MSPNetworks Blog

Collaboration is important for many businesses and it is something that takes some time to master. In fact, a lot of businesses that do pretty well struggle when it comes to getting their project teams and operational staff to work together. Today, we thought we would take a look at technologies and strategies that will not only help collaboration, but can promise rises in productivity as well. 

Voice over Internet Protocol

It’s no secret that the telephone system is one of any business’ most crucial tools. What may be a secret, however, is that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to get the comprehensive business telephone system you need. Most businesses that still use telephone services through a telephone company are missing out on an opportunity to significantly cut their communications costs while also gaining access to some of the very best collaborative tools a business can have. 

VoIP is a platform that uses your business’ Internet connection to fuel its telephone system. Not only does it provide the crystal-clear communication that customers and employees demand, it also provides options that no RJ11 cable can deliver. Services like video conferencing, text messaging, and mobile phone access make VoIP a much more valuable product than your typical business telephone service through the telephone company. With hundreds of additional features available, you can pick and choose the communications platform that is right for your needs and budget. 

Cloud-Hosted Collaboration Tools

One of the positive elements that has come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is that since so many people worked (or are continuing to work) remotely that many businesses had to find a way to get their newly-remote employees the tools and resources they need(ed) to have a chance of success. A lot of businesses had moved some of their information systems to the cloud previously, of course, but the growth of cloud-hosted management software nearly tripled from March 2020 to today. 

There are several platforms that work for businesses. Some choose to go with services that allow for one-button video conferencing, while others lean heavily on the message board and instant messaging capabilities. Some just provide collaborative access inside working documents. Regardless of what platform a business uses, however, it should be noted that it is all in a concerted effort to build a collaborative workforce in a time when a lot of their human resources need remote access.

Today, a business can get about any type of computing they need in a cloud-hosted platform from some of the top business software developers on the market. Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and others can be used to the benefit of just about any business that is looking to expand their computing capabilities to the cloud to adapt to an increasingly-remote workforce.

Move Support Off Production Workers

For many businesses, the same people that create products and services are forced into support roles due to budget constraints. If you want your team to be on point and working collaboratively, having to juggle support issues could be negatively affecting their productivity. There are several ways that you can move support off of your employees. They include:

• A rotating support schedule - Instead of having support be a major distraction for your whole staff, consider assigning one or two workers to handle support calls and requests on a rotating schedule. Not only does this provide fairness, it also ensures that your product and service support is covered as it is a crucial part of your offering. 
• Hire new workers for support - If you have extra capital, hiring a support staff is one of the most effective ways to get returns out of a department that doesn’t bring in much in the way of revenue. 
• Use technology - Nowadays there are artificially-intelligent platforms that can be used to handle organizational support queries effectively and keeps the amount of human resources involved with support to a minimum. 

Collaboration is going to continue to be a key for a lot of businesses as purse strings tighten in the near future. Getting your team to work together improves your products, services, and your customers’ experience. If you would like to talk to one of our knowledgeable IT consultants about how to integrate the right technology to get your team working together more effectively, give us a call today at (516) 403-9001.   

One of the best ways to create positive change in your workplace is the act of projecting positive thoughts into it. In other words, we’re talking about ditching the typical doom-and-gloom that comes from the workplace and picturing the worst-case scenarios. We’re not trying to plan for the worst here; we’re trying to envision the best in an effort to make it a reality for your company. Let’s explore this concept by examining technology management.

Imagine arriving at the workplace after a long weekend. You’re full of energy, smiling, and ready to get to work. Instead of a computer that is slow and sluggish in the morning, you have a desktop that runs particularly well. In a split second, your computer boots up and is ready for you to get started on your daily tasks. You enter your password, check your phone for the multi-factor authentication code, and log on to your computer.

Next, you go to check your email. Oftentimes business professionals can get overloaded with emails, particularly after days when the office is closed, like extended weekends or holidays. In this case, your email inbox is nice and organized; there’s no clutter to be had here. You have email folders organized and sorted according to topic and priority, meaning that you know exactly what needs to be addressed on your first day back to the office.

After checking your email, you take a look at your productivity software and put together your daily to-do list. You have all the tools needed to get these tasks done and you are able to seamlessly navigate between them thanks to your productivity suite. There’s no reason to download new applications or look for alternative solutions; all software licenses are accounted for and all patches are applied as needed. Everything works just the way it’s supposed to.

That is, until you experience a problem with one of your devices. The monitor starts to flicker on and off. You contact your help desk or service provider, they deploy a technician, and the problem is resolved in a matter of minutes. How convenient! You don’t have to sit around waiting for someone to order new parts or cables, and you can get right back to work in a short moment.

Now, we’re not delusional; things can’t go perfectly all the time, and you can’t expect them to, either. That’s why preventive measures like network security and data backup/disaster recovery are so important, even for day-to-day operations. However, through the power of managed services, you can capture more than just a fraction of this productivity and efficiency. When your technology works for you the way it’s supposed to, you can focus on the tasks at hand rather than worrying about whether your web browser will crash or if your hard drive can hang on long enough for you to save important files.

MSPNetworks can help you implement technology solutions designed to help you focus on what truly matters most: running your business and getting the work done. To learn more about how we can optimize your business workflows through technology, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Sometimes you might encounter situations where your network is limited in the amount of data it can process at any given time. The unfortunate truth is that it can be difficult to identify exactly what the problem is that is causing the slowdown, but one of the most common issues—the network bottleneck—is a pretty safe bet. But what exactly is a bottleneck, and what can be done to solve it?

Consider the design of a bottle; it is rounded at the bottom with the top growing more narrow as you reach the opposite end. The design itself seems to be one that limits the amount of fluid that can pass through it at any given time to keep you from drenching yourself in whatever it is you are drinking.

For another example, imagine a two-lane highway on a busy day. With so many cars traveling to the same destination, both lanes need to be functioning at maximum efficiency to deliver the traffic in a safe and effective way. What happens if the path is restricted to just one lane, though? Can the road handle the same amount of traffic, or does traffic grind to a slow and painful crawl? We’ll let you call on your own experiences during the morning commute for that answer.

A network bottleneck is similar in the sense that the amount of data is restricted by the design or limitations of its container. The flow of data throughout your network infrastructure is governed by the bandwidth and capabilities of its hardware. If the network is trying to transport too much data at the same time, a network bottleneck can surface, creating problems in the process. Here are some of the common causes of network bottlenecks; these causes are generally caused by issues related to the hardware components:

• CPUs
• Graphical processing units
• RAM shortages

Network bottlenecks are known to create several issues that can impact the efficiency of a network and the productivity of its users. With insufficient resources to transport data, the network may experience considerable slowdown that impedes your company’s ability to function. Tasks that would normally take a small amount of time might be longer or drawn out, forcing your employees to either rush through the tasks to get them done on-time and on-budget, or worse, skipped over entirely in favor of other tasks that can actually be completed. You don’t need us to tell you how much of a problem this can be.

Depending on the nature and design of your network, you might have bottlenecks that are completely accidental and have gone by the wayside for far too long. Furthermore, unless you are actively looking for them, it can be tricky to find where exactly they are. Thankfully, you don’t have to go through this process on your own. With the help of professionals like us, you too can find bottlenecks and dramatically improve the performance of your network.

MSPNetworks can help your business discover and address network inefficiencies, including bottlenecks. To learn more about our network audit services, among others, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

How confident are you that your business could survive a data disaster of any size and scale, from a single misplaced file to a complete loss of your entire onsite infrastructure? Being prepared to recover from any version of events is key to your business’ success. Let’s discuss this concept, which is widely known as IT resilience.

What is IT Resilience?

Resilience is a kind of umbrella term, covering three more specific business IT concerns and consolidating them into a single concept. These three concerns are:

1. High availability of your business’ crucial hardware and software, covering how well it can rebound from issues like minor failures, user errors, and attacks. This means that your resources need some level of redundancy.
2. Cybersecurity measures, so your IT resources are protected against threats and any security issues that do arise can be rapidly identified and mitigated.
3. Disaster recovery solutions that can minimize your downtime should some event impact your business processes, so that you can quickly return to productive operations.

These three concerns each must be attended to for your company and its IT to be truly resilient… where these issues can be experienced and overcome, and your business can fully recover and resume operations as usual. Ideally, your resilience will be high enough that your customers could conceivably go without even noticing that an issue took place before you had already resolved it.

Ensuring Resilience

To best understand the process of making sure that your IT infrastructure is sufficiently resilient, let’s look at a different example.

How often do you cross a bridge? For that bridge, resilience is extremely important, as it will need to hold up against a lot of pressure to successfully do its job. This means that a lot of consideration and care need to go into its design and construction. Supports need to be able to handle the amount of traffic with precautions put in place, safety concerns need to be addressed for the bridge to continue functioning, and so many other concerns need to be seen to. The same can be said of your business’ hardware and software.

How well can the bridge resist intentional sabotage as well? If it’s easy for someone to make it more vulnerable to issues, “resilient” is hardly the right word. Tying this back to your infrastructure, how much cybersecurity is in place to protect it?

Finally, what’s the plan for the worst-case scenario, like if the bridge were to fail? What strategies have you prepared to deal with the immediate effects and the ramifications moving forward? Are you prepared to divert traffic to maintain operations? How well, and how quickly, can the bridge be repaired for traffic to continue? This kind of disaster recovery preparation is something that you need to have completed for your business.

Planning for Resilience

Each step of your processes and procedures needs to be examined to ensure that your strategies are sufficiently prepared for the potential events that could impact them. For instance, in terms of your disaster recovery strategy, where are your data backups stored? Keeping them in the same place as your original data is not resilient at all, as it could just take one disaster to lose it all.

Plus, even though there needs to be some ranking in terms of importance, you need to make sure that all your business’ IT is protected. All your data and its storage infrastructure, your business location, and yes, your employees, all need to be considered as you reinforce against disaster. Will it be cheap? No—but experiencing a disaster will be far worse.

Who Can Help?

True business resilience requires a very in-depth process, and as such, it requires the skill of an experienced IT professional. This is a hurdle for many businesses, with many currently relying on the skill of one or two of their employees to handle their IT needs and provide the support necessary—or seeking out external assistance from an outside provider.

The fact that resilience also isn’t one-size-fits-all, but more individualized to each business’ solution, is another complication. Neither an internal team nor a call-in, one-off provider can usually manage this challenge. However, for a managed service provider like MSPNetworks, this all is firmly in our wheelhouse.

What We Can Provide

Instead of offering all our clients the same solutions and assuming they’ll work, our team approaches things from a more personalized angle. After a comprehensive audit and review of your situation, we’ll work with you to design and implement an infrastructure and strategy that mitigates your weakness and leverages your strengths.

We can supplement your existing IT or step in as an outsourced department, whatever you need to keep your technology secure and available to your business regardless of the situation. To learn more about our services at MSPNetworks, and how they can boost your IT’s resilience, reach out to our team by calling (516) 403-9001.

Productivity is a huge priority in any business. This makes it crucial that all tasks can be picked up and put down as efficiently as possible. With mobile browsing now playing a major role in most users’ lives, the version of Chrome for Android devices is a very utilized tool. With these factors in mind, we’re sharing tips to make your use of Android Chrome that much more efficient and productive.

Continuous Productivity

Everyone takes a little while to ramp up their productivity, mainly so that they can get everything arranged and organized before diving in. With so many tools now online, Google Chrome enables you to access them from essentially everywhere. However, as an added bonus, by logging into the same Google account on a computer and on your Android device, your history would contain exactly what you would need to open. Even better, if your desktop version was still active with certain pages, the Recent Tabs option in the Android version of Chrome could replicate them.

Download Pages for Offline Browsing

While mobile devices are incredibly useful, the occasional lack of connection you may encounter can put some of these uses on hold. However, if you know that your connection is going to be poor later, you can proactively save certain web pages with the Android Chrome browser. By selecting Download (the one that looks like an arrow pointing at a horizontal line) in the three-dot menu while you’re on a page, you can save that page for later in the Downloads section.

Referential Search

Context is an important thing to have, especially when you are reviewing online documents and other materials. On an Android device, this context would be a pain to get, as you’d have to open a new tab and start an entirely new search, just to go back and continue. Would be, if the Android version of Chrome didn’t have a feature to work around this need.

By highlighting a word or phrase that they need more information about with a long press, a user can generate a small tab at the bottom of their display that displays a search for whatever was highlighted. This tab can then be dismissed or opened as an additional page in the browser.

What are some of your favorite tips for using Google Chrome to browse while on a mobile device? Tell us some of them in the comments, and make sure you subscribe today!

A strong email solution can bring a great deal of continuity to a business. If it is mismanaged, however, it can quickly become a major pain point. Today, we thought we would go over a couple of ways that you can use your email platform to boost productivity, rather than waste time with it.

Useful Tip #1: Don’t Spend So Much Time on It

Email can be a major time sink. People can lose hours going through their incoming messages even though most of the messages don’t really have any relevance to the job at hand. This is exacerbated if the user checks the email every 10 minutes. The fact is that if someone is sending you an email, there is a good chance that it wasn’t meant to be an urgent message. Most people would pick up the phone for that. Here are a few ways you can regulate your email usage:

• Schedule a time to check all your emails and deal with all of the incoming messages at once. This will ensure that your focus is on your incoming messages and that you are not wasting time checking and replying to messages as they come in. 
• Create a shortcut that will take you directly to your email composer, bypassing the distraction of the inbox.
  
  • For Gmail, use: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1.
  • For Outlook Online, use: https://outlook.office365.com/mail/deeplink/compose?version=2020042702.13&popoutv2=1&leanbootstrap=1

Useful Tip #2: Organize Your Inbox

If you let your incoming messages fester, you can end up with a pretty ugly and disorganized inbox. It can also inadvertently make you miss important information. That’s why it is important to keep your email organized. Adding in rules and features to whichever client you use can be advantageous. Try these things: 

• When there are a lot of emails to go through, it can be difficult and counterproductive to leave it for a long time, but it can also be a major problem for your productivity if you are spending a big chunk of your time being interrupted by more email to go through. What do you do to keep from doing that? Use a simple shift in your settings:
  
  
  
  • In Gmail, there is a feature called Auto Advance. When this feature is activated, the act of deleting, moving, or archiving a message will no longer send you back to your inbox, it will just take you to the next message. Gmail also provides the Send & Archive button, an option that gives you the option to do both in a single click.
    
    
  • In Outlook, you can change your settings quickly by calling up your Options (under the File menu option) and selecting Mail. On that page, you’ll find a section labelled Other, and the specification to complete an action “After moving or deleting an open item.” Select open the next item from the dropdown.
    
    
• In business, your email is typically the central hub of your workflow. That means you get a lot of messages referencing different projects, and it can be difficult to keep them straight. By sorting these messages automatically, you can save quite a bit of time and be more effective at having the resources you need when you need them. Here’s how:
  
  
  
  • In Gmail, you can create Labels, which can help you effectively manage different incoming messages that reference different topics. By creating Filters via the drop-down option in the Search bar, you can also set certain emails to have these labels applied based on preset criteria. These can even be used to sort through different email addresses you receive in the Gmail client.
    
    
  • Outlook also offers a similar function with its capability to create Folders and generate Rules to direct certain messages to them automatically, once again. When an existing inbox message is right-clicked, suggested rules will display, along with the opportunity to create one or to manage the ones you have already created.

#3: Prepare Ahead of Time

We all have emails that we need to send over and over. Either thanking someone for their efforts or alerting someone of a change to their service/project/account. By setting up some canned responses, over time, you can save dozens of hours dealing with repetitive messages. Here’s how to set it up:

• In Gmail, as the composer is open, click the triple-dot menu at the bottom and navigate to Templates. From there, you have the option to either insert a template you have already created or save what you have drafted as a new template to use later. If you no longer need a template, you can also delete it from this menu.
  
  
• In Outlook, you can create a new template from a message by navigating to File and Save As, then switching the file type to Outlook Template. To use them, select New Items as you are drafting your email and from there, More Items and then Choose Form. From there, select User Templates in File System in the Look In box. Find your template and select Open.

Email will continue to be a useful business tool. For more great email tips and tricks subscribe to our blog and return regularly.

With the COVID-19 pandemic causing businesses to rethink their operational strategies, many businesses have had to make a quick digital transformation. Many businesses have accomplished this before the stay-at-home orders, but with employees working from home, we thought this was the perfect time to take a look at four tools businesses can use to improve their work-from-home strategies. 

Analysis, In Real Time

Making prudent and qualified decisions is more important now that it has ever been before. To be able to make informed decisions, many SMBs are looking to their analytics platforms. By being able to look at how aspects of your businesses are functioning in real time, you can quickly change strategies that need to be changed in order to keep your business running efficiently.

Additionally, many analytic systems can be structured near the edge of an organization’s computing network, giving them more insight into how data is flowing in and out of their network.

Other benefits include:

• Managing location data - Directs decision makers’ strategies by determining the relevant data for multiple locations.
• Anomaly detection - Helps decision makers detect outlying data sets to avoid impulsive decision making. 
• Improved marketing - Assists decision makers to make decisions based on demand when it otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

Voice Over Internet Protocol

VoIP is one of the most useful tools for teleworkers. It provides strong communication options, highlighted by an enterprise-grade telephone system, for pennies on the proverbial dollar. Additional available options that can help remote workers such as instant messaging, text messaging, and audio and video conferencing make VoIP a powerful tool for businesses looking to sustain levels of productivity with workers out of the office. 

Automation

One of the best tools for cutting costs is process automation. A lot of businesses are trying to effectively identify processes within their workflow where they can automate mundane or repetitive tasks. By having the type of consistency automation brings to these types of tasks, businesses can utilize their human resources on more revenue-building assignments.

Tasks that can be automated include:

• Tasks that involve moving information around
• Frequent and mundane, but necessary tasks
• Tasks that frequently interrupt focus on business-critical tasks

Making the investment to automate parts of your business will assuredly save your organization money. Best yet, by automating these tasks now, once operations return to normal, you will keep seeing the cost savings you do today. 

Online Sales

There are a lot of businesses that have implemented some semblance of ecommerce prior to this event, but if you haven't, or if you have a limited ecommerce platform, you could see a major bump in revenue from investing in your ecommerce platform. In retail, companies are seeing double and even triple times the sales through their ecommerce solution than they did only a few short weeks ago. Prioritizing your online sales will go a long way toward keeping revenues up while your storefront is closed.

For the small business these can be lean times. Knowing what technologies and strategies to implement will go a long way toward getting you through this period. For more information about technology and how it can work for your business during the COVID-19 period, call MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001. 

Social distancing has more or less confined many to their homes, and so many people have begun to adopt remote working to stay busy and to keep their workplaces operational. One way to assist these activities, VoIP (or Voice over Internet Protocol) is a massively helpful tool that many businesses use. Here, we’re going over why this is.

We’ll begin by reviewing the current situation.

As COVID-19 continues to make the workplace too risky to spend time in unless it is absolutely necessary, many people have committed to isolating themselves in their homes. Fortunately, we have the technology today that allows work to still be done in this situation. Thanks to the capabilities of VoIP technologies that lean on cloud solutions, remote work and collaboration become possible.

Let’s explore how:

Remote Work is Easier with VoIP

If they’re going to work from home effectively, your employees will need the tools for the job, just like they would in the office. This includes a workstation, whether it's a laptop that travels with them or a workstation capable of accessing their resources remotely. It could also include a desk phone, which is something that is much more difficult to transfer from location to location, or at least, it once was.

VoIP now allows for this, as it runs the phone through the Internet instead of a separate dedicated line. Thanks to VoIP, your employees can make business calls with the same number they have in the office, without needing to be in the office itself. Software on their workstations, or an application on their mobile device, gives them access to their calling capabilities--along with many other features--even from home.

VoIP Offers Secure Information

Furthermore, it isn’t as though your employees will no longer need to discuss business operations as they are working from home. Communications will still be critical, but residential services just aren’t secure enough to freely talk about these matters over the phone or even a personal Internet connection. Efficiency just isn’t worth sacrificing your security for.

VoIP can help you to mitigate these challenges. By using a VPN (virtual private network) in tandem with your VoIP solution, your conversation will be shielded by a tunnel of encryption.

VoIP Plays Nicely with Other Collaborative Solutions

Many VoIP platforms will incorporate additional communication tools, such as video conferencing, to increase their functionality. Conferencing allows you to have a face-to-face discussion with the other parties involved. This can help reduce the isolated feelings that many remote workers can develop, on top of improving the quality of your communications.

Find out more about VoIP solutions and how you can adopt them yourself! Give MSPNetworks a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

Your relationships with your customers and clients are reliant on one thing more than any other: communication. In order to optimize this communication, many businesses are leveraging technology solutions, and are enjoying a variety of operational benefits as a result. Is your business one of them?

How Powering Communication with Technology Directly Benefits Your Business
Choosing the right communications is one of the most important decisions that any business can make, as the decision you make influences many levels of your operation. On the one hand, there’s the internal side of things, where the different members of your organization can keep each other in the loop. On the other, your business needs to also maintain clear communications with your clients, offering them the value they’re seeking from your services.

The technology you use can offer some assistance in accomplishing as much.

From the solutions that allow you to more effectively communicate with your clients directly, to the potential cost savings that this technology can offer (thereby allowing you to pass these savings along to your increasingly loyal clients), there is plenty of upside to augmenting your communication practices via the right technology solutions. Here, we’ll explore some of the options available for your business to utilize.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems
CRM systems are a fundamental solution for any business interested in leveraging their technology as a means of improving their relationships with their clients and customers. These systems enable companies to better keep track of each of their customers and their interactions with them by centralizing all of this data into a single dashboard. This makes tracking this information far easier than if it were to be scattered about inboxes and voicemails.

Furthermore, these solutions offer integration with many other business applications that further simplify many key processes, like billing and acquiring signatures. They can even provide insight into social media behavior, allowing you to optimize your client acquisition strategy. A CRM solution can increase customer and client satisfaction by a reported 35 percent, making it an invaluable tool.

Automation
Managing your relationships with your business contacts and prospects is a formidable task, simply due to the fact that there are so many moving parts and processes when it is done correctly. It also doesn’t help that many of these relatively simple processes could potentially be overlooked, hindering your progress toward your business objective. Automating these processes can help to fix that.

Let’s consider a simple hypothetical example: let’s say that you offer a few industry-related products. Instead of having a sales representative man the phones, you can leverage automated workflows to expedite the process. Once your customer clicks “submit” on the order form, it’s possible for your sales team to be notified of what was sold, accounting to start invoicing the order, and your CRM system updated with the information… all without you needing to lift a finger. This allows you to focus more energy on your new customer, providing the highest quality service you can.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Solutions
This approach to telephony has a few benefits, but today, we wanted to focus specifically on one: its portability.

One of the keys to fostering a positive relationship with your business contacts is to be available to them. How often have you reached out to someone, only to have to wait for a response back? You don’t want to be the cause of this irritation when someone reaches out to you.

One of VoIP’s biggest benefits is the fact that it can be leveraged from anywhere an Internet connection can be made, and many options offer a mobile application. Using a VoIP solution, your calls can be directed to your smartphone, enabling you to answer when your contact calls, proving your business to be reliable.

MSPNetworks can help you implement these solutions so that you can work on your business relationships. To learn more, call (516) 403-9001 today.

You can’t have a successful business without a little bit of productivity. Unfortunately, some office environments can have a negative influence on the way your employees get their work done. Take a moment to ask yourself this question: “Are you simply busy, or are you actually being productive?”

These Words Are Completely Different
While it might seem like being busy and being productive are the same thing, this is quite far from the truth. For example, take a look at that worker who is constantly running around the office handling this or that. While they might be busy, they might not necessarily be productive or getting anything important done.

In theory, you could be “busy” doing anything. This doesn’t always translate to being productive, though. Think about the word itself; in order to be productive, you have to “produce” something. Whether it’s a complete sales proposal or an email to an important client, nothing that produces something and furthers a business goal can be considered non-productive.

The Issue with Comparing the Two
Unfortunately, the difference between the two is largely subjective. Let’s say you assign a research project to two employees. One of them starts watching YouTube videos while the other is typing up a document. Who is really getting the work done? If the one watching videos has found something relevant to their task and the writer is typing up something unrelated to the task, then it would be the supposed “slacker.”

This showcases how similar pure business and productivity can be. Basically, if you can fool yourself into thinking that being busy is the same as being productive, you won’t be getting anything done. Here are a couple of ways to determine whether you’re simply busy or being productive.

Take another look at how you spend your time, and compare it to how you accomplish your responsibilities. If you spend a lot of time reading about things on the Internet, they should be about something related to your job, not unrelated.

How to Identify When You’re Just “Keeping Busy”
None of these activities absolutely have to be time-wasters, but they are when they are done without a clear goal or product in mind. Many of your job’s responsibilities might not need Internet access to get them done, so staying away from wasting time on the Internet is an easy way to optimize productivity. There is always an exception to this rule, so just try to use your best judgement to determine if what you’re doing is a waste or not.

MSPNetworks can equip your business with solutions to get the most done in the workday. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Quick question for you: how many email accounts do you have? How many do you have to regularly check? How many different platforms do they utilize? If there’s too many, important communications are easy to miss in the ensuing mess of messages. Fortunately, there are a few ways that this can be avoided, which we’ll review for this week’s tip.

How Many Emails Do You Need?
Depending on your office’s organization style, there may be a fair chance that you have to juggle multiple email addresses. You may have one that you use internally, one that’s client-facing, and one to interact with your vendors. However, we do have to address how many messages this could wind up being. You and your team are responsible for more than just checking emails, after all, so you don’t have the time to log into each email account you have in order to do so.

Fortunately, your email platform of choice will have the capability to handle each of these emails from each provider. First, we need to set some terminology straight:

Understanding Email
When we refer to an email account, we’re talking about the individual address used. For instance, if your organization has a branded email address, “” and “” are two different accounts.

An email client, on the other hand, it the program that you choose to use to read your emails, like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. If these clients are stored on a single server, you can use them more or less interchangeably, as all of your emails will appear in each client.

However, this doesn’t help you if you have too many accounts to keep track of… at least, not without exercising the capabilities of your chosen email client.

Utilizing Multiple Inboxes
Those responsible for developing these email clients understand that there are assorted reasons that a user isn’t going to be tied to a single email account or provider. As a result, email clients are now designed to support multiple inboxes. This means that, if properly configured, a user can access one email client and check multiple email accounts, dividing them into folders (or combined into one large group, if so desired).

Utilizing Multiple Personalities in a Central Inbox
Alternatively, if you don’t mind the idea of using a single inbox to hold all of your correspondence but still want to respond with multiple addresses, you can use a different method. This method will collect all of your messages into a single inbox, while allowing you to select which email address (sometimes known as a personality) your response comes from.

First, you will need to set up an email with an address that you never give out. This mailbox will be the central catch-all. Then, you need to set all of the accounts you have in use to forward to that mailbox (ask your internal IT resource for help). Pretty simple so far, right?

However, you still aren’t quite done. After all, you want to be able to respond to these emails with the address that they were originally sent to, right? This is where the personalities we mentioned above come into play. Basically, your email client allows you to change the address that appears in the From: box to whichever email address is appropriate for that correspondence.

Adding Inboxes and Personalities to Your Email Client
Of course, each email client has a somewhat different approach to adjusting these settings:

Gmail
To set up multiple accounts in Gmail, click on the gear to access your Settings, then select the Accounts and Import tab. To add inboxes to your Gmail, you should see a section labeled Check mail from other accounts. In that section, follow the prompts given after you click Add a mail account.

To add new personalities to your Gmail account, follow the same steps to the Accounts and Import tab. Under the Send Mail As section, follow the instructions provided when you click Add another email address. You can also select this email address as the default selection from here.

Outlook
Unfortunately, we don’t have the information required to provide a walk-through for setting up Microsoft Outlook, as there are too many versions to cover here. Make sure you check the documentation provided online for what Microsoft describes as “connected accounts.” Of course, we are always available to help, so feel free to give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

What other tips would you like to learn for your most-used solutions? Let us know in the comments, and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything!

Revenue is a key component of any business, crucial to the continued success and efficacy of it. However, in order to sustain an incoming revenue stream, a business needs to be able to operate efficiently enough to support it. In this week’s tip, we’ll review a few ways that you can build this efficiency in your own operations to assist your efforts to build a prosperous business.

Your business’ operational efficiency is largely in control of the employees who are driving these operations. With the right tools and motivation, there are a few ways you can encourage them to work more efficiently to the benefit of the organization as a whole. They include:

Automation
It only makes sense that allowing a machine to complete a task independently would be the more efficient route to take, as it effectively enables you to accomplish multiple tasks at once. As a result, it won’t be long before any time spent setting up your automated processes is reclaimed through using automation to save time on billing, procurement, business management, or just about any other task you could think of.

Communication
The link between efficiency and communication has been demonstrated definitively--the more effectively your staff can communicate amongst themselves, the more they are able to produce. You need to encourage these kinds of habits, making it clear that face-to-face communication is an option for them if miscommunication over digital means is a concern. Developing communicative habits among your workforce will only help to boost both the quality and speed of what they are accomplishing.

Many people hear the term “communications” and have their minds immediately jump to “meeting.” Meetings have developed a reputation for being time wasters, and if handled improperly, yours could follow suit. However, with brief, communicative meetings held at the beginning of the day, many meetings that would otherwise interrupt a workflow later can be eliminated. With improved communications, your workforce can meet smarter, not more frequently.

Communication can also assist you in rooting out the operational hang-ups that are affecting productivity. Encouraging your employees to bring up any inefficiencies they experience is a great way to leverage communications to assist you in optimizing your internal processes.

Limit Interruptions as Possible
Finally, how often have you found that your communications have actually gotten in the way of your productivity? Are you interrupted every so often by a bing announcing that a message that doesn’t concern you has been delivered, or worse, that a non-work-related app wants your attention?

There are certain applications that allow you to limit notifications of these kinds from delivering during certain hours, so you may consider requiring them as a part of your company’s Bring Your Own Device strategy, or even distributing work devices to your employees if your budget allows for it. The fewer interruptions to the workday there are, the more productive focus can be lent to the task at hand.

For assistance in implementing any of these measures, the staff at MSPNetworks is here. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 for more assistance.