Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

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.

Most modern gadgets have several different options for storage space, including both internal and external storage. However, the amount of space you’ll need on any given device will depend on various factors. It’s critical that you take these factors into account when purchasing or building a new desktop or laptop.

The second part of our desktop buying guide will focus on RAM, or random-access memory. Many users might not understand the importance of this, or they might have the impression that memory is the same thing as the amount of data your computer stores, which is certainly not true. The truth is that understanding RAM will have a major impact on the way you purchase devices. We’ll help you determine the best options for your device.

Buying a new computer can be exciting, but when you are buying computers for your business, finding the most cost-effective machine that also fits your operational and budgetary needs can  be difficult. Today, we will start our five-part business computing series by looking at CPU options.

As the world’s top telecom supplier and a major phone manufacturer, Huawei has been placed in a precarious situation due to its close ties with China’s government. In response to potential spying allegations, many countries have banned the use of the Chinese company’s networking equipment, throwing a wrench in the manufacturer’s plans to become an even bigger global force in the telecom industry.

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.

Microsoft Windows is a common sight in the modern office, but no matter how great the solution, it will eventually grow outdated and require updates in order to maintain security and efficiency. Businesses often have trouble adjusting to Windows End of Life events, and with a major one just around the corner for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you need to consider moving away from these solutions if you haven’t done so already.

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. 

After years of talk about individual data privacy, and years enacting regional laws, the European Union’s flagship individual privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation went into effect a year ago in May. Suddenly, if your organization does business inside EU member states, you will be under a stringent regulation concerning individual data privacy. Today, we will look at the GDPR and what has changed in the year it has been law.

Microsoft is saying goodbye to OneNote 2016. Although the handy note-taking app will still be supported until October 2020, with extended support for a few more years after, Microsoft has decided to no longer add features to it, and instead, they are focusing on the new version of OneNote that comes bundled with Windows 10.

Microsoft’s handy little note-taking app, OneNote, is gearing up to hit the old dusty trail and retire. At least, that’s the plan for OneNote 2016, whose end of life coincides with the rest of the Office 2016 suite in October, 2020. Fortunately, most of us already have OneNote 2016’s successor installed. Wait, what?

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.