Directive Blogs

Success is what you make of it, and everybody has a different definition of what success is. Whether your goals are to revolutionize your industry or simply earn enough to provide for yourself and your family, building success is a step by step process.

Server Virtualization sounds like a phrase from late 1990's science fiction, but it plays a big role for small and medium-sized businesses that want to cut down on the costs of housing and maintaining multiple servers at their location. What is it and how does it work?

For corporations and individuals alike, computers are mandatory. Off-site, on-site, home portal access, and remote offices are more widespread than ever. The design of Windows 8 has given special consideration to businesses. Its format includes organization, availability, security, and compatibility that allow a more cohesive operating system. For small and medium businesses, Windows 8 will acclimate to their needs like no operating system ever before.

Like most business owners, you probably have a Facebook page set up for your organization. Like most people, you likely also use Facebook to communicate with friends and family. Here's a simple method for doing so seamlessly.

Someone is laughing their way to the bank when it comes to printer ink prices, but it isn't small businesses. A gallon of printer ink can cost a minimum of $2,000. Granted, Upstate New York small businesses usually don't purchase a gallon of ink at a time. Suddenly, walking to the office printer and finding two copies of a 50-page .PDF file that had been printed accidentally and left for recycling would take on new significance.

Microsoft has released a preview of their highly anticipated Microsoft Office 2013, with features meant to coincide with their release of Windows 8 set to be released this fall. Like Windows 8, Office 2013 was designed to accommodate the needs of not only individuals but businesses, as well.

Android users may have some cause for concern. Considering its surging popularity, there is going to be a certain amount of rouge applications and other malware that targets the top iPhone OS. According to the popular anti-virus maker, Trend Micro, there are at least 20,000 applications that are malicious that target Google's Android OS. That is an increase of at least 400% since the beginning of 2012. By Christmas of this year, experts have given a conservative estimate that puts potential malware and rouge apps at around 150,000 different applications.

Making the transition from a single monitor to a dual monitor may be one of the best technological enhancements you can do for your desktop. This relatively cost-effective upgrade can offer a lot of extra productivity and allow your employees to get more done.

Ever need to put together a quick flowchart or diagram but the tools in Microsoft Word aren't quite giving you the results you need? Gliffy is a quick and easy online solution that's free and simple to use.

Business owners and employees alike are inundated with email. According to a study done in 2011, as much as half of an employee's day is spent sifting through their email, and as the study puts it, "necessary, yet unproductive tasks." Freeing up that time and spending less time managing email can open a worker up to more productivity. Here's a quick and simple way to start organizing your inbox to free yourself from your email and get more done!

Nature can be pretty impressive. It can interrupt the day-to-day operations of businesses, cause major damage, and cost your business in expensive downtime. Having a good business continuity plan (and ensuring you have it set in place) can make or break your company when mother nature comes knocking at your door.

Google Glass, which was announced a few months ago as a concept, now has a price tag and a few additional details, but is the world ready?

Protecting your business network from the threats lurking on the Internet is crucial for a small business. Threats of all shapes, sizes, and severities are out there and if they get into your network you could be looking at some serious issues ranging from data theft to extended downtime. Fortunately, there is a single solution available that can deliver a total security package to protect your business from virtually any outside threat.

Does it seem like every day your network is suffering from a different issue? How about the same old issues that keep coming back? Think about how much time is wasted every day while you and your employees have to cope with viruses, malware, and oddball technology issues. What if we told you there is an easy solution that will eliminate 99% of these problems?

June 18 marked a banner day for Microsoft as they unveiled their long-awaited tablet 'Surface'. Microsoft is hoping that the productive compatibility of Surface will make successful bid to unseat Apple's iPad as long reigning tablet-supreme.

Last time we talked about ways to standardize your Microsoft Word documents so the look and feel remains consistent throughout the document and between multiple documents. Today we are going to look at a more advanced trick that will let you take predefined content and data and allow yourself to pick and choose when you use it in a document.

Do your documents look a little bland? Representing your brand is important whenever you do any corresponding, whether you are just using letter heads or creating custom documentation or project proposals. Microsoft Word makes it simple to standardize the look of your documents so your brand can shine through no matter what type of document you are creating.

Modern technology makes it easy to get things done from anywhere, allowing employees to work while on the go. One of the caveats of working while traveling is keeping focused. Unlike sitting in the office where an employee can focus, traveling puts workers in busy airports, coffee shops, or poolside at a hotel. Here are a few tips to help you focus on tasks while on the road.

For those who use Mozilla Firefox as our web browser of choice, you may have noticed that there have been a large number of updates over the past year, leaping from version 4 to the now current Firefox 13. Mozilla has been following an aggressive roadmap to improve performance and features.

Do you work in an office and sit in front of a desk all day? Chances are, you have experienced back pain or tight shoulders. Maybe you get headaches from staring at the computer all day. Well today we will discuss some tips on how to reduce the negative effects that office work can have on your body. Working these tips into your day can have a dramatic effect on your mental and physical health and you will feel all the better for it.

Think back a few years ago before the Apple ipad (if you are in the medical field, there is a good chance you'll relate to this). Remember back when "tablet" computers were essentially laptops sans-keyboard with little plastic styluses? Now kindergarteners are using tablets instead of chalk boards. What happened?

Computer components generate a large amount of heat. When your equipment overheats it can increase the chance of a crash or other issues. Long term heat issues can even cause damage to your hardware. Here are some best practices for keeping your expensive technology cool.

LinkedIn, the popular social network geared towards business networking and communication, has reported a major breach in security. A file containing over six million passwords was leaked and posted on the Internet. What does this mean for you, and what course of action should you take?

Today, your employees are more and more technologically empowered. With the consumer electronics market teaming with amazing gadgets and high-end devices, cool tech is no longer reserved for fancy geek toys. With employees bringing in their own smartphones and tablets, mobile security becomes a big concern for small businesses.

Desktop virtualization is a method in which one machine can run more than one Operating System at the same time regardless of architecture requirements. There are two models of Desktop Virtualization that will be discussed here: Local Virtualization and the Client/Server Virtualization Model.

Small business owners and Entrepreneurs wear many hats. They have certain strengths and a drive to make money using the skills that they have. But there are many facets to running a business. Someone needs to do the accounting, the networking, inventory, manage employees, do sales calls and more. Then, someone needs to manage the technology.

Pixar, known for CG Animated films like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Up, produced a short video about how they almost lost Toy Story 2 due to a simple linux command and faulty backup.

Do you find yourself constantly navigating to a certain directory on your network to access the files you use the most? With this quick and easy tip, you can browse the contents of that folder with a single click without needing to dig around for it first.

Windows XP was released back in October 2001, and still today, many users and businesses still use it every day. Even in 2012, XP's market share is around 27%. Is your business still using Windows XP? How much longer should XP be kept around?

Once considered impossible, the threat of malware on mobile devices is becoming a serious reality. Malware used to just be a plague to PC's, however, in the last few years we have seen a rise in Mobile Malware specifically the threat of Mobile Botnets.

The purpose of a solid business network is to iron out the chaos of running multiple computers whose users need to access and share files and documents. With sharing comes the need to restrict some users from certain files, all while protecting your IT infrastructure from the inside and out.

The consumer electronics market is inundated with countless mobile devices with flashy interfaces, sleek profiles, and names that are more ridiculous than most car makes. Understandably, it's hard to keep up and when picking out a smartphone for yourself or your business, the demos at the store don't give you much of an insight.  Here's an extensive cheat sheet on what to look for when making a new smartphone purchase.

Ever since the Internet became a household commodity, many viruses and malware have donned a social mask; causing harm to computers and data but doing so by deceiving the user. One form of this is ransomware, a type of malware that locks users out of their computer until they pay a toll.

There comes a time when you are looking at a new laptop and you are asked the question: Do you want a Solid State Drive, or a traditional Hard Disk Drive? Well here is a quick run-down of both technologies in the hopes of shedding some light on the issue. By the time you are done reading this article, you will be better able to answer that question.

Microsoft Office and Windows 7 provide many keyboard shortcuts that can improve your ability to multitask and get things accomplished quickly. Most of these shortcuts will work in previous versions, like Windows XP, Vista and the Microsoft Server Operating Systems as well. Give them a try, and the next time your tech comes by, be sure to show off your new skills.

Knowing how to adjust the line and paragraph spacing in Word can be very handy. Modifying these settings can really impact the presentation of your document and keep it from looking too cluttered. After reading this short tutorial you won't have any trouble adjusting these settings to your needs.

At Directive, we always look forward to checking out new gadgets and software, and since Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system is so fresh and unique compared with previous iterations, we are interested to see how it will impact businesses.

Last time we wrote about the importance of having a social media policy for your business.  Let's go over some of the things you'll want to cover in your social media policy.

Computer viruses are pretty serious threats, and can cause huge expensive issues for businesses. Many cases of malware and computer viruses actually use your computer to commit real crimes. The FBI states that hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose the ability to surf the web if they have a particular piece of malware.

Is your email sending out mass-mail spam messages? Have you ever received a complaint about sending unsolicited ads or obvious spam messages? Have you ever received bounced emails by the boatload that look like they have been sent from your own account, even though you know you didn't send them?

If you've used a USB flash drive or other USB devices like cameras, smartphones, and external hard drives, you've probably seen Windows request you to safely remove the device as opposed to simply unplugging it from the PC when you are done. How important is this? Very.

Social media has revolutionized the way people communicate online. Social media is where discussions are had and information is shared. Over the past few years, the world has seen a remarkable shift in the way people socialize and it is not going away.

It looks like Mac users won't be getting a break from malware as another trojan is breaking out on OS X. In February, malware known as Flashback infected around 600,000 Macs. This month a new trojan called SabPub is making its rounds.

Techies get pretty excited over neat new gadgets and integrating them into day-to-day life, so when we heard about Sony's new SmartWatch, it caught our attention. Will smart watches become the next thing in the not-so-distant future or will they become flops like New Coke and Betamax?

"Almost 40% of enterprise network bandwidth is being consumed by recreational or non-business applications [facebook, linkedin, youtube]"
~Blue Coat Systems Survey More companies are blocking video streaming sites such as YouTube and Netflix to improve productivity at work..

When traveling with your trusty laptop or tablet, it's pretty common to find publicly accessible Wi-Fi networks that you can connect to, enabling you to surf the web. Where ever you are, whether it's a coffee shop, hotel, airport, or anywhere else, it's important to be safe about public surfing.

Most people might not realize this, but a Microsoft Word Doc can retain a lot of information pertaining to the history of the document, your personal information, annotations, and other invisible elements. This can be a huge security risk! Read on to learn how to remove that extra information.

Voice over IP phone systems revolutionize voice communications for small businesses by providing plenty of big benefits. VoIP uses the Internet to send signals as opposed to standard telco phone lines. Let's go over a few major benefits that businesses see when they switch to VoIP.

Technology today makes it easy for businesses to let employees work from home. Offering secure remote access gives employees the flexibility to work on the road, at events, or from home as if they were at their desks in the office. Is this good for small businesses?

Nobody likes thinking or talking about this (except maybe if you are in the insurance business), but businesses are fragile entities. Enough hardship and loss will greatly weaken the foundation that keeps the business running smoothly. What if your business suffered from a fire, devastating flood, or even a misfortunate bolt of lightning that destroys your server? Would you be able to pick up the pieces and start over?

Does your Wi-Fi require a secure password to allow users to access your network with their mobile devices? And no, the word "password" is not a suitable password. If your wireless network is easy to gain access to, you are opening up your sensitive data to anyone within range.

"As a business owner, when should I worry about implementing data backup for my company?" The answer comes in the form of another question, "How much do you value your business?"

We can't stress how important data backup is for businesses. Backup is so important that March 31st is World Backup Day, a day for people and businesses to observe the importance of backing up data regularly.

Read on for World Backup Day's excellent Infographic.

Server Virtualization has been around for a while but has quickly become more popular for small businesses due to the long-term costs saved when your servers are virtualized. What exactly is server virtualization and how can it benefit Upstate New York businesses?

Fans of Microsoft's note taking application can now use OneNote on iOS devices, Windows Phone 7 Smartphones, and at long last, Android devices. Up until now, Android users have been left in the dark for synchronizing and managing their notes through an official OneNote app.

We've seen a pattern over the years as Microsoft releases operating systems where every other operating system is great, while the releases in between are somewhat lacking. Windows 98 was pretty solid, as was XP, however the middle-child Windows ME? Not so much. This kind of progression is usually reserved for Star Trek films. What does this mean for Windows 8, the successor of the great Windows 7?

CES, a massive consumer electronics tradeshow, always presents some neat new gadgets and doodads to ogle over, and this year was no exception. One of the biggest hits at the event this year was Samsung's Transparent Smart Window. Describing it doesn't do it justice, hit the jump to see a video of it in action!

For those who find themselves struggling with resizing windows and flipping between documents and getting lost in a sea of open applications on their desktop, connecting a second monitor to your workstation can double your screen real estate.

One of the benefits of managed IT services is allotting time and having the proper tools to effectively monitor an entire network for issues. This allows technicians at Directive to detect, identify, and resolve issues before they start to affect users.

Most digital cameras produce very high resolution images, which is fantastic for printing, but higher quality image files means larger file sizes, and these days images aren't quite as portable as they used to be. Fortunately, Outlook has a great feature to reduce the size of image attachments for you.

Microsoft's Excel may look daunting, but it can be incredibly useful for presenting and organizing massive amounts of data. While it is capable of letting you put together advanced formulas, much of the time it's just nice to see a sum of a column of figures.

Over the past couple years we've seen a huge shift in the reliability and functionality of the tablet PC. What was once was a struggling market of just a few overpriced, bulky, devices that were neither practical nor stylish has become the next big consumer product. Tablets have been making it into the business world, supplementing smartphones as a new addition to mobile arsenals. We're going to highlight the best two tablets on the market that you can buy right now.

If your company has employed a backup solution, what process do you go through to ensure it is doing its job? Backup systems need to be tested regularly to ensure all the proper files are being backed up, and to check data integrity.

Email is a huge part of day-to-day business, and it can take a lot of time out of your day to manage it. Fortunately, Outlook has a lot of great features that will help you manage your inbox and effectively handle your email as efficiently as possible.

Social Media is a tough industry - the only way a good social network can succeed is by being extremely popular, and it takes a lot of criteria for that to happen. A social network site either has it or it doesn't, and Pinterest apparently has it in massive quantities.

We've been blogging a bit about ways to prepare for laptop theft and what to do if a company laptop is actually stolen.  Laptop and mobile device theft is a widespread issue for businesses and can lead to data theft which can be extremely costly; much more than the mere price of the hardware. This issue is all too familiar with NASA, which admits that thousands of mobile device theft incidents have occurred over the past few years.

We saw a statistic the other day that really boggled our minds. LoJack, a security firm that specializes in theft, estimates that two million laptops are stolen each year. That's about a one in ten chance that your laptop will fall into someone else's hands. What can you do to prevent that?

To most people, computer viruses are things that cause annoyance, downtime, and cost money to fix. That's pretty bad on it's own, but some viruses are much more complex than others and can be far more dangerous. Let's look at Stuxnet, coined as the first weapon made entirely out of code, and why it is so frightening.

Business owners, this one is definitely for you. You've probably experienced the fact that shaving expenses here and there can lead to more flexibility and long-term savings, but at what cost? Are you limiting your company by nixing those extra services and costs? Sometimes you can get more and still save money. Let's look at a few ways Upstate New York businesses can do just that.

The problem with carrying around an expensive, portable piece of equipment is that it's possible for someone to pick it up and run with it. According to LoJack, a security firm that focuses on stolen property, two million laptops are stolen each year. What should you do if you are a victim of laptop theft?

Unfortunately cell phone service providers are discovering that smartphone users love their bandwidth. With the majority of carriers dropping unlimited data plans, when a user goes over their limit massive charges can apply. Let's cover a few tips to limit the amount of bandwidth you use on your smartphone.

Google has gradually become a major part in our lives. Most of us use it every day to find answers, research products, and determine what Upstate New York restaurants are open on a Sunday night.  Google is on our phones, we watch videos on YouTube, and we get from point A to point B with Google maps. So what does Google know about us?

Whether you are going completely paperless or just want to send digital copies of paper documents, there are a lot of solutions out there for quickly scanning a doc and converting it to PDF for easy archiving and emailing, but most of these devices aren't exactly portable. Here's a quick way to digitize documents with the camera on your Android smartphone.

If you've been using computers for a while, then there has probably been at least one point in your life that you've lost data. Maybe it was something you were working on when your computer crashed, or maybe a disk failure wiped out some data. Does this bring back memories of frustration and angst?

There has been a growing trend where businesses are allowing more employees to work from home or other remote locations. Technology makes this possibly by letting users remote into their work environment securely as if they were sitting at their desk at the office. VoIP phone solutions can even bring the worker's office phone to them, no matter where they are.

At Directive, we hate seeing our clients suffer from slow computers, bogged down networks, and other computer issues that prevent work from happening seamlessly. That's why we are so passionate about proactively safeguarding your network BEFORE issues happen, in order to prevent expensive downtime.

Sometimes when your workstation feels bogged down, a relatively cheap and simply hardware update can make a huge difference in performance. Adding more RAM (Random Access Memory, often just referred to as memory) can be a game changer for your bogged down PC.

Is staying in business important to your company?

We don't want to be sensationalistic here, but there is a serious real-world link between data loss and staying in business. Let's look at some statistics.

Internet privacy is no new issue. Between malicious hackers trying to breach private information, governments trying to regulate it, and organizations trying to track as many metrics as they can, the Internet continues to chug along for the most part just fine. Are YOU concerned about Internet privacy?

Why Upstate New York Businesses should all say "I Don't Like Spam!"

Spam wastes company time and harbors viruses and malware that can quickly infect your entire network. It can bog down your network and your mail server.

Last time we went over how to dress up your PowerPoint presentations with SmartArt, a feature in many Microsoft Office applications. Today we're going to be showing you how to create charts to display various types of data in PowerPoint, but like before, these will work much the same in other Office products such as Microsoft Word.

PowerPoint has been, for a long time, the staple of presentation software. The last few incarnations of Microsoft PowerPoint (especially 2007 and 2010) have some great tools to spiffy up your presentations quickly and easily.

Nobody wants to spend more than they have to, especially when it comes to those necessary evils like bills, utilities, insurance, and the general costs of keeping things running smoothly. At Directive, our goal is to provide outstanding enterprise-level solutions for small business prices. Let's talk about a few ways to cut long term IT costs.

This has been a pretty common topic for us on the Directive blog. We've seen a lot of Upstate New York clients and customers suffer the consequences when online retailers and other account providers experience a security breach. It is equally vital for consumers to know what to do in the event of a security breach as it is the company that is actually breached.

This month Google announced that their search results will now contain personal results from friends and connections made in Google+. Twitter, the real-time searchable social network, publicly announced that they thought this was not a good idea. Will personalizing search results make for a better Google experience or will it hurt? Let's take a look.

Hard drives have been getting bigger (capacity-wise) and cheaper over the past decade which is great news for everyone. Toshiba predicts that in 2012 that over 2 zettabytes (2 trillion gigabytes!) of data will be created and replicated (double from 2010). While costs are going down, data growth is still a challenge for data centers and IT administrators.

On the topic of identity theft, social media accounts are becoming a high target for hackers, especially for spreading malicious viruses. To some, losing control over their Facebook or Twitter accounts could be just as devastating as having their credit card stolen. Trouble is, for many users, having one login account stolen means hackers have access to their other accounts too.

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.

Computer viruses and malware have been around for a long time, and cybercriminals have always tried to package their malevolent doings under a veil of deception. One method that has been in place for a while now is called scareware. Often disguised as something that appears to want to help your computer, scareware will scam users into paying for a service that isn't beneficial.

It's January, it's 2012, and you know what that means! It's the time of year everyone tries to start fresh and make big changes in their lives to hopefully improve themselves. Does your Upstate New York business have goals and resolutions to work out for 2012?

Granted, growing up we were made to believe that by now we'd have flying cars and robot butlers, but technologically speaking we're in a pretty great era of gadgets and conveniences that aren't just giving us cool toys to play with, but are changing the way we communicate, learn, and work. Let's look at what's in store for the world in 2012.

Want to send out a large number of documents that are almost the same aside from a few specific areas? One example would be a letter to all of your existing clients about a new product or service, but you want each letter to address the recipient's name and company. This looks like a job for the mail merge!

Let's get theoretical here. Let's say your friend Hank suffers from chest pain. It could be nothing, but chest pain isn't something you want to mess around with, so you suggest that Hank goes to a doctor to get it checked out. There are certain things in life you don't just let happen without getting an assessment to make sure they don't turn into bigger issues, right? Your business's IT security is one of those things.

Despite a quivering global economy, people have been spending a lot of money on gifts this holiday season, and much of that is online. In a comparison between this year and last, U.S. consumers have spent $32 billion dollars online, a 15% increase from last year.

Everyone at Directive would like to wish you and yours a happy holidays and a fantastic new year!  We hope you can spend the holidays sharing precious time with friends and family. Let's all spread some fun holiday cheer and get ready to face all of the opportunities and challenges of 2012 head-on!

Server virtualization offers a ton of benefits for small businesses - less energy consumption, easier management, better hardware utilization, smaller footprints... but diving in recklessly can cause a lot of expensive headaches. Let's take a look at a few things to consider when switching over to a virtual solution.

Your printer typically has pretty limited functionality, or at least one would think, right? It prints, maybe it can print on both sides of the paper, sometimes it can scan documents, and it can allow hackers the ability to steal your data and commandeer your network. Wait, say what?

Recently we mentioned Evernote as a great note taking app that is supported across multiple operating systems and mobile devices. We compared it to Microsoft OneNote as a lighter alternative that is easy to set up and sync across a plethora of devices. However, diehard fans of OneNote probably don't want to make a switch to a whole other platform. Today we're going to talk about ways to mobilize your OneNote notebooks as well as some other features that are exclusive to OneNote that you might not know about.

It's always important to be prepared for emergencies, and for a small business these days even a minor disaster can have long term ramifications with serious consequences. Whether the disaster is short lived, like a power outage or hardware failure in your server, or a more serious event like a flood or fire, you want to be able to get back in business as quickly as possible Here are some steps Upstate New York businesses should take to prepare and add to their disaster plans.

Are you the kind of person who takes meticulous notes? Do you carry around a pen and pad with you so you never forget a single line item from meetings, presentations, or your grocery list? Enter Evernote, a free application that gives you an easy-to-use note taking solution that syncs your notes across multiple devices.