Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Business Solutions & Software Group has been serving the Coral Springs area since 1997, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

What You Can Integrate with Your Business’ CRM Solution

What You Can Integrate with Your Business’ CRM Solution

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.

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Improve Your Email Management in Outlook

Improve Your Email Management in Outlook

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:

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Tip of the Week: How to Manage Microsoft Outlook

Tip of the Week: How to Manage Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a very common solution for businesses to use for their email needs. If you happen to use it, there are a few ways that it can be managed to make it even more useful to you and your team. Here, we’ll give you a few tips to make the most use of it.

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Seven Solutions to Boost Your Business Communications

Seven Solutions to Boost Your Business Communications

Communication is a key business need, and as such, there are a variety of solutions devoted to improving your business’ communications strategy in some way, shape, or form. Here, we’ll go over these solutions, and discuss why they aren’t really “options,” but actually requirements for today’s business.

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Tip of the Week: Create Useful Email Subjects

Tip of the Week: Create Useful Email Subjects

If you’ve ever received an email without a subject line, chances are you’ve never felt inclined to open it as soon as possible. The email subject line is critical to capturing the user’s attention, as it helps to ensure they understand what they can expect from the email’s contents. Here are a couple of pointers on how you can create more effective email subject lines to increase the chances of them being read.

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One Phish, Two Phish, The Grinch Who Didn’t Phish

One Phish, Two Phish, The Grinch Who Didn’t Phish

An email’s important, that much is clear fact - but you need to stay safe from an email attack.

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Why You Should Be Encrypting Your Emails

Why You Should Be Encrypting Your Emails

Encryption can be an invaluable tool for your company, especially where your email communications are concerned. Here, we’ll go over a few of the benefits you can see by adopting it - but first, we’ll briefly go over what encryption is.

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Tip of the Week: Outlook 2016 Can Do More than You Think

Tip of the Week: Outlook 2016 Can Do More than You Think

Email is one of the most common productivity tools in any office. It can also be one of the easiest to become disorganized. However, users of Microsoft Outlook 2016 will find that the program provides plenty of useful tools to ensure that your communications don’t get out of hand. For this week’s tip, we’ll explore some of them.

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Email Security Basics

Email Security Basics

Email is a modern classic as far as business solutions are concerned, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an office that didn’t use it in some capacity or another. However, because email is so popular, it has become a favorite attack vector of malicious users. Fortunately, there are some basic practices that will help keep your email account secure and your communications private.


Follow Password Guidelines
As you might imagine, one of the most important, basic ways that you can lock down your email account is to ensure that your password is sufficiently strong. Too often, breach statistics (and similar data sets) reveal that passwords are still overwhelmingly insecure. Pet names, birthdays and anniversaries, and favorite sports teams are used as passwords far more than they should be, as are common keyboard patterns, like qwerty, asdf, and the like. Some minimal social engineering could very easily provide someone with access to an email account they have no business being in.

To counter this, avoid the temptation to resort to formulaic, easy-to-guess password systems - like, for instance, smushing your alma mater’s mascot together with the number of your childhood home. Again, these password conventions are the first things that a cybercriminal will try if they want to get into your email account. Instead, do your best to rely on an as-random-as-possible string of numbers and letters - creating a different one for each of your accounts. This will ensure that your passwords are as strong as possible with the added benefit of protecting the rest of your accounts if one of your passwords is discovered.

Of course, for the sake of pragmatism, is it totally realistic to remember a completely random string of alphanumeric characters for everything that requires a password? For many, it isn’t. That’s why many resort to using, rather than a password, a passphrase. A passphrase takes a sentence memorable to the individual and turns it into a mnemonic device. So, a fan of films by Rob Reiner could take a line from one of his works and create a password from it, like “uRdBS” or “HFSTC” from The Princess Bride, or “UCHTT” from A Few Good Men.

Avoid the Unknown
Once you’ve accessed your email, there are a few ways that you can avoid putting yourself at risk. One very important way is to avoid the links in email unless you have verified that they do, in fact, go to (and come from) where they appear to.

First, where will the included link direct you? Links can be tricky things, which makes them a favorite of cybercriminals to use in emails. If the link is attached to text, you should hover over it and peek at the status bar that pops up before clicking on it. While the text might say that it brings you to the sender’s official webpage, the link could very well actually direct you to a domain that uploads a virus into your system. If the status bar says that you will be directed to someplace that doesn’t look quite right, skip the link.

You also shouldn’t blindly open an email that hasn’t come from a known or verified source, and even that can now be dangerous. There is a tactic that can be used to great effect as a way to snare even the most cybersecurity-mindful targets called email spoofing. As its name suggests, email spoofing is the act of forging an email’s header so that it appears to have come from someone else, likely someone trusted enough that the email will be opened, read, and interacted with.

As a result, it is best to verify the email with the cited sender whenever possible, through a different means of communication. Whether that means a quick phone call or instant message before you open the email, it is better to be safe than it is to be sorry.

What are some other ways that you keep your email from becoming a security risk? Share them in the comments, and make sure you take a moment and subscribe to this blog!

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Email Malware is the New Schrӧdinger’s Cat

Email Malware is the New Schrӧdinger’s Cat

There is a famous thought experiment devised by physicist Erwin Schrӧdinger, describing a very particular paradox in quantum physics through the experience of a cat. While Schrӧdinger’s cat was initially intended to demonstrate a very different phenomenon, it can also be applied to something that all businesses need to consider: their email security.

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Tip of the Week: Gmail Is Made Even Easier When You Use Filters

Tip of the Week: Gmail Is Made Even Easier When You Use Filters

Your email inbox can quickly become an overwhelming mess without the proper management, but who has the time to sort through their email inbox on top of all of their other, more urgent responsibilities? Fortunately for Gmail users, the program provides the answer with its filter feature. For this week’s tip, we’ll show you how to regain control of your inbox with filters.

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Tip of the Week: Improving Outlook With Three Tips

Tip of the Week: Improving Outlook With Three Tips

Does your business use Microsoft Outlook as its preferred email client? It’s likely that you have already noticed how dynamic of a solution it is for your business purposes, but little do you know that the most recent version of Outlook is stacked with some of the best features out there to make your user experience even better.

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Why Your In-House Email Server Probably Isn’t Worth The Trouble

Why Your In-House Email Server Probably Isn’t Worth The Trouble

Most businesses rely on email in at least some capacity. Nowadays, organizations often choose to outsource the management of their email servers, including their hosting, to other organizations, most notably cloud providers for ease of use. Here are some of the benefits that you can gain from switching your in-house email management to a cloud-based email server.

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Tip of the Week: A URL Can Help Give Away A Phishing Attack

Tip of the Week: A URL Can Help Give Away A Phishing Attack

Back in 1995, scammers pulled the first phishing attack. They took the identity of AOL employees and requested the billing information of users through instant messaging. More sophisticated phishing attempts have evolved over the years, culminating in the commonly-seen email phishing attack, which tricks users into handing over personal or sensitive information. Phishing attacks can be seen through, so we’ll show you how you can identify threats before they become a problem.

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Tip of the Week: Get the Most From Your Company’s Email With These 3 Tools

Tip of the Week: Get the Most From Your Company’s Email With These 3 Tools

As a small business grows and takes on more employees and adds more departments, one aspect that becomes increasingly difficult to manage is email. Essentially, you go from using a handful of email addresses to managing dozens of accounts. If it feels like you’re losing control of your company’s email situation, then you’ll want to implement the following email solutions.

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Tip of the Week: 3 Tips to Keep Your Email Inbox Under Control

Tip of the Week: 3 Tips to Keep Your Email Inbox Under Control

Email may be crucial to the functionality of your business, but at times it can seem like your inbox is far beyond your control. You might find yourself throwing away hours on end just to clean up the pile of unread messages in your inbox. Thankfully, with a bit of effort, you too can free yourself from an overburdened inbox.

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Those Cute Little Emojis May Be Putting Your Data at Risk

Those Cute Little Emojis May Be Putting Your Data at Risk

As the world of technology grows increasingly mobile, emojis are appearing in the most unlikely of places, like business communications. Even though emojis may seem rather cute and innocent, their use by employees may cause more problems than they’re worth. :-O

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Tip of the Week: 4 Tips to Writing Effective Emails

Tip of the Week: 4 Tips to Writing Effective Emails

We’ve all been in a situation where we’re watching our inbox waiting for someone to send an email back. However, you might be limiting your own success by making your emails be too long, too wordy, or even too brief. According to a study by Boomerang, there are several ways to make your emails more viewer-friendly, and it all starts by analyzing what you’re currently doing with your outbound communications.

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Tip of the Week: Turn Your Favorite Email Client into Gmail on Your Android Device

Tip of the Week: Turn Your Favorite Email Client into Gmail on Your Android Device

Even though Google would prefer it if everyone switched over to Gmail as their primary email client, this simply isn’t going to happen. Many businesses are set in their ways, and would prefer to use Microsoft Outlook. Other users might still be in the days of Yahoo Mail for their personal email account. It’s to the users of other email clients that Gmailify is targeted.

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Nearly 50% of Data Stolen in 2015 Were Passwords and Email Addresses

b2ap3_thumbnail_stolen_data_400.jpgIn 2015, there was an incredible amount of information stolen from organizations all over the world. From healthcare companies to government institutions, nobody was safe from the endless onslaught of hacking attacks. Now, in the wake of these hackers’ destruction, it seems that most of the incidents in question exposed passwords and email address; important credentials that put many users’ security in jeopardy.

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About Business Solutions & Software Group

Business Solutions & Software Group has been serving the South Florida area since 1997, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses. Our experience has allowed us to build and develop the infrastructure needed to keep our prices affordable and our clients up and running.

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Business Solutions & Software Group is proud to announce the launch of our new website at www.bssgcorp.com. The goal of the new website is to make it easier for our existing clients to submit and manage support requests, and provide more information about our services for ...

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10211 W Sample Road Suite 114
Coral Springs, Florida 33065

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(954) 575-3992