Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Businesses are expected to make a choice regarding which solutions they will utilize. Typically they choose between Google’s or Microsoft’s productivity solutions. The unfortunate side of the choice is that they are often used exclusively, meaning there was little interoperability between the two. Nowadays, however, Google is moving to allow users to edit Microsoft Office files in Google Docs.

Gmail is a widely used email client for both individuals and businesses, and as such, it’s a valuable tool that helps them get the most out of the workday. Gmail provides an incredible amount of space to store, archive, and sync messages with other email providers, but the biggest draw by far is its third-party integration tools. Today we’ll take a look at four of the best Gmail integrations that your organization can take advantage of.

Wearable technology, or “wearables”, have been around for decades, technically first becoming popular with Pulsar’s Calculator Wristwatch in the 1970s. Since then, our wearables have become much more capable, accumulating detailed profiles on us as we use them. This begs the question… who is in charge of regulating them?

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.

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that a lot of people don’t know what to make of. Most people's experiences with VR have either been from a third-party perspective or seen through their smartphones with the help of a $20 headset you can get about anywhere. In fact, in a study done by Statistica, it was pretty evident that first-person experience with VR is very limited. Of the 3,000 people polled, only 16 percent of men and six percent of women admitted to trying a “real” VR headset. Today, we will take you through modern VR technology and see what the future potentially holds for virtual reality.

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.

For decades, a common quick fix for a slow computer was to run a disk defrag on the hard drive. For most modern computers, however, this common practice can actually harm your computer. Let’s talk about why, and how you can tell.

Microsoft Word is one of the most popular software titles in the world. It wasn’t always so. Despite competing with a myriad of separate word processors over literal decades, Word has sustained and is now more powerful than ever. Today, we’ll take you through the history of the world’s most recognizable word processor.

Social media has brought about a massive shift in the way people interact. Today we share our opinions, photos, and videos; and, we can even choose our dates by swiping right or left. With social media, people share moments, opinions, and other information, but is all this sharing actually setting people, and the organizations they interact with, up for failure? We’ll take a look at social media privacy concerns and potentially hazardous practices that could exacerbate the problems further.

There have been whispers for years about manufacturers using flexible OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays to create devices that were flexible enough to fold in half. As late as 2018, that’s all they were...whispers. In the subsequent year, to the surprise of many industry professionals, several manufacturers have committed to creating foldable devices. We’ll look at the technology behind these devices and tell you about which foldable devices are going to be available in 2019.

We’ve long accepted that, as an IT provider, there are a lot of stereotypes about what we can do and how we do it. Yet, just because we’ve accepted it, doesn’t mean we aren’t going to do anything about it. That’s why we wanted to use this blog post to clear up a few misconceptions about the nature of IT services.

Chances are that you use the Chrome web browser, and we know that even if you don’t, you definitely use Google search. With all the exposure these applications bring Google, it is kind of strange that their operating system, Chrome OS, isn’t more popular. Today, we will take a look at Chrome OS, the Chromebook, and explain why they might be a cost-effective solution for your business.

Technology innovation continues to move rapidly. It seems that every few days that there is a major breakthrough with some type of IT or other computer-based technology that is seemingly going to change the world; or, at the very least improve humanity in some way. Sometimes, however, it just wasn’t meant to be. We’ll take a look at a few technologies that once were shoo-ins to transform society, only to have come up short in one way or another.

Automation is all around us, in almost any industry one could name. This is because there are many benefits that it can offer a business of any size. Having said this, these businesses need to be careful, as there are a few situations in which improperly leveraging automation will actually hurt productivity. Let’s review these benefits and detriments in a bit more detail.

Nowadays, it’s odder not to utilize technology in the office environment. This, if anything, only makes it more important for you to embrace the proper technology that matches your office’s approach to the responsibilities and tasks of every day. For this week’s tip, we’ll look at a few reasons why you may want to make laptops the office’s standardized device.

The cloud has made so many services accessible that it can be difficult to isolate one in particular your organization can benefit from. Nonetheless, we’ve tried to narrow it down a bit, and it’s clear that Voice over Internet Protocol is a solution that all businesses can benefit from for one specific reason. Let’s dig in to why VoIP is such a great tool to use in the cloud, particularly in regard to the argument of hosted vs on-site VoIP.

It has become more evident than ever: any business that wants to be successful needs to have the proper means of communication established. For many years, this meant utilizing email for business correspondence. Now, while email still has a valuable place in business operations, users rely on messaging platforms that almost ensure that they get their point across instantly.

When you’re trying to run a business, there are a few things that you will require of your technology solutions. However, finding a solution that fits the bill isn’t always the easiest thing to do independently. That’s why we’re dedicating this week’s tip to an overview on using Google’s solutions for your business’ benefit.

In this day and age, it seems that everything is being digitized - even your business’ signage. This is to your benefit, as digital signage offers many capabilities that a traditional sign just can’t. If you’re on the fence about adding a digital signage strategy to your business, we have a few reasons to consider it a viable solution.

One of the most prominent benefits that technology has lent to businesses and their operations is how much more potential productivity these businesses can enjoy--that is, assuming that these businesses leverage the right technology solutions. Today, we’ll review three solutions that can provide your business with a much greater level of productivity than what could have been achieved in the past.