Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Most offices contain a productivity suite, and most productivity suites will come with some type of slideshow software that can be used to prepare presentations. Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool to make slideshows, but it can be used for other purposes that you might not immediately think of. We’ll go over some of the best, including when and how you might want to use PowerPoint.

Relationships can sometimes be uncomfortable. Whether it is in the workplace or at home, sometimes people find the need to take advantage of other people. To get control over their situations, solutions have been invented to help parties monitor endpoints for information.

The fear of losing data fuels the data backup market, and with all the new threats that are constantly trying to find you on the Internet, every company has to have a strategy to protect their data. A lot of small businesses struggle to recover if they don’t have proper continuity policies, including data backup, when there is a situation that causes them to lose data.

Network is a word that’s commonly seen in the office environment in many different ways. In particular, you’re likely to hear about network security, network maintenance, social networking, and network switches, but what does it all mean? In this week’s tech term, we’re going to address what a network is and how it works to tie your business together.

We usually discuss how a business can help keep itself more secure. Unfortunately, this time we have reason to discuss the potential for a business to undermine the privacy of its own customers and staff. Walmart recently applied for a patent for a new surveillance technology that, buried in the jargon, holds many details that undermine the security of every customer and employee who works there.

For the business owner that likes to keep his/her pulse on how his/her staff communicates, email has traditionally been the best solution. Most enterprise email setups these days will provide you with email, file storage, and an integration for a messaging application--all of which have their uses--but, today’s business owner has to understand that their employees are living more mobile lives and can be productive when they’re on the move. Typically, the email application, no matter how strong their integrations are, doesn’t support real-time text messaging, but today there have been a couple solutions developed to speed up and streamline business communications, they are Slack and Microsoft Teams.

We generally cover tips that help business owners get the most out of their technology, but even the best business owner has a personal life, as well as technology that helps them stay connected with those they love. How can you share files with people you are close to without leaving them wide open to attack? We’ll discuss some possibilities for personal file sharing.

In the medical field, efficiency and access to information are crucial for the wellbeing of patients. This is why the medical field has not been shy about employing advanced IT solutions in the past, and it shows no sign of slowing in the future. Here, we’ve listed a few predictions of how the field will take shape in the near future, and what methods will be adopted.

Managed IT services are a great way to make your small business take advantage of a smaller budget while still getting all of the services that are critical to everyday success. One of the best ways you accomplish this is by using proactive maintenance to ensure unforeseen issues are accounted for. If a managed service provider only solved issues after they appeared, then it wouldn’t be any different from your typical break-fix IT solution. We take proactive measures to save your business in the long run.

Spreadsheets are great for organizing information, but they aren’t particularly interesting to look at--especially if you aren’t using Microsoft Excel to the best of your ability. Today’s tip is dedicated to going over some of the more obscure Microsoft Excel tips and tricks that will help you stylize your spreadsheets and make them more dynamic.

A lot is being made about running smarter businesses. Many businesses are looking to their data to try and work out how to build a better business. Two terms you typically hear during this conversation are business intelligence and business analysis. Today, we will take a look at the two terms, decipher their meaning, how they are different from one another, and how they can help you determine the resources a business needs to improve itself.

Your choice of browser can easily impact your security, as each handles how it informs you whether or not your connection is encrypted differently. This is especially important to recognize, especially when the Chrome browser will soon run counter to the advice users have received for quite some time.

Adding a watermark to a document is a great way to very visibly share a message about the contents of a document. Microsoft Word makes it pretty easy to do it yourself and leverage the associated benefits. Below, we explain how.

Once again, there is an example of why all users need to be careful about what they install. This time, however, users of the Google Chrome browser are the ones being specifically targeted by a particularly nasty attack known as “Nigelthorn.”

There is a lot of demand for perfected wireless charging. If this could happen, it’s possible to think about a world where no devices ever ran out of juice. Though there is a major push to make this happen, it’s clear that there are some people out there who don’t think that wireless charging will have as drastic an effect as it would seem.

The Internet might be an incredible tool to get lots of work done, but it can also be a major detriment in the form of workplace distractions. It’s true that your employees might feel tempted to visit these websites when left be, but what if you were to remove these websites as possibilities entirely? This week’s tip is about blocking certain websites that can be problematic for productivity.

Like cars and industrial equipment, computers are complex machines. To function properly they will need to be maintained, and sometimes fixed. Components inevitably fail, users (very) often make mistakes, and sometimes other people deliberately break things out of a litany of emotions. If your computer has seen better days, and you’ve done all you can, seeing if you can get it repaired will involve unhooking it and bringing to your local computer guy.

You may have heard of .NET framework before, or if you routinely use a Microsoft Windows operating system you’ve probably been prompted to install it at some point. Pronounced “dot net”, it is the predominant software framework of Windows, the most used non-mobile operating system in the world. Today we will introduce some software terms, go into what a software framework is, and how .NET framework is unique.

One of the biggest benefits of mobile data is how useful it is to business users for networking and productivity while they’re on-the-go. However, one of the biggest drawbacks to mobile data is how easy it is to use up while networking and being productive, and how expensive this can be. Fortunately, there are some ways to reduce the amount of data an Android device uses, as we’ll discuss in this tip.

Thanks to what’s become known as the “as a service” business model, organizations of all sizes can take advantage of great services that once may not have been as accessible. Even better is that they are often provided at an even more affordable rate than ever before. We’ll walk you through the specifics of what you can expect to receive from a using an “as a service” model.