IT consulting for micro businesses is a good starting point for many IT professionals. In addition to the general hardware and software, and peer-to peer networking, you'll need to be familiar with some additional items. In this article, you'll learn what other skills you need for micro business IT consulting.

When providing IT consulting to micro small businesses, you will occasionally get requests for support of the big competitors of the basic Windows software for their competiton. Some of these include Goldmine and other kinds of tech management or Peachtree - another accounting package.

Virus protection is also real important, so make sure you are comfortable with McAfee and Norton. Make sure you are comfortable with personal firewalls like Zone Alarm, and Norton personal firewall as well as remote control packages like PC anywhere.

Micro Small Business Networking Needs

You need to be comfortable with working and setting up basic peer to peer LANs to share a drive, to share a CD-ROM, to share a printer, to share internet access, and share ICS kind of stuff. You should be pretty comfortable with the inexpensive routers that share a broadband connection among a whole office and have the little built in 10/100 switch and you can scale it up there.

With IT consulting, you should also have some familiarity with some Y-5 products, the wireless products that allow you to do some limited amounts of wireless access, especially the entry level ones you find in a lot of office supply superstores and warehouse clubs.

The Bottom Line about IT Consulting

Do you need to know all of these to provide IT consulting micro small businesses? Preferably you should know half or more. So in other words there are like 13-14 things on the list, so if you know 4 or 5 of them you are kind of ok, you should ideally know half of them or more.

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