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Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Ferrum Technology Services has been serving the Elgin area since 2007, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Tip of the Week: How to Waste Less Time on Your Email

Tip of the Week: How to Waste Less Time on Your Email

As much as we all rely on emails throughout the workday, they can be an intense pain to manage, which only makes it a hassle to deal with and can actively make it less useful for your users. We want to help you avoid this outcome, so we’re sharing a few tips to make the management of your email that much more effective.

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Tip of the Week: 6 Data Security Practices You Can Take

Tip of the Week: 6 Data Security Practices You Can Take

Data is one of the most valuable assets there is today, which is why any business should consider its security a prerogative. This can admittedly be a lot, which is why we’ve taken the liberty of preparing a few tips to help you get started on the right path. These may also help those in the middle of the process who need a little reminder.

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Tip of the Week: Three Ways to Make All Meetings Better

Tip of the Week: Three Ways to Make All Meetings Better

Remote collaboration, especially online meetings, have recently surged in popularity amongst businesses. However, as this has happened, many new adopters have gotten the impression that they just can’t accomplish as much as they could otherwise. To help readjust this perspective, we wanted to share a few productivity tips to apply to your next remote (or even in-person) meeting.

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Reopening Your Business Comes with Real Challenges

Reopening Your Business Comes with Real Challenges

Business reopening is proving to be relatively difficult as COVID-19 isn’t going away. To ensure the health of your staff, while still reopening your business to create revenue, you will need to carefully weigh all your operational decisions. Today, we have outlined some best practices in which to do so. 

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Tip of the Week: Maintain and Backup Your IT

Tip of the Week: Maintain and Backup Your IT

Imagine for a minute that you work in a small factory or machine shop. Some wind comes through and drops a 200-year-old maple tree through the roof onto the machines that you use to create your product. The devastation is total. If you have a second factory built to scale from the first, you could just ship your workers over to that one and keep productivity high. Chances are, however, there is no second factory. Your business is done until you can get the situation fixed. It could take days, weeks, or even months to get your business back on track; and if the stats are any indication, it probably won’t. 

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You Need to Plan for the Worst and Hope for the Best

You Need to Plan for the Worst and Hope for the Best

Hope can be a big part of a person’s notion to start their own business. Needless to say that entrepreneurial hope doesn’t always consider that there will be a global pandemic that grinds the operational effectiveness that you’ve spent years building to a halt. Hope does, however, play a big part in the creation of a business continuity plan. Today, we’ll briefly discuss why you should never lose hope and how being prepared stems from the same notion as starting a business.

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Addressing the Toughest Challenge in Remote Conferencing

Addressing the Toughest Challenge in Remote Conferencing

Video conferencing is a crucial technology for businesses, especially now. Although, while it has the benefits of accessibility, it certainly is a different animal than your run-of-the-mill in-person meeting… as due to this, it has a challenge that an in-person meeting does not. Let’s go over what this challenge is, and how to overcome it.

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Managing Your Business and Remote Workforce During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Managing Your Business and Remote Workforce During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Companies around the world have or are finding the need to send their workers home to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. For many business owners, managing your staff remotely is a brand new paradigm. Here’s what you need to know.

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Coronavirus: A Threat to Your Staff, Cyberthreat to Your Operations

Coronavirus: A Threat to Your Staff, Cyberthreat to Your Operations

COVID-19, or coronavirus, has been a major global health concern over the past couple of months. At this point, it is clear that this disease could have serious impacts on the workplace. We wanted to provide a brief rundown of good workplace and network health practices, as well as a few pointers on how you can handle health-based employee absences.

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Tip of the Week: Business Resolutions for a Successful 2020

Tip of the Week: Business Resolutions for a Successful 2020

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.

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How to Optimize Security, Regarding Your Servers

How to Optimize Security, Regarding Your Servers

Your business relies on its servers in order to function - which makes it incredibly important that these servers are sufficiently protected. There are a few practices that you can put into place that will help you to secure your server room. Let’s work our way from the inside out as we review them.

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Tip of the Week: Automatically Organizing Your Email

Tip of the Week: Automatically Organizing Your Email

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.

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Any Business Should Leverage Certain Software Solutions - Does Yours?

Any Business Should Leverage Certain Software Solutions - Does Yours?

Businesses rely on a lot of different software solutions to complete their processes. Many are based on a given business’ industry, but there are a few types that every business should involve in their operations. Let’s review what they are, and how they can be beneficial to you.

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Tip of the Week: Speed Up Your Computing with Windows Shortcuts

Tip of the Week: Speed Up Your Computing with Windows Shortcuts

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. 

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Want Proof that You Need to Monitor Your Solutions?

Want Proof that You Need to Monitor Your Solutions?

When discussing the practice of monitoring solutions to prevent threats, it isn’t uncommon for many businesses to put these concerns on the back burner. However, every so often, an example comes around to help inspire businesses to take their monitoring seriously. This time, the example was the arrest of 24 spammers in October for scamming American citizens by impersonating Microsoft support staff members.

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How to Order the Items on Your To-Do List

How to Order the Items on Your To-Do List

Being in business today means that you have a lot on your plate, it’s as simple as that. Yet, with so many tasks piling up, it can be challenging to prioritize them all so you can figure out where to start. Below, we go over some strategies you can use to make sense out of all the tasks you have on your day and reach a point of productivity.

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Does Messaging Actually Slow Down Productivity?

Does Messaging Actually Slow Down Productivity?

While email remains an important facet of professional business communications, the instant message is of rising importance in office environments everywhere. While any one of many factors may contribute to this shift, it provides those businesses that adopt it great advantages to their internal processes, and might even aid in their cybersecurity.

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4 Ways to Engage Your Employees to Increase Productivity and Job Satisfaction

4 Ways to Engage Your Employees to Increase Productivity and Job Satisfaction

Business owners that regard employee engagement as an unimportant aspect of managing a business are sorely mistaken. There are few things more crucial to the success of a business than keeping employees happy and fulfilled. Yet, even if businesses have only the best intentions and want to improve employee engagement, few actually manage to do so.

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Mr. Wolfdog Teaches You to Dominate the Competition With a Giant, Honking Computer [VIDEO]

b2ap3_thumbnail_wolfdog_tips_400.jpgApril 1st is a day for jokes and laughter. Therefore, we thought we’d lighten the mood and consult the funniest and the furriest CEO we know for computer advice; that’s right, Old Spice’s wolf-dog hybrid, Mr. Wolfdog!

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Tip of the Week: 3 Reasons Why Skipping Your Breaks Can Hinder Productivity

b2ap3_thumbnail_take_a_break_400.jpgWe live in an age where productivity is at its peak, but as you might be aware, this often leads to a stressful work environment where anything less than your best can be considered slacking. You might have several tasks that need to be completed today, but we’re sure you can take the time to read this blog about giving yourself a break once in awhile. You might find that breaks are absolutely crucial to both your creative and physical well being.

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