Business Apps

Being a business owner can be a dream come true, but it does come with some challenges. It can be difficult to manage a company especially if one is wearing to many hats. Managing all sectors at once like sales, finances, marketing, etc., is overwhelming and adding IT on top of everything can make you feel lost. For that reason, we have come up with a list of items a small business should have for IT and that will also help you with other parts of your company.

Here’s a list of features we put together to help you know where to start to help your company work on its best pace.

Professional E-mail and Domain

One of the main goals of a company is to potential customers know exactly who you and your brand are, and with that you want to put a professional face forward. Therefore, having a custom URL for your website rather than something like mybusiness.wordpress.com, and a professional email are what can make your organization seem more reliable. Using free email addresses detracts from the value you want to offer your customers.

We recommend Microsoft Exchange because its Online features helps you protect your data and keeps your employees connected with secure, reliable access to email, calendar, and contacts — from virtually any device. Some of the most important benefits, are:

• Protect your sensitive data and inform users of internal compliance policies with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities.

• Keep all of your important data in one place.

• Enable your users to collaborate on projects.

• Eliminate email threats before they reach your network.

• Move to the cloud on your terms with flexible options.

• Decrease the amount of time spent managing your messaging systems.

• Bring all of your contacts together in one place.

Security Policies

One of the things you must stay vigilant with is the security of your data. It can be very simple to organize yourself to stay on top of all security policies you need.

Bitlocker is a great ally you can enable to protect you data. BitLocker is Microsoft’s proprietary encryption program for Windows that can encrypt your entire drive as well as help protect against unauthorized changes to your system such as firmware-level malware. This application is a data protection feature that integrates with the operating system and addresses threats of data theft or exposure from lost, stolen, or inappropriately decommissioned computers.

BitLocker is primarily designed to prevent a user’s data from being viewed, extracted or retrieved in case a drive is stolen.

Some extra security action you could consider taking, is to Always add 2 factor authentications to every login you need to do, and plan your computer security policies, implementing testing, physical security options, among other things.

Storage and Back-ups

The main reason for data backup is to save important files if a system crashes or hard drive failure occurs. There should be additional data backups if the original backups result in data corruption or hard drive failure. It’s important to remember that a company’s data is an important asset in any business, and for some companies it's one of the most important assets. The way you store yours plays a major role in how easy it is to access, use, and keep it secure.

The best choices in the IT market are OneDrive, Azure and Share Point. See below a little more information about each.

- OneDrive: OneDrive is Microsoft's storage service for hosting files in the cloud. It is available for free to all the owners of a Microsoft account. OneDrive offers you a simple way to store, sync, and share your files.

- Azure: it is a service solution for building and hosting infrastructure using Microsoft's products in their data centers. This versatile platform is often used to run applications in the cloud or just improve existing applications with cloud capabilities. Azure is a fast, flexible platform with affordable pricing and capabilities, which makes it one of the best public cloud offerings on the market.

- Share Point: SharePoint makes storing, sharing, and managing of digital information easier within an organization. It has a microblogging feature that allows users to engage with one another in conversations while sharing videos, pictures, and other documents. It also makes collaboration with vendors and customers straightforward.

Productivity

Microsoft Office offers a bunch of applications suitable for every need and situation. With advancement in technology these applications are no longer limited to your computers anymore. You can download and use them on your mobiles and smartphones to stay connected with people regardless of geographical or time limits. Companies of all sizes are finding Office 365 collaboration to be increasingly popular due to its ability to drive productivity, ROI and corporate success.

Word is the most commonly used program from Microsoft throughout the world. It allows you to create and edit any document just the way you want to. With Excel, you can not only enter data and use formulas for various calculations but can also edit and manipulate data into various forms. Including charts, graphs and data sets.

The Microsoft PowerPoint is indeed a powerful application that you can use to enhance your presentations by adding pictures, text and even videos. The Publisher is a desktop publishing program that is ideal for creating different types of publications. With the various tools in the Publisher, you can create fantastic greeting cards, business cards, newsletters, calendars and so much more.

Collaboration

Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity and collaboration applications that integrates all Microsoft’s existing online applications into a cloud service, adding Microsoft Teams as the main communication and collaboration application. It can be quite a challenge to keep up with all Microsoft applications and know which one will suit best your exact needs. We have a few tips for you about the best organization software currently on the market.

OneNote is a tool that has a cloud system of data sharing that allows you to synchronize notes across all your devices as you type. The most notable feature is the option of importing emails and texts into your notes without having to copy and paste them. You also can import and export notes and images in different formats to suit your needs.

There is also Microsoft Teams that is a collaboration software in the Microsoft Office 365. It is cloud-based and includes features such as calling, messaging, file sharing, and video meetings. It aids collaboration among remote workers in an organization. And there is Windows Phone, a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune.

Microsoft Office 365 offers many more features. In fact, it comes with about 20 installed apps for your use, and you have access to about 100 more apps in the store. Office 365 is vital for any organization as it contains tools that improve the efficiency of the organization and can be used by any company department.

You can also increase security with Microsoft 365 and you are able to secure your devices. This way you can, for instance, make people save their work files in OneDrive for Business or automatically erase work documents from a device when it’s lost or stolen. Besides your devices, you also want to secure the browser-based workspace as well.

These 5 tips will help you have more peace of mind and manage your company with less worries. Some extra things that you can do are:

- Talk to your IT dept or provider about inefficiencies you encounter in your company often there are tools and technology we can recommend checking out which may eliminate or improve these processes. Especially around tasks that happen on a regular frequency.

Example: I want to have a way to monitor, track and display information about my company’s performance. You can utilize PowerBI and Azure to develop dynamic reports which provide near real time data to management and employees with Key Performance Indicators.

- Have a disaster recovery plan in place. It is always better to hope for the best and plan for the worst. All systems and processes have points of failure, you can identify, mitigate and have documentation on them, to make it easier to manage and prepare for disasters. Do you want to know more about these applications and how and how they can help your company? Contact us here.