Ferrum Technology Services Blog

With data being such a valuable asset today (especially personally identifiable data), you can’t afford to let any of the information your company has access to fall into the wrong hands. The same goes for all of your data, especially that which concerns your employees or your clients. Let’s go over a few tips that should help you keep this data safe, step by step.

Windows 10 gives you interesting options to help you manage your computing experience. One of these options is the presence of the virtual desktop. On a Windows machine, look at your taskbar, near the Start button and the search function. The next little icon, the one that almost looks like a bit of film, is the Task View button, the button that will give users the ability to create and manage virtual desktops. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss how to use this feature.

At the time of this writing, Microsoft Word has a market share just shy of 37 percent, making it a pretty safe bet that you’ve used it at some point. As a result, you’re probably familiar with Word’s insistence of changing how certain things are formatted, which can become irritating - especially if you had it formatted how you wanted it the first time. This week, our tip will cover how you can stop Word from editorializing.

Happy New Year! As tradition dictates that we all select a resolution to improve ourselves for the coming year, why not do the same for your business and its operations? For our first tip of the year, we’re sharing how to come up with resolutions that could help you start off this year on the right footing.

You have goals for your business and most of them will require strategic investment to get off the ground. These projects can have a huge effect on your business. If they go right, your company stands to benefit, but if they go wrong, you are putting your business in jeopardy. It is important that you have a careful and capable project manager to help you implement your plans. Today, we’ll give you three variables that you have to look for when hiring a project manager. 

Statistically speaking, there’s a pretty good chance that you use Microsoft Office 365 in your business, which means you can use OneDrive, Microsoft’s contribution to cloud-based storage and collaboration. If this is how your users work productively, they are probably already familiar with how they can share these documents - but what if there are some things you don’t want freely shared around? Today, we’re going over how you can restrict OneDrive sharing capabilities.

With personal privacy being a major public topic, Apple decided to give users more control over their data. 

Back in July, Apple had admitted that it was holding and listening to recordings of iOS users who use Siri. This wasn’t much of a surprise, since we know that Amazon and Google do the same with their digital assistants. Apple now lets you delete the conversations you’ve had with Siri.

Let’s face it - you’d be hard-pressed at this point to find someone who wasn’t fairly confident about their use of email in the office. However, the way they are currently using their email may not be the most efficient. This week, we’re focusing our tips on how to better use your email.

Do you have a smartphone? Do you feel as though your data is secure on it? Users are relying on smartphones more and more to accomplish daily tasks. This means there is a massive amount of data traffic each day transferred to and from your device, and potentially transferred into the hands of a cybercriminal. 

The modern threat landscape is filled with horror stories of people that have been the victim of software vulnerabilities, hackers, and situations that could have been managed differently. Today, we will go over some of the best ways to keep your business from being a victim of a data breach, data theft, or malware attack.

Patches are one of the most important aspects of your technology. As with anything, technology is constantly changing, so shouldn’t your software? Today we will discuss three tips, sharing advice on optimizing your patch management process. 

Small business owners are always looking for a way to shave some of that overhead off of their budgets. While this is probably true for most business owners, the more capital a small business can save, the more it can do. Outsourcing its IT management is one way to either cut down the company’s technology maintenance costs--or, if your company doesn’t currently have a dedicated technician--can keep you from paying way too much to keep your business running smoothly. 

The Windows operating system has quite a few shortcuts baked in, each offering a user quicker access to the utility they are seeking out. It may sound crazy, but using these keyboard shortcuts can actually eliminate the eight days the average employee accumulates every year by just moving their hand from their keyboard to their mouse. 

Most people today spend a lot of time on the Internet, which means that most people spend a lot of time using a browser. Little do they know, selecting the wrong one could easily put their cybersecurity at risk, along with dozens of other actions. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over how to make your Internet browser as secure as possible.

As time passes, your business will need to be able to grow and develop its use of technology through thoughtful investments and improvements. To do so, it helps to calculate the returns you can anticipate seeing from these investments. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over how to do so.

The modern workforce depends on collaboration, which is one reason why solutions like Slack have taken off in recent years. Another reason for this is that it’s very user-friendly with many shortcuts built right into the interface. Here are just a few of these shortcuts that can save your business time during the workday.

Microsoft Excel has a ton of functionality, but how much of it are you actually utilizing? This week’s tip will help you take full advantage of keyboard shortcuts, so you can leverage the solution to the best of your ability.

Collaboration is, in many ways, one of the most important parts of running a business. The issue is that you need to ensure your entire team is prepared to participate and work towards the same goal. This week we want to emphasize the importance of collaboration, and to that end we have provided six simple steps to better collaboration.

Smartphones have become an important part of our lives, whether it’s for personal or professional purposes. Downloading media to devices rather than computers was practically unheard of, but nowadays it’s commonplace. Now that we mention it… where exactly do those files wind up going on an Android device? This week’s tip is all about how to find your downloads on an Android device.

Thanks to file management systems that can be digitized and stored online, filing cabinets can be considered a thing of the past. Of course, you still have to keep digital filing systems organized, but this is easier to do and more efficient than paper files. Today, we provide you with tips on how to ensure that you can keep your files in proper order.