Coleman Technologies Blog

Sure - if you want to limit how you can leverage it to your business’ advantage. Here, we’ve assembled a few features that you can use to make YouTube a better resource for your business.

First Up: YouTube’s Keyboard Shortcuts

Whether you’re using YouTube as a research tool or presenting your findings in a meeting, effectively using its built-in shortcuts can make your use of the website much more productive (and, let’s face it, more impressive).

If you’re doing research, jumping back to the beginning of a video will be super handy - and is possible, by pressing the 0 (zero) key. You can also use your arrow keys to fast forward or rewind the video in five-second increments (or ten-second increments, if you hold the Ctrl key at the same time).

If you’re using YouTube as a part of a presentation, you can quickly pause and resume the video by pressing either the spacebar, or the K key. If your audience can’t quite hear what you’re presenting, you can adjust the volume using the up and down arrow keys. The M key will mute the video, and unmute it when you’re ready to hear the video again.

Starting From a Specific Point in the Video

Speaking of using YouTube as a part of your presentation, you may not always want a video to start from the very beginning. YouTube gives you a few options to do so - the easiest being grabbing the altered link to your desired time directly from YouTube.

Let’s look at this video about phishing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfnA7UmlZkE

There’s a lot of information in this video. What if you want to focus on one specific aspect, like how phishing can be spotted? This video doesn’t dive into this aspect until just about the one-minute mark. YouTube offers a function that eliminates the need of fast-forwarding to this point. Under the Share option, the menu that appears offers a Start at option. You can select the precise time that you want your video to start. The link that appears will begin your video at the moment you have selected (unless a pesky ad gets in the way):

https://youtu.be/jfnA7UmlZkE?t=63

Search Filters to Improve Your Results

If you’re having trouble finding the right content on YouTube, there are filters that you can whittle down your results by - making it more likely that you will find more videos that fit what you are looking for. You can seek out videos that were uploaded during a specific time frame, that fall within a certain duration, and seek out specific channels, playlists, and other media types - among other filters.

YouTube can be one of the greatest resources available today... as long as you can find and share the information you need. For more ways that technology can improve your business and its processes, subscribe to our blog!

You would think that since millions of phishing attacks are ignored, set to spam, and actively mitigated each month, that there wouldn’t be such a desperate effort to educate people about the signs of phishing attacks, but the fact remains that it only takes one successful phishing attack to compromise an entire workstation, network, or computing infrastructure. 

Today, everyone that works for your company will need to be able to spot and report a phishing attack. Doing so can sometimes be extremely difficult if the spammer does his/her homework. Consider using and teaching these tips to keep your business from being a victim of a phishing attack.

1. The Email Gives You Anxiety

One of the first things you need to know about phishing emails is that they almost always push you to take impulsive action. That’s why so many people fall for them each year. They often seem like they are from a legitimate source and are written to deliver fear. If the contents of an email give you an uneasy feeling, and they seem a little out of scope for the sender, chances are it is a scam and should be reported.

2. It’s Zipped Up

Hackers will often send attachments with their phishing attacks. If you are sent a .zip file, and you don’t immediately recognize the sender, do not click on it. In fact, it’s best practice that any email sent with an attachment, if you don’t know exactly what it is, should be verified before being opened. 

3. URLs and Addresses are Fraudulent

If you can’t tell by the tone of the content, one telltale sign that you are dealing with a phishing attack is to look at the URLs of the links or the actual email address the message comes from. Hackers will often resort to small changes and redirects to get a recipient into a compromised position. If you hover your cursor over any link, you can see the URL it directs to in the status bar. If it is not a URL you immediately know, you should verify from the sender.

4. The Message is Sloppy

Today’s company is more cognizant of their brand and message than any time in history. If you receive an email that is filled with grammatical errors, misspelled words, and poorly defined sentences, you will want to avoid clicking on anything. Marketers today are trained to make an email as personal as they can. If your email has an impersonal message, chances are it wasn’t sent from a marketer and should be reported.

This may not be a comprehensive list, but by following these tips you will be better prepared to deal with a phishing message. The IT professionals at Coleman Technologies do a lot to drive forward security as an integral part of any IT management policy. To learn more about phishing, call our knowledgeable professionals at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

Business Doesn’t Stop, But You Should

We’ve all been there. We’re driving or on the train and a phone call comes in that you absolutely have to take. What do you do? Most people will take the call, but the right thing to do is send it to voicemail and return the call as soon as possible. Why? Because you are distracted. It’s best to call back and give the caller the attention they deserve rather than trying to juggle a phone call in the middle of traffic. Okay, this one is pretty basic, but it’s the foundation of all mobile etiquettes.

Don’t Be Rude

One of the biggest problems with mobile business is that there seems to be a continuous amount of communications that come in. This isn’t a problem when you are free to talk or text. It can be a problem if you are with other people, however. If you must take a phone call when you are face-to-face with others, be sure to excuse yourself and go at least ten feet away. This is courteous, and after all, it’s only four more feet than social distancing.

Brevity is often a cornerstone to modern mobile communication, with emails and texts often being short and sweet. Keep in mind though, sometimes being overly short can come across as disarming or even disrespectful to the recipient.

Stop Texting in Important Moments

One of the biggest faux pas that a mobile professional can have is the tendency to text people when other people demand their attention. If there is business going on right in front of you, even if it’s just a meal or an impromptu conversation, do yourself a favor and wait until it is over to return text messages. Again, pretty basic, but it doesn’t hurt to keep it top of mind.

Make Sure You Have Good Reception

This one is a serious problem. A lot of times when people are on the go, their service is not conducive to professional conversation. You can't do business if calls keep getting dropped or texts don't go through because you've chosen a poor place to conduct a mobile meeting; and nothing ruins your ability to communicate than if people have to stop every few minutes to get clarification or ask you to repeat yourself. Choose your location wisely.

Sometimes you can’t help it, we get it, but if you are planning on running a meeting and need to participate, try to be somewhere where the service is reliable. It’s a sign that you respect everyone else’s time. If it’s impossible to prevent, simply be forthcoming about it and let everyone know at the start of the call. Perhaps even give an option to resume the call later if things get too difficult for the other participants.

Return Calls as Soon as Possible

When you return phone calls soon after you miss them, it shows professionalism and respect for the caller. If you are going to be out of touch for a bit, whether it be for meetings or personal time, it is solid practice to change your voicemail to state when you won’t be available. Then, when you are available, be sure to reach back out. Nothing is worse than getting a voicemail stating that the person won’t be available two weeks ago.

The mobile device is one of the best business tools available for people today, but knowing how to use them professionally is extremely important. Have you had to deal with a vendor or client that doesn’t adhere to mobile best practices? Leave your stories in the comments section below and return to our blog for more great tips and tricks each week.

Labels

Instead of categorizing your notes into folders and notebooks, Keep is organized by labels. You can create labels to find everything you have stored on a particular topic. Fortunately, it's also easy to use, so in this tip I'll show you how to use Google Keep to track all the important information you need to process and store.

Adding a new label to a note is as easy as selecting the Labels option in the lower right menu on the editing screen. You can also add a label by holding down the note from the main list and tapping the label icon or by including a hashtag at the start of your note. This allows you to check your note for the label you have added by tapping on the hamburger menu and selecting which labels you want to go through.

Reminders

Setting up reminders for various tasks and appointments is a very simple utility that Google Keep allows you to perform, assisting you in managing all your usual tasks. 

Let’s say you need to go to the bank or run some other errand during your lunch break, which starts at 12:30. Keep allows you to set a reminder for 12:27. Additionally, if you need to perform a task as soon as you get to work, you will be alerted as soon as you are on the premises.

The setting is simple enough and is available by pressing the icon that looks like a finger with a string tied to it. Keep also allows you to check your alarm settings by accessing the hamburger menu and selecting Reminders.

Checklists

Of course, many things you want to remember can involve several steps, but in these cases Keep’s checklist feature makes task generation much simpler.

You can quickly and easily create checklists and simple lists by tapping the Plus icon in the action bar. You can create a quick, simple checklist or use ones you’ve already made, with the capability to close and reopen line items by checking them off and unchecking them as needed.. 

Collaboration

Notes created in Keep can be shared with other people so that everyone can contribute, whether you're developing a business strategy or keeping track of topics discussed during a meeting. After accessing the note to be shared, tap the lower-right menu icon and select Collaborator. You can then send the note to one of your Gmail contacts to invite them to edit and utilize your note. Any changes they make will be reflected whenever you access the tool.

Google Keep is a great tool for anyone looking to be more organized. Have you used Google Keep? What did you think of it? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you feel like you have too many browser tabs open at any given time, then you'll be happy to know that you can sometimes save certain browser tabs as a standalone application on your device. This will give them their own icon and make accessing them much easier than constantly navigating to them through your web browser.

How to Turn a Website Into a Standalone App

If you frequently refer to websites throughout the day, you might need a quick and convenient way to open them. The aforementioned apps can help you do so without opening even more tabs on your browser.

For example, you might want quick access to your email or other cloud applications that load in your web browser. You can use this trick to remove your often-accessed browser tabs and have them open in their own standalone window, complete with a taskbar or start menu icon. It’s great for freeing your brain of just one more browser tab.

Here’s how to turn your favorite websites into standalone apps in Google Chrome:

1. Go to your designated website and go to the page that you want the app to start at.
2. Click on the three-dot icon in the top right corner of your browser.
3. Select Save and share > Install page as app… Some of the Google services you want to do this with don’t let you do this, like Google Docs and Gmail. Some websites might prompt you to install a preexisting app, too.
4. Give your app a name. If you don’t, it will automatically generate one for you.
5. You’ll find your new app in the taskbar and you can search for it through the Start menu. You can also pin the app to the taskbar if you’d like to have easy access to it. All you have to do is right-click the taskbar icon and select pin to taskbar.

Be sure to visit our blog periodically for more great tips like this!

Let’s go over how to set up this capability. As a disclaimer, it will require you to edit some of your menu options, so reach out to your IT resource to confirm that it is okay to do so and to assist you if need be.

You should also know that Track Changes won’t work if a spreadsheet contains a table that hasn’t been converted into a range. To make this conversion, select the table, navigate to the Design tab, and click the Convert to Range option. If you want others to be able to collaborate on your workbook, it needs to be saved in a shared location.

Adding the Track Changes Buttons

To access these options, you’ll need to add them to your Ribbon menu (unless your version of Excel includes them by default). Doing so is simple:

• Right-click on the Ribbon menu. From the options available, select the Customize the Ribbon option.
• On the resulting dialog screen, find the drop-down menu labelled Choose commands from: and select All Commands. In the other menu, select Main Tabs, and find Review in the list that appears. Click on the + next to Review, and then click the New Group button.
• Right click on New Group, renaming it to “Track Changes.”
• With “Track Changes” selected, find Highlight Changes and Accept/Reject Changes in the left-hand list. Click the Add button to add them to your “Track Changes” group.

Once your Highlight Changes button has been added to the Review category of the Ribbon menu, click on the Highlight Changes button. A box will appear, where you should select both Track changes while editing… and Highlight changes on screen. Click Okay once you’ve done so.

Once you’ve done this, any changes made to the spreadsheet will be marked with a small triangle in the corner of the cell to display the most recent change.

Reviewing all Changes

After everyone has contributed their input, you can choose to accept or reject the changes that have been made with the Accept/Reject Changes button. You’ll be asked to Save the Workbook, and once you have, the changes will be highlighted one by one with the option to Select Changes to Accept or Reject.

All changes will be listed so that you can Accept them or Reject them accordingly. The cursor will automatically proceed to the next change for you to repeat the process. If there are multiple instances of a similar change (like all ampersands or percentages written out instead of the symbols used), you can use the Accept All button to mass update them.

With any luck, we’ve helped make collaboration that much easier for you and your team members. For more tips like this, as well as best practices and other IT assistance, make sure you subscribe to our blog. Remember, our team is always available at (604) 513-9428 for your IT needs.

Whatever your industry, there are going to be processes that need to be followed, and this will require no small amount of organization to keep all the moving parts in tandem with each other. Fortunately, tools that can help with your project management needs are readily available, so long as you take advantage of their capabilities.

Take Google Sheets, for instance.

It’s true! Not only does Google Sheets offer fully customizable templates intended specifically for project management purposes, there are a lot of other features that are conducive to the kind of processes that should make up your project management activities.

For instance:

Google Sheets Allows You to Create Custom Dropdown Lists

With all the standard updates that proper project management will require—for instance, the status of certain goals and initiatives within your process—having the ability to select from a preconfigured list is hugely helpful. 

The existing templates that Sheets offers give you the opportunity to edit the drop-downs they come populated with. All you have to do is click the small downward arrow in the cell, select the pencil icon in the resulting menu, and edit the rules for the dropdown. For added visibility, you can even apply different colors to the different options. 

However, you won’t be able to add new options to your dropdowns or change the order in which they appear if using a preconfigured option. That will require you to create a dropdown menu from scratch. Once you’ve selected the cell or range of cells you want the dropdown to appear in, click Insert and then select Dropdown. A sidebar will appear for you to populate the data validation rules you want… or in other words, what options you want your dropdown menu to include. Once you’ve added and arranged your options, click Done to complete the process.

The Inherent Collaboration within Google Sheets Makes It Easier to Fully Plan a Project

Today’s workplace is increasingly built on collaborative work, which means that it is all the more important that the tools used therein are conducive to this kind of collaboration. Google Sheets, just as with the rest of the Google Workspace offering, is built to help you accomplish just that. Adding contributors to your spreadsheet is a simple matter… all you need to do is click the Share button at the top right of your page, select who you want to grant access to and specify the level of access and permissions you want to provide.

Once you’ve done so, others will be able to interact with a given Sheet at the level you have permitted them to—and you’ll still be able to adjust these permissions as needs change.

Google Sheets Allows You to Tag Your Collaborators

Google Sheets offers a feature called smart chips—small interactive widgets that can be embedded into your documents that link to pertinent information. You can tag different collaborators directly in the spreadsheet, and from there, email them, kick off a video chat, or (most applicable to our purposes today) assign a task to them.

We Can Help Outfit You with Proper Project Management Software, Too

Of course, you may prefer to use a dedicated software to help organize your company’s activities. Turning to us means you’ll have someone in the wings to help you procure, manage, and maintain all of the tools that your company uses.

Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

For context, it helps to know that Microsoft OneDrive is a cloud storage platform that just about any business could make use of, regardless of its size. After all, any size of business will have to remain organized.

Speaking of which, our first tip covers how OneDrive can make this organization super convenient for you.

OneDrive Files On-Demand

Files On-Demand gives your users the ability to effectively link their File Explorer to OneDrive, which enables them to work with files found in your OneDrive without downloading all of them to their device. Not only does this save real estate in the device’s storage, it allows work to continue offline through a simple proactive switch in a particular file’s settings.

Known Folder Move

OneDrive can also work as a simple backup option, although it certainly should not replace a comprehensive plan. Regardless, Known Folder Move allows users to have the contents of certain folders automatically synchronize with their OneDrive storage. This can be set up during the initial installation of OneDrive, or at any time you have need for it.

Integration with Microsoft Outlook

Consider what typically happens when you try to share some kind of Office document as an email attachment for someone to work on: you aren’t sending them access to your file, you’re simply sending them their own copy. OneDrive fixes that by enabling a user to share their files as though they were attachments, editing the permissions provided on the fly. As a result, the actual file is being collaborated on, really allowing work to be done.

What has been your experience using OneDrive? Share your impressions, as well as any other questions we can help with, in the comments!

What is Bandwidth?
In its most basic form, bandwidth is how quickly you can download content from the Internet. Bandwidth is measured in megabits per second, or Mbps. The more bandwidth you have, the faster downloads will run. Some high-speed connections can be measured in Gigabits per second.

How Exactly Does Bandwidth Translate to Download Speed?
If you’re trying to calculate your projected download speed, keep in mind that there are eight bits for every byte. This means that if you’re trying to download eight megabytes of data on a one Mbps connection, it will take about one minute. A 512 megabyte file, on the other hand, would take just over a hour to download on the same connection.

Estimating Your Business’ Needs
In order to reach an appropriate estimate for your business’ bandwidth, you’ll need to use a little math. Take the estimated traffic that you expect each of your processes to take up, as well as the number of users that are engaged in this process. You’ll want to assume that this is during peak operations; otherwise you might not have enough during an important operational period. You can generally rely on the following speeds for bandwidth estimation:

• 100Kbps and below: Low-end, single-line VoIP phones and e-fax machines. Some more basic computers have processes that use less than 100Kbps, but in the business world, you probably aren’t using them.
• 100-500Kbps: More computers and laptops fall into this range, as they are more likely to be the ones streaming, downloading, emailing, and browsing than other less intensive devices.
• 500Kbps-2.0Mbps: Cloud solutions and standard definition video conferencing take up about this much bandwidth. This is the general range for Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, Customer Relationship Management platforms, and Point of Sale devices.
• 2.0Mbps and more: High-definition conferencing solutions, remote access, heavy cloud access, and other resource-intensive tasks fall under this category.

If you keep peak activities at the top of your mind, use them to add up what your staff will need to stay on task and ahead of schedule. For example, let’s say you have ten users, including yourself. You might be using 450Kbps for correspondence, while six of your employees are using a CRM solution at 2.0Mbps each. The last three are using high-definition video conferencing software for 2.5Mbps each. Add all this up and you can expect to use about 20Mbps at heaviest use, but you want to go a little beyond this to 25Mbps, just to be safe.

What are other tips that you might want us to share? Leave us a comment and let us know.

You Don’t Have Enough Bandwidth

When you purchase an Internet package, you get certain speeds. Today, these speeds are faster than ever, but if your business has too much going on, it can wreak havoc with your Internet speeds. There is a situation that happens when too much data is trying to pass through a network connection. This situation is called bottlenecking and it is potentially the reason your speeds are slow. Think about it, if you try to put several gigabytes through a connection that is only rated for a few megabits per second, it’s going to take some time to get all the data through. To check this, audit how many devices are at work. Most of the time you’ll be surprised how much data you are sending and receiving. We can help you with this audit before you make the call to upgrade your Internet package.

Outdated Equipment

Another potential issue is that your networking equipment may simply be old and not be able to use the dual bands that are often necessary to get the most out of your wireless network. If you have enough bandwidth, but your Internet is just slow, chances are upgrading the modem, switches, or routers would be a prudent move and will likely fix any problems you have. 

Misconfigured Equipment and Environmental Factors

Once you’ve made sure that the physical components of your network are working as intended, but your Internet connection isn’t improving, you probably need to reconfigure your software on your devices or move your hardware to avoid interference. Specifically, if your wireless network signal is having problems making it through obstructions, you will want to consider using the 2.4 GHz connection rather than the 5.0 GHz channel. The max speed you’ll see will decrease, but the 2.4 GHz connection makes its way through obstructions better. Unfortunately, however, the 2.4 GHz signal can be a victim of electronic interference more than the 5.0 GHz channel. 

If you need help with your business’ networking, don’t wait and lose more money. Contact the professionals at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

The Ideal Task Formula

The consensus of many productivity experts and trusted names is that the equation to build out a task essentially looks like this:

Step + Detail + Deadline + Context = Task

This works well, as it can apply to either a complete project, or each piece of a larger project. Let’s take a closer look at each part.

Step

Every task is going to feature some action or another, whether something needs to be researched, written, completed, or reviewed, what have you. Essentially, this defines the what of the task at hand, the goal that the person assigned to it needs to accomplish.

Detail

This takes the step and builds it out with additional context and specificity. This might involve such details as:

• Who the task is assigned to
• Why they’re completing the task
• What contribution this task gives toward the final goal
• Where the assigned team member can find the resources needed to complete the task

Deadline

Of course, one of the most important details associated with any task is the date and time it needs to be completed. By specifying this, you prevent your projects from remaining in a holding pattern, moving them along.

Context

The final things you include in your task are the other important details surrounding it: how long is allotted to spend on it, any projects it is associated with, and where it should fall in the assigned team member’s priorities. This enables the person you’ve assigned to better organize their schedule to make the most effective use of their time.

Let’s say you wanted to assign one of your team members to write you a blog post about creating a task, so you needed to task it out. The final product might look something like this:

“Write blog post about creating tasks”

Creation of blog for website describing how to create a task for a business goal to be posted on Friday. Please compose blog on document found in content creation folder.

Assigned to SEAN – Priority 5

*If unable to complete, please inform HR and reschedule to next week*

Wednesday: 9:30—10:30

• Seek out sources for blog post about how to task out responsibilities
• Compose blog post
• Contact BRIAN to read blog over and proof

Friday: 1:30—2:00

• Post blog to website”

There you have it: how to task out your business’ processes for your team to reference as they follow your instructions. This process can apply to just about anything, if you are careful to follow the steps and provide a clear and comprehensive view of that which needs to be accomplished. The more information you provide, the better the outcome will likely be.

For more information to help you boost your productivity, and information about the tools that can help you to do so, subscribe to our blog today!

Let’s face it, if your business operates anything like most do, you have far too many of these processes for anyone to reasonably remember. This means that making sure that your processes are both comprehensively recorded and accessible for your employees to reference is a crucial facet to your productivity.

Fortunately, doing so is relatively simple, as long as you go about it properly.

Step One: Identify What You’re Documenting
The important thing to remember about creating documentation is that, unless the task itself is incredibly granular, making the documentation too specific isn’t going to help anyone. On the flip side, any documentation that is too vague isn’t likely to provide anyone with the value that it should.

You need to store your documentation in a centralized place that all employees can access. It helps even more if there is a system in place to allow you to search the contents of each document, sort them in various ways, and highlight changes and edits made to processes. In other words, utilizing a document management system or a knowledge center of some kind will go a long way in preserving the functionality of your processes. There are plenty of tools and applications out there for this, and we can help you choose the best one for your situation based on your specific needs.

Step Two: DIARI (Do It And Record It)
This step will form the basic shape of your documentation, as it will create a step-by-step guide to completing the task as a whole. You’ll need to go through a run-through of the process you’re trying to document, recording every step you take.

Don’t be shy about including details, either. For instance, if your process will require the same questions to be asked each time it is put into action, include the list of questions in your documentation. If someone is supposed to be contacted specifically, identify them in your documentation and provide their contact information.

From here, you should have a pretty good handle on how the process typically goes down… and the insights to make it even better.

Step Three: Refine, Repeat, Revise
When you were running through your process, were there any steps that would have made more sense to do earlier so you could be better prepared for a later responsibility? Try rearranging the steps in your documentation and trying it again. Did it work better, or worse? Take these observations into account and act accordingly.

Really, once you commit the time to doing it properly, creating invaluable and useful documentation isn’t that difficult of a process. You can even bring multimedia into it, if it’s a good fit, using tools like Steps Recorder on Windows.

For more handy IT tips, make sure you subscribe to our blog!

Create Procedures for Both Routine and Emergency Patches

Many patches are released on a predictable schedule, so as to make it easier to keep up on patches - after all, if you know that a patch is going to be released on a certain date, you can set aside time to apply that patch. There are also emergency patches that are released when a vulnerability is discovered and remediated.

As you might imagine, both are important to maintain - one, to keep your business as free as possible from vulnerabilities, and second (and perhaps more obviously), to keep your business secure in the face of an impending threat. That’s why you need to make sure you have set processes in place to ensure that all patches are tested and applied. While it may not always be a pressing security issue, it is better to be prepared for anything that the vendor is concerned about.

At Coleman Technologies, we always build out and update our procedure, and test updates before they are applied to prevent downtime and other issues. It’s all about working smarter, not harder.

Have a Controlled, but Realistic, Environment for Testing Purposes

Let me ask you a hypothetical question: someone comes up to you on the street and offers you a pill that would make you immune to the common cold, but with no peer reviews by any medical board or the FDA. So, do you take it?

I would hope you would say no, simply because you have no idea of the effectiveness of the pill without it having been tested. Patches are the same way. Without any testing, you simply don’t know how well the patch will work, or if it will interfere with another process. Before you apply any patches to your primary infrastructure, you need to have made these evaluations in a reasonable approximation of it. An effective means of doing so is to spin up a virtualized environment and stress-test the patch there, before actually applying it - just make sure you give your tests enough time to produce trustworthy results.

Keep Track of When Patches Are Released

Depending on the hardware and software you use, patches are going to be released on a different schedule. This is because different manufacturers and vendors manage their schedules differently. Just look at Microsoft and their famous Patch Tuesday (typically the second and sometimes the fourth Tuesday of each month). In order to properly keep your patches up-to-date, you need to know when to expect them.

For assistance with your business’ patch management, you can always turn to Coleman Technologies. Give our professionals a call at (604) 513-9428.

In OneDrive, a user can share a singular file or folder pretty easily. All they have to do is log in, right-click on the file/folder, and click Share.

Sharing this way allows a user to share their content with one of their contacts, send it to an email address, or copy a shareable link and send it along through an instant message or, again, and email. Doing so gives the recipient access to make edits to it by default, but the sender can restrict them to read-only access if desired.

However, you probably don’t want to micromanage your entire team to make sure they are sharing files and folders with people actually authorized to receive them. Fortunately, by using the global settings of OneDrive, you can take control past the file/folder basis to control how a user can share documents.

Controlling a User’s File Sharing in OneDrive

Assuming that you have administrative access over your OneDrive account, sign in by visiting https://admin.microsoft.com/ before proceeding with the following steps:

•  Look for Admin centers on the left side of your display. Click SharePoint.
• You should then be directed to the new SharePoint admin center. If you are brought to the old one, you can go to the new on by clicking on Open it now.
• Again, on the left side of the screen, find Policies and click on Sharing.

Doing so means that you have edited the global settings, applying your changes to all accounts. To manage settings on a case-by-case basis, access Users, Active Users, and select the individual who you are attempting to manage. You should find a OneDrive tab, with adjustable Sharing options.

With privacy and security being so critical for contemporary businesses, you need to make sure you are doing everything you can to maintain control of your company’s information. Our security experts can help - reach out to us at (604) 513-9428 to get started.

First, we’ll define what “infrastructure monitoring” refers to:

Understanding IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring covers a few different considerations, all critically important to the continued productivity of your business. These considerations include things like the physical condition of your infrastructure’s hardware, how your operating systems are being utilized, how much of your network’s bandwidth is being consumed and how many errors are occurring, or the performance and availability of your applications.

Naturally, hardware failures are a considerably sizable issue, even among the issues that infrastructure monitoring can help detect. This is especially the case when you consider that your remote workers will be especially reliant on your hardware to deliver the solutions they need. This means that you need to be particularly concerned about the possibility of issues happening within your server room and impacting your physical infrastructure itself.

In order to avoid the disastrous results this could have upon your data, productivity, budget, and business continuity, it is important that you have the proper infrastructure monitoring in place. Considering all that is going on now with a largely absent workforce, you especially need to abide by a few best practices considering your infrastructure monitoring solutions.

How to Make the Most of Infrastructure Monitoring

Here, we’ve assembled a few of the most important considerations you need to take into account--especially if your team is operating remotely.

Identify your most critical pieces of infrastructure for remote work capabilities.

While the entirety of your infrastructure is important, there are bound to be some components that a remote team is going to rely on more frequently. Regardless, since your business likely relies on each piece of equipment in your setup to some degree, you will want to make sure that the conditions are ideal for them all to operate. Consider adding backups of your climate control systems to take over if your primary ones should fail, and devices that allow for unresponsive components to be rebooted remotely to ensure that your in-house tools are available to your remote team.

Make sure your alert settings are up-to-date.

It’s one thing to have alerts set up for detected issues… it’s quite another to have alerts set up to inform the right people about these detected issues. If James needs to know about something, it doesn’t make much sense to alert Sarah. As the balance of your team shifts and responsibilities move around to new people, you need to make sure that your alerts are shifted accordingly. 

Confirm your system is in working order.

If a technician ever must go into the office to attend to something, have them check around your infrastructure for issues with your monitoring system. After all, it won’t do you any good if it isn’t functional itself and something were to happen. Have them check connections and ensure that the sensors are clean.

While we all try to keep ourselves safe, we must remember to do something to keep our business technology operational. Monitoring its environment is a great way to accomplish this.

To learn more about implementing the tools that protect your business during a wide array of circumstances, reach out to the team at Coleman Technologies today by calling (604) 513-9428, and subscribe to our blog for more IT information and updates.

It is important to keep modern computers clean, and laptops are no exception. However, a laptop's different form factor makes cleaning it much different from cleaning a traditional desktop computer.

Let’s review the process that someone seeking to clean their laptop should follow, broken down between the different components.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Make sure you have backed up all your data, then turn off the device and unplug it. While we’re going to stick to safe methods of cleaning a laptop, accidents happen, so let’s mitigate most of the issues before there’s a risk of them taking place.

How to Clean a Laptop’s Chassis

• Use a microfiber cloth, very lightly dampened with water or a dedicated laptop cleaning fluid, to wipe down the exterior of your device. Be careful around ports and vents to avoid introducing moisture to the laptop's interior.
• Use compressed air to clean all vents and ports, applying it at an angle so debris isn’t pushed further in.
• If your laptop’s documentation confirms you can, gently open the back to clean vents, ports, and fans with compressed air. Make sure doing so won’t void any warranties.

How to Clean a Laptop’s Keyboard

• Carefully lift up your laptop and, with it upside-down, gently shake it to dislodge any crumbs from the keyboard.
• Use a microfiber towel to wipe down the keyboard, and use compressed air to clear out additional debris.
• If the laptop features removable keycaps, remove and replace one first to ensure you can do so. If you aren’t sure, however, don’t try removing the keys or keycaps.

How to Clean a Laptop’s Screen

• Use a microfiber cloth to wipe your screen, dampening it slightly if necessary.
• Use water, a 70% isopropyl alcohol solution, or a dedicated screen cleaning solution, avoiding other household cleaners.
• Use slow, circular motions to avoid creating streaks.

Hopefully, these tips will help you properly clean your laptop. Just be careful to avoid damaging your device.

Real-Time Analysis

It’s been said that knowledge is the best weapon. For the small and medium-sized business looking to navigate this situation, this couldn’t ring more true. To be able to make the best financial and operational decisions possible, SMBs are turning to data analysis, in real time. By being able to look at the data that is coming in and going out in real time, a decision maker can swiftly make educated decisions. This can help businesses stay afloat in times where they are at their most vulnerable.

When decision makers can get insights as they happen, they can take action quicker. Additionally, many of today’s most dynamic analytics platforms can be deployed near the edge of their company’s computing infrastructure, meaning that data coming represents the flow of information in and out of a business. 

Some other benefits include:

• Managing location data - Helps decision makers determine the relevant data for multiple locations.
• Anomaly detection - Quickly detects outlying data sets to avoid impulsive decision making. 
• Improved marketing - With a lot of the information coming in, decision makers can make decisions based on demand when it otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

Online Sales

Many businesses feature ecommerce platforms already, but since all non-essential store locations are closed as lawmakers try to stymie the spread of the Novel Coronavirus, businesses are quickly ramping up their online sales capabilities. In fact, in the retail sector, some businesses are now seeing two-to-three times the amount of online orders than they would typically. It may not be the same as it was when foot traffic was allowed, but by having a strong online sales platform in place, businesses can stay in operation until the stay-at-home orders are lifted, and they are allowed to resume business as usual.

VoIP

It seems that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems are the single most useful tool during this entire situation. VoIP provides businesses with strong and reliable telephone systems, with options that you would expect out of an enterprise phone system, for a fraction of the cost of what a business would normally pay for a comparable system from a telecom. 

Additionally, VoIP has a lot of optional features that a business can add when remote work is necessary. Solutions like instant messaging, text messaging, and audio and video conferencing can be major benefits for the remote workforce. Many businesses have taken advantage of their VoIP system’s more dynamic features during the stay-at-home period to ensure that communication and productivity isn’t stymied. 

Automate

Cutting costs during an economic downturn is an art form. Many businesses looked at their pre-coronavirus operations as efficient until they were forced to embrace a digital workforce and cut additional line-items from their budgets. If there is one element that will help any business streamline their operations it is finding ways to deploy automated tools. 

For the business that is looking to enhance their automated processes, they will first need to identify which of them they can effectively automate. These typically include:

• Tasks that involve moving information around
• Frequent and mundane, but necessary tasks
• Tasks that frequently interrupt focus on business critical tasks

Investing in ways to automate tasks like these can go a long way toward streamlining your operations now when it’s most necessary. Best yet, these automated processes will be in place when business returns to some semblance of normalcy.

This is an unprecedented time for the small business, and we would like to help see you through it. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to find out more how we can help you streamline your business processes.

As a manager, some of the administrative work can be, if not the worst part of the job, easily the least engaging. For instance, having to create all the different folders for the employees under your purview, projects, and other organizational needs. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel offers a relatively quick and easy way of doing just this.

Let’s walk through the process.

How to Use Excel to Mass Generate Folders (and Even Subfolders!)

Rather than manually going through, creating and naming each folder you need, Microsoft Excel enables you to automate the process somewhat. The trick revolves around you creating a Windows Batch file—a type of file that contains a script that executes predetermined commands in a specified order.

The process is as follows:

• In one column, list all of the names your different folders need to have, whether that’s a month and year, each of your team members’ names, or your different departments.
  
  
• To turn this into a batch file, you first need to add a second column that formats this data in a very specific way. Let’s assume that you wanted a folder for each month of 2024, for instance.
  
  
  • Your first column will be your list of months, January, February and so on, with cell A1 formatted as “2024 - January” to help avoid Excel auto-formatting your data.
    
    
  • Your second column will have the batch command filled out. This will require the following formula to be used:
    
    ="MD "&""""&A1&""""
    
    Dragging the bottom corner of your top cell down will populate the rest of your list, referencing the proper cell in the first column to complete the formula.

• This will give you a list formatted as MD “2024 - January” and so on. Copy and paste this data into your Notepad application.
  
  
• Once your batch commands are copied over, save your Notepad file as a .bat file format wherever you want your folders to be saved. Clicking this file will generate the folders where the .bat file was located.

Hopefully, this will help you to more quickly create the folders you require for your assorted needs.