The Connection, Inc Blog

There are many ways to share a file between two computers. Being familiar with multiple options will certainly come in handy, especially when your preferred method of file sharing isn’t an option (like when you can’t find your flash drive, or maybe you lose Internet connection). For this week’s tip, here are four options to help your business more effectively share files.

Share via Email
For smaller files like Word documents, you can simply attach them to an email and send them to the receiving party. Any email solution worth using, like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, allow users to attach files and send them to a recipient, but the number and size of them cannot exceed a certain amount. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand this limit before relying on email to share important files.

Share via External Solutions
You can always share files via an external piece of hardware like a portable flash drive or USB hard disk drive. While this is a great way to share when there are no other options available, keep in mind that you also run the risk of losing them. Unless your device is protected and encrypted by a pass code of some sort, anyone who finds the device can access its contents simply by plugging your drive into one of their own devices. Therefore, you should take precautions with what information is shared in this fashion.

Share Locally via a Network Drive
Have you ever been in a situation where you need to share a file with someone else in your office, but it’s too large to send through email? You can share files locally via a network drive that connects all of your organization’s endpoints to one central location. You can then drop files into your network drive for users to access. It’s best that you utilize some sort of folder system that keeps files organized--that way, you don’t wind up with a messy network drive that makes it impossible to find important files.

Share Virtually in the Cloud
The optimal way to share files involves sharing them virtually through a cloud-based storage system. A couple of good examples of this are Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. You can provide each of your workers with access to a cloud-based “drive” that you control, which delegates a portion of storage for their use. However, what’s more notable is that you can create shared folders, which allow your users to share files and allow for collaboration remotely via the cloud. You can even add permissions and edit sharing details to only let specific users access important or confidential data.

How does your business transfer files, and do you find it satisfactory? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to reach out to The Connection, Inc if you want to improve the way you share and manage technology.

Do you remember the day that you purchased your current workstation? Maybe it was last week, last month, last year, or several years ago. At one point, it was pristine, untouched by the demands of the workday, but those days have long since passed. Over time, your computer collects all sorts of stuff on it, from unnecessary files to outdated, unused software.

For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss ways in which your organization can cut down on the immense amount of digital clutter on your PC, ranging from how to organize the contents of your workstation, to what you can do with your old mobile devices and other unnecessary hardware you have lying about.

Organize Your Workstation’s Files and Network Drive
Is your desktop filled with all sorts of files and icons that make navigating your workstation more difficult than it should be? This is a common problem, and it’s important to stay organized so you can be productive, especially if you utilize an on premise shared network drive. Make sure that all of your employees know the proper protocol for storing files before they are allowed to upload files to the shared drive.

You can work with the business technology experts at The Connection, Inc for help if you feel your current system needs some work. Whether you need to better the organization process for stored data, or control who has access to things, we can assist you to make sure it’s done right, and backed up. 

Remove Unnecessary Programs and Applications
As time passes, certain applications will lose their value. This is due to a number of factors, such as changes in internal policy, the size of your workforce, and so on. Perhaps you’ve found a better solution that suits your needs, but you forgot to uninstall the old one. Old programs that are no longer useful can take up valuable network space, and worse yet, they could become vulnerable if they aren’t kept updated. We recommend performing a network audit to determine exactly which applications are being used, and how often they’re accessed.

Properly Dispose of Unused Devices
When a device’s life cycle meets its end, or it’s simply outclassed by another, more potent device, it’s natural to replace it with something that better meets your organization’s needs. However, when you regularly refresh your hardware, you’ll wind up with plenty of extra devices just collecting dust. Even worse, these devices might be completely functional. You don’t want to simply throw away old computers, laptops, and mobile devices. This is bad for the environment as there are harmful metals and elements. It also puts your business at risk because your data may still be on the device even after deleting it. It’s best to have professionals purge the data and recycle old hardware.

That said, it never hurts to keep an extra workstation on hand just in case something bad happens to an employee’s computer in the line of duty. Still, all other devices that are no longer in use should be wiped of any data that’s on them (ask us if you have questions on how) before being recycled.

For more great tips and tricks, be sure to subscribe to The Connection, Inc’s blog.

Let’s say you’ve got an email that you really need to crank out from home, and pronto. So, you whip out your laptop to get started, and that’s when you spot the menacing eyes of a toddler from across the room. What do you do? Is it even possible to use a mobile device once a toddler has it in their greedy little sights? For this week’s tip, we’ll explore your options.

Providing outstanding customer service is a requirement to be successful in today’s business environment. If you ignore this valuable tenant of business, then you’ve got a competitor who will gladly jump on the opportunity to steal away your customers and prospects by offering better service. What steps is your business taking to make sure that your customer service is second to none?

For this week’s tip, we’ll share four fundamentals of what good customer service looks like, as well as how technology can help.

Be Easy to Work With
Having a customer service team with likable personalities and good communication skills goes a long way when it comes to gaining and retaining customers. That said, it should be fairly obvious that not every employee fits such a profile. It’s, therefore, advantageous if you’re deliberate about putting the employees that are the easiest to work with on the front lines with your customers. Alternatively, having employees with awkward and obtuse personalities serving customers may end up driving them away from your business, and to another company with a more likable customer service team. Depending on what technologies you use to communicate with your customers, some solutions allow customers to rank the quality of service they receive, allowing you to get an accurate picture of your team’s customer service skills.

Meet and Exceed Any Commitments
The customer-business relationship comes with a set of expectations on the customer's part regarding your company’s product and service. Keep in mind that doing the minimum amount of work to meet these expectations will only put your business in the danger zone, seeing as your customers and prospects will be susceptible to being swept away by a competitor that promises to go above and beyond. Remember, if you go above and beyond and exceed customer expectations, you’ll build brand loyalty that will keep customers within the orbit of your organization.

Be Available to Answer Customers
We live in an age where more services are offered 24/7. Maybe your business can’t have a customer service representative on call 24/7, but you can implement communication tools that will allow your staff to be more available to customers.

You can achieve this in two ways: 1) by having your staff carry mobile solutions that allow them to stay in touch with customers while they're on the go, and 2) by equipping your company with multiple ways that customers can reach your team. Regarding the latter, keep in mind that not every consumer prefers to communicate the same way. You’ll want to take advantage of email, phone calls, instant messaging, and more. Even having a designated employee to answer inquiries over various social media platforms will go a long way in serving a customer's needs in a satisfactory manner.

Have an Agile Work Environment
Having an agile work environment really shows when it comes to handling a customer’s request. By having departments equipped with technology that allows them to freely share information and collaborate easily, you’ll be assured that customers will be processed as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you don’t take such efforts, then it’s quite possible for different departments to be their own silos of information, and for a customer’s request to get tied up by a single employee at the top.

For all of these customer service initiatives, you’ll want to collaborate with your IT provider in order to find ways that technology can be integrated into these processes and provide customers with the best experience possible. What technologies can your business implement that will keep your customers coming back for more? To find out, give the IT experts at The Connection, Inc a call at (732) 291-5938.

Throughout human history, cartography served as an exciting and specialized field for knowledgeable scribes. Today, the entire planet has been mapped and apps like Google Maps allow any Joe Schmo with a smartphone to have the world at their fingertips. Consequently, you can effectively be a cartographer of sorts, just by knowing how to best use Google Maps.

Here are four lesser-known features that will help you get the most out of Google Maps.

Have Google Maps Save Your Parking Spot
How do you remember where you parked? Do you scribble the lot number on your hand, or just commit the spot to memory by repeating it a dozen times under your breath? Fun fact: you can actually have Google Maps be your parking assistant and remember all of this information for you. When you park your vehicle, Google Maps will display a pop-up window asking you to save your location. Upon doing so, you’ll then be given the option to enter helpful information about the spot, like the lot number, a nearby landmark, or even how much time is left on the meter.

Plan Your Trip on Your PC and Send Directions to Your Phone
When it comes to browsing the web to make travel plans, doing so on a desktop provides users with better functionality than what a smartphone offers. Google Maps allows users to take advantage of this dynamic by providing the option to send any directions made in Google Maps on a PC to a smartphone connected to the same Google account. To take advantage of this feature, simply select the route you wish to take and then click send directions to your phone, located above the listed route. When you get in your car to begin your trip, you should have all of this information loaded on your phone’s Google Maps app.

Avoid Paying Tolls and Highway Traffic
If you’re looking to take the scenic route, or if you’re low on cash, Google Maps can help you out by showing you alternative routes that avoid both tolls and highways. To view these route options, simply enter your destination like you normally would, then, select Route options. From here, you can select a new route to be shown based on avoiding these three factors; highways, tolls, and ferries.

Download Google Maps for Offline Navigation
To avoid the panic of losing your Internet connection while navigating a roadway with many twists and turns, you can download Google Maps and use it while offline. This will also come in handy if you’re trying to conserve your mobile device’s data plan, as well as if you’re traveling internationally. To download offline maps on your mobile device, tap the Download button to save that map. You can then see what you’ve saved by tapping the three-line menu button in the search bar > Offline Areas. In most cases, you can still navigate and search for destinations in this mode.

Are you a fan of Google Maps? What are some additional tips that you use to make traveling easier? Feel free to share them with us in the comments below.

Managing your company’s email can be a complex endeavor, due to the sheer volume of messages being sent and received, as well as the need to have a way to prioritize which messages are important. It’s safe to say that all organizations can benefit from email management solutions, such as email archiving and spam protection, and multi-factor authentication.

The average employee and business owner relies on various hardware solutions to go about their day-to-day duties. These hardware devices--think keyboards, wireless mouses, external microphones, and any USB devices--utilize drivers which allow for inter-device compatibility. What happens when these drivers aren’t installed or kept up to date? Your technology suffers, and so does your productivity.

A crucial step of setting up your business is the implementation of a physical infrastructure, including cabling and electrical lines. Unfortunately, the same setup won’t work for two very different businesses, so you’ll need to put considerable time and effort into the cabling process as a whole. Here are a few ways that you can make the process easier.

However, it’s important to note that this article will only help if you have yet to fully implement a cabling strategy, or if you’re looking to implement a more dynamic one. Cabling is a time-consuming process, and one which you want to get done right the first time so that you don’t have to waste even more time fixing mistakes down the road.

Consider Your Wired Endpoints
How many wired devices does your organization have that must be physically hooked up to your in-house network? Examples of wired endpoints could be anything from servers to workstations, and how they all figure into your infrastructure is good information to have before setting out on your implementation journey. Depending on how many devices you have, your optimal network infrastructure will change, so you want to consider this before all else.

One particularly helpful tip is to plan ahead, even if you don’t anticipate it. Run twice as many cables as you think you’ll need. You’ll be surprised by how much time and money you’ll save just by doing this. In the event that you need to implement new workstations or expand to a different part of your office, you’ll be less likely to run into cabling problems.

Ask Questions to Find the Right Setup
When laying cable, you have to be mindful of what you want to accomplish; and, what kind of property you are dealing with. You need a knowledge of the building specifications to avoid making any large oversights. How large is your office? How many floors do you have? How many users do you have to accommodate? Do you want to go wireless? If so, do you know what materials the walls are made of? These are the types of questions (and many more) that have to be answered before you lay the first wire. Your best bet is to bring out a floor plan to get the information you’ll need.

Consider the Future
Businesses, especially small businesses, are more focused on keeping the lights on and building profitability than considering what will happen if everything goes well for the next few years. One problem with a strictly contemporary view of things is that you never quite know when success is going to come. For the growing business, considering the flexibility of your IT is essential when setting up cable for your workspace. Wire your office with the future in mind to ensure that when you are successful, you are able to accommodate new workers and solutions proficiently.

Be Mindful of Solid Practices
Running cable has its own best practices. Depending on what kind of cable you are running, what solutions you are installing, and what type of setup you are going for, it’s best to keep in mind traditional best practices for cabling. For example, Cat5 cable should not be run along with electrical cable. They shouldn’t be placed at 90-degree angles. Some types of cable have different makeups than others, so keeping in mind the materials you are working with becomes essential to complete an exemplary cabling job.

If you’d like more information about cabling an office, wireless solutions, and enterprise-level IT support call The Connection, Inc today at (732) 291-5938.

It’s no secret that finding a particular program or file on your computer can be a pain, especially when you don’t have the time to hunt it down by clicking through folders. However, there is a much easier way to locate your desired data. All you need to do is use the search option found in the Start menu, which is the subject of this week’s tip.

As the more recent versions of Windows were developed, the Start menu was given a very useful utility in the built-in Search option. It is able to search not only documents, but also online, to find what the user is looking for, this nifty utility provides an essential function with the convenience that a user should expect from a modern computer.

It’s extremely easy to use. All you have to do is press the Windows key to access your computer’s menu. Then, you can simply start to type the name of what you are looking for. Like most searches, you will be presented with suggested results based on what you have typed. For example, if you were to type in location, your results might include things like Location Privacy settings, as well as a few other options to change settings like change your country or region, default save locations, clear location history, and taskbar location on screen.

Not only that, but you can also use this feature to run a quick web search with just a few keystrokes. However, this does default to opening the Edge browser, so this may or may not be something that interests all users.

Your results can be more focused by making a few simple adjustments to the search filters. For example, if you knew you were looking for a document with a particular word in the title, you could type in that word and then, by clicking into the Filters menu, adjust where the search targets.

For those of you who aren’t too shy to speak directly to your Windows 10 PC, and you have a built-in microphone, you can start by saying “hey Cortana” and perform your search. The latest Creators update pushed out by Microsoft added many new improvements and features to Cortana.

How much faster do you see your browsing becoming thanks to this quick and easy search functionality? Let us know in the comments!

While you are probably spending a fair amount of time thinking about your business’ security, can you confidently say the same about those that you’ve employed? Unfortunately, your workers may not put much thought into network security. This could very possibly lead to some severe issues potentially harming your business operations.

Phishing attacks have been around for decades, first being recorded in 1995 where scammers would pose as AOL employees and request a user’s billing information through instant messages. Nowadays, email phishing attempts have tricked users into handing over personal information of all kinds. There are many methods of identifying a phishing attempt, but today we’ll focus on one.

If you use Google Drive as your preferred cloud provider, you know that it’s a dynamic service that offers everything from word processing to spreadsheets to file storage. However, there are many other ways to use Google Drive that you may not even be aware of. Here are three secret tips that can help you get a little more value out of Google Drive.

If there’s any experience that’s universally shared by the modern worker, it’s the sensation that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Fortunately, there are some habits that can be developed that can help to mitigate these feelings by enhancing productivity. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss some of these practices to help boost your office’s time management capabilities.

Everyone has a right to privacy. However, with the popularity of social networks, the Internet is a very hard place to remain a private individual. Digital communication is everywhere. Cybercrime has become a fairly regular event. This week’s tip of the week takes a glance at three websites that you can use to help enforce your right to privacy.

Does your business use Windows 10? If so, there are all sorts of hidden tips and tricks that can help you gain even more value from your workstations that are running Windows 10. Here are a few of these secrets and how they can help your staff save time.

Have you ever felt like talking to someone in the technology industry was like speaking with someone who spoke a different language? You’re not alone. It’s no secret that the IT industry loves their jargon - and has dozens of buzzwords at any given time. These are a few such words that have the industry buzzing right now!

With all of the talk about the FCC and Net Neutrality in the recent news, a lot of computer users are concerned about the amount of privacy afforded them by their Internet service providers--and rightfully so. Regardless of whether the net neutrality ruling was justified (hint: it wasn’t), users are finding that they have to take their privacy into their own hands. The easiest way to do so is with a Virtual Private Network.

The latest version of Android, Oreo (version 8.0), was released earlier this year. Has your phone received the update to it yet? Either way, you’ll want to know what features it has, including how it can help you get more done. Here are five of the many new additions offered by this update to Android Oreo operating system.

Most people don’t think to try and print something out from their smartphone--particularly because it’s such a new concept. With smartphones quickly becoming just as fast as desktops from just ten years ago, it shouldn’t be such a stretch to suggest printing from them. Thanks to the cloud, you can use your Android smartphone to print something directly from the device.

Whenever you download a file from the Internet, the file will, by default, go to an aptly-titled folder in Windows called Downloads. Unless you change the default settings, your files will always be saved here. But what if you want to make it so that your downloads go somewhere else? You can accomplish this pretty easily. We’ll walk you through how to do it for some of the most popular browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.

You might be wondering why you would even want to make this change to your PC in the first place. After all, there must be a reason why it defaults to such a place. Let’s use the example of downloading a large file, like a video. Maybe you don’t want that file to take up so much space on your hard drive. If you have a connected hard drive or a network drive, you can tell the file to download directly to it by customizing where your downloads go. This saves you the pain of moving or copying files to the location after the fact.

For Google Chrome
Open up your Chrome browser and click on the three-dot menu that’s found in the top-right corner of the screen. You’ll then want to click on Settings. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the settings menu to find the Advanced option. If you look far enough, you’ll see the Downloads heading. You can then change the default location for any download that you choose to start. Just make sure that you also toggle the option to ask you for the location before you start a download so that you can change the location as needed.

For Microsoft Edge
Just like Google Chrome, you’ll have to navigate through the three-dot menu that hides Edge’s Settings. This will open up a new menu that appears on the right side of the screen. Next, go to View Advanced Settings. You’ll eventually see the Downloads section, which will give you the same settings as Chrome.

For Firefox
Even for Firefox, the steps are largely the same. Open the three-line menu that is in the top-right corner and select Preferences. Once you’ve done so, make your way to the General tab. Finally, select the Choose button next to the Save files to. You’ll be given the same options that are available for the other browsers.

For more tips and tricks, subscribe to The Connection, Inc’s blog.