Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Many businesses find themselves allocating their time for IT in a particular way—70 percent to maintenance, with only 30 percent dedicated to innovation and development. For real growth, the opposite is far preferable.

Fortunately, you can embrace better IT by simply reallocating some of your resources. Let’s explore how.

You can invest all you want in security software and firewall systems, but how much will these systems help when someone physically breaks into your office and steals data or destroys property? This is why you need to shore up weaknesses not just in your digital infrastructure, but physical infrastructure as well. Today, we want to go over how even a passing thought at physical security is better than the alternative (and how it can make a big difference in your approach to business continuity).

With the way things are today, you need to consider ways to prioritize not just your mental and physical wellbeing, but also your digital wellbeing. This involves taking a look at how you use technology and the role it plays in your workplace; which, if we’re being honest, is probably a big one.

Here are some simple best practices to ensure that you are promoting workplace wellness to help your employees achieve a healthier balance in their day-to-day life.

Running a small or medium-sized business means wearing many hats. But is "Chief IT Firefighter" one you want to wear? Constant tech issues, cybersecurity worries, and wondering if your IT is holding you back. Sound familiar?

For many local businesses, IT feels more like a necessary burden than a strategic tool. 

Automation makes sense from an operations standpoint, and people see this despite the many who advocate for scaling back to save jobs. For every task that can be completed, however, less than half can be automated. When you consider all the tasks that a human might be responsible for at their job, that number further dwindles, resulting in surprisingly few jobs that can be fully automated by artificial intelligence. Today, we want to look at reasons why you shouldn’t implement automation for certain tasks and why working with humans is still the right call for many.

We are the first to understand that nobody really likes reaching out for support. It’s time-consuming, for starters, and there’s something uniquely humbling about having to ask how to use the tools everyone relies on nowadays. However, there is nothing to be ashamed of when turning to help, especially if you can do so as effectively as possible.

We’re willing to bet good money on the fact that your business suffers more technology problems than you’d like (but don’t hold us to that). Sometimes the problems are more complex, but many are simple and can be addressed quickly without the need for a professional. Today, we want to help you with some of the basics so you can know for sure when something is outside of your wheelhouse.

Compressed files, or ZIP files, are great for certain tasks in the business environment. That said, many individuals simply don’t know what they do and what benefits they offer. Today, we want to change that. We’ll discuss what a ZIP file does and how you can make one.

Spreadsheets are a staple in the workplace, but even with these tools to help manage data, it’s easy to lose track of it as the size and scope grows larger. Today, we want to help you better reference your spreadsheets through the use of naming cells.

Today’s businesses need to have access to IT expertise. It is not a stretch to say this in our highly tech-reliant modern society, as business technology has become a legitimate advantage for organizations of any size to utilize against their competition. However, how confidently do you know what to look for in a job candidate?

Let’s go over the expertise—in both hard and soft skills—that you want any IT professional you depend on to have.

Productivity fuels your business and its profits, so it makes sense to consider it when examining your business’ performance. Small and medium-sized businesses, or SMBs, have opportunities to improve operations through the use of productivity technology. Let’s explore some of these strategies!

In 2022, Microsoft introduced the concept of "productivity paranoia," highlighting managers' overwhelming concerns that remote workers might not be operating at peak efficiency. As remote and hybrid work models persist, however, a new manifestation has surfaced: the pervasive feeling among workers that they must constantly prove their productivity while working from home.

The conference room for any business is bound to be pretty interesting, and it can tell you all there is to know about a business. This is why it’s especially important to ensure your conference room gives the right impression, especially if you have clients who frequent your office. Let’s go over how you can make your conference room the best it can be!

PowerPoint has made a significant impact on the world, so much to the point of being synonymous with presentations. It’s the premier presentation software first introduced by Microsoft, and with countless cool features to explore, we’re confident that you can find a lot of use for this software. Today, we want to share some of our favorite lesser-known features to help you get more out of your presentations.

Communication is critical to successfully working in a group, regardless of your role in that group, including your capability to be heard when you have something to contribute. Let’s review a few ways you can help make it more likely that your collaborators will ultimately hear you out.

Technology is a great enabler of productivity, and you can use it to build better habits that can compound your productivity over time. Let’s look at a concept called habit stacking that can be used to great impact.

The relationship you have with your employees sets the pace for not only the kind of company you want to run, but also the kind of employer you want to be. Many employers fall short when it comes to managing their employees in ways that are respectful and beneficial to the continued betterment of both employee and organization. We’re here today to help you with some simple ways you can improve relations between your employees and management.

If you take vacations or are going to be out of the office for any specified amount of time, then it helps to set an out-of-office message so that your coworkers and clients know that you’ll be away. You can make them more effective, however, with a couple of simple practices, namely one particular personal detail.

Taking care of your technology is vitally important, and that’s something that we as a managed service provider will always espouse, but the truth is that your technology is only as effective as the people using it. Therefore, you should make sure to take proper care of your team, too, and one way you can do this is by sharing these workplace stretches with them. The right stretches can improve physical health, which in turn improves other aspects of their lives—including their work.

Presentations can be a challenge for many people in the modern office. We wanted to make it a little easier to put together a great one, so we’re sharing some of our favorite tips for putting one together.