MSPNetworks Blog

If your business is looking to cut costs, one area to focus on is printing. While paper documents have traditionally played a significant role in business operations, they can consume a lot of office space and are challenging to manage efficiently. Let’s explore how you can reduce your printing expenses and streamline your document management processes.

The workplace is, fittingly, a place for work to be done. While there are a lot of factors that can contribute to a person’s day-to-day productivity, having a space that is conducive to accomplishing their work tasks can be seen as essential. Let’s go over how you can design a workspace that does just that:

Have a Place for Gadgets to Be Out of Sight (and Out of Mind)

While mobile devices have many legitimate and genuinely useful applications in the workplace, the pattern many have to sit and endlessly refresh their social media profiles isn’t one of them. A good rule of thumb to improve productivity is to keep these devices—and any gadget like them—put away. 

Of course, this isn’t a perfect solution to procrastination. People don’t need a device to zone out, and it isn’t as though they couldn’t visit Twitter on their workstation if they really wanted to. However, by reducing the potential for temptation, you and your team members can accomplish more. Pick a desk drawer to keep your phone in, and you may find yourself accomplishing much more.

Invest in the Right Peripherals

This may sound crazy, but giving your team the right tools to use can make all the difference. A good pair of headphones very much helps collaboration and communication if they also feature a headset, and by blocking external sound, they reduce the distractions that make it through to your team members’ collective attention. There are countless similar examples for all of the other peripherals your team may depend on, depending on their role—and there’s nothing wrong with going a little low-tech here, too.

For instance, if you haven’t switched to a paperless office and your team still uses paper documentation, providing each person with a pen and paper to jot down quick notes and a monitor-mounted document holder that allows them to reference other files and notes without shifting their gaze too far can keep their focus where you want it: the task at hand.

Encourage Movement and Personalization

There are also the little ways that you can help keep your team engaged and thereby productive. For instance, if it isn’t overdone, a little bit of movement keeps your team more engaged than motionlessly staring at their monitors all day does. Likewise, a clinical workspace that’s devoid of personality can also leave employees feeling devoid of purpose. So long as it isn’t overdone to the point of distraction, a few personal belongings and other identifiers can contribute a lot to an employee’s engagement (bonus points for plants, which have been shown to boost productivity through their presence).

In a lot of ways, you have more control over how productive your team is than you may think—it’s just up to you to give them the environment and tools they need to thrive. We can help supply the tools and support they’ll need. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today and ask how our managed services can help boost (among other things) your business’ productivity!

Microsoft Excel is, for many, the de facto spreadsheet-creation software. However, fewer know about its useful formatting capabilities and shortcuts. To help you make your own Excel sheets more comprehensible, we’re sharing some tips to help you format your documents.

Fast Table Format

When you have a data set that outlines different related data points, using a table is one of the best ways to review it, as the table allows you to reorganize and filter the data it includes. If your data is already in a spreadsheet, you can quickly create a table by selecting a cell and pressing Ctrl + T, and then pressing Enter.

Excel Formatting Shortcuts

Of course, when you’re hard at work on a spreadsheet, you don’t want to spend too much time playing with a whole lot of nitty-gritty formatting but this kind of formatting could potentially make your spreadsheet that much more easy to understand.

In addition to the familiar Ctrl + B for bold, Ctrl + I for italics, and Ctrl + U for underline, Excel offers plenty of other shortcuts to help you format your sheets. For instance, pressing Ctrl + 5 when text is selected will mark that text with a strike through, while pressing Ctrl + 1 with anything highlighted will bring up a format dialog box for that selection. Pressing F4 will repeat the last action, which is handy if you want to apply specific formatting to certain cells.

Icon Sets

Adding icons to your cells can help provide some context at a glance, and it is simple to do. With the cells you intend to accentuate highlighted, click on Conditional Formatting (which can be found under the Home tab. You will see an option for Icon Sets, where you can select the icon set that best suits your needs.

In fact, these icons are preconfigured to differentiate between certain data ranges. For instance, if you were to pick the option with three arrows, the downward arrow represents when your data is in the lower 33 percent, the sideways arrow the middle 33 percent, and the upward arrow the top 33 percent. These numbers shift with the number of icons you have available, divvying up evenly.

What Excel formatting tricks do you know? Share them with us in the comments!

Technology can be complicated, and it doesn’t help when all you hear is an alphabet soup of acronyms used to describe it. As professionals, this kind of jargon has become a second language to us and it is easy to forget that not everyone will recognize these acronyms. For your reference, we’ve assembled some common ones you’ll probably hear us use.

-aaS

This means “as-a-service” and is typically preceded by another letter or letters, like “IaaS” (for Infrastructure-as-a-Service) or “DRaaS” (Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service). This means that a given business need is available from a service provider at a monthly, budgetable rate, with the provider managing whatever the solution in question is on an ongoing basis. This approach has grown in popularity amongst businesses, who benefit from the sustained nature of the given service delivered.

BI

BI, or business intelligence, is the culmination of data analysis to better understand business trends. While enterprises have put it to the most use, business intelligence and big data are slowly being introduced to businesses of all sizes to help them boost their operations. 

BYOD

BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, is a strategy that many businesses use to cut costs and boost their employee satisfaction by allowing their staff members to use their own devices in the workplace, rather than ones provided by the employer. With the right precautions in place, BYOD can prove to be very beneficial for the business’ budget.

DoS

A Denial-of-Service attack (and sometimes, a DDoS, or Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack) is a form of cyberattack where a system’s operations are overwhelmed by an onslaught of incoming traffic. The interruptions that this causes can create significant challenges for a business.

EOL

When a solution reaches its EOL, or its End-of-Life, it effectively means that the developer is no longer updating its security to protect it and, by proxy, its users. This makes it of significant importance to keep apprised of the status of your solutions and have plans to migrate away from any that are approaching their EOL dates. Windows 7 reached its EOL not too long ago, for example.

IoT

The IoT is shorthand for the Internet of Things, the assortment of non-traditional devices that feature an Internet connection to boost their capabilities. While the IoT is a fascinating development in technology today, it also presents many challenges to your organizational security that must be addressed.

LAN

A LAN, or a Local Area Network, is a network used to share resources between computers contained within a limited distance. This is present in many offices, especially those that share printers or access to other pieces of connected equipment.

MFA

Multi-factor authentication, sometimes referred to as 2-factor authentication, is the practice of requiring an additional means of verifying one’s identity as one requests access to an account or a resource. By identifying a user with a username, the traditional password serves as the first factor of authentication, while the second requirement might demand a PIN number dictated by an application, or even biometric information.

SSL

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a protocol for encrypting data between a server and the device a user has. Used to protect data as it passes from client to server and back again, SSL is what turns HTTP into HTTPS in a web browser.

UPS

Disasters are nothing to fool around with, which makes the inclusion of an Uninterruptible Power Supply so crucial to your infrastructure. Many pieces of computing hardware need to go through a process to safely shut down, so a sudden power outage is a dangerous prospect. A UPS gives them the juice needed to safely power down, protecting your business’ hardware.

VM

A VM, or a virtual machine, is an interesting piece of technology. Rather than installing an entirely new piece of hardware, a simulated version is introduced into an infrastructure, allowing users access to an additional solution set. This enables you to make use of additional resources without investing in additional hardware.

VoIP

As the acronym for Voice-over-Internet Protocol, VoIP describes an approach to telephony that cuts out a large chunk of the costs associated with office telephones. In addition, VoIP solutions come with many business-friendly benefits included, while they would ordinarily come at a cost.

VPN

A VPN is a virtual private network. A virtual private network effectively creates a tunnel that encrypts data as it makes its way to its destination, protecting it along the way. It is an excellent solution for a business, especially one that utilizes many remote workers.

WAN

WAN, or wide-area networks, are used by organizations that have multiple locations over a wider area by connecting multiple small networks into one larger network. 

To learn more about these solutions, and many others that we can help you to implement, reach out to MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001.