A Conversation with Trey Mayer of TekDog, Inc.
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I recently had the opportunity to speak with Trey Mayer, SharePoint consultant, Nintex evangelist and Co-Founder of TekDog Inc. Trey has a deep and comprehensive background in automating business processes, which allows him to understand the ever changing needs of businesses while providing complete and scalable solutions in any industry.
TekDog was founded to provide revolutionary solutions using SharePoint and SharePoint alone. TekDog’s core competencies include SharePoint support training, user adoption, business process management, governance, implementation, and migration. TekDog has been working with SharePoint from the beginning…as in 2001, not 2007. As Trey explained to me,
“We believe in providing real-life scenarios for our training classes, our classes are more complete, personal and effective this way. And without CloudShare, we still may be working on setting up our training infrastructure.”
Trey and his business partner discovered CloudShare upon founding their company; at first, they used it to build environments to demo SharePoint for clients. CloudShare soon spread throughout the company and is now an integral part of many functions.
“We found CloudShare while researching SharePoint hosting options for a client demo and it made it very easy for us to demo SharePoint for our clients. But, eventually CloudShare became our environment for training, demos, and POCs. We use the Solution Showcase most often. I haven’t built an environment out in CloudShare from scratch in ages; I’m always choosing a template from the showcase and making changes as needed.”
When users come to TekDog, Trey elaborates, “They’re given a permalink of a CloudShare environment we’ve built out for them with SharePoint.”
“We encourage our customers, for your development efforts, let’s get a CloudShare environment set-up. It’s CloudShare and Nintex that are the two companies that have been so great for our company and have just made things very exciting for us.”
But, “the cloud” is still an area that requires a lot of learning. Trey says people have a hard time understanding that you don’t have to have everything on-premise. That you don’t have to pay engineers $40,000-50,000 a year to set up and maintain servers.
“That’s why we get our clients familiar with CloudShare from the start. We explain to everyone the high value it provides.”
When I asked Trey how he addresses his client’s concerns of security in the cloud, he replied,
“Security is something we take very serious. However, I think that a lot of our clients would be impressed with the security of Cloud based environments if they were to explore their options a bit more. CloudShare ProPlus is a great example of a secure development environment.”
I then asked Trey if he had any complaints. His response?
“I have no complaints whatsoever. I am a huge proponent of CloudShare and the value it offers TekDog and our clients.. I love it, we love it. And at $50/month, how can you complain? You just can’t. The amount of time and money we save with CloudShare is in the thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars annually.”
And Trey looks forward to getting even more out of CloudShare in the future.
“We don’t even use CloudShare to its full potential. We use the permalinks but we don’t use the collaboration-with-other-team-members feature and there’s no reason why we don’t, those are just great features we have yet to take advantage of. The usability CloudShare offers, especially for the non-techie and our clients, is enough to keep us hooked. But, I look forward to using some of the other features in the near future.”
Trey doesn’t just use CloudShare on the business side, though. He also regularly uses CloudShare to play around with BETA testing in his spare time. He’s even trained his mom on various applications. After training his mom on Office, Trey realized,
“CloudShare is an excellent option for small business that don’t want to invest in resource heavy applications without testing their usability first.”
When I asked Trey to describe CloudShare in one word, he responded without delay – Phenomenal.
And we feel the same way about TekDog’s services. Check them out here.
Follow TekDog on Twitter. Like TekDog on Facebook.
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