Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

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.

Be honest: you don’t think, “I need to search for this online.” You think, “I need to Google this.” Google is the standard in online search, but so few of us use it to its fullest abilities. Here, we’re sharing a few tips and tricks to make your use of Google Search much more effective.

More than ever, data fuels business decision making. To get the best use out of the data your business collects, automated tools can be used. This eliminates the (often impossible) task of manually getting the data together and then analyzing it. Today, we’ll talk about data automation and how rethinking how you look at your data can really help your business improve its operations.

Your business’ data is its lifeblood, which means that one of your internal priorities should be protecting it. While we often discuss the importance of your cybersecurity to defend against data theft and similar issues, it is also important to consider what would happen if the data loss was caused due to damage to the infrastructure it was stored on.

Keyboard shortcuts are inherently useful, from the classic cut (ctrl+X), copy (ctrl+C), and paste (ctrl-V) to the ones that fewer people know about. For this week’s tip, we’re shining the spotlight on some of these other (perhaps lesser known) keyboard shortcuts.

Small business owners have to confront a lot of issues, with more every day. As your business grows, however, there are too many for you to manage on your own. If your business is too big to control, you will need to expand on your strategies. Today, we will take a look at how decision-making shifts when your business grows. 

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.