Where to begin? There are so many different ways you can make streamline your email, our challenge was to whittle down the list to our top 5 “need-to-knows.”

Here is what we decided:

Limit desktop notifications to only the most important emails.

When I’m working, I have the tendency to get “in the zone,” especially when I’m writing. At those moments, the mail pops up are concentrations worst enemy. More, than once, I’ve been tempted to close my email and block out the world.

But that’s not always an option, and you still want to get notified of the most important alerts. In Outlook, set desktop notification only for those VIP messages. Essentially, first, you’ll turn off all desktop alerts under the Mail Options, then create an Outlook rule to display alerts for messages from specific people sent only to you.

Use an email template to never write the same email twice.

For those emails you send often, such as requests for information or reminders of due invoices, save the email as a template via File > Save As… > Outlook template. Then, to use the template, go to New Items > Choose Form… and look in your “User Template in File System” to browse for the template you saved. Or, even quicker, double-click the OFT file from Windows Explorer to create a message from that template. You can also use text expansion to accomplish this across any program on your computer.

On the same track, If you regularly need to trot out a standard passage of text, you can save it as a Quick Part for easy insertion into your emails. Simply highlight the text in the composer window, then switch to the Insert tab, click the Quick Parts dropdown and select “Save selection to Quick Parts gallery”. In the future, when you start typing the phrase, you’ll see it pop up as a suggestion – hit return to insert it in full. You can also select your text with the mouse from the Quick Parts dropdown. Right-click on it for placement options, or to edit and manage Quick Parts and other “building blocks”.

Get emails that aren’t sent directly to you out of your inbox.

One of the best tips is to use a special “Inbox-CC” bolder to gather all the emails that aren’t sent directly to you; that way, the inbox is focused on only the most important emails. To set this up, go to Rules > New Rules… Then click the “Advanced Options: button. In the Rules Wizard, select “where my name is not in the To box” and then in the next screen “move it to the specified folder.” Alternatively, set up a VIP email folder and move “emails send only to me” into that folder.

Create search folders for your most important emails.

What are your most frequently accessed emails? Maybe they’re emails from your boss or certain subjects (now where’s that TPS report?). For any search, you perform often, just save the search for quick access. Click on Search Folders in the left navigation menu, select “New Search Folder,” and then either use the wizards or manually customize the search to your specifications.

If you receive a high volume of email, folders may not be realistic, and tracking down relevant messages can be a chore. Outlook can group emails into conversations so that a single click shows all related messages together. You can set this on a global or per-mailbox basis by going to the View tab and ticking “Show as Conversations”. Click the “Arrange By:” bar at the top of the message list and select “View Settings…” from the dropdown menu to configure additional grouping options.

Quickly save emails as files.

If you want to save certain emails for posterity, you have a few methods at your disposal. While you can individually save any email through the File > Save As… menu (options: text, HTML, Outlook Message format or .msg, HTML, .mht), it’s far faster to save emails by dragging them to the desktop or Windows Explorer. This will save them in Outlook’s proprietary .msg format, with the subject as the file name.

Hope this helps. After reading this, you’ll be zipping out emails as fast as they come in.

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Many companies have become dependent on e-mail, internet, and intranet services. Without it, employees are almost cut off from important business communications.

Just mentioning outages has the ability to strike fear into the heart of even the most robust IT associate. Companies spend a lot of money to ensure the performance of critical applications and data centers, though the investment doesn’t always pan out. In 2013, companies such as Google, NASA, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and others all reported outages stemming from some problem in the network. IT failure have become an accepted (expected) aspect of business.

An Avaya survey in 2014, revealed 80% of companies lose revenue when the network goes down; on average, companies lost $140,000 as a result of network outages (The financial sector lost an average of $540,358 per incident), and 1 in 5 companies fired an IT employee as a result of network downtime

The costs of system downtime can be tangible/direct costs such as:

• lost revenue, because sales transactions could not be completed
• lost wages because employees could not perform their duties without the system
• lost inventory due to data loss
• marketing costs, to recover consumer confidence
• bank fees and legal penalties for not delivering on service level agreements,

or intangible/indirect costs including:

• lost business opportunities,
• losing employees and/or damage to employee morale,
• decrease in stock value,
• loss of customer and partner confidence,
• brand damage, possibly driving business to competitors or even bad publicity/press.

The cost of each hour of system downtime can vary depending on the nature and size of your business, and how critical your IT system is to making money. Establishing the true cost of downtime requires going beyond the IT department and into every operational area of the business.

3 Ways System Downtime Cripples Companies

When an outage occurs, it’s a race against time to handle it before it spirals out of control. The average reported outage length was 86 minutes in 2013. However, the frequency of downtime, and the duration that critical systems are unavailable has become far too acceptable to organizations these days.

Critical Process Interruption

Imagine not being able to ring something up at the counter or send that client email.When core systems are unavailable, productivity suffers. Depending on your industry, you may not be able to assign a value to the inability to send an email, but it can be incredibly frustrating and damaging to employee morale. Not to mention those wasted hours employees will spend waiting to access your system. In Ponemon’s 2013 survey of data centers end-user productivity loss ranked 3^rd after the cost of business disruption and the resulting lost revenue in a comparison of cost categories.

Data Loss

The risk of losing important documents and information increases when systems go down. Intranet files have replaced hard copies of information. Depending on the type and amount of data lost, can affect everything from sales and customer service to security and compliance. For example, if a pharmaceutical company that is manufacturing drugs does not show all of the records of its collected data from the manufacturing process, the FDA could force the company to throw away its entire batch of drugs.

Security and Compliance

When technology fails, employees turn to consumer grade tools, like a flash drive, to send and access confidential information.

Threats

It’s important to identify and understand all the potential downtime threats, both within your system and outside your network. External threats, both natural and man-made, you have very little control over, such as weather and DDoS attack.

The most frequently cited root causes of outages include:

Eighty-three percent of survey respondents in the Causes of Downtime study said they knew the root cause of the unplanned outage.

Cost of System Downtime: Calculating it Yourself

How much do you lose from unexpected downtime of your servers & business applications?

The simplest way to calculate potential revenue losses during an outage is with the equation:

Prevent Costly System Downtime with Proactive Network Monitoring and Management

Enterprise are challenged with shrinking IT budgets but still need to manage network infrastructures to prevent costly outages. The intricacy of modern IT means that avoiding downtime means more than just provisioning additional servers. Businesses need services that not only protects the infrastructure, but also has the ability to optimize, manage and scale for efficiency.

When it makes sense to outsource IT network management, it’s important to choose a provider that understands your business’s unique environment and challenges. Telx Computers takes the complexity of managing your IT network with 24/7 monitoring and support and incident notification across all platforms.

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However, as the city moves forward with its plan to collect data from thousands of sensors and use predictive analytics to measure the effectiveness of city service, the 30 people in the IT department will have to learn new skills associated with the internet of things (IoT).

Kansas City must also hire IT staffers with expertise in analytics, project management, and communications. “The IT team is a critical part of this,” said chief innovation officer Bob Bennett. “Those are the type of folks I’m looking for.”

Unfortunately, there is a mass shortage of IT professionals who are expert in analytics or data science. The IoT is a complex ecosystem, and tech workers will have to have some knowledge of every aspect of that ecosystem, says Seth Robinson, senior director of technology analysis at CompTIA.

“It’s not just about building a competent technical system that can perform a task for daily operation,” he says. “It’s about using this technology to drive forward into new areas. There has to be this knowledge of what the business is trying to do.”

Tech workers in the IoT world will expand their primary domains of infrastructure, development, security and data to include IoT-related skills, however, they will still need project management skills and business acumen, Robinson adds.

The following skills are in high demand across the IoT ecosystem:

• Cybersecurity specialists will be in even greater demand as the influx of IP-enabled devices increases vulnerabilities. The DDos Attack launched last week against Dyn will only add fuel to the demand.
• Hardware and networking. Just about any device can be equipped with a sensor that can gather, store and transmit data. Robust networks will be required to move all of that data. IT professionals who already specialize in infrastructure will need an understanding of the types of networks that have to be in place to connect IoT devices, Robinson says.
• Software and connectivity. Software is required to make the data usable, and connectivity is needed to share that data with the entire system.

“Some people are very good at a system,” Bennett says. “In an IoT environment those who are the most successful have figured out how to link multiple systems, how to link the data from them to accomplish a second or follow-on goal, and they understand how System A communicates with System B.”

• Big data. The biggest force in software is Big data. According to ComputerWorld, IT professionals will need at least a working knowledge of big data to be successful in managing IoT devices.

At GE Aviation, an IoT-oriented digital transformation has led to the creation of new positions – including chief data officer and “brilliant factory leader.” Likewise, the company’s software development initiatives require people with a broad knowledge of big data because the big data technology life cycle is just 19 to 24 months, says CIO Jude Schramm.

• Another driver of IoT projects is a desire to make better decisions, and that requires analytics to create insights out of data.

According to research conducted by LNS Research, some 60% of companies don’t have enough internal expertise to launch an IoT or analytics project. Matthew Littlefield, president and principal analyst at LNS, says the remaining 40% – those who say they do have the necessary skills – “don’t really understand how big the challenge is.”

The best option is to hire IT service professionals to help with IoT integration. Telx Computers offers premier IT services for businesses across the country. With locations in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, our IT professionals help businesses manage their technology  applications, servers, computers, software, and more.

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Senior ITZ leaders genuinely do want to bring their organizations in line with strategic business goals, but often they find the relationship isn’t exactly an equal partnership. As Mihir Shah, CTO of the asset management group at Fidelity Investments, quips, “Perfect alignment is when the business gets whatever it wants, whenever it wants.”

When resource-constraine, has to deal with multiple business units simultaneously – all demanding what they want when they want it – the situation quickly becomes unsustainable.

As the digital transformation continues to accelerate, the pressure on IT will continue to mount; is there a better way to create an efficient and satisfying partnership?

The answer, according to MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), is yes, due to a concept known as “demand shaping.”

There are six key elements in the MIT CISR toolbox:

• IT cost transparency
• Strategic program management
• Roadmapping
• Business relationship management
• Post-implementation reviews
• Agile development

IT executives at Staples, HP, Charles Schwab and BMW have publically discussed their use of demand shaping. Demand shaping is a sound method for creating a foundational platform that can serve the needs of subsequent projects.

Demand shaping is an effective way to do more with less, a way to get more bang for your buck.

Demand shaping is “a way to turn the conversation from IT being an order-taker into one where we can enable opportunities with outcomes,” says Herve Coureil, CIO of $26 billion global energy management and automation firm Schneider Electric.

How demand shaping works

The six steps in demand shaping all aim to turn what has traditionally been a one-way interaction – with this in the unwanted and ineffective role of order-taker, into an ongoing, two-way dialogue. “Thus business needs to provide more clarification to the CIO about where it’s going and why, and what outcomes it’s expecting,” says Ross. “Then CIOs need to say, ‘If that’s our strategy, then here are the capabilities we need.’ There’s no point in building capabilities that don’t help the company.”

The discipline also forces CIOs to focus on the whole organization, rather than individual businesses, and to set and pursue long-term priorities rather than short-term goals. “CIOs want to meet needs and keep people happy. But if there is no clear prioritization of what’s important [for the entire company].

Article source: Computer World

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How does it work?

Opera’s new ad blocking feature will be switched off by default. However, when an ad is causing a web page to slow down, the user will be prompted to turn on the adblock.

Why is Opera doing this?

An Opera spokeswoman remarked, “Ad-blocking technology is an opportunity and a wake-up call to the advertising industry to pay attention to what consumers are actually saying.” In other words, consumers are annoyed with intrusive ads that are irrelevant, and Opera is creating an opportunity for advertisers to develop more relevant, and more meaningful advertisements.

How will this affect business?

Ad blocking has been around for some time, but it is only in the Opera browser where it is built directly into the platform. Opera has said that with the use of their native ad blocker, their browser on average runs 45% faster than using Google Chrome with the AdBlock Plus extension and 21% faster than using Firefox with that same extension. In today’s browser competition, speed is money. This fact alone could make users abandon their current browser and adopt Opera.

What can your business do?

Large companies, such as Forbes and The New York Times, are already experimenting with ways to prevent ad blocking users from accessing their site. However, this may not be an option if your company is on the smaller side. Luckily, for businesses that primarily use content marketing, the Opera update will have little effect on their traffic.

Curious about ad blocking, cloud computing, or technology in general? Get in touch with us. Telx Computers is here to make your IT needs happen.

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Today, we have more information than ever before. This paradigm shift isn’t just about knowing more, or being more informed. It’s about the ability to garner insights from data, take decisive action, and pave new worlds.

Big Data

Big Data is just one of the many new technologies sweeping the planet, however, as Technology Review states, “No area of human endeavor or industrial sector will be immune from the incredible shakeup that’s about to occur as big data plows through society, politics, and business.”

Employment

The new world of massive data bumps up against two areas of public policy and regulation. The first area is employment – new technologies can challenge existing global infrastructure – such as white-collar industries, and innovate existing workflows. Although disrupting, new technology inevitably brings great changes to society; and eventually bettering livelihoods.

Privacy

The other area is privacy. Privacy is one of the biggest concerns for the big data era. Securing personal information from internet piracy can be difficult, attacks are being launched every second. Additionally, privacy law is more difficult to enforce in this arena, as users seldom know when their privacy is being violated in the first place.

So, how do you take advantage of future business technology, and remain safe? Telx Computers employs world-class encryption and verification to safeguard personal information. With powerful firewalls and monitoring, our team can diagnose patterns before they become problems – saving your team money and minimizing risk.

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With mandatory updates, Microsoft hopes to make the platform more secure, “The license terms for Windows 10 require Automatic Updates be enabled as a part of keeping our customers secure and delivering Windows as a service.” Some organizations will be provided wiggle room around this verdict, such as enterprise companies that need more control in this arena.

The benefits of mandatory updates include not only security best practices but extend to performance enhancements for the popular operating system. Now users will not have to worry whether new updates will impede functionality to their systems or pre-existing applications.

The most recent Windows 10 licensing agreement, from build 10420, states the following:

“Updates. The software periodically checks for system and app updates, and downloads and installs them for you. You may obtain updates only from Microsoft or authorized sources, and Microsoft may need to update your system to provide you with those updates. By accepting this agreement, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice.”

Windows hopes that such a move will prevent migration nightmares like what happened with the Windows version 8.x, where several users stayed with the old version of the software despite the new edition, Windows 8.1, being offered for free.

By making automatic updates mandatory, Windows hopes to keep a more efficient platform, with fewer processing glitches or security issues. Some speculate that windows software will automatically update when new versions are released.

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Outlook 2013 Shortcuts

Like every other office app, Outlook 2013 Shortcuts saves you time moving your mouse around or drilling down through names. Learn the ones you use most and you’ll speed through your Outlook tasks. MakeUseOf has a great downloadable PDF of Outlook shortcuts. Here are a few that we thought were helpful:

• Ctrl + R: reply to email
• Alt + W: forward email or switch to the weekly calendar view
• Alt + S: send email
• Ctrl + G: open the “Go to Date” dialog to jump to any date in the calendar

You can also switch between mail, calendar, contact, and other items in the navigation pane by hitting Ctrl + [the place number of the item]

 Take advantage of Outlook’s Quick Steps.

For those unfamiliar Quick Steps is the killer feature Microsoft introduced with Outlook 2010. If you find yourself regularly performing a particular task – such as forwarding an incoming email to a colleague, or inviting a group of recipients to a meeting – then Quick Steps can save you time. They’re shortcuts to any multi-step action you can think of, such as moving emails to a specific folder and marking them as read or forwarding an email to you team and flagging it at the same time. It was short work of repetitive tasks, and you can create your own Quick Step Actions. 

Copy any text to your clipboard, then in Outlook press Ctrl+V.

Outlook creates a new message (or note or whatever item, depending on the folder you’re viewing) with the text already pasted. So instead of opening an item, then pasting, you do both in one step.

When we set out to write some tip and tricks for using Outlook, we were expecting to learn a thing or two… but two thousand? There is a wealth of information out there on using Outlook. Too much for one post. So we’ve broken it into 3. Come back soon for our next post, Tips and Tricks for Outlook 2013: Email

Do you know any tricks for Outlook 2013? We’d love to hear about them!

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Windows 7 is quickly being adopted by the consumer market even though IT management around the world still hasn’t been able to make the jump. Microsoft’s profit was up to 51% over this last year. Office 2010 and Windows 7 are seriously helping Microsoft with those numbers. Consumers see the value Windows 7 brings to the table, as it’s many new and improved features makes the new OS stand tall right next to competitors like OSX.

Amazing New or Improved Features in Windows 7 Include:

• Home Group: Takes the headache out of sharing files and printers on a home network
• Jump Lists: Speedy access to your favorite pictures, songs, websites, and documents
• Snap: A quick (and fun!) new way to resize and compare windows on your desktop
• Windows Search: Find virtually anything on your PC, instantly
• Windows Taskbar: Better thumbnail previews, easier-to-see icons, and more ways to customize
• Remote Media Streaming: Enjoy music and video on your home PC—even when you’re not at home

Even though these features don’t translate well to the corporate world, Windows 7 works seamless with Windows Server 2008 in ways that really increase productivity by streamlining IT management processes.

Some of these features are:

• Simplified remote connectivity for corporate computers by using the DirectAccess feature
• Secured remote connectivity for private and public computers
• Improved performance for branch offices
• Improved virtual desktop integration
• Higher fault tolerance for connectivity between sites

Sooner or later IT departments all over the world will start embracing the benefits brought by the relationship between Windows 7 and Server 2008. Windows XP compatibility requirements are not an excuse anymore as Windows 7 supports Windows XP Mode. In the end, we all benefit.

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With the holidays quickly approaching it will soon be that time when people start buying new computers. The decisions to be made when purchasing a computer can be quite overwhelming. All the different terms and names can be confusing along with the pushy sales person always trying to add something else. Telx can help with the Hopefully after reading the blogs in this series you will be better informed and more confident when making that purchase.

The first thing to determine would be what the primary purpose of the computer is going to be. If you plan on using it for surfing the internet and reading emails then you could go with more of an entry level pc. If you plan on doing photo/movie/music editing then you will need a high end system. The difference between the two can be thousands of dollars. Below are some specifications that I recommend as a Technician at Telx Computers.

Before Choosing a New Computer Check Out The…

Processor- This is the brain of the computer the faster this is the faster your computer can think and effectively go faster.

(Intel i5-i7 with at least 2.0 GHz speed)

Memory/RAM- Memory is what holds it all together. This is the temporary storage space the computer uses while transferring data between the processor and the hard drive. The more you have the more you can accomplish at once. (i.e. multitasking)

(4GB with today’s applications this should be a minimum on all computers purchased as it will increase the life of the machine.)

Hard Drive/HDD- The hard drive or hard disk is just a storage place for all your files and pictures.

(100GB minimum, Drives are getting faster and cheaper every day.)

Everything else is up to you. If you are using it for gaming or movies you want to make sure it has a good video card.

Thanks,

Steven Jarrard

Senior Technician

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