ZR Systems Blog

Communication is a critical part of your business’ operations, but how can you ensure that you’re not holding your business back by failing to consider modern solutions to age-old problems? While your telephone system likely gets the job done, you shouldn’t let complacency keep you from striving for improvement. For telephony solutions, you can consider leaving behind your service provider and investing in a digital solution called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

The ability to take notes is invaluable to business, but the ability to take cohesive, well-organized notes is essential. Therefore, it is important to utilize a solution that enables you to do so. For this week’s tip, we’ll compare and contrast two note-taking applications -- Microsoft OneNote and Evernote -- to evaluate which will better serve your needs.

Almost everyone has, at one time, worked with someone with whom their personality clashed, whether they did not get along or just didn’t work effectively together. While this is a perfectly natural phenomenon of both nature and nurturing, it is best to put personal differences aside when forming a professional relationship with a coworker.

Depending on how long you’ve had your current workstation, you might start to see performance problems. Eventually, you’ll start to see issues that could cause downtime and lead to wasted assets. Therefore, you need to have a plan in order to replace your hardware before it fails. What’s the best way to do this without breaking your budget?

It’s a well-known fact that nothing in this world lasts forever (other than Twinkies), and this pertains to your technology more than perhaps anything else. The same solutions that you’ve been working with for years will also need regular updates and improvements in order to stay relevant to your organization.

As a business, you focus on providing a specific good or service to your area. This means spending a considerable amount of time trying to make your organization the go-to SMB for that particular service. All organizations specialize in a certain craft, but sometimes their skills may fall short of their needs in areas that lay outside this expertise. Outsourcing is a simple way for businesses to leverage skills that aren’t part of their expertise without taking the time to learn the skill themselves, and it’s an invaluable part of any business owner’s strategy.

It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare; they wake up to find out that their entire data infrastructure has been wiped out by some unexpected natural disaster or hacking attack. The only way to guarantee that your business’s future remains intact is to have some sort of data backup and recovery system, just in case of the worst.

It’s not always easy to identify what will be hip and trendy years from now, but big data is attempting to bridge this gap. In general, due to the unpredictability of human behavior, it can be difficult to spot cultural anomalies before they happen. Despite these challenges, algorithms are being applied to various practices in both the business world and elsewhere. One innovative way in which it’s being used is by attempting to predict the next bestselling novel.

Traditional communications solutions are all well and good, but they’re quickly growing antiquated and outdated with the inception of more dynamic solutions. Some organizations have found that cloud-hosted VoIP has advantages over an on-premise telephone solution. While there’s a certain degree of truth to this, an on-site system still presents value.

Is your organization still relying on antiquated tape backup to keep your data safe? A more reliable, less time-consuming alternative known as image-based, or “snapshot” backup, could change the way that you look at disaster recovery. In fact, image-based backup has the potential to optimize your business’s data continuity.

In 2014, Facebook launched Safety Check, a helpful tool allowing users to “check in” that they’re okay during a crisis event, like a natural disaster, mass shooting, etc. Recently, Facebook made a major change to Safety Check by allowing users affected by the crisis to activate the feature. This is yet another example of how social media is changing the way people find out about major events and react to them.

Disasters are commonplace in the business environment, especially when you work in a technology-heavy office. It’s not a question of if you’ll ever experience a hardware failure; it’s a question of when you will. Regardless of how your business functions or what sector you fall into, there will always be disasters that you should be prepared for.

Even if you already have Microsoft Office, did you know that there are multiple ways to use Office which could potentially save you money? It’s the difference between using the traditional Office apps, versus the subscription-based model provided by Office 365.

Microsoft has been looking to cover more ground in the business environment by offering a new Technology as a Service (TaaS) offering, which will allow small businesses to purchase Surface products, accessories, and support for their devices, all with a monthly payment plan. Also, when it comes time to upgrade, customers can easily make the switch, as per their lease agreement.

Let’s say that you get new equipment and software for your company’s network, expecting to see a boost in performance. When everything is tested, you see no change in performance, which understandably bums you out. In a situation like this, your network is likely bottlenecking.

Are your employees trained to answer the phones in a helpful and professional manner? If you're not intentional about this, calls made to your company will be fumbled, notes will be scribbled on paper, and clients will lose confidence in your business. One way to really impress callers is to equip your staff with phone features allowing them to know pertinent information about a client before they answer the phone.

The release of Windows 10 is fast approaching, and it’s suspected that it will arrive sometime this summer. However, Microsoft’s latest OS release, Windows 8.1, is still being left in the dust by Windows 7 in terms of sheer popularity and usage. What’s the current state of Microsoft’s Windows OS economy?

Proper communication is an imperative part of doing business, and nothing improves this aspect of your company better than a telecommunication system of some sort. Some businesses rely on their legacy telephone system for interoffice communication, but this can be both difficult and expensive to maintain.

Just like the personal computer before it, smartphones have become essential pieces of technology that are practically required in order to complete mission-critical tasks. However, the primary advantage that these devices have over the popular PC is that they’re vastly more mobile and designed for use on the go. Are users able to increase productivity by using Windows tablets?

In our last blog article, we looked at Microsoft’s mobile computing strategy for businesses. In part II, we want to follow up by looking at some specific mobile technology from Microsoft, including a preview of its newest mobile computing venture, Windows 10.