Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

2020 has been filled with challenges and many small and medium-sized businesses have been put through the ringer. With everything going on, and many things causing obstructions to business-as-usual, getting out in front of the things you can control can pay great dividends for your business. Today, we’ll take a look at how the managed service provider can help you stay on top of everything.

As a consumer, how concerned are you about the care that businesses give to your data privacy. Very? You aren’t the only one. 87 percent of Americans see their data privacy as a human right.

Over the last few months, many businesses have had to hurriedly adopt remote work as an alternative to in-house operations. While many have done so successfully, it isn’t uncommon for certain elements to trip them up, including remote meetings. As these meetings are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, we wanted to share a few tips to help make the most of them.

Windows 7 was once the best operating system ever made by leaps and bounds. Now, it’s unsupported and shouldn’t be found on any Internet-connected device. Unfortunately, this isn’t the truth as millions of people are still using Windows 7 for their businesses. Today, we will take a look at why Windows 7 is dangerous and what options businesses have to upgrade away from the unsupported OS.

With COVID-19 creating the challenges that it has for so many, there is little wonder that creating a vaccine is such a major focus. Unfortunately, hackers are aware of this focus, and how it makes the organizations conducting vaccine trials particularly vulnerable. Let’s examine this situation, and the lessons that all businesses can take away from it.

Most businesses stick to a schedule to help ensure that their processes are chugging along efficiently, and that everyone has a task to ensure that the business is optimally productive. Of course, these kinds of things aren’t always easy. However, modern cloud software solutions are now available to make it a lot simpler.

Finding ways to save money is something that most entrepreneurs take pride in. Today, as costs of doing business continue to climb, VoIP can present the business owner with the rare solution that actually saves them money. Hosted VoIP, in particular--where your phone system is hosted in the cloud--presents an innovative and straightforward way to reduce your business’ operational costs. Let’s take a look at some ways it goes about doing this.

Windows 10 is five years old now. It didn’t become what it first set out to be, but today it can be found on over a billion devices. Not too shabby. The operating system is still being developed by Microsoft, which based on the company’s history, is kind of surprising. After they suggested that it would be the last version of Windows, some people were confused. Could Microsoft stop making Windows? Let’s take a look. 

If your smartphone has ever been blazing hot for no apparent reason, you know how worrying it can be to try and use it. Many smartphones will automatically shut down if they get too hot, but either way, this excess of heat can also be very bad for the device itself, so it is important to try to keep it as cool as you can. For this week’s tip, we’re sharing a few simple and safe ways to cool your overheating phone back down.

If there’s one buzzword heard more than any other in today’s workplace, I’d be willing to bet it could be “collaboration”… and no wonder. Collaboration serves a very important purpose in today’s operations, which is why establishing the processes that encourage it makes sense for your business’ well-being.

Business owners don’t often think about where their documents are stored. They typically have a staff of people who handle that for them. If you want to speed your business up and make it easier to store, search, and retrieve the documents you need, a Document Management System (DMS) might be right for you. Here are five good reasons why moving to document management can surely be a benefit for your business. 

There are a lot of functions and capabilities buried in Microsoft Excel, many of which are unknown by most users. This is a real shame, as the value of Excel as a business tool is considerably larger than the simple organization that many see as its limits. To help counteract this, let’s go over a few useful utilities that Excel enables, if you know how to access them.

The more businesses have become capable of, the more important their communications and the tools that enable them have become. Given the current global situation and the challenges that arise because of it, these communication technologies can now be considered indispensable to businesses. Let’s discuss why so many businesses have elected to adopt unified communications as a means of fulfilling their operations.

While remote work has been possible and somewhat popular for some time now, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made it indispensable for many businesses to survive. Nevertheless, as it has spread, it has become apparent that remote work isn’t likely to go away as our immediate need for it does. Let’s look at how remote operations are influencing businesses to see why.

When it comes to their necessary hardware, there are some things that most businesses generally have in common, differences in scale notwithstanding. As such, businesses of all sizes should consider the same things while putting together their IT infrastructure. For this week’s tip, we’re going over these considerations to benefit your hardware planning and implementation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way that a lot of businesses are approaching cybersecurity. In normal times, businesses will periodically try to make improvements to their organizational security and pounce all over events that could put their network and data at risk. While this strategy has worked, the new normal brought on by COVID-19 has IT administrators and business decision makers focused on maintaining resilience regardless of the financial and operational stressors they encounter. In today’s article we will look to identify the major shifts businesses have had to make, and how a consistent approach to cybersecurity is giving some companies an advantage.

One of the most prevalent problems that businesses now face are scams known as phishing attacks. When it comes to defending against these attacks, the capability to identify phishing as such is perhaps your greatest asset. Let’s go over a few signs that a message you receive might be a phishing attack.

Is your Android device’s battery becoming a problem? Does it seem like you only get a few hours of use on a full charge? Does it shut off well before it should? These are common problems that happen when a device gets older (not-so-curiously around the time that you pay off the device). If your device’s battery is running slower, there are some steps you can take to ensure that you can get through your day without having to constantly worry about your device shutting down.

In a recent security update, most Android and iOS phones received a new opt-in setting related to the COVID-19 Exposure Notification system. What is this? Is your phone being tracked? Let’s take a deeper look at what is going on.

Microsoft has been a driving force in personal and business productivity for over 40 years. Over that time one of their most popular offerings has been Microsoft Office. For the past several years the software giant has been bundling their Office platform with OneDrive and calling it Office 365. Millions of individuals and businesses utilize the tools in the platform, which is now being rebranded to Microsoft 365, and that has started to confuse some people. Today, we’ll clarify what this means for businesses and individuals.