In light of the recent devastating tornadoes that have hit Forney, Kennedale, Arlington, Forney and Lancaster, we’d like to share with you a Tornado Preparedness Checklist that gives helpful business advice for both before and after a tornado.
At this time, our hearts and thoughts are with those who have been affected by this disaster, particularly those who are currently without homes.
NEW YORK, NY, December 14, 2011 — Cybernut Solutions has been selected for the 2011 Best of Mesquite Award in the Computer Support & Consulting category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).
The USCA “Best of Local Business” Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.
Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2011 USCA Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.
About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)
U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a New York City based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.
The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.
SOURCE: U.S. Commerce Association
CONTACT:
U.S. Commerce Association
Email: PublicRelations@uscaaward.com
URL: http://www.uscaaward.com
VoIP is the future of voice communications for businesses.
You’ve probably heard about VoIP – voice communication that transmits over the Internet. VoIP can save 30% to 50% compared to traditional phone bills, and empowers your business to go far beyond the restraints of a typical phone system solution. Cybernut Solutions can evaluate your needs and pair the best-fit VoIP solution for your small business. Our solutions are scalable to accommodate your company’s growth.
Take your office phone anywhere
One of the most outstanding features of VoIP is that you can take your phone anywhere, plug it into the internet, and make and receive calls as if you were still sitting in your office. Whether you commute to another location on the other side of town or you are sitting in a beachside hotel on the other side of the country, your business line will function normally.
Don’t run new phone lines next time you expand
Voice over IP uses your LAN to transmit data, and doesn’t require extra phone lines to be run through your office. There are many types of configurations, ranging from the phone being plugged between your network drop and your workstation, to Wi-Fi-based phone stations that just need to be in range of your Wireless Network.
Save money compared to traditional phone bills
With VoIP, your phone data is sent over the Internet and not over traditional phone lines (although it can be received over traditional phone lines). This eliminates the need for costly local phone plans as well as long distance services. In most cases, your current broadband solution will supply enough bandwidth without slowing down your network use.
Contact us today for an evaluation of your current phone service and review of your last bill. In most cases, we can save you hundreds of dollars over your current phone service.
Email has integrated itself into the way we do business. If you use Outlook as your primary email client, there are plenty of tricks you can do to increase your productivity and practice better email etiquettes.
Utilize Cc and Bcc
If you want to send a message to a group of people and you want everyone who gets the email to know who else is receiving it, use the Cc field. If you do not want to reveal a recipient’s identity, include them in the Bcc line. Bcc stands for Blind Carbon Copy. Any recipient in the Bcc field will not be disclosed to other users getting the message, although the Bcc users will see everyone else on the email.
Set reminders to reply to messages
If you know you need to get a response out to an email but don’t have time, Outlook will let you set yourself a reminder to follow up. Simply right click the message you want to set the reminder for, and go to Follow Up > Add Reminder. You can set the date and time you want the reminder to go off. Outlook will then remind you to respond to that email.
Use Flags and Colors
Quickly label important messages with flags and different colors. You can set up colors to mean different things, such as red for internal conversations, blue for meetings, and so forth.
Quickly Flag a Message
When a message is selected, hit INSERT on your keyboard to attach a flag to it.
Use Categories
Instead of simply creating rules to move certain emails to specific folders, assign categories to messages so they display right in your inbox.
Find all Messages from a Certain Sender
Right click a message from a particular person and go to Find All > Messages from Sender.
Delete Names from the AutoComplete List
When you start typing in an email address or a person’s name in the To: Field, Outlook will automatically suggest contacts you’ve emailed in the past. If you want to clear out these lists, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight them, and press delete. This won’t delete contacts from Outlook, it just prunes down your autocomplete list to make it more accessible.
Having the right kind of email system in place can do wonders for increasing productivity, especially for people on the go. It’s important to note the distinctions and feature differences of the email systems available to you, so you can be sure that what you’re using is the most efficient and cost-effective solution.
Whether you work from an office or are productive while on the go, email most likely plays a big factor in the way you go about your business. Unbeknownst to many, some types of email systems have certain limitations that by extension can also limit the level of productivity of your business, and especially for people in the organization who must also work while out in the field.
One major issue for many people is synchronicity. Many people need their emails to be accessible on their mobile phones, PDAs, or other mobile devices, and they need them to be properly synchronized with their desktop workstations. The need to constantly update conversations and email threads from mobile devices to desktops with certain types of email can prove to be tedious and unproductive– and some email system types don’t include this ability at all.
Depending on the way you use your email, especially when on the go, having full access and full control of your account can define how productive you and others in your organization can be. Besides providing a much better degree of synchronization and integration with mobile devices, certain types of email systems also have features for sharing and collaboration features that allow you to set schedules and share files from your mailbox, as well as central storage for emails that allows you to access your account seamlessly with any mobile device, regardless of where you are located.
Of course, having a full-featured email system might not be best for everyone. The key is to know whether adapting a more bare-bones system is cost-effective for your business (especially in the long run). Sometimes the top of the line may be needed, and sometimes all you need is a bit of tweaking on your less fully featured system. Not sure which is best? Call us and we’ll be glad to sit down with you and assess what kind of email system is best suited for you and your business.
The clarity of text and images on your screen can depend largely on how you set your monitor’s screen resolution. At high resolutions, such as 1280 by 1024 pixels, you can display more on the screen—but text and images will look smaller.
At lower resolutions, such as 800 by 600 pixels, objects will appear larger but may look jagged and less sharp. The optimal setting to choose really depends on your monitor and the larger the monitor the higher resolution it supports. Most newer computers have already been pre-configured for you, but you can try various options to see what works best for you. You can quickly change this setting by right-clicking any empty space on your desktop, then choosing “screen resolution” in the menu.
The proliferation of websites and social media tools is making the job of monitoring what’s being said about you online increasingly difficult to do. But you need to somehow make sense of the sea of information available in these online tools, because depending on what’s being said—it can have either a helpful or a damaging effect on your reputation or your business. Here are some tools to help you.
Besides your own eyes and ears, there are plenty of tools—for free or for a price—available to help you monitor your presence online. The simplest of these is your familiar search engines such as Google or Bing. By simply searching online, you can find where your name or your company’s name appears in various websites. With Google in particular, you can set up “alerts” which will email you when a specific word or term appears in their website index.
What words or terms should you use? Start with your name, or your company name, then try the name of your products and/or services, and maybe even the names of your employees, directors, and other stakeholders. It might also be helpful to search for the competition as well. As results come in you can refine your search by expanding or narrowing the scope of terms you would like to search or be alerted on. If you want to be able to search across all different search engines and not just one or two, you can use Monitor This.
Next you can use specialized website or social media monitoring tools to search only specific sites or services as opposed to the entire Internet. One example is Greplin, which allows you to search all of your accounts or accounts that you own. This is very helpful to be able to execute highly filtered searches on specific information in your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, or your blog. Another option is Rollyo, which allows you to set up your own specialized search engines that cull content from public or open websites of your choosing.
Other more generalized tools include RSS feed readers—which allow you to consume news or information feeds from news sites or blogs. Examples include Newsgator.com, Bloglines.com, Google Reader or Pluck.com. Other generalized tools include those that monitor specific newsgroups or message boards like BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, and MSN Money. Still others track changes to content of specific sites (Copernic Tracker, Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com), as well as their domain information (DomainTools.com and BetterWhois.com).
The really interesting new services actually give you an explicit idea of the status of your reputation—especially if you are a relatively well known name or your business has an established brand. In this category are sites like Amplicate, which monitors general feelings or impressions about brands, businesses, or services; Klout, which tries to measure the influence of individuals based on their social interactions; and SendLove.to, which focuses on celebrities and media personalities.
There are literally dozens more tools you can use to monitor and manage your reputation online. To find out more, a great resource is here at the Duct Tape Marketing blog. If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to let us know!
Do you sometimes forget the file attachments you meant to include in an email message? Thanks to a free plugin for Outlook, now you can be alerted when you do just that.
Head over to CodeTwo‘s website and download the free Outlook Attachment Reminder. Install and configure it to scan for text in your email’s subject line and body text (such as “attachment” or “attached” or “see document”). When you press the send button, if the system finds that you included these phrases but did not attach a file, it will prompt you to do so before sending out the email.
Interested in setting up your company’s email in the cloud? Here are two options to consider—one from Microsoft, the other from Google. See how they compare.
Google Apps
Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space.
Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology.
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new—being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier.
Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance—this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with.
Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.
It’s the dilemma of many smaller businesses lacking the budget for advertising that many of their bigger competitors have to be able to establish a better presence in a specific market. However, the rise of the use of social networks now allows these smaller firms to reach thousands to millions of people – at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising and marketing.
One of the most difficult challenges smaller businesses face is having a bigger presence in the market. While many of these companies offer good, quality services at much more affordable rates, they are many times overshadowed by larger firms that have bigger budgets to spend on marketing, advertising, and the like.
Things have changed, though, with the advent of social networking. What was once a simple, social, get-to-know-each-other tool between people on the internet has now evolved into a tool that small businesses can take advantage of in order to get their voices heard.
The gist of social networking for business is the simple concept of reaching potentially millions of people at a mere fraction of what is normally spent on advertising and traditional marketing. The wide reach of social media allows businesses to find their voices and showcase what they can do. The playing field then moves from an unfair balance of advertising budgets to a battle of service quality and value for money, as it should be – and many smaller firms can compete effectively in this arena.
There are many ways to tap into the social networking phenomenon to boost your online presence and aid in your marketing. If you are interested in knowing more about this, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you in developing strategies that fit your specific requirements and needs.
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