Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

While it is very, very hard to say that much good has come from the COVID-19 pandemic, much less to make light of it, it is an important exercise for all of us to take. That’s why we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the advancements—including an objectively silly one—that this time has helped foster.

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.

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.

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.

Environmentally-friendly business practices are a fundamentally good thing for a business to implement. Not only is it better for planet Earth for businesses to adopt green practices, doing so might even save your business a little green in the long term. We’ve put together a few ways that you could start:

As businesses have come to rely on increasing amounts of data, the importance of keeping this data organized and usable has also increased. Therefore, databases are a critical consideration for any business that wants to gain as much value as they can from their collected data. However, a database can only be useful if a database management system is involved. Let’s go into why this is.

Downtime avoidance isn't exactly an art, but organizations that do it best often find themselves in much better positions than competitors that deal with more downtime. They deal with the expense of it, the lack of productivity that comes from it, and the multitude of ways where they can avoid it. Uptime is the name of the game, and today, we’re going to talk a little bit about how we like to remove downtime from the scenario. 

Innovation is a core necessity of the market economy. Taking good ideas and making them more dynamic and practical fuels economic growth, efficiency, and creates a better standard of living for the entire culture. IT is now firmly transforming the way that business is done with innovative tools and strategies. Today, we’ll look at some of the shifts we are seeing come about as a result of information 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.

Most of us are old enough to remember when you had to bring your computer into the shop to get it fixed. This break/fix method in neither affordable nor efficient when you are dealing with several computers. IT services and support has evolved and now is available around the clock though a managed service provider. Businesses that once had to spend large parts of their operational capital on IT administrators now have the opportunity to cut their IT support costs and get comprehensive support regardless.

Today, a business accumulates a lot - a lot - of files as time passes, and for the most part, they all need to be stored somewhere. In addition to that, there’s a good chance that multiple people will need to remain involved with these files. These challenges can be resolved by adopting solutions devoted to file sharing and collaboration. To assist with this process, we’ve decided to share a few best practices that will help make your implementation much easier.

With the use of computers and mobile devices becoming persistent in the culture, there have been some myths conjured up by people that have become just as incessant. These lead to people getting the wrong idea about situations with their IT; and, ultimately believe things that are going wrong, when nothing can be further from the truth. Today, we’ve picked five such scenarios we feel need to be debunked.

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.

Are you looking to get your current IT situation under control? Whether you are dealing with repeat issues, slow response times, or you are simply looking to grow and upgrade what you currently have, it’s important to know what you are up against and have an idea of where to go next.

Many businesses have begun to take advantage of the benefits that come with having remote workers. One tool that has seen an increase in utilization as a result is a conferencing solution. Communications are extremely important for the growing business, and with a full-featured conferencing tool at your disposal, you can expect to see the following benefits. 

It is said that software runs the world, but it wouldn’t necessarily be so without the ability to integrate applications with others. What exactly makes these integrations possible? For this week’s tech term, we will briefly introduce you to the application programming interface, or API; and, why it's so crucial in software development today.

A small-to-medium-sized business, by definition, isn’t going to have the same resources that are afforded to enterprise corporations, especially where its IT is concerned. However, this doesn’t mean that the SMB is stuck using sub-par solutions. Here, we’ll review a few key needs of any business, and the solutions that an SMB can access to meet them.

Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is a wonderful alternative to a business investing in high-end workstations. On one hand, it can save your business thousands of dollars by having your employees bring their own devices to the workplace. On the other, it could expose your network to untold risks. How can you strike a balance between the two and help your business prosper?

While many colleges and universities once associated themselves with thick tomes of knowledge, technology plays a critical role in their processes. In addition to all of the typical IT operations that any business must contend with, these bastions of learning also need to keep their students’ data secure, make sure that these students are completing their degrees on time, and make sure that students stay enrolled.