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XFER Blog

XFER has been serving the Livonia area since 1994, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.
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Best Practices

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Mike

How to Build a Successful Roadmap to the Cloud

360 imageIf you have no strategy in place for a) determining if you need a cloud-based phone system and b) how you will migrate towards one if you do, you should prepare your company for a long and pricy road to failure.

Your phone system is a critical component to the success of your business and the productivity of your employees, but taking advantage of its capabilities requires incorporating your phone system platform into your overall IT strategy.

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Best Practices Communication Phone System VoIP
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Mike

Tip of the Week: 5 Technical Tips to Troubleshoot a Troublesome Touchpad

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Laptop touchpads can be rather fickle. You may have experienced the frustrating situation where you’re using the laptop and then an unexpected glitch causes the mouse to jump across the screen. This error can actually cause data loss if it happens at the worst possible time, but it’s also just plain unproductive. Here are five troubleshooting tips to keep your touchpad in good working order and prevent this all-too-common issue from happening.

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Best Practices Laptop Touchpad
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Mike

Why You Need to Think Through Which Employees Have Access to What Files

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It’s clear that your IT department should have administrator privileges with your business’s technology, but the average employee is another story altogether. Administrator privileges provide users with the ability to do many things, such as install programs and access admin settings. Administrator privileges are exactly what you want to keep users away from, and it turns out that the majority of flaws in the Windows operating system depend on these privileges.

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Security Best Practices Windows
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Mike

Tip of the Week: Don’t Use Your Keyboard as a Dinner Plate and 3 Other PC Best Practices to Live By

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Computers are complex devices that require special attention to keep in optimal shape. Unfortunately, some people don’t pay enough attention to the current state of their computers. Once you’ve cleaned your computer properly, though, it’s important to make sure that it stays that way for as long as possible. Doing so can increase the longevity of your technology, and prevent it from an untimely demise.

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Best Practices Office Tips Cleaning
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Mike

Tip of the Week: Should You Leave Your PC On, or Power it Down?

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At the end of the workday, you’ve got an important decision to make: power down your desktop or log off? Each option has its own set of pros and cons, but are you confident that you’re making the right decision? Here’s how to find out for sure.

Tags:
Hardware Best Practices Computer
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Mike

Tip of the Week: Every PC User Should Know NOT to Do These 3 Things

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Knowing how to properly use your PC is key to its longevity. Therefore, you should never take for granted basic PC best practices. Here are three basic PC best practices that are easy to overlook.

Tags:
Best Practices User Error Computer
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Mike

Why You Shouldn’t Chuck Your E-Waste In the Garbage

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Today’s society practices a policy of upgrading to brand-new devices whenever the next big thing drops. We see this all the time when businesses want to keep up with the latest trends by upgrading to new workstations that utilize recent operating systems, or because their old hardware feels slow. However, this can have a negative effect on the environment in the form of e-waste.

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Best Practices eWaste Environment
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Mike

Tip of the Week: 4 Common Email Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

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Email is a staple in offices around the world, but many organizations are finding it easier than ever to make simple mistakes that can be easily avoided with proper training procedures. It’s a best practice to ensure that your team is adequately trained on how to efficiently use your chosen email client to its maximum potential. Here are four of the most common email mistakes that the average employee can make, and how they can easily be avoided in the future.

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Best Practices Email Tip of the Week
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Mike

If a Teenager Can Hack the CIA, You Can Be Hacked Too!

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With new threats emerging all of the time, it’s no wonder that cybersecurity is such a major part of any technological endeavor. Your should be using the most powerful security solutions on the market in order to avoid intensive hacks. Despite the emphasis that our society places on security, it takes a high-notoriety hack to truly shake the public into action; for example, what if the Central Intelligence Agency were hacked by a teenager?

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Security Best Practices Hackers
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Mike

3 Ways to Make Sure that Your Technology Doesn’t Get Stuck In the Past

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The purpose of business technology is to propel an enterprise into the future. Yet, too many businesses are reluctant to make major adjustments to their current IT systems, wrongly believing that it’s not worth the investment. The best way to approach upgrading is to use an IT roadmap that lays out a plan for your technology’s future. This way, you won’t be surprised by what the future holds.

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Best Practices Technology Innovation
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Mike

Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to Take Back Your Day From Workplace Distractions

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In today’s competitive workplace environments, productivity is at a premium. Although, thanks to our gadgets, the allure of the Internet, and of course, having to interact with people, working at the modern office isn’t without its fair share of distractions, which hinder productivity. Here are three tips that you can use to tune out the distractions so you can get more work done.

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Best Practices Workplace Tips Business
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Mike

You Might Be Surprised At the Ways Your Employees Put Your Data At Risk

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October is Cyber Security Month and we want to use this time to bring awareness to the different aspects of cyber security. One often overlooked element of cyber security is employee risk management. What level of risk does your staff pose to your network’s security? You can easily find this out by taking an online test.

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Best Practices Risk Management Employer-Employee Relationship
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Mike

3 Ways To Buck the Trend of Unproductive Meetings

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Running a business means going to meetings. There’s really no way around it. And while you can’t run a business without meetings, you can run your meetings as efficiently as possible so that they’re not a complete waste of time. Unfortunately, according to a recent study by Blue Jeans Network, the worldwide trends for meetings show that they can hinder productivity more than help it.

Tags:
Best Practices Efficiency Meetings
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Mike

4 Ways You Can Protect Your Accounts from Hacking Attacks

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We don’t need to explain how dangerous the Internet is. Behind a veil of deception is a horde of malicious entities that are practically begging you to make a mistake and allow them access to your infrastructure. If there’s one thing you should be sure of, it’s that a single mistake is all it takes to allow dangerous entities into your organization, like ransomware, viruses, malware, or even spyware.

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Hacking Best Practices Security
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Mike

Your Inbox Needs a Sheriff with a Strike Plan

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Spam emails often contain viruses leading to any number of potentially threatening situations for your company’s network. Therefore, it’s essential that your network has a security solution in place that acts as a sort of virtual sheriff, blocking malicious messages from accessing your network, while granting passage to the good guys.

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Security Best Practices Email
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Mike

Overcome IT Performance Issues with These 4 Proven Practices

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Is your network running a little sluggish? Computing hardware isn’t perfect and requires a certain level of maintenance in order to keep everything running at capacity. Before you swap out your old server units for new ones, try these maintenance best practices.

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Best Practices Maintenance IT Services
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Mike

Tip of the Week: Taking a Screenshot is Ridiculously Easy

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Sometimes explaining issues with your technology to someone over the phone is difficult at best. To help your tech support better understand the issue you’re dealing with, provide screenshots to help with your explanations. All you have to do to take a screenshot is hit a few keys. Here’s how it’s done.

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Best Practices Software Application
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Mike

Tip of the Week: 3 Tricks to Get the Most Power Out of Your Android Device

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Smartphones are exceptionally useful tools capable of enhancing your productivity, even while out of the office, but this comes at a steep cost. If your phone’s battery isn’t optimized to handle the workload, the multitude of apps will quickly drain it and you’ll be left with a dead device.

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Best Practices Lithium-ion Battery Android
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Mike

Take a Fresh Look at Your IT Security Budget

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As technology grows ever more complex, the average garden-variety threats grow exponentially. As such, security measures grow more comprehensive to battle the myriad of new threats that appear every day. If you’re not protecting yourself by maximizing your network security, you could be weak and vulnerable.

Tags:
Security Best Practices Budget
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Mike

Why Coca-Cola’s #MakeItHappy Commercial Fails to Make IT Happy

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One of the most memorable Super Bowl XLIX commercials yet again came from Coca-Cola. In classic Coca-Cola fashion (pun intended), they premiered an inspirational video with the message, “Let’s all make the World Wide Web a better place, #MakeItHappy.” We can’t contest to Coke’s feel-good message, but as an IT Company, we must object to one horrifying aspect of this commercial.

Tags:
Marketing Best Practices Miscellaneous
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