Coleman Technologies Blog

Improving Your Google Queries

-

If you want to tell Google to omit certain potential results from your search, you can use the hyphen/subtraction mark to define what you don’t want considered.

Excessive Permissions

Data security is a priority for many people, but even amongst them, mobile applications often aren’t even considered a potential threat to their data. While you should ever only download applications from an official application store, some attacks can potentially slip through the vetting process to be distributed via these means. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider every application you have installed and the permissions that each one demands. If these permissions seem excessive for the application’s needs, reconsider if the app is necessary to use (chances are, it isn’t). This helps protect you against the tactic that many cybercriminals use: getting a harmless app to the store, and then turning it malicious with an update once it is downloaded.

Quick and Easy Tables

Let’s face it—a spreadsheet full of points and figures isn’t the most comprehensive way to view your data. It is far better to instead format that data into a table, as you can then reorganize it and filter it as needed. Once your data is in a spreadsheet, creating a table is as simple as selecting one of your cells, pressing Ctrl + T, and then hitting Enter.

Dictate Your Environment

One of the psychological keys to effectively working from home is to identify a certain area as the at-home workplace and stick to it. Preferably, this workplace is away from the distractions of the kitchen and its snacks or the bedroom and its temptation of a nap. Once you have found your area, make sure that you have it equipped with the tools you will need to be productive, like a laptop, external monitor, and any other accessories you use.

Figure Out Where and How You Work Most Effectively

As you work from home, it will help to establish one area of your living space as the area where work is to be done and commit to working there. Pick a spot that isn’t going to serve as an additional distraction (as the snacks of the kitchen and the temptation of a nap in the bedroom would serve) and claim that area as your productive workspace. Make sure that you have all the tools that you will need for your work in that area—from a laptop, an additional monitor, and any other peripherals that you will need for your tasks.

If you use the selection of tools that Google offers as a part of its G Suite offering, you’ve probably found a few documents that you find yourself repeatedly returning to on a regular basis. Rather than navigating to them via the appropriate folder hierarchy in Google Drive, there is a simple shortcut that you can take advantage of in Google Chrome: creating a bookmark that navigates directly to the appropriate page.

1.  Use the Best Tool for the Job

Your contacts should never find it difficult to reach you, so you need to make sure you’re providing them with plenty of options for them to make contact. Don’t pick between a phone number or an email address, give them both, along with a live chat feature, conferencing options, and other forms of communication. Making use of things like a blog and social media give you a great way to reach out to them first, starting the conversation.

#1: Interact with it less.

As we established from the very start, email can very rapidly shift from an asset to a considerable time commitment, often multiple times throughout the workday. If possible, avoid getting drawn in by reducing the total amount of time you spend in your mailbox. There are a few ways to accomplish this:

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging is a handy utility for any team to have at their disposal for the brief messages that coworkers must send to one another throughout the day. Not only is it more efficient than checking and responding to endless emails throughout the day, it allows the message’s recipient to stay more focused on their task. After all, instant messaging and texting has hardwired us to switch more efficiently between tasks when we deal with these kinds of quick messages.

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.

1.  Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Even in the best of times, clear and comprehensive communications are necessary to the success of any business initiative. Without them, a team simply cannot function as they should, leading to delays, redundancy, and missed steps.

To avoid these ramifications, you need to set a precedent that encourages your team to communicate with one another. In addition to frequently reinforcing the importance of their collaboration, give your team the opportunity to do so in various settings. Regular meetings are a must to keep everyone on the same page. You should also provide your team with the solutions that facilitate communication (like VoIP, messaging, and good old email) and set an example by using them yourself.

If you want to try them out as you read along, make sure you open a new browser window… we don’t want you leaving this page before you read all of them!

Jump to Address Bar: Ctrl+L

Let’s say that it’s the beginning of your day, so you are checking your email for the first time. Afterwards, you know that you need to go to a particular website. Windows offers a quick shortcut that selects and clears the address bar so you don’t have to even stop typing before you move along. To make the jump, simply press Ctrl+L.

For this week’s tip, we’ll dig into this exact question.

How Working from Home Has Impacted the Use of Mobile Devices

Here’s the thing: with stay-at-home orders and other measures being put into place across the country, a lot of people aren’t as mobile as they once were. As a result, the mobile devices that would travel with them back and forth to the office have effectively become temporary desktops in their homes… and as such, are spending more time plugged in than not.

Involve Your Team

In a crisis event, you need to have your team at your side (even if they must physically stay home) and supporting you. Here are a few ways to encourage this:

• Keep your team in the loop. Make sure that everyone has the information that they should, as withholding as much as possible will only distract from the goals you are trying to accomplish and make effective communications more difficult. Of course, don’t share information that they shouldn’t hear.
• Set the tone. As much as you can, maintain control of the situation at hand and make sure everything that you need to complete is still completed. Your employees will probably follow your example, making progress and recovery much simpler.
• Trust who you’ve hired. There is a reason that you haven’t fired your employees: they can contribute to the business. Allow them to make these contributions, rather than taking on too much yourself.

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.

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.

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.

Set Some Boundaries

Establish a Workspace

One of the first things that you should do when adopting a remote work approach is to give yourself guidelines. It can be immensely helpful to establish a set place to do your work, and equip it appropriately with minimal distractions. As a general rule, it is best if this area is not in the bedroom, or any area in your living space that you typically spend your recreational time. This will help you to keep up your focus throughout the day.

In actuality, you’ve used a template every time you’ve opened a Microsoft Word document… the Normal template. However, you may want to use a different template to meet your different needs. If that’s the case, you’ll need to adjust some settings as you create your document.

As you select New from the File tab, you will be presented with a few options. One of them will be Blank document, but you also have the opportunity to utilize a huge variety of other templates that can be found in the application and then downloaded. Once you have done so, select your chosen template and your new document will be generated with that template’s contents. These can include:

• Boilerplate text
• Styles
• Images and logos
• Table of contents
• Sections that split the document into different parts, with appropriate numbering
• Table and chart boilerplates

Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive list of your options. Feel free to explore the different templates and their options to see all that these documents can do.

Once you have a few templates downloaded, you can even edit them to better fit your needs. To do so, all you need to do is open the template you want to edit (File>Open>This PC>My Documents>Open) and make your desired changes. Once that’s done, just Save and Close.

Why Bother with Templates at All?

There are a few advantages to using templates that you should see significant benefits from, such as:

1. Templates can be shared amongst your staff and unify your business’ style.
2. Templates can be used to make forms much easier (and less expensive) to reproduce.
3. Templates can reference your other applications to simplify additional tasks.
4. Templates allow you to quickly reformat your documents if need be.

So, do you think you’ll do any investigating into templates in the future? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments, and let us know what other tips you would find helpful!

1. Adopt Technology Solutions

Regardless of your industry, who your business serves, or even where you operate, there are some universal changes that technology has brought to how the average small-to-medium-sized business functions. Methods of collaboration have shifted to digital formats, “coming to work” is no longer a prerequisite to working, and the filing cabinet has been rendered woefully obsolete by other, better options. Cloud solutions are a major contributor to this. I want you to take a moment and consider something: why were any of these changes made in the first place?

It is for the same reason that the assembly line process was adopted, or why we cook our food before eating it: it provides greater benefits than the old way. It is the same with business technology, and you will see this as a common theme throughout these tips. Don’t disqualify yourself from competing by removing your ability to do so.

2. Don’t Shortchange Email

Email is now the gold standard for business communications, for numerous reasons. While a small business might find it redundant to email an announcement, doing so can prove useful to their operations. For instance, let’s say Mary manages a small office with four or five employees. She could easily just announce an important message to the room, but what if James was at the dentist that day, or Rob had excused himself to the bathroom just before? What if Ellen had just connected for an important phone call?

Email provides an easy way for you to communicate with others in your workplace that ensures everyone gets the message, without disrupting operations too much.

3. Go Mobile

While we’re on the subject, let’s consider Ellen for a moment. In the past, making a phone call would tie her to her desk, so any distractions in the office would be an unavoidable issue. Nowadays, there are many ways that Ellen could hypothetically remove herself from the situation while still fulfilling her responsibilities. For instance, a Voice over Internet Protocol solution could allow her to make and take calls from anywhere she could establish a connection, so she could presumably find a quieter area to work without sacrificing her ability to do so.

Other solutions also offer some form of mobility, assuming they are backed up with enough security. For instance, if James was unable to get to the office after his dental appointment, he could still work on his assigned tasks from home with the right cloud-based solutions.  Again, this helps eliminate his reliance upon getting to the office in order to produce.

4. Don’t Underestimate the Cloud

We’ve already touched upon how the cloud has shifted businesses, primarily focusing on how useful it is for hosting and storing data. However, this isn’t the only thing the cloud can do. Cloud technology enables today’s businesses to make use of tools that would ordinarily be out of reach. Yes, its storage capabilities can help make data more accessible to team members who need it, but it can also assist you in preserving your data in case of some disaster, give you access to computing resources that you couldn’t procure yourself, and provide you flexible access to your business applications.

5. Improve Your Security

A small business’ size once protected it from cybercrime, but nowadays, all businesses are fair game. In order to remain secure against these attacks, the right defenses need to be put in place. Things like firewalls, spam blockers, antivirus, and assorted other solutions help to reduce these risks. Additionally, any employee could potentially let in a significant threat, so all need to be educated on how to spot them, and the proper procedures to dealing with them.

Coleman Technologies is here to assist you in implementing these modern IT essentials, as well as maintaining them for you through our remote monitoring and access capabilities. To learn more about how else we can help your growing business, give us a call at (604) 513-9428.