by Felicien | May 4, 2018 | Education
Over the years there have been many versions of Windows such as Windows 8, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. Windows 10, the latest update from Microsoft, has many unique features that distinguish it from its predecessors. While the previous versions ran mainly on laptops and desktops, Windows 10 is designed to run on tablets equally as well. One of the best features of this update, which is also known as Spring Creators Update, is that takes very little time to install – just under thirty minutes. While the previous updates used to take a lot of time, this new version is very time effective.
Windows 10 has many other distinctive features that are very useful for many small businesses.
Cortana on Desktop
Windows 10 brings voice-controlled digital assistance in the form of Cortana to computers. Now you can interact with or give commands to your computer without lifting a finger. You don’t need to type – just tell your computer if you want to launch a PowerPoint presentation, need a specific file, or want to look at specific photos. Your PC can do all this while you work on, say, an interdepartmental email.
Timeline
Timeline has replaced the Task Viewer icon beside the Windows taskbar. This new feature allows the user to view the activity history of their desktop. If you are looking for a file that you were working on last week, Timeline will help you find it quickly. Just click on the Task View button on the taskbar, and you will be able to see all your open files and applications. It is a convenient way to see what applications are running. Windows will display photos, folders, and documents according to the date that they were last used.
Privacy
Another security feature of Windows 10 is the new Windows Diagnostic Data Viewer. This feature allows you to view the amount of information that Microsoft can access from your computer. You can keep your data safe by fine-tuning privacy settings which concern application usage, browser history, web permissions, and connected devices.
The Start Menu is back!
In the previous update the Start Menu was eliminated, but in Windows 10 we can see its revival. The bottom left shows the Start Button, and when you click on it, two panels appear side by side with the left side showing the most used applications. The right side displays a list of live tiles that you can resize, reorganize, and customize. There is a power button at the top similar to Windows 8 for features such as Standby, Hibernate, and Shut down.
Nearby Sharing
Another simple feature that makes office work so much easier is Nearby Sharing, which you can enable from the Control Panel. Select the computer you want to send the file to and then click on the Share button in the Photos app or the Edge browser. The computer will receive a notification asking it to accept or decline the file. This ensures that file transfers can happen without unreliable network folders, beat-up USB devices, or empty email messages.
Snap Assist
In this update, the Snap View feature has also been updated which allows users to open multiple windows side-by-side without being limited by your screen’s resolution. This feature also suggests different apps that you can open to fill the available space.
Swift Pair
This feature allows you to connect to a Bluetooth device within the desktop’s range. You will automatically receive notifications whenever there is a connection opportunity. With Windows 10 you can use wireless headphones to make a call or try out a wireless keyboard by just clicking connect.
Microsoft Edge
The new browser called Microsoft Edge has replaced the old Internet Explorer. This browser has many impressive features such as Cortana integration, which allows you to pull up contextual information without having to search through emails. It has an annotation tool which lets you write anything and share it with your friends on social networks without leaving the browser, and PDF support which makes reading easier by improving the layout of long articles.
Tablet Mode
Windows 10, unlike Windows 8, makes a clear differentiation between tablets and desktops. In Windows 8, if you happen to be using a mouse and keyboard, by default, you will be in desktop mode.
Action Center
The Action Center in Windows 10 has been expanded to allow easy access to frequently used settings such as tablet mode and Wi-Fi connectivity. It also shows all essential notifications as soon as your computer receives an update.
Windows 10 has many impressive features which were missing in the previous update. It is faster, provides invaluable security protection and makes multitasking much easier. Update your computer today to enjoy all the benefits of this new operating system.
by Felicien | May 4, 2018 | Education
Is a backup enough to support your business?
Absolutely not.
What causes data loss?
45% is due to human error
45% is due to server failures
50% is due to network outages
Can you risk time, security and peace of mind?
No. If your technology comes to a halt, so does your business.
Can you afford to wait for the slow wait times of traditional backups?
No. Time is money. Plus, traditional backups may not be secure.
Can you risk using an untested backup?
No. Because over 50% of tape backups fail.
Can you risk using only one backup location?
No. Your data will be in jeopardy.
Can you afford to wait hours, days or weeks to recover?
No. Your customers will leave and go to your competitors.
What Exactly is Intelligent Business Continuity?
Intelligent Business Continuity is more than a backup. It’s an image-based backup that’s saved as a VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) that can be instantly virtualized.
Intelligent Business Continuity tests each backup and sends a screenshot to report success.
Intelligent Business Continuity is a Hybrid Cloud Solution that guarantees complete uptime. It utilizes end-to-end encryption protections for your data in transit and in the Cloud.
How does Intelligent Business Continuity with VMDK work?
It preserves your disk file system and system memory of your virtual machine and lets you revert to the snapshot in case of a disaster, deletion or other error that could otherwise erase your data.
Intelligent Business Continuity is thinking about your business on a higher level.
Top security officials advise that businesses like yours in Dallas/Fort Worth strengthen your IT defense structure with Intelligent Business Continuity. Your data will be preserved, protected and easily recoverable 24/7 no matter what.
For more information, contact the Business Continuity Experts at VersaTrust.
by Felicien | May 4, 2018 | Education
Your business is at risk every day.
Simple daily backups are no longer enough to ensure your business can keep running in the event of IT equipment failure– equipment fails due to:
Human Error
Fire
Flood
Cybersecurity Threats
If a disaster strikes, how will you ensure that your IT environment has enough flexibility, redundancy, and resilience to protect your data, while remaining simple to set up, use and recover?
You can with Datto Siris–the first fully featured, Total Data Protection platform in one integrated solution.
With Siris, you can choose from a family of physical, virtual and software appliances, as well as a variety of storage options to craft a unique data protection solution tailored to your business.
Siris supports a wide array of operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.
It protects and restores both physical machines and virtual environments. You have the option to restore no matter where your business data lives.
Your backups are scheduled every 5 minutes.
They’re tested, stored locally and replicated to the secure Datto Cloud.
And, this isn’t just any cloud. It’s stored within Datto’s Globally Distributed Data Centers.
With Datto Infinite Cloud Retention, you can store your data for as long as your business requires.
You can’t risk losing any piece of data to corruption.
Outdated data backup methods force you to restore an entire system from a single restore point. This results in data loss for any files created after the restore.
Siris uses Inverse Chain Technology and ZFS Snapshots to make each file interdependent. Each snapshot saves the changes between each data point, ensuring that any individual piece of data can be recovered from any previous backup without losing the most recent data.
When disaster strikes your business, there’s no time to waste waiting on outdated technology to restore backups–even 15 minutes old.
With instant virtualization, your business can restore within seconds from your local device or by using Datto’s powerful cloud.
While a complete image of your system runs through a virtual machine, regular backups continue.
And, if you lose the entire source machine, Siris also provides the option for Bare Metal Restore, into new hardware or a virtual destination.
Detect ransomware threats before they happen.
Siris monitors and targets specific patterns of ransomware within a single backup.
Plus, it notifies you and helps you get back to business without paying a ransom.
Imagine the power to backup, restore and secure your business data integrated into one solution.
And supported by a world-class, 24/7/365 tech support group.
With Datto Siris, your business can run anywhere, protect anything and restore any time.
Find out more by contacting the Datto Experts at VersaTrust.
by Felicien | May 3, 2018 | Education
On May 7th, all smartphones on an LTE network will receive a test notification for the new Public Emergency Alert System.
Don’t let it catch you off guard – coming up on May 7th, 2018, if you live in Ontario or Quebec, your smartphone will receive a test alert for Canada’s Public Emergency Alert System. The same test will run in the rest of the country on May 9th.
Be aware that this first notification will simply be a test by all major broadcast and telecom companies that offer LTE service. In some cases, you may be required to acknowledge receipt of the alert. Depending on your service provider, the alert may also make a notification sound that circumvents the settings on your phone (i.e., even if you have your phone set to silent, in some cases it may still notify with a noise).
These notifications will be sent out as a part of the Alert Ready Emergency Alert System. According to their website, Alert Ready is “designed to deliver critical and potentially life-saving alerts to Canadians through television and radio. The Alert Ready system is developed in partnership with federal, provincial, and territorial emergency management officials, Environment and Climate Change Canada, The Weather Network, and the broadcasting industry and wireless service providers, to ensure you receive alerts immediately and know when to take action to keep yourself and your family safe”.
Once tested and verified, these types of alerts will be sent to Canadians to inform them about a range of types of emergencies and imminent threats, including:
Natural Disasters
Tornado: a vortex of violently rotating winds, often forming a funnel-shaped cloud that is capable of damaging property and injuring people.
Flash Flood: Usually caused by river ice jams and excessive unpredicted rainfall, a flash flood is a sudden onset of water causing immediate flooding of the local area. The danger is in the little to no warning to local residential areas.
Earthquake: A sudden release of violent seismic waves due to energy generated by the movement of plates in the Earth’s crust, which can cause extensive damage in urban environments.
Hurricane: A violent storm made up of intense winds and heavy rain that can lead to storm surge, floods, coastal erosion, and landslides.
Fires
Urban Fire: Any urban fire that presents a threat to multiple residential and/or commercial properties.
Industrial Fire: A large fire in an industrial building or complex that poses a threat to human health.
Wildfire: A large natural fire involving combustibles such as grass, brush, and trees.
Forest Fire: As opposed to a wildfire, a forest fire burns in a forested area, grass or alpine/tundra vegetation and poses a threat to human safety.
Biological
Biological: A potentially dangerous or poisonous substance that is both unstable and easily transferred between living organisms.
Chemical: The misuse or release (unintentional or otherwise) of a chemical substance that could result in serious injury or death.
Radiological: A radiological (radioactive) substance with sufficient concentration to do serious or lethal harm to exposed populations.
Drinking Water Contamination: In the event that drinking water is negatively affected and as such, a boil-water advisory is raised, cautioning use by the public.
Hazardous
Explosive: A potentially dangerous substance or device that may explode within an affecting radius of an urban environment or concentrated population.
Terrorist
Terrorist Threat: The use of violence or threat of violence by individuals or groups against civilians or infrastructure.
Environmental
Air Quality: Caused by an elevated particulate count in the atmosphere that could negatively affect visibility or the health of individuals.
Falling Objects: Natural or human-made materials at risk of falling, which may threaten people or property.
Civil
Civil Emergency: Occurring when humans cause a disruption of services or require varying levels of support, law enforcement, or attention.
Animal Danger: Occurring when a wild or domesticated animal poses a threat to human life or property.
Amber Alert: Issued when a child has been abducted and police services believe that the child’s life is in grave danger. This type of alert gives the public immediate and up-to-date information about the abduction in order to gain their assistance in ensuring a fast and safe return of the child.
911 Service: This type of alert occurs when there is a disruption or outage of telecommunication services between public and emergency responders.
Check out the Alert Ready website to hear an example of the specific alert tone that will play through television, radio, and wireless broadcasts to notify Canadians of an impending emergency.
Be sure to take note of how the test occurs – it is the public’s responsibility to ensure that they understand what the alert is informing them of, to consider it carefully, and to respond appropriately and as directed.
For more information about Alert Ready, check out their website here.
by Felicien | May 3, 2018 | Education
Do you use 800 million pounds of paper each year? That’s the latest estimate for the average professional – and nearly 20% ends up in landfills. Would your habits change if you were taxed on paper consumption?
The use of paper to record thoughts, plans, transactions, agreements, or anything at all, is nothing new. Ancient Egyptians invented the earliest known type of “paper”, named papyrus from the plant which the material was created. The more modern forms of paper are likely created from a process similar to that invented by the Chinese, who remain the leading paper manufacturers today.
The ability to document everything from knowledge and information to financial transactions and taxes brought the foundation of the technological era – though not quite as we see it today. For the first time in history, accountability no longer relied on memory or spoken word, but the origin of the “paper trail” concept.
One of the earliest modern ways we’ve found to scale back paper use is the predecessor to the smartphone, the personal digital assistant (PDA), like the Palm Pilot. Migrating from paper planners to a handheld organizer enabled professionals to have easy calendar access, along with a variety of other resources like the Internet and telephone.
Would it surprise you to know that the first person to coin the phrase “PDA” was a former Apple CEO, John Sculley?
The intended purpose of technology is to improve our lives and simplify our tasks. For example, email was designed, in part, to expedite communication in a cost-efficient manner. Written communication that previously took more than a week to deliver via U.S. mail with the added cost of a postage stamp and envelope – also relying on the correct mailing address of the recipient – was now nearly free and instantaneous. The fax machine was intended to serve this same purpose of timely delivery, but still involved paper waste. In fact, fax machines created a unique problem: the sender had to have a print copy to scan and fax, and the recipient thus received a paper copy of the message. In the case of email, technology should decrease the use of paper, and successfully has.
The average professional has indeed cut back on paper use. Statistics vary, but no matter how you look at it, we consume far too much paper for the amount of technology we have at our disposal. Notice the word “consume”? The sad reality is that not all consumed paper is used. Have you ever visited a print station only to have to dig through sheets to find the printed document(s) you’re looking for? How many times do you see the same sheets that never get picked up?
Every year, organizations look to trim costs from their budget in unique ways, but rarely are paper costs fully considered. It’s estimated that U.S. companies spend $120 million annually on printed documents – a number that can, and should, easily be reduced.
Companies like Microsoft are trying to facilitate less paper consumption, and therefore, less waste. From online storage with Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint, where users can store, share, and access files from anywhere without needing to produce paper copies, to collaborative software solutions like Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Project which help groups jointly communicate in real time, modern solutions are geared toward less paper consumption.
One industry where paper consumption has significantly decreased in recent years is the medical field. Patient charts used to be entirely paper, including test results, office visit notes, and full patient history. For large medical practices, this involves a lot of expensive real estate for a physical item that isn’t often used. The movement toward electronic health records is more efficient in every way: cost savings for less paper and less space taken, easy to share and access from anywhere, and less chance of a test result or document getting lost or damaged.
Banking is another industry to vie for the record of worst offender in terms of paper consumption. Between lending for auto purchases or mortgages and account statements, banks recognize the high-consumption of paper and have (slowly) been moving toward online signatures, email statements, and digital records.
Even major metropolitan areas are jumping on the “green” bandwagon. Bike lanes are being rolled out in cities across the country. Mass transit light rail systems are being installed and adopted for easy navigation and decreasing carbon footprints and toxic emissions. On the smaller scale, but no less important, it’s becoming more common for consumers to be emailed a receipt at a point of purchase, rather than have a paper receipt printed at the time of transaction. Most cities have designated locations to return printer ink cartridges for recycling to help cut down on waste.
Commonly purchased with large print workstations are service agreements to maintain the printer. Rather than a set cost, these agreements are based on use and consumption, with fees for black-and-white documents ranging from 5¢ to 12¢ on average, and color documents ranging from triple to more than five times the cost of black-and-white fees. By comparison, cloud storage costs are far more economical!
So, what can you do to help cut down on paper waste, thereby cutting costs for your company?
Evaluate who uses a printer at your organization and for what purposes.
Determine if your printer(s) are the most efficient available, and if they are maintained for efficiency.
Monitor overall usage, and then assess how usage can be decreased.
There are so many ways technology can help decrease print usage and costs, and here are a few to get started:
Cloud storage
This cannot be stated enough. Moving file storage to the cloud is a big leap, but can save you time and money.
No more file cabinets taking up real estate.
Documents are easier to find, access, and share from anywhere.
Reusable notebooks
Do you or your team still prefer to take handwritten notes? Using a smart notebook like the Rocketbook Wave propels your note-taking into the next century. Once captured, notes can be shared to the cloud using your smartphone. Once the notebook is full, a quick run in the microwave and it’s empty to use again!
Collaborative platforms
We mentioned Microsoft Teams already, but there are countless options available. From Slack to Basecamp, most offer users a similar feature base intended to encourage digital collaboration and eliminate paper waste.
It’s not unheard of to offer incentives to decrease waste, but the greatest incentive is decreasing costs for the organization resulting in increased revenue – and hopefully increased salaries! Decreased paper waste shouldn’t have to rely on staff incentives – and hopefully, it won’t come to taxation, but you never know…so let’s get ahead of the game and help ourselves while helping the planet. Saving two kinds of green – money and Mother Earth – with one effort!
