SMART Blog

The people that support a business’ information systems are widely renowned as a bunch of nerds sitting in a basement office waiting for someone that matters calls them upstairs. Now, we think this characterization is unfair (of course), but since our jobs are so technical, it can be hard to relate with clients all the time. Fortunately for us, the most useful tool we have in our repertoire is excruciatingly simple. To fix your computer problem, have you tried turning it off, and turning it back on? 

While there are definitely gimmicks when it comes to technology in the small business (for instance, USB-powered staplers) there are many devices and technologies that have far more utility, although they may not seem to be applicable to all industries. One example would be the digital signage solutions that have grown in popularity. While they may seem to have limited uses outside of retail, there are plenty of ways to use them to your advantage.

All businesses demand a certain amount of technology in order to push their organizational profitability forward. Whether they invest in tried-and-true technologies or they use their capital a little more innovatively, really depends on how decision makers’ forecasts of those investments help the organization become more productive or efficient. Today, we will look at five of the most important technology trends for SMBs in 2020.

While there aren’t many reasons that you would want to restore your existing Android applications, the ones that do factor in are pretty compelling. Here, we’ll take you through the process of doing just that.

Over the past few years, there has been a general fascination with smart devices in the home, and to a certain extent, the office. These Internet of Things-powered appliances and gadgets can help add to the convenience of rote tasks and other everyday activities, but is it actually a good idea to use them? As it turns out, unless you’ve taken the proper precautions, maybe not.

Many businesses need to deal with a lot of vendors in order to keep their doors open - enough that, at times, it might seem that the most time and energy is spent juggling these vendors. That doesn’t have to be the case, however, at least where your technology solutions are concerned. 

As important as it is to keep your technology up-to-date, it can sometimes be prohibitively expensive to do so throughout your entire business. If you have found yourself in this position, one option you may consider is to resort to hosted desktop solutions. Here, we’ll go over what a hosted desktop is, and how it can serve companies well.

Business owners and managers are always looking to save a buck. Since the cost of doing business continues to climb, looking to the cloud for their business-critical applications is one way to extend operational capital. The cloud offers several solutions to help the modern business keep their costs down, and one service that can be very valuable is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP, specifically hosted VoIP, can help you reduce your communications costs in many ways, including:

Mobile devices (as their name would suggest) go everywhere, including the modern office. As such, it is likely that your employees will want to take advantage of their capabilities to accomplish more of their responsibilities and tasks. This can be advantageous to your business, assuming that you have a well-thought-out mobile device policy in place.

Personal information is precious, especially in this increasingly digital day and age. This makes it incredibly important that you are doing everything you can to protect it in your business - whether it is your own or belongs to somebody else. Here, we’ll go over a few tips to help you better protect the data you’re responsible for.

About a decade ago--when managed IT services were just starting to gain traction--one of the major selling points was that break/fix was expensive, because not only was the machine you needed fixed, broken, your business had to eat the cost of downtime. Now that many businesses have benefited from the proactive approach to IT management, and managed IT services are a big part of business for a lot of companies, one question is left unanswered: What happens when technology breaks under a managed IT services agreement? This month, we’ll answer that question.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) solutions famously offer businesses some significant cost savings. While this may be the extent of many people’s understanding of its value, VoIP actually has a lot more to offer. That’s why we wanted to go over just a few of its benefits - to provide a bit of insight into what makes VoIP such a great choice for today’s organizations.

As you oversee your business, there is a lot that you’re going to have to manage - including how much access your employees have to the data you have collected and generated throughout your operations. An access management policy can help you to accomplish this. Here, we’ll review a few key features you need to include in your strategy.

Quick - when was the last time your routers were updated? Not sure? How about your servers, or every other piece of technology in your office?

The truth is, maintaining a business’ IT requires more than just running a virus scan every once and a while, or updating a mission-critical program on each workstation. It requires an in-depth understanding of each component and its history, assisted by the use of specialized tools and extensive record-keeping.

We’re always trying to get our message out, sharing how our services can bring value to just about any kind of business - including nonprofits and municipalities - seeing as just about every business today relies on technology to some degree. Here, we wanted to demonstrate how that value can present itself through managed services.

Businesses have a variety of communications to manage, including their internal ones. For many, this may be put on the back burner, as they prioritize their operational and sales-encouraging communications. However, internal communications are just as crucial, which is why we’re going over some of your options here - and how you need to use them.

One of the most common file types you hear about is the Portable Document Format file - although you probably know it simply as a PDF. PDFs are so well known because they are the best way to save a document so that, regardless of the device it is viewed on, the file will always appear the same. Did you know that you can do more than just look at a PDF? Here, we’re providing some tips on how you can make your PDFs work for you.

If you were to search Google for “the most important thing for a company to be successful,” there appears to be a wide range of answers - from team management, to sales skills, to relationship building, to decision making. However, among the vast majority of the results, there was one common thread: the ability to communicate. That’s why we’re exploring how to best communicate with people associated with your business.

In just over a week, Microsoft is retiring two of its most popular operating systems - although this shouldn’t be news at this point. Microsoft has consistently been reminding Windows 7 users that they need to upgrade before January 14, running a major campaign to do so, but there are still a quarter of all desktop users that haven’t done so.

It’s pretty easy to ignore the printers around your office - until they run out of toner/ink, or jam, or just disappear from your network for seemingly no reason. Okay, it’s easy to ignore printers most of the time. Unfortunately, business owners do tend to ignore their printers, and this can get really expensive over time.