The Connection, Inc Blog

In business, good communication is essential. If you do it right, you can streamline actions that can save your business a lot of money and build incredible efficiencies that can bring your vision to reality. Poor communication, on the other hand, can hinder a business’ ability to prosper. In order for your staff to be able to communicate effectively, they need the tools to do so. Here are three tools that most businesses should have in place to help drive business forward.

Email groups are remarkably useful. Instead of sending a copy of an email to each individual recipient, you can effectively create a simple forum post that everyone can participate in—a feature that certainly helps when collaboration is a priority. Let’s go over how you can quickly and easily create a group in Gmail.

Phishing has become one of the great problems for technology users in the 21st century. The ironic part of the whole thing is that it has taken a good old-fashioned social engineering scam to make today’s robust information systems less secure. Phishing is the predominant way that hackers and scammers gain access to the systems they target. Today, we’re going to spell out what to train your employees on to help them identify phishing attacks. 

The holidays are fast approaching and that means people are going to miss work for one reason or another. If you can get away from the office for a little bit, you’ll want to set up an out-of-office message to ensure that others know you will get back to them when you get back to the office. Here’s how you can set up an autoresponder for an out-of-office message in Microsoft Outlook.

While we’re all for efficiency, there are some boundaries that should not be crossed for everyone’s benefit. Take, for instance, the email you use to subscribe to online services. While it may be tempting (or, for some people, automatic) to use your work email address when you sign up for, say, your Netflix account or an online merchant, we wanted to discuss why this is a bad habit to get into that could have lasting consequences.

The software you choose to use for your business largely defines the capabilities of it. When it comes to communications there are some very standard options that you probably already have and then there are some more innovative options that can have significant benefits for your staff. Let’s take a look at some of the standard communications options a business might use and how they can use technology to crank it up a bit.

What do you do with your old email messages? Do they just sit around in your inbox and collect dust? If so, this is certainly a wasteful practice, as those emails can accrue over time and take up a sizable chunk of space. The question then becomes, what do you do with the emails to keep them from taking up so much space, especially when you might be paying for the space?

What kinds of communication tools does your business utilize on a daily basis? Chances are that your communication infrastructure can benefit from some of the latest and greatest solutions on the market. Communication is one aspect of your business that you definitely do not want to skimp on, as failing to implement the proper tools can bleed into other aspects of your organization, including operations and, in return, your bottom line.

Like any email platform, Microsoft Outlook can easily become overwhelmed with messages and conversations—effectively making it counterproductive rather than an asset to you and your team. Let’s take a few moments to go over a simple way that you can use Outlook’s internal tools to make your messages easier to deal with.

Email—it’s a business tool that we all use and rely on, but (if we’re being honest) it can be a pain to manage properly. Unfortunately, this can also depreciate the value of the solution to its users. To help prevent these problems, we wanted to share a few tips to assist you with your email management.

For the past several years, ransomware has been a major thorn in the sides of businesses. Hackers that were once known for “hacking” into networks, changed tactics when encryption just got too strong. Today, these “hackers” use confidence tactics to gain access to accounts. Once they’re in, their strongest tool is ransomware. Let’s look at what makes ransomware so dangerous and how your company can combat the constant attacks that come your way. 

Every business should consider its security one of its top priorities, and with so much business now happening digitally, cybersecurity is a major part of that. Take, for instance, the heightened importance of email in the extended remote workforce. While email is a great business tool, it can also be an avenue that a cybercriminal uses to attack. So that you can better protect your business, we’re discussing some basic email security steps for this week’s tip.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 situation in March, creating a vaccine has been a major priority. True to form, hackers have begun targeting the very organizations responsible for the vaccine trials. There’s a lesson to be learned, today we’ll discuss it.

Phishing emails are a real problem for today’s businesses, which makes it critically important that you and your team can identify them as they come in. Let’s touch on a few reliable indicators that a message isn’t a legitimate one.

Have you ever been in a situation where you’re watching your inbox, waiting for a response that probably isn’t coming? This is a problem that’s all too common, and it’s because the average business owner could very well be stymieing their own progress by sending emails that are too long, too wordy, or even too brief. A study by Boomerang suggests that there are four ways to make emails more viewer-friendly.

Imagine that you are the CEO of a mass media organization whose Twitter has just been hacked and was now posting 20 spam-filled tweets every second. You’ve just put yourselves in the shoes of Tim Armstrong, CEO of now-Verizon-subsidiary AOL.

Email is a central part of any functional modern office, but if you aren’t proactive in keeping your inbox under control, you could be wasting time on unnecessary messages or spam. If you want to get the most out of your workday, it’s imperative that you take back control of your business email inbox. Here are three ways that yourself and your employees can clean up your inboxes and waste less time throughout the work day.

There are many ways to share a file between two computers. Being familiar with multiple options will certainly come in handy, especially when your preferred method of file sharing isn’t an option (like when you can’t find your flash drive, or maybe you lose Internet connection). For this week’s tip, here are four options to help your business more effectively share files.

Share via Email
For smaller files like Word documents, you can simply attach them to an email and send them to the receiving party. Any email solution worth using, like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, allow users to attach files and send them to a recipient, but the number and size of them cannot exceed a certain amount. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand this limit before relying on email to share important files.

Share via External Solutions
You can always share files via an external piece of hardware like a portable flash drive or USB hard disk drive. While this is a great way to share when there are no other options available, keep in mind that you also run the risk of losing them. Unless your device is protected and encrypted by a pass code of some sort, anyone who finds the device can access its contents simply by plugging your drive into one of their own devices. Therefore, you should take precautions with what information is shared in this fashion.

Share Locally via a Network Drive
Have you ever been in a situation where you need to share a file with someone else in your office, but it’s too large to send through email? You can share files locally via a network drive that connects all of your organization’s endpoints to one central location. You can then drop files into your network drive for users to access. It’s best that you utilize some sort of folder system that keeps files organized--that way, you don’t wind up with a messy network drive that makes it impossible to find important files.

Share Virtually in the Cloud
The optimal way to share files involves sharing them virtually through a cloud-based storage system. A couple of good examples of this are Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. You can provide each of your workers with access to a cloud-based “drive” that you control, which delegates a portion of storage for their use. However, what’s more notable is that you can create shared folders, which allow your users to share files and allow for collaboration remotely via the cloud. You can even add permissions and edit sharing details to only let specific users access important or confidential data.

How does your business transfer files, and do you find it satisfactory? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to reach out to The Connection, Inc if you want to improve the way you share and manage technology.

Managing your company’s email can be a complex endeavor, due to the sheer volume of messages being sent and received, as well as the need to have a way to prioritize which messages are important. It’s safe to say that all organizations can benefit from email management solutions, such as email archiving and spam protection, and multi-factor authentication.

An unfortunate fact about the modern business world is that any organization that utilizes technology is playing with fire. Cyber attacks can circumvent even the most well-protected networks through the company’s users. This is, unfortunately, something that business owners often don’t learn until they’re on the receiving end of an attack; just like the two companies that fell victim to phishing attempts that were supposedly operated by Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian hacker who has been accused of stealing $100 million from them.