Computerware Blog

Enhancing collaboration is pivotal for the success of many businesses, and leveraging technology can exponentially improve collaborative outcomes. The challenge lies in identifying the most suitable collaboration tools for your organization’s specific needs. In this month’s newsletter, we will explore two categories of software that can enhance your organizational collaboration.

Have you ever wondered how in the world you’re going to get everything done, only to lose track of everything or get distracted? Some researchers believe that the tomato might be the key to unlocking the latent knack for productivity that lies dormant within us all. Albeit, not a real tomato, but the familiar tomato-shaped timer that counts down from 25 minutes.

Video conferencing is an essential communication tool for modern businesses and their team members. As such, we wanted to share some tips that can help everyone involved, from the conferencing veteran to the remote work newbie. Here are four.

Your business’ operations and performance will vary depending on how you choose to invest your IT resources and budget. If you see marked improvements over the years, then you are doing something right. If things remain the same, however, perhaps you could benefit from a different approach to your technology investments. Let’s examine the subtle art of IT investment and how you should approach it.

Collaboration is key in the business world, but it’s not always as easy or as simple as it might seem at first glance. Naturally, when you try to get people to work together, you add even more moving parts to the puzzle, and if you aren’t careful, you can accidentally influence your bottom line, and not in a good way. Here are three helpful tips you can implement for better collaboration strategies.

Productivity is crucial to every workplace. If your employees are not properly leveraging their opportunities to be productive, then they are ultimately costing your business a considerable amount. Thanks to technology solutions, you can help your employees stay productive in numerous ways--chief among them being access to crucial data and applications.

Without a reliable way to stay in touch during office hours, your business can suffer from miscommunications and other, worse consequences. With so many communication solutions available to the average business, how can you help your business be as productive as possible? It all starts by making sure that your employees stay connected.

It would be hard to find someone who has never experienced the feeling of a time crunch, a situation where someone has more to do than they had hours to do it in. This feeling can be reduced by enhancing productivity through better time management. For our tip this week, let’s discuss some methods to improve time management within your office.

With productivity being so important in the modern business, it only makes sense that so much of the technology we have now--and will likely have in the future--is devoted to maximizing the amount of work that can be accomplished by one person in a given time. While not everything we will discuss is always relevant for the typical SMB, if your business continues to grow, more technologies will only become accessible over time. Here are a few technology tips to increase your organization’s productivity.

Social media is so popular that it feels like almost everybody uses it. If you’ve ever thought this, then a new study by communications agency We Are Flint confirms this suspicion. While there are several benefits to having more people connected via social media, the popularity of the technology can make it challenging to keep your employees on task.

Your organization needs its technology solutions in order to keep up with day-to-day operations, but at the same time, you’ll need to maintain them. Organizations that don’t have an IT department will sometimes turn to their employees to do the required maintenance, but this can put your infrastructure at risk.

To keep your IT out of danger due to inexperience or negligence, we want to share with you a way that you can keep your technology up-to-date and functional, without putting it at risk. It’s called managed IT services, and you’d be surprised what they can do for you. We’ll discuss some of the many benefits that your business can stand to take advantage of by forsaking break-fix IT in favor of managed IT.

Cost Savings
You’ll notice an immediate cost savings when using managed services as your core method of IT maintenance. Right off the bat, you’re saving money. Since you only pay a monthly service fee rather than large up-front costs, you’ll benefit immediately. You receive any sort of maintenance as per your service level agreement from your managed service provider, which is more effective than paying for unexpected maintenance from break-fix IT.

Plus, since you’re taking proactive measures to ensure that your organization’s technology is maintained, you’ll be less likely to experience crippling hardware failure. Break-fix IT providers basically depend on your technology not working properly for them to make money, so they have no real incentive to ensure that your technology is working properly in the long run. Managed IT providers, on the other hand, want to build a relationship with the client and prevent problems from happening in the first place, saving your organization money and boosting rapport in the process.

Less Wasted Time
Small businesses have a tough time acquiring an internal IT department due to budget restraints, but if you do have one, it’s probably swamped with work. This means that the work is either not getting done, or it’s being done poorly due to time constraints. You can’t cut corners in IT, as it could lead to dangerous downtime or missing important updates, putting your data at risk. In fact, one of the most important skipped maintenance procedures is the administration of patches and security updates--something that absolutely shouldn’t be missed.

Managed IT services, regardless of whether or not you have an internal IT department, can provide value in the fact that they provide your organization with more experts for more work. Whether you want to catch up on missed work, implement new solutions, or stay up to date, managed IT providers give your business the flexibility to accomplish your technology-related goals in a time-efficient manner.

Peace of Mind
Untrained employees working with complex machinery must be nerve-wracking--or, at least, it should be. User error is difficult enough to prevent, so it’s reasonable to suggest that only those trained in the proper best practices should be managing technology solutions.

This is perhaps one of the biggest benefits of managed IT services; you don’t have to have untrained users maintaining your technology solutions. You can rest easy at night knowing that your hardware and software initiatives are being helmed by Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC’s finest experts. We firmly believe that an IT project should only be done once, and that’s because it should be done right the first time.

How does your business manage its technology? We know how it should be managed--with Computerware. To get started, give us a call at (703) 821-8200.

There are remarkably few people on the planet capable of filling an entire workday with 100 percent productivity. The human body simply needs to be refreshed. Fortunately, there are a variety of techniques and technologies that let you do just that!

It’s important that your workflow allows you to get the most success out of your workday, yet this is often easier said than done. Everyone has different routines and practices that might work for them, and no one else. If you’re looking for ways to improve your own productivity processes, why not consider these four famous individuals with unorthodox practices?

Chances are that you’ve been forced to endure slow computers in the past. They test the boundaries of your patience, and they make it extraordinarily difficult to get any substantial work done. Slow computers can have devastating effects on your budget. Can your business afford to use technology that doesn’t work properly?

Multitasking is no easy thing for a human being to do, no matter what anyone says--our brains simply are not wired to focus on more than one task at a time. To resolve this dilemma, there are apps that will automatically carry out an action if triggered by a user completing some other action. These are called automation apps, and they are becoming extraordinarily useful in today’s dynamic workplace.

Even though taking a break from work seems like something that everybody would want to do, many cogs in the corporate machine choose to forgo breaks in the name of productivity. Oddly enough, this is a counterproductive move, seeing as taking breaks actually makes you more productive by improving your job performance.

Each business has some common risk factors, be they from hackers, natural disasters, or user error. It’s your responsibility to ensure that your business can recover from dangerous and threatening situations with minimal damage to your infrastructure. We’re happy to help your business assess risks to your network and inform you on what you need to do to ensure your organization’s continued functionality.

Defining Risk Management
Risk management is the process of identifying, understanding, and solving issues that present danger to your business in the long run. Risk management can include the following:

• Business continuity: This is a term for the act of planning for the future of your business. Of particular importance are backup and disaster recovery, workforce retention, and other problems that could negatively affect operations. Basically, your business must be prepared to handle all worst-case scenarios.
• Network security: Network security is important for protecting your organization’s sensitive data and critical assets from all types of online threats, including viruses, malware, spyware, ransomware, trojans, and others. As such, it’s an imperative part of handling risk management.
• Asset management: Asset management consists of ensuring that your technology, as well as your IT budget, are on track and capable of handling a worst-case scenario. For example, if a major server unit were to go down due to hardware failure or a hacking attack, would your budget be able to accommodate the purchase of a new one?

What to Watch Out For
It’s made painfully clear that risk management is an all-encompassing part of managing any business. The good news for you is that many of the above services can be provided by Computerware. Our managed IT solutions are designed to take a proactive approach that eliminates many of the troubles associated with risk management. Here are some of the services that we offer:

• Backup and disaster recovery
• Security solutions - firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, content filtering
• Penetration testing
• IT management and roadmaps
• Remote maintenance and workstation/server management

Computerware gets that you’re a small business, and that you don’t have the time to deal with the technical difficulties that come from managing an IT infrastructure. If you have your hands full, we can assist you with preparing your systems for a catastrophic scenario. For more information, reach out to us at (703) 821-8200.

The last time you tried to wake up before 6:00 a.m., how did it go? Dragging yourself out of bed can be a huge pain, and when you realize that you have to work for eight, ten, or even twelve hours, you might get the urge to just crawl right back into bed and drift back to sleep. Even though it seems tortuous at best, getting into the routine of waking up early can set the tone for a productive workday.

Microsoft Office 365 can enhance a company's operations in a variety of ways. Yet, due to the fact that not every business is the same, your organization will benefit more from a solution that’s customized to meet your needs. This is a big reason behind Microsoft’s customizable offering: Office 365 Business Premium.

Let’s face it; the office is a pretty distracting place most of the time. You have people in meetings, discussions happening around every corner, the phone ringing every thirty seconds, and emails hitting your inbox left and right. With so much happening around you, how in the world are you supposed to get anything done?