, and finally to their biggest space on Faithfull Avenue North of 51st with a second shop in Regina similar in size and over 30 employees between both locations.
In the quickly evolving and competitive market of retail computers, OTV forced out all of their less efficient competition trying to expand to Saskatoon from out of province. With thousands of part numbers and almost ten million in revenue annually, OTV leveraged Spire Systems software to keep their competitive edge. Watch this video of Ryan, the owner, talking about why Spire is the right choice for your business.
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- Written by Shayne Zaba
Fire, virus, and mistake insurance in one.
Don't let bad data backup strategy close your doors. Mirrored hard drives, local versioned backups, and off-site backups for disasters.
Hardware
Mirror the hard drives in the server or the entire server to eliminate single points of failure with hardware.
Corruption
Go-to backups for daily recovery of lost data due to file corruption from malware or user error.
Disaster
The final resort for data recovery in the event of fire or flood or theft. Define and meet your RPO and RTO.
Hardware Mirroring and Failover
Hardware mirroring is most commonly found with the storage in your server, where drives are copied on the fly so data resides on two of them at all times, allowing you to tolerate a drive failure without losing any data. How much you should spend on preventing downtime due to hardware failure should be informed by your Cost of Downtime Index (CoDI).
We offer several software and hardware solutions for hardware mirroring and failover, including Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) and failover using Microsoft Server and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Corruption Recovery Backups
Corruption recovery backups are an important part of your data backup strategy, and these will be your go-to backups when a user accidentally deletes data or gets a virus that encrypts files. Deciding on how much to spend on backup software for corruption recovery is a function of your Cost of Downtime Index (CoDI).
We offer several software and hardware solutions for corruption recovery, including Microsoft Server Shadow-copy, Microsoft Server Backup, and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager.
Disaster Recovery Backups
Disaster Recovery (DR) backups make sure your business will survive unexpected problems and they are part of any reliable data backup strategy. Deciding on how much to spend on backup software and offsite backup storage is a function of your Recovery Point (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), which are informed by your Cost of Downtime Index (CoDI).
We offer several software and hardware solutions for disaster recovery backups, including our NICS online service that does daily backups of changes to your critical data, and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager to sync larger data sets between sites. When you have a disaster event, we will recover your environment using these backups and new hardware.
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