Things to know

Productivity Secrets For Business Professionals

on August 7, 2019 No comments

Even though Boston College reports approximately two-thirds of people believe working at home is a positive influence on job success, work/life balance, and job commitment, those of us who use a home office understand the difficulties associated with productivity. A home office means there will be a mingling of personal home responsibilities and those that are demanded by your career. Balancing these two significant parts of your life is a secret sought by stay at home parents and telecommuters. Some have even found the solution.

9 To 5 AM

It is illogical to think you will do six hours of parenting, two hours of exercise and eight hours of work all during traditional work hours. One of the reasons you opted for a home office is to be able to do all of your work, personal and professional, throughout the day. Create a schedule that will work for you. Anne Rice, the author of the “Vampire Chronicles,” slept in the daytime and worked at night, theoretically to remove distractions. The schedule you adopt must include those hours when you are the most alert and creative. To stay alert during a long work day, it may be best to schedule a nap to reenergize your body.

Have A Cup Of Joe

Caffeine has a long list of positive health benefits, which is why it has become the go-to drink of the work-at-home professional. Caffeine is a stimulant, so a cup of coffee will help keep you awake and alert. If you are working your own schedule and balancing home and career responsibilities, then you may need this little boost throughout the day. Instead of a pot of coffee or a kettle of tea heating all day, a single cup coffee maker may be a good investment. There is even evidence that this caffeine lift can make you smarter. Caffeine blocks neuro-inhibitors, making your brain function faster.

Maintain Goals

The to-do list is the tool of choice for the work-at-home pro. Being productive is all about maintaining and hitting your goals. Prioritize your work daily. Create a list of what needs to be accomplished throughout the day. As things come up, use the Two-Minute Rule. Coined by author and business consultant David Allen, the rule says that if you can handle it in two minutes or less, then do it. If not, prioritize it. Using this idea, everything either gets scheduled or is completed immediately.

Stay Happy

Juan Casimiro, entrepreneur and founder of the nonprofit business incubator Casimiro Global Foundation, believes people are driven not only by personal success, but by the success of communities. This focus of community success is part of the definition of happiness and is integral to personal productivity. There is a large body of evidence showing happy workers are productive workers. Keeping yourself happy requires you look at the important things in life, assessing your success against them. If you chose to stay home because you wanted to be with the kids, then make this a priority and revel in your time with them. The money may not be there, but the joy will more than make up for it.

Email Etiquette For The Workplace

on June 25, 2019 No comments

With the popularity of texting/Facebook Messaging/Slack…email is no longer regarded as an essential tool for online communication among millennials. Most of us probably use our personal inboxes more as a way to collect Uber receipts and track the status of our Amazon purchases than for keeping in touch with friends and family.

Even though it’s used less in our personal lives, whether we like it or not, emails are a part of business. The issue with email comes as you get more and more inundated with email messages. At some point, you want to do everything you can to ensure that your important emails get read. One method you can use on your own outgoing emails is to adopt some best practices for professional email etiquette. From a professional email greeting to professional email format, it can all make a big difference.I have listed below some best practices for business email etiquette tips that will increase the odds of your emails being read rather than trashed..

1. Use a professional email address
Most companies provide a professional email address for their employee’s correspondence. Proper email etiquette calls for sending emails from your business email address rather than from a personal email address. Using a personal email address for business purposes can be seen as unprofessional by some, especially if you’re discussing confidential matters.

2. Use clear and precise subject lines
To ensure your email gets opened, read, and thoroughly understood, start with a short and precise subject line addressing the issue at hand. Ex. “Wednesday Meeting Agenda”. You should title your email in such a way that the recipient immediately knows what the message is actually about.

3. Avoid “reply all.”
It’s usually a good idea to forego the temptation to hit the “reply all” option when sending professional emails. Proper email etiquette aside, it can be quite annoying for people to be included in a group email if the content of the message has nothing to do with them. So be considerate and hit “reply all” only if the message would be of interest to all of the recipients. Otherwise, your email might be considered spam.

4. Acknowledge emails.
With business email, even if you are too busy to reply with a full on answer, it’s always a good idea to at least send an acknowledgment and follow up later. You should not only acknowledge all emails but also do so in a timely fashion. Since this is not always standard practice, you’ll be surprised at how much your professionalism can set you apart.

Remember to keep these tips in mind next time you open up your inbox at work and in no time you’ll be an email expert!

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Why Strong, Unique Passwords Matter.

on June 12, 2019 No comments

Strong password policies have come a long way. How many people remember the 1995 movie Hackers. It had a very young short haired Angelina Jolie in it but the point was the entire mess started with one of the hackers being able to access files that should have been secure. All because the executive with the company had his password as “god”.

Fact: Every extra character in your password increases the difficulty for hackers to crack it.
The most commonly used password is…123456.

And it’s closely followed by just as insecure passwords like “password”, “welcome”, and “12345″.

Think one extra letter or number doesn’t mean much? Consider this:

A 6-character password with only letters has 308,915,776 possible combinations.
An 8-character password with only letters has 208,827,064,576 possible combinations.
An 8-character password with letters (upper & lower case) and includes numbers and symbols has 6,095,689,385,410,816 possible combinations.

Creating a strong password policy is key to helping users safeguard these critical systems they rely on every day. While additional complexity can seem like an inconvenience to many users, it shouldn’t prevent a strong password policy being implemented in your organization.

Now that you’ve come up with the strongest password possible, it’s time to absorb some principles of good password security practice in daily life:

Never disclose usernames and passwords to third parties
Never store usernames and passwords on paper or in an unencrypted computer file
Update your account password at least every 6 months
Do not use passwords that have been used in the past
Never provide credentials when requested through email
Run regular virus scans on your computer
Use Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). With 2FA, you will receive a text message for login and password reset requests. You may choose between SMS, OneTouch, and TOTP (Time-Based One-Time Password) 2FA authentication.

If you have to share a password, use a site like a one-time secret. This site creates a link to a page with your password info (or whatever info you choose), and once the page is viewed once, it is gone forever.
Don’t save passwords or use “remember me” on public computers

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Let Unified Technology Solutions Help

on April 4, 2019 No comments

It’s your company. It has your name on the door and your reputation is on the line if things don’t go well. We understand that. But trying to do everything yourself just doesn’t always work. Let us help.

Here in America, we take pride in self reliance. It’s important that we be able to wear many hats and take care of things ourselves. But is that really the best way to do things? Is it the most effective way to run your business? Probably not.

You spend countless hours educating yourself and working with your staff on the things you need to know to be the best you can be in your area of business. How can you also devote the time and resources it would take to be an expert in Information Technology, software and hardware?

We at Unified Technology Solutions can take over that part of your business for you. It’ doesn’t mean that you should stop learning about new advances in technology, it just means that you can trust us to resolve your tech issues so that you can work on your business.

Servers, Cloud storage and back up, internet security, preventing malware attacks and recovering from hardware crashes, that’s what we do. We also have help desk services for when your people encounter a software or hardware problem. Some issues require us to be on site, but there are also issues we can solve by logging in remotely and diagnosing the problem right from our offices.

Give us a call at : 772.539.7667 to set up an appointment for us to come and learn more about your operation and you to learn more about our services.

Your Tech Guys

Getting More Control of Your Web Presence

on January 17, 2019 No comments

The World Wide Web is less than 30 years old. Today, there are those of you who will read this post and have no idea there was indeed a world without web. In fact, until around 1990, trying to access the Internet was not for the average pc user.

Beginning in the late 1980’s and early 1990s the tech geniuses of the day began to build search engines and browsers, but they each had their own way of coding and indexing data.

Then in 1991 a man named Tim Berner-Lee and a woman named
” Nicola Pellow, a math student intern working at CERN, to write the Line Mode Browser a cross-platform web browser that displayed web-pages on old terminals and was released in May 1991.^[14] ” This according to Wikipedia.

For all intents and purposes Berner-Lee and Nicola Pellow were the founders of what we now call the World Wide Web. It looked nothing like it does today, with all the ads and fancy, colorful photos. But still, it became a great way to find things without having to run around looking in different reference books.

There were several iterations of search engines that came and went before Google took hold of all of us. And once they did get us hooked, they began to collect all sorts of data about us which they could then monotize by selling it to others.

Today, everyone knows everything about everybody, and this same man, Tim Berner-Lee is starting a new company to try and given us all some measure of control over that data and perhaps some income from what we choose to sell from that data pool.

It is an interesting article. Mr. Berner-Lee ” ….has a proposal called Solid, and a startup called Inrupt to promote it, which aims to allow people to have control of their own data, as opposed to the big corporations.

He described this as “web technology repurposed,” and said he is driven by the belief that you should control your data and receive a share of the revenue derived from it. “You shouldn’t worry about someone monetizing your data and influencing elections,” he said, and described Solid as a private repository—or “Pod”—which has a common API for all websites. This would separate applications on the web from your data, and you could then write the data to a generic website and share it via an API with anyone you wish, such as your family or your doctor.” taken from www.pcmag November issue.

Check out the link from our Facebook Page

Let us know what you think.

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Changing the Way Business is Done

on January 9, 2018 No comments

Ten years ago, consumers began to tire of the old way of doing business. Being force fed a steady diet of overly zealous commercials imploring consumers to use a product or service were largely being ignored. Company’s like Ford understood this more quickly than others, when targeting the younger audiences, and instead of commercials they did something radical.

How Can Your Network Be Safer?

on July 7, 2017 No comments

Unified Technology Solutions is a good place to start when you are looking to protect your network from spam and viruses. We can configure your email system using off-site filtering at your domain address (@yourcompany.com). Your mail system can be set up such that before any email is sent to an individual email address, it is first put through a filtering service instead of directly to your server.

This filtering service will run the e-mail through multiple filtering software packages to look for both viruses and spam. The reason for multiple filtering packages is, there could be the chances that a single software program does not recognize a virus, but another program could catch it.

The procedure with these filtering services is a system which works like this. On the first pass, the most common threats, which are usually all virus emails are filtered out. After that each E-mail is scanned and assigned 1 of 3 spam rankings.

Any email message where nothing suspicious is detected will be forwarded through the service to your mail server and show up in your mailbox. Email which looks most likely to be spam or infected in any way is sent into quarantine to prevent someone accidentally opening a suspicious email. The recipient of that email will receive a daily e-notifications to either add the sender to your safe list, or delete the email for good. The 3rd ranking is “definitely spam“, this is spam coming from known spam servers or matching known spam patterns, and is immediately deleted by the service.

Outbound filtering does the same in reverse, filtering your outbound e-mail to make sure your server has not been hijacked and is being made to send spam. Beyond simply checking for spam, you can set also configure filters to make sure employees do not send out e-mails with racial, derogatory, or curse words that can reflect bad on your business. You can even add a companywide legal claim to all outgoing e-mail if needed, this is much easier than keeping every E-mail client updated with the latest legal disclaimer every time it needs to be change.

Filtering service also adds a layer of protection if your server or internet access goes down, especially in a disaster. Email will be spooled on the off-site filtering servers and sent to your server when it comes back online, and you can access it from any internet connected PC if an important email is needed immediately.

Because of economy of scale, the pricing for this off-site filtering, with all it’s added features, is right around the cost of your current filtering software. In fact, it is often less expensive, with rates under $3.00 per user/month and requires little to no regular maintenance. This is very cost effective compared to on-site filtering software, and can be especially inexpensive if you are maxing out your available bandwidth and are considering the purchase a higher rate or second connection.

UTS recommends and sells off-site filtering service by McAfee, a world leader in information systems and security research.

To find out more and see if off-site filtering may be right for you feel free to contact us by email at sales@unifiedtechs.com, or give us a call at (772) 539-7667.

Your IT Guys @uts

Facebook and Your Business

on May 16, 2017 No comments

I hear it all the time, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat. all of them a waste of time. They just suck up your mental energy, good for nothing. That is just Not so!

It’s time to catch up with what’s going on out there. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are places where friends check in with each other to learn where the best deals are, where the best food is, and what services to use in their respective communities. Recently I posted about Facebook check-ins and free WIFI. Facebook Check-Ins are helping to drive traffic to local establishments.

Optimize The Performance on Your PC

on May 10, 2017 No comments

How to Optimize The Performance on Your PC

Windows has built-in utilities which can help you keep your PC running efficiently. One of those is a utility called Disk Defrag.Disk Defragmenter? What does that even mean? And why should you be using this particular utility?

First, before I explain what disk defragging is, it will be helpful to understand how disk drives work, and then you can more easily understand why a utility like defrag is important.

As you use your PC, files are created on the hard drive. Rarely is there a contiguous space for those files to be written in. The operating system looks for any available space to write your new files to. It uses a system of file pointers to map out all the sectors of each file. Often a new file may be spread between numerous smaller areas or fragments of free space when being written, this causes the hard drive read heads to have to move all over the drive area to find the parts of your file.

Imagine taking all the pages out of a book and spreading them randomly all over your house and then trying to read the book. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to put those pages back together in order? Disk Defragmenter is a program that keeps the data on your PCs Hard Drive grouped together and in proper order.

Windows 10, like Windows 8 and Windows 7 before it, is supposedly set up to automatically defragment files for you once a week. This does not always happen, so if you notice your files are taking longer to load it pays to run the disk defragment utility on your own. In fact, as a preventative measure, the techs at Unified Technology Solutions recommend that on average you will want to run the Disk Defragmenter every month minimum.

If you with digital photos, music, videos editing or large databases, some users may require it more often.For those who regularly work with large files, there is software available for purchase that will continually monitor and defrag your drives.

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