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Four Simple Things To Help You Get More Done In 2013

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Making New Year’s resolutions is a cliché these days, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile. Whether we’re successful or not, I think it’s healthy to take some time each year to look at where we’re at, and what improvements make sense.

One of the biggest resolutions, of course, is to be more productive. Toward that end, here are four simple things you can do to get more done in your day.

Block non-work related websites
This one won’t be popular, but if you want to get more done, then get rid of the distractions.

Of course if part of your job is to manage the social media for your company, this doesn’t apply; for all the other workers in your office who don’t need to be on Facebook and Twitter all day, this will remove the temptation to pop on social media sites “for just a minute.” This adds up to hours of wasted company time, and zero productivity.

A content filtering firewall, or even special filtering software, can easily manage which sites you can visit. Other things to block include gambling sites, employees searching for a new job on company time, and bandwidth wasters like Youtube.

There are also many distraction-blocking apps you can use to help you disconnect. AntiSocial and Freedom will make time-sucking sites unavailable for however long you choose.

Set up remote access
With the ubiquity of fast residential Internet, it’s easy to set up a VPN to your office to access files, e-mail and programs from home (or while on the road) using remote access applications or cloud technologies.

This lets you work when forced to stay home with sick kids or to wait for the repairman to show up.

Studies show that employees generally put in several more hours of work on their own initiative if they can easily jump on their home PC to finish up a report or check their work email.

Use dual monitors
According to a University of Utah study, you can increase your efficiency by 25% just by adding a second monitor.

A second monitor increases effectiveness and usability, decreases errors from switching between applications, and makes task tracking easier. All of these factors combined show vastly improved productivity.

Put your storage in the cloud
Cloud storage began as a way to backup data, but now you can use it for file storage just like a network drive.

Cloud storage can boost productivity by giving you access to your data anytime, anywhere. Get even more done when you pair cloud services with mobile devices like iPads and smartphones.

Each of these is an easy update for us to implement. If you want more details on improving productivity in your office, just give me a call at (734) 457-5000, or send us an e-mail at support@MyTechExperts.com.

 

Increase Network Security And Productivity

By Tech Experts Staff
As a managed services provider, we regularly consult with companies about issues they would like addressed. We find that many times, a simple solution can correct their issues in one fell swoop.

What are some of the biggest concerns businesses have? The top three we hear most often are security, productivity, and network speed.

These three main issues encompass many other common issues businesses have to deal with on a daily basis and are easily resolved.

In these days with high profile businesses such as Sony, GoDaddy, Verisign, etc. being hacked this past year it’s easy to see why security is of utmost importance.

Many businesses store confidential data such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other personal information on their servers, and because of this, must protect that information at all costs.

So, what’s the solution to this? Having good security policies in place is a start, but a giant leap in the right direction is having a business class firewall in place.

We offer Fortinet firewalls which, when properly implemented, can stop unauthorized network access in its tracks.

Fortinet firewalls offer many different security features to keep your network safe.

Network protection features include an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), built-in antivirus solutions, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) services. Fortinet firewalls protect your company’s, and more importantly, your client’s, private information.

Fortinet firewalls also offer the possibility of huge boosts in productivity.

In a recent study conducted by Salary.com it was found that employees waste on average 1.86 hours of work per day. That’s almost 25% of the work day!

So if this rings true to your company, you’re paying each employee for three months of work each year that they are not even doing!

What are your employees doing that is wasting so much time? Studies show that 52% of the two hours per day that employees waste were spent on non-work related websites like Facebook and Twitter.

While many companies don’t think this goes on in their business, the moment we put in one of our Fortinet firewalls, we almost always find someone on websites they were not supposed to be on during the work day.

Keeping these figures in mind, the costs associated with not having measures in place to stop these kinds of activities far out weighs the actual costs of having one of these units installed.

Once the unit is installed, we can implement web content filtering so employees cannot access time wasting websites.

Users that need access to these types of websites, like the owner of the company for instance, can have credentials to be able to override any filtering in place.

The final item that businesses strive for is a faster network. While this can be dependent entirely on the Internet connection speed your business has, it is entirely possible to have a high speed connection and still feel like your Internet is terribly slow.

So, this again goes back to web filtering. Users should not be able to download from unauthorized sites or do any activities on the network that take a large amount of bandwidth.

Also, if you have a couple of separate Internet connections, it is possible on some of our higher end Fortinet firewalls to have load balancing in place to help better distribute the load of connections out to the Internet if need be.

Whether you’re in a small business with a handful of employees or in a medium to large size company with potentially hundreds of employees, we have a firewall solution for your business.

Fortinet firewalls allow you to better manage your company and increase security, productivity, and network speed significantly.

 

Taking Your Business Online With WordPress

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
If you have thought of creating a website or currently have one that is difficult to edit then you need WordPress.

With WordPress, you can easily create, modify, and update your website with more features than you could ever imagine.

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), which allows you to easily manage all content on your website.

This includes any sort of content such as web pages, blog posts, videos, music, and much more.

You are able to create users or even have people create user accounts themselves, with a default permission that you can set. You will not have to pay a website designer or a webmaster to add, remove, or modify any of your content.

There are hundreds of free themes that you can choose from to make your site unique. There are also many premium themes that private and professional developers create and sell. These themes often look better and have much more functionality.

WordPress has thousands of plugins from which to choose. These plugins can help you do anything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO), shopping carts, forums, maps, to automation of content generation.

Plugins can come in handy if the theme that you chose does not have a feature that you want.

WordPress is optimized for SEO, out of the box. There are also plugins that will help you optimize your site further such as All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, and Rich Snippets.

These plugins will make it easier for Google to crawl the site and this will bring your site up in the search results ranking.

WordPress is easy to manage, add new content, and secure as well. You can download various management plugins. There are plugins that will guide you through the administration aspects of your site. The system can email an alert if there are any issues with or someone comments on your website.

Adding new content is as easy as creating a document in Microsoft Word. In fact, anything that you create in Word can be copied and pasted directly into WordPress.

WordPress is extremely scalable; this will allow you to continue to use WordPress no matter how large your business grows.

The latest features and options will always be an update away. Of course, WordPress will let you know what needs to be updated every time that you login.

WordPress is an easy way for anyone to have their own website that is fun and very easy to use. If you are interested in using WordPress for yourself or your business let us know.

We can help you get started and answer any questions that you may have. We have already created many WordPress sites for our clients and have had nothing but positive feedback since.

Avoid Vexing Your Boss With These Workplace Fouls

You don’t have to be a toady to get ahead at work, but staying on your boss’s good side is a positive strategy. Smart employees do their best to steer clear of these management pet peeves:

• Tardiness/excessive absenteeism. Managers can’t make plans if they don’t know when—or if—you’re going to show up for work. Do your best to be on time and stay healthy.

• Procrastination. Don’t waste time. Managers depend on you to get timely results, not make excuses for lateness. If you run into a problem, tell your manager right away so he or she can plan accordingly.

• Drama. This can include gossip, turf battles, and constant sniping between employees. Stay focused on getting your job done in a professional manner no matter what personal issues might intrude.

• Dishonesty. If a manager can’t trust you to tell the truth, your whole working relationship is likely to crash and burn. Tell your boss what’s going on, even if it’s bad news. A good manager will appreciate your truthfulness.

• Insubordination. Few managers will tolerate an employee who openly challenges him or her for very long. Learn the difference between raising issues and making trouble. Even when you disagree with your manager, do it with tact.

• Negativity. An employee who’s constantly complaining, or always pointing out the down side of every decision, isn’t helping his or her boss. You don’t have to put on a Pollyanna act, but do your best to be positive about what’s happening in your workplace to show your boss that you’re a team player and that you can get along well with coworkers.

Business To Business Sales: Listening Is Key

One of the best pieces of advice when it comes to the world of B2B is for salespeople to actually listen to their customers.

At present, this is not always the case. But clients and customers really want you to listen to them and gain a real understanding of their needs, situation and requirements, and it is your job to do that by listening actively to what they have to say.

Many B2B salespeople have a particular behavioral style or may even have been trained to focus on presentation and talking.

Unfortunately, sometimes this style actually prevents them from listening to what their customers are really trying to tell them.

Listening as a sales skill is taken for granted far too often. Some people may even believe they have a natural gift for it – a perspective that can mean they put very little effort or time into learning how to listen properly.

While it is important to listen to the customer first, when it comes time for your pitch, engaging the customer with your storytelling skills is one of the most crucial tools in a salesperson’s skill set.

Being able to capture the imagination of your customers and to engross them in your tale can very quickly give you an enormous competitive edge over your rivals.

It’s Time To Get Your Business Ready For 2013!

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Thankfully, black Friday and cyber Monday are over. As we settle in for the rest of the holiday rush and start looking toward 2013, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and miss out on some important, year-end activities.

Here are a few reminders to help you stay on top of your IT needs and systems in the new year.

Set Goals
Now is the time to get your team together and set achievable goals for 2013. Discuss issues and successes that happened in the last year and how you are going to use this information to make things run smoother in the coming year.

It makes sense to have your IT consultant participate in these meetings – we have insight into what’s coming up in the networking, cloud and server spaces, as well as practical expertise on getting the most from your IT investment.

Promote open communication so your team members can voice their ideas, concerns, suggestions, and feedback. This way, everyone will be part of the goal-setting process and know their responsibilities for the year ahead.

Update your website
Is your site ready for the New Year? This means that you need to update the copyright dates to 2013 on the appropriate content, install current updates to your software applications, check terms and privacy conditions, and more.

These are little things that are easy to forget, but they can mean a huge difference in the message you send to customers and advertisers. Plus, they can help protect your legal rights too.

Communicate
As the business owner, it’s important to keep your entire organization aware of upcoming plans and changes.

Inform all staff members what is going on with technology, your plans for the upcoming year and what they can do to help.

Keeping everyone in the loop avoids unnecessary issues from escalating into major problems. Share information to improve processes and increase working relationships throughout the entire organization.

Are you ready for 2013?
It’s a busy time of year for everyone, but don’t let that get in the way of your IT and business planning for 2013.

Set achievable goals with your team, and review all of the key issues from the past year. Make updates to your Website so that you protect your information legally and present current messaging to your customers.

And be sure to communicate your plans with everyone in your organization. This way, you’ll save time and money, as well as avoid confusion. Starting the year with a firm plan will put your business on the road to success in 2013.

Windows 8 Offers Users Enhanced Security Features

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Windows has been known as a trustworthy computing platform, a lot of which is due to the ability to secure your operating system without infringing upon availability.

Microsoft has once again improved security across all versions of Windows 8. Just as in earlier releases, this version of Windows improves user and network security.

All versions of Windows will have many new security features such as:

UEFI Secure Boot support which is a large hardware step toward mitigating malware, specifically rootkits and bootkits. Rootkits and bootkits are low-level malware that run as your operating system starts up.

Organizations that deploy Windows 8 will want this feature enabled and prevent users from disabling this feature.

Smart Screen Filter which has already made its debut in Internet Explorer. Microsoft has decided to implement it into the operating system itself.

Smart Screen Filtering has been proven to be the best at blocking socially-engineered malware, which are phishing and pharming attacks such as bad links or redirects to bad or look-a-like sites.

This can aide in the prevention of drive-by downloads as well, which is where you unknowingly download malware by visiting websites.

Integrated anti-malware and Windows Defender is included in all Windows 8 versions. Windows defender will incorporate anti-virus from Microsoft Security Essentials with improved performance and a smaller footprint.

This can all be implemented alongside your current anti-virus provider’s anti-virus and should be implemented as soon as you obtain your computer, this way you are starting from a known-good environment.

Picture Passwords have been added to all versions of Windows 8 as well. Picture Password is a touch-based secure login. You select a picture and then create a gesture-sequence on top of the picture. These can simplify the login process while making it more difficult to hack.

Windows Reader is something completely new to Windows 8. Windows will now be able to read PDF documents without having to install 3rd party software. This can mitigate the popular PDF vulnerabilities. The more software you have installed the more vulnerable you become.

Address Space Layout Randomization was introduced in Windows Vista and has been improved upon since. This can aide in the prevention of the “buffer overflow” attacks that are gaining popularity. They have added integrity checks, and an Enhanced protected mode “Sandbox”

Windows 8 Professional has additional security features to the one listed below such as: Bitlocker and Bitlocker Togo, which are not new but have been improved upon. The same goes for Group Policy Objects.

Windows 8 Enterprise has additional security features such as: Applocker which was introduced in Windows 7 and gives the user the ability to white-list or blacklist applications.

Direct access is an alternative to VPN’s, and finally “Windows to Go”, which allows people to image your computers with a Windows 8 corporate image.

It can be put on a USB and loaded onto any 64-bit PC and can include all of the management features.

If you need assistance or help with any of the new features of Windows 8 please contact us for assistance.

We can even setup your new computers for first-time use and transfer any data from your old computer to your new Windows 8 computer.

What Your Company Can Do To Cook Up New Ideas

Most companies recognize that innovation and creativity are vital to their survival, but they don’t know how to plan projects that will bring the quantum leaps they’re looking for.

Design specialist Heather M. A. Fraser, in her book Design Works (Rotman-UTP Publishing), describes three essentials every business needs to generate productive innovation:

Empathy
To create products or improve services, you need to understand what your customers (or even your employees) want.

They won’t always tell you; sometimes they don’t know themselves. That means you’ve got to develop your knowledge from the inside out.

Learn everything you can about their business needs, their personal goals, their failures, and their successes, regardless of whether any of those data seem to apply to your areas of expertise at first.

What you collect can lead your organization’s imagination in unexpected directions. Before the introduction of the iPod, for example, few people realized they wanted “a thousand songs in their pocket.”

Visualization
Take what you’ve learned and add it to what your organization can do.

Brainstorm as many ideas as you can, in practical terms but without limiting yourself to what’s easy or what you’ve done before. Combine ideas and concepts that don’t obviously go together, and look for ways to maximize your strengths—always with an eye on what your customers really want.

Strategy
This is where innovation can bog down unless you’re careful to select ideas that fit with your overall business objectives and strategy. Some companies pursue too many promising ideas at once, never perfecting any of them. Others design a great new product that doesn’t apply to their market and that they don’t know how to sell.

Be creative, but be rigorous in your analysis of what the market needs and what you’re capable of delivering. Then get to work.

Healthy Aging Tips From WebMD

A recent poll of centenarians, grouped with people who are over 65, conducted by WebMD found that there were a number of tips that they believed were very important to aging in a healthy manner and maintaining a youthful outlook on life.

One of those tips is to maintain strong relationships with family and friends, and another is to keep learning new things throughout your life and ensure that your mind stays active in the process.

Centenarians also believe that it is important to maintain a sense of humor and laugh a lot as well as to look forward to each and every new day with a sense of optimism and purpose.

Exercising, keeping moving and staying active were also viewed as vital, as were making healthy nutritional choices in terms of food consumption, keeping up with the latest news and current events, and maintaining a sense of independence.

This Thanksgiving, Pass The “Storytelling Fork”

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Plan on getting together with friends and family this Thanksgiving? Then pass the “storytelling fork” and you’ll create incredible memories that no one will forget!

This tradition is a variation of the “talking stick,” which is an old Native American tradition used in council circles to give everyone a chance to speak.

When matters of great concern came before the council, the leading elder would hold the talking stick and begin the discussion. When he finished, he would hold out the talking stick, and whoever wished to speak after him would take it.

In this manner, the stick was passed from one individual to another until all who wished to speak had done so.

The stick was then passed back to the leading elder for safe keeping. They believe that whomever holds the stick is imparted with the sacred power of words.

So how can you use this as a fun Thanksgiving tradition for your family?

Before everyone leaves the dinner table, bring out your “storytelling fork” and request that everyone tell a story as a small payment for the meal they’ve just enjoyed.

To make it fun, tie a red ribbon around a silver serving fork and hold it up for everyone to see.

Say, “This is a magic Thanksgiving fork. Although it seems like an ordinary serving fork, it has special powers that will imbue the holder with amazing storytelling ability. When you hold this fork, memories and fun stories of people and places you’ve seen will come flooding into your mind. When you hold this fork, everyone will listen.”

Start by giving them a story of your own. Maybe you can talk about the day your children were born. Tell stories of your childhood or previous Thanksgiving meals.

Talk about how you met your spouse or an old friend, teacher, or mentor who had a big impact on your life.

Or talk about the funny habits or quirks of family members who have passed away. Then, pass the fork for others to do the same.

Kids will love the attention they get when telling a story, and you’ll have several memories that will last forever!