Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is an especially useful solution for any business to utilize, as long as they do so with a strategy in mind. Let’s go over why this strategy is so important, and how it should be shaped.

The smartphone has come to define computing in recent years. With this new role, public demand for more powerful and useful hardware persists in every market. As the calendar turns to 2020, the flagship phones offer a computing experience that is remarkable. Today, we take a look at a few of the best options you will find, and provide you with their specifications.

Before we roll out the list, we want to be transparent. We don’t have a horse in this race. Any manufacturer’s flagship smartphone will be more than enough for the lion’s share of things it’s needed for. Regardless who makes your smartphone, the important part is to get one that will sufficiently handle the applications, storage, and action you will need it for. 

Shadow IT is the moniker that people in the technology industry have coined for applications that employees download that aren’t vetted for use on an organization’s networks. For the better part of the past decade, IT administrators have universally demeaned the use of unsanctioned software for use on company networks due to potential vulnerabilities that come with these applications and any phantom costs associated with their use. What may surprise you is that some organizations are rolling back their shadow IT policies. Today, we will take a look at both ends of this issue.

The data stored on your computer is valuable, and that’s a fact. Unfortunately, this means that there are unscrupulous characters out there who will want to get at this data, so you will need to have the right solutions in place to protect it. Part of this will require you to have a firewall included in your protections.

With most everything having gone digital, most consumers have changed their preferred payment method. Many different factors contribute to credit cards becoming the most used payment. Today, we take a look at why this has become a popular means of payment, as well as weigh the pros and cons of credit cards. 

If you own a business today, you use the Internet. Chances are about as good that it plays a key role in your daily functioning, which means you need to be sure that your network is well-maintained and functioning equally well. Here, we’ll go over a few ways you can get an idea of how healthy your network is.

Certain useful business technologies, like VoIP, screen-sharing, and webinar platforms, require a lot out of your Internet connection. This means that you need to be sure that you have sufficient bandwidth to support these solutions. Today, we’re taking a look at how your business relies on having the appropriate bandwidth to support your operations, and how to find out if it does.

There are certain technologies that - despite some issues that should be seriously considered - are inarguably useful to a business and its operations. One such technology is the notorious IoT, or Internet of Things. With the right preparation, the IoT can provide your business with a few advantages and benefits. Let’s review some of them.

Smartphones are a big part of modern society. Just go to any place where people congregate and look around, you’ll see what we are talking about. Businesses have finally begun to realize that they can’t do anything about people bringing their smartphones into the office, so they have instead begun to alter their strategies on how to manage these devices. Let’s take a brief look at the modern smartphone and see just how much people are depending on their mobile devices. 

More businesses with fewer than 100 employees are planning to adopt new technologies than aren’t, according to the 2020 State of IT report released by Spiceworks. If you aren’t among them, there are a few reasons that you should be. Here, we’ll review those reasons, to give you a few points to think about as you consider your use of technology. 

Augmented reality is a technology that has been around for a while, and has been thought of as one of the “next big things” for the past few years. AR almost broke out of obscurity with the development of Google Glass earlier in the decade, but with well-founded security and privacy concerns that come with providing the technology that makes AR possible, the market dropped out. That’s not to say that AR is done, however. In fact, it seems as with the growth of new technologies, AR is also beginning to grow.

Does your business use remote workers? If you currently don’t, you should know that there are several benefits of allowing your staff to work outside of the confines of your office, but you have to be careful. These days, with the threat landscape as it is, it is important that if you are going to allow remote workers, that you have a strategy in place. Let’s take a look at some of the tools you will need if you want to take advantage of remote workers. 

While we typically write about matters that concern your business and its use of technology in this blog, we decided to do something a little different today. Someday in the not-so-distant future, today’s students will make up the workforce, and their educations are more shaped by technology than ever before. That’s why we wanted to examine the role technology plays in education (warts and all), to understand how it is impacting our youth.

Any business should list its priorities as follows:

#1 - Security
#2 - Everything Else

This means that, should an employee be working from a location that isn’t in your office, you need to have something in place so they can do so without compromising your security. One very effective option to leverage is a virtual private network (VPN) solution.

The smartphone is a transcendent innovation of a brilliant idea. As these devices have gotten more and more powerful, it has seen a situation where the batteries powering these devices keep having to outperform the batteries from the previous year’s devices. The technology, however, hasn’t changed very much in over a decade. Today, we take a look at modern smartphone batteries and innovations to power sources that you can expect to see going forward.

It’d be hard to find a more influential modern invention (not counting the Internet) than the smartphone - it has expanded from voice and messaging to include entertainment, social media, and countless other purposes. This just so happens to include mobile productivity, assisted by a variety of mobile applications intended to augment communication and collaboration between departments, as well as between a business and its clients.

It wasn’t too terribly long ago that Windows 10 was offered for free to users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. While this offer was constrained to a limited time, the response was surprisingly stagnant. Why didn’t more people jump at the chance to snag the latest version of the operating system - especially when it would come at no cost to them?

Plan: NOUN
1. A detailed proposal for doing or achieving something.

We’ve all heard or maybe even used the expression “That didn’t go as planned”. More often than not, a well-designed and implemented disaster recovery goes as planned, but do you really want to wager your entire business without doing any sort of testing? 

You should be well on your way to getting your new computer. We’ve gone over the processor, the memory, the storage, and the display, and should be confident about what you are looking for. For our final part of our computer buying guide, we are going to focus on topics that are important to mention, but maybe didn’t seem to fit in other parts of our guide.

After you’ve got the machine’s core specifications worked out, you then have to turn your attention to your displays. In part four, we take a look at how you are going to broadcast the information from the computer, what you should know about modern displays, and what considerations you need to take.