Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

The days of the cash-only business are over. It doesn’t matter if your business is a multinational corporation or you cut grass for a living, accepting payment cards is not only convenient for your customers, most of the time it’s the most secure way to get paid. In an effort to protect the personal and financial information of consumers who have come to depend on their payment cards, the banks that back the credit card industry have developed a regulation that businesses who process cards need to adhere to. Today, we will go over this regulation and how it affects small and medium-sized businesses.

Hold onto your hats folks, this article is a rollercoaster. It has been recently discovered that a totally innocuous photograph is causing smartphones to break when set as the wallpaper. Is this some new malicious type of malware? Are dastardly hackers behind this exploit? 

It’s a much crazier story. Let’s take a look

Are your company’s policies and procedures documented? If not, they should be. Having a policy and procedure manual will act as an easy-to-distribute guide to educate your staff on the expectations you have for them. It will also provide a physical document that can be referenced if employees have questions about anything pertaining to your business. Today, we will give you a few tips on how to best go about completing an employee handbook for your business. 

To succeed in business, you need to cultivate relationships with the people you call your prospects and clients. Like any relationship, this takes a lot of work, never mind the fact that you’re dealing with hundreds instead of just one. However, there is a solution to help you with this, called a CRM, and its integrations offer nothing but benefit. Let’s discuss.

Businesses of all sizes have budgetary considerations to observe, so it is crucial that any investments into their operations are optimized to meet each business’ individual goals. With the assistance of a managed service provider, this process is simplified. Let’s go over a few ways that a business can push its IT investment further, especially if it has subscribed to managed services.

You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. Making the most of your time at work isn’t always easy. There are all types of unexpected distractions that take up a lot of time, so you should know what works to help you get the most out of the time you do have. Today, we present three considerations that will help you manage your time better.

We’ve all seen them: the scam emails that are so obviously a scam, you have no idea why a scammer or a cybercriminal would even bother sending them. It just so happens that there is a very good reason that criminals continue to use these transparent attacks, as they have done for centuries.

As businesses everywhere are now operating with a remote workforce, many are seeing an issue common enough in the office settling in with their at-home employees: burnout. Let’s examine this phenomenon and see what can be done to avoid it.

To consolidate their tools, numerous businesses have adopted the centralized benefits of software suites and comprehensive cloud services, like Google’s G Suite offering. However, while all these files and resources may be available through a single service in G Suite, they could easily be stored in far different locations. For this week’s tip, we’re going over how you can fix this by using the Google Drive feature known as Workspaces.

More than three-and-a-half billion people are active social media users, making it one of the best inventions of the 21st century. Recently, however, Twitter, one of the most used social media platforms in the world, got into some hot water when it labeled a tweet from President Donald Trump as having “potentially misleading information”. He then responded by signing an executive order condemning this action as a method of censorship. Let’s briefly unpack this issue.

Internet-based companies have access to an audience that, at the very least, are extremely trusting of them. There is an expectation that these businesses will fulfill their promises while also protecting the information that their customers and clients provide to them, but are these expectations well-founded? Let’s consider common collection practices companies deploy and how you can keep yourself safe.

It can’t be denied that the Internet browser is one of the most utilized pieces of software on any workstation, mobile device, or computer of any kind. With so much time spent inside the browser, we thought that we would share some shortcuts that you probably don’t know exist.

Information technology is an incredibly important facet to any modern workplace, which means that your team needs to know how to properly handle the IT you have in place. Here are a few key practices that you need to ensure your team is up to speed on:

With so many people working from home due to stay-at-home orders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, IT security may not be at the forefront of users’ minds. Unfortunately, scammers and hackers aren’t unemployed during this time and are still causing havoc for businesses of all sizes. Let’s take a look at cybersecurity during COVID-19.

Businesses have been leaning more towards using laptops for their computing needs, thanks to the mobility that they offer while also offering comparable performance to modern desktops. There is an important question that you should be asking, though: can a laptop be left plugged in whenever it is left in one spot? Let’s find out for this week’s tip.

We all use email, in fact, without an email account you couldn’t do much of anything online. For those that use it for business, it can be a complete drag, often hindering as much as it helps. Microsoft has improved their Outlook platform with some useful features aimed at cutting down on the time that you have to stare at your email. Let’s take a look at two options you can use to get the most out of your email in Outlook:

Businesses need access to some considerable amounts of data these days, regardless of their size, which means that even a small business has a few things to weigh out. For instance, should they keep their IT in-house with on-premise solutions, or should they cast their gaze at cloud-hosted solutions? Let’s consider the benefits available for either.

Today’s businesses have swiftly adopted video conferencing, even before business continuity required it. Considering this, let’s examine how your team can make the most of their video conferences with a few tips.

In one of the most negative times in recent memory, something positive happened, people started to work from home using technology as a facilitator. This has led a lot of businesses, who hadn’t already, looking to make a digital transformation. As one of the most useful and valuable digital tools, Voice over Internet Protocol is at the center of this shift. Let’s look at VoIP and how it presents the modern business value.

We’re just shy of halfway through 2020, and it is already apparent that this will go down as one of the most challenging years for businesses around the world for some time. With many businesses facing extensive and continued pauses in their operations, many will be looking for opportunities to get more out of their investments. Managed IT services are one such opportunity.