Author: Casserly Consulting

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How to Be Selective when Picking a Backup Solution

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You literally never know when your data may be lost. It may be frightening to consider, but there are so many factors that could lead to you losing your data, ranging from an act of nature to user error. To counter this, you need to make sure your backup solution meets certain requirements. Today, we’ll review those requirements.

What Does Your Company Need from Its Backup?
Your backup, in many ways, should be your company’s saving grace. Whatever the cause of your data loss may be, the loss itself creates a significant issue in and of itself. Buildings can be repaired, equipment can be replaced, but once data is gone, it is practically impossible to retrieve it without some kind of backup in place.

Therefore, it is important for your backup to meet certain benchmarks:

  • How quickly can data be backed up?
  • How quickly can data be restored?
  • How badly could your operations be interrupted in the interim?
  • How protected is my backup against its own disasters, especially the same ones that could influence the data I have stored in-house?

What Kind of Data Backup Best Fits My Needs?
There are a few kinds of backup solutions available, and while it may not be a bad idea to maintain multiple forms of backup in a hybrid approach, we always recommend that your backup strategy revolve around the use of a cloud backup solution. The reasons for this are simple: a cloud solution can be automated, eliminating the risk of user error leading to a backup not being refreshed, and your data is kept in multiple locations, adding the protection of redundancy.

How Can I Get Started with a Backup Solution?
In order to really begin with a backup solution that fits the requirements we’ve reviewed, it is best to go through a reputable vendor. COMPANYNAME can help with that – not only do we have good working relationships with a variety of reputable vendors, we’ll act as your representative with them, ensuring that you get what you need for your business’ benefit.

For more information about backups and how to go about implementing one, give us a call at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: Your Guide to Using Multiple Displays

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Depending on the task you’re trying to work on, it can sometimes seem like there just isn’t enough space on your computer monitor. One of the best solutions is to add another monitor. However, this sometimes requires more that just plugging another display into your system. For this week’s tip, we’ll review the steps to connecting multiple displays to your workstation.

Preparation
Connecting multiple monitors is a process, so before you begin, you should make sure you have all your ducks in a row. First, you need to make sure that your computer is capable of supporting multiple monitors in the first place.

To do so, you need to make sure you have sufficient graphics ports to connect these multiple monitors to. Look at the back of your computer and check for graphics ports, or ones labeled DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, or VGA. Depending on what you see, your computer may or may not have a discrete graphics card, which dictates whether or not you can most likely use more than two monitors. If you only have a motherboard, two displays are generally your cap, while three or more – in addition to the first two – suggest that you have the separate graphics card.

However, even this doesn’t always mean that you can use more than two displays. Checking for the make and model of your graphics card and running it through a quick Google search with the amount of monitors you’d want to use should tell you if your card can support them.

If not, there is always the possibility of adding an additional graphics card, as long as you have the real estate and a sufficient power supply in your computer to support it. If you do, you will want to be sure that you use the same brand of card as your system currently uses. This will improve your performance and cause much less trouble for you in the long run. In addition to this, you will also need to be sure that you have the appropriate connector cables, and that they will connect properly between your tower and your display.

From there, all you have to do is obtain the additional monitors you want to use, which will be dictated by your budget, your needs and intended use, and your available real estate.

Setup and Configuration
Unfortunately, you still aren’t quite ready to dive back in – you need to tell your computer itself to play nice with all these monitors, too. Fortunately, the Windows operating system makes this fairly simple.

Press Windows + P to pull up a simple menu of your display modes. These modes are as follows:

  • PC screen only – Your primary monitor will be the only one utilized.
  • Duplicate – All monitors will show the same desktop.
  • Extend – The monitors work collaboratively to provide a single, expanded desktop.
  • Second screen only – Your secondary monitor will be the only one utilized.

Generally speaking, you will most likely want to utilize the ‘Extend’ setting.

Once you have done all this, you will want to right-click anywhere on your desktop to pull up your Display settings. Using the diagram provided, mimic the way your screens are set up, each numbered box representing one of them. Clicking Identify will have the screens identify themselves by number. You can also adjust whether your taskbar is displayed on all screens and change up your desktop customization for each.

It doesn’t take much to help boost your productivity at work, which means even the smallest changes can make a big difference. How many monitors do you prefer to use? Tell us in the comments!

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Does Your Server Room Need Air Conditioning?

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You don’t need us to tell you that servers, workstations, and many other network components create a lot of heat from constant use. Servers in particular produce an incredible amount of heat, so much that they need to be kept in a climate-controlled room to ensure they don’t overheat and cause hardware failure. How can you make sure that your business’ servers are in an adequate environment to preserve your organization’s future?

It all starts by examining the current environment in which you store your hardware. Are you storing your servers in a closet (or other small room) with only fans to cool them? Is there poor air circulation? What about humidity? All of these variables need to be addressed before too much damage is done to your server.

Prolonged exposure to heat can cause permanent damage to your server units, decreasing their value over time and lowering the quality of service you get from them. However, not just any air conditioning system will do to protect this critical hardware. The best kind of air conditioning for a server room includes a comprehensive approach to climate control. This includes sensors that can measure room humidity and temperature. Ideally, you want sensors that can be monitored remotely so that you can always keep an eye on the environment. This allows you to properly manage the environment your organization’s critical hardware is in.

While you want to monitor humidity and make sure that it doesn’t exceed a certain threshold, you should also be wary of the room becoming too dry. Storing active electronics in a dry room is certainly not an ideal situation, as this can create unwanted static electricity that can cause damage to devices.

Air flow is also extremely important, as you want to make sure that your servers are actually being hit by the cool air so that they can be adequately cooled down. For example, you don’t want to have your air conditioning on at its highest setting in your server room because it might be wasteful in the long run, whereas air blowing directly on your server cabinets can accomplish largely the same goal with less investment into your energy costs. To this end, air conditioning units can be installed in the floor or ceiling, directly above or below the cabinets, so as to get the most out of your investment.

Of course, no amount of air conditioning can prepare you for the worst-case scenario–the inevitable failure of your business’ server units and loss of its data. In cases like this, you should always be prepared for the worst. A comprehensive data backup system needs to be implemented in order to guarantee that the worst doesn’t wipe your organization off the map entirely. To this end, COMPANYNAME can help. We’ll identify how you can optimize your server infrastructure and data backup system so that an unexpected disaster doesn’t prematurely end your business. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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How Much Time Do You Spend on These Websites?

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The Internet is massive. It’s simultaneously a never-ending shopping mall, the biggest library that you’ve ever seen, and movie theater. According to a study conducted by MIT, the average American now spends a full day of their week (24 hours) online…and that’s just an average. We all know people who are locked into the Internet from the moment they wake up and stay locked in until they go to sleep. Surprisingly, people only spend their time on a handful of the over 644 million websites that populate the Internet. Today we will take a look at the four most visited sites on the Internet and examine why users spend so much time visiting them.

Google.com
I don’t think anyone would be surprised to find out that Google was the most visited site on the Internet. As the most popular (and best) search engine on the web, it is the most useful site. After all, when you search for something on the Internet (whether you use Google.com or not), it’s referred to as “googling”. This just speaks to its transcendence in the consciousness of Internet users everywhere.

The Google homepage is extraordinarily simple with no advertisements and options to access Google-based products and services and provides a legendary ease of use. Simply type (or speak) your query in the Google bar and wham, you have results. In 2017, nearly 70 percent of all web searches were done using Google.com. Results pages give visitors a lot of options, and do have advertisements, but Google has made certain that the ad space they sell is qualified and is represented on the page much like the non-ad content, as to not distract the user. Some options they give visitors include search query results, access to media, access to contact information, access to immediate information (if available), and suggestions for other queries you may use to get the answers you want. Add it all up and Google has become the most visited site on the Internet because it brings a lot of value to each and every user.

YouTube.com
Consider for a moment that the video streaming service YouTube may just be human’s greatest resource. Who among us hasn’t gone onto YouTube to view a tutorial about something or other? People continuously seek knowledge and today’s person is much more comfortable taking their information in video form than they are through reading. YouTube is a website that shows you just how helpful people can be when they have information they are willing to share.

YouTube’s search engine is technically the second largest of its kind on the Internet, and if you think that figure is impressive, consider one more tidbit: at any given time, half of the Internet is viewing YouTube. Whether you are looking to be educated or entertained, YouTube is a one-stop shop.

For businesses it’s more a mixed bag. There is no doubt that the marketing opportunities provided by YouTube can be a great way to get your message out to potential customers, but the drains that YouTube can have on employee productivity are substantial. In fact, some businesses have suggested that they lose upwards of seven hours per week per employee (or about 18% of total productivity), so if you are going to allow your staff access to YouTube at work (which statistics show you should), make sure that you have a system in place that can work to limit employee access to training materials and other educational channels and not time-wasting channels.

Facebook.com
Over two billion people actively use Facebook. Today, it’s used to run events, sell products and services, and express opinions. Since so many people utilize the service, anything you need to do as far as virtual networking can be done using Facebook.

It has a lot of attractive integrated applications, but no single application has as big of an effect on the use of Facebook as Facebook Messenger. The messaging application sets Facebook apart from all other social networks as it integrates with most computing platforms to provide feature-rich text messaging to other people using the service. Beyond Messenger, there are countless other ways to connect with people on Facebook. Games, discussion groups, and much, much more make Facebook the go-to resource for social networking on the web.

Like YouTube, Facebook can be a big drain on productivity. One study found that Facebook costs U.S.-based businesses upwards of $28 billion a year. That’s about 1.5 percent of all potential productivity lost to political memes, friend’s statuses, and event planning, so be sure to monitor your network for Facebook usage and limit it as necessary.

Reddit.com
Reddit is the largest online forum website and has made it up to the top four because of the amount of time people spend on it. As the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet”, it has become the site where people spend the most time. There is no other website that has the combination of controversy, information, entertainment, and potential distraction that Reddit has. There are literally thousands of different topics being discussed in forums, called subreddits. Any hobby, platform, opinion, or fact probably has its own subreddit. Since users can search through them, and quickly become engaged, time can melt away pretty quickly.

Of all the sites that a business should consider blocking, Reddit has to be at the top. By allowing it to be accessed by your staff, there is a distinct possibility that you are just tossing money down the drain. So, while it is extremely useful for anyone that wants to learn or discuss variables about issues that are relevant today, Reddit is most certainly an enemy of productivity.

Everyone knows that the Internet is a great resource, but it can also be a huge waste of an organization time–and that is a resource you can’t get back. For more information about instituting a content filter to ensure that your staff is focused on the things they should be while at work call COMPANYNAME today at PHONENUMBER.

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Tip of the Week: How to Improve Your Invoicing Processes

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One of the most important considerations in any business is to ensure that payments are properly received and processed. Otherwise, you may as well not be in business at all. To help expedite this, we’re dedicating this week’s tip to creating a better, more effective invoice. Let’s get into it.

How to Create Your Invoice
First, you need to have some way to actually construct the invoice document itself. For this, you have some options. If you use Microsoft Office products, both Excel and Word have templates you can use to put it together, and G Suite users can leverage any number of integrations to do the same. Alternatively, there are many software titles out there that offer more specific functions based on need and preference.

Once you have selected your software, you can start to put your invoice together. You will want to be sure that your invoice includes the following information:

  • Description – You want to be crystal clear on your invoices about what you are billing for, especially if part of it refers to time spent rendering a service. This will allow you to properly bill your clients while allowing them to understand exactly what they are being billed for, cutting back on how often your invoices are contested. Overall, every invoice should include the order number it refers to, the total amount owed, how the invoice can be paid, and when payment is due.
  • Discount Details – If you are offering any discounts, you will also want to make sure these are clearly annotated on your invoices as well – especially for those who are first signing on to your services. Otherwise, these discounts may confuse your clients and instill a false expectation for the future – creating surprise and frustration when the discounts are gone later.
  • Schedules and Policies – Just as you were held to a schedule to deliver your service, your client needs to be held to a schedule to pay for it. Consistency will also help your client prepare their payments on time. On a related note, your invoice should thoroughly explain your company policies on discounts, late payments and associated fines, and due dates to make your expectations of the client very clear.

Of course, this isn’t everything that can, or should, go on your invoices. However, these aspects are crucial enough to be mentioned and detailed separately. You should also consider other elements to include on your invoice, making use of what would otherwise be blank space. You may consider adding a more personalized touch and suggesting the next steps that a client should take, based on the services you are billing them for.

Furthermore, add some more of a personal touch by including some kind of thank-you message on the invoice. Write up a brief piece thanking your client for their business and have it printed on the invoice. Not only is this a visible way to earnestly say thank you, the appreciation you show may help to expedite payments and encourage repeat business.

When and How to Distribute Your Invoice
If you want to receive your payments on time, how you send your invoices is just as important as how they look. First and foremost, they need to be sent much sooner than later.

If yours is like many businesses, you may have found that your invoices go unpaid for long stretches of time. Estimates put the total of unpaid invoices to small businesses at well over $800 billion, and that was back in January of this year. This is why it is crucial that your invoices are distributed efficiently – it may be a long time before you get them back.

This is another reason that technology solutions are useful tools to assist you in managing your invoices digitally. Most invoicing software will likely enable you to track the status of the invoices you’ve sent.

If you want more assistance in managing your invoices, reach out to COMPANYNAME. We’d be happy to assist you, all you have to do is call PHONENUMBER. In the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for more useful technology tips and advice!

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How Does the A.I. in Reality Measure Up to Hollywood’s?

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Figuring out how to utilize platforms that depend on machine learning to boost an organization’s bottom line is one of the biggest puzzles for every modern business owner. After all, seemingly every new technology concept can be leveraged into enhanced profitability if it is rolled out right. In this case, many organizations have found ways to use human-created machines to learn how to do tasks that would be deemed too expensive if humans were to do them.

Over the years, A.I. has been a frequent topic of discussion, and one that fiction authors (especially those in science-fiction) have used for all types of stories. In Hollywood, the artificially intelligent character has been around for a long time, a lot longer than the A.I. businesses are using to enhance their profitability. Today, we are going to look at how A.I. is portrayed in media and how it differs from the reality of modern A.I.

The Start of A.I. in Reality
In 1956, 30-some scientists met at the Hanover Inn on the campus of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to discuss a “strange new discipline”. The talks were about how to build a machine that could think and went on for weeks. What came to be known as the “Dartmouth workshop” founded a quest for A.I. The discipline almost died off several times, but if you look at the world we live in today, it’d be hard to consider that. These days it seems like every business is using some sort of software platform that features what those at Dartmouth a half-a-century ago could only dream about. Machine learning has seen major innovations in many different industries, and we are closer than ever to deep learning–the innovation needed in machine learning to create machines that think like we do.

The Start of A.I. in Hollywood
In Hollywood, however, deep learning is a thing of the past. Machine sentience is commonplace and stories of A.I. are typically approached as commentary about the tyranny and hubris of human beings. A.I. works for so many different types of story arcs as setting an A.I. up as the hero works, setting them up as the victim works, and setting them up as a villain works. In fact, since humans haven’t mastered the technology, writers do what they do best: use creative license to create A.I. characters that are more like humans than machines. The first robot A.I. was Robby the Robot in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, but 1931’s Frankenstein was the first time an artificial being was brought to life on the big screen. A.I. is often used as a plot device for entertainment’s sake, or as commentary, but media hasn’t been able to completely represent where we are at with the technology today because, thus far, A.I has been created to help humans solve problems, not to actually have artificial consciousness. Here are a few movies that represent different uses of A.I. and how they stack up against modern A.I.:

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick.
Written by: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Williams Sylvester.
Summary: The sudden appearance of a giant black monolith acts as a portal through time, transporting the view from prehistoric Earth to a future where space exploration is commonplace. On a manned trip to Jupiter, two astronauts are tricked by a crafty mission computer, a HAL 9000 series that claims to be “foolproof and incapable of error.” One of the astronauts is killed by HAL, while the other one risks everything to inflict retribution.
How the A.I. stacks up to modern A.I.: The HAL 9000 is a pretty decent representation of what a future A.I. system is going to be used for. The decision to kill the crew, and its subsequent pleading toward the end of the film show situations in which HAL was more like a malevolent human than as a sentient machine. Today’s A.I. is all about using data to solve organizational problems, but “feelings” is not in the equation at this time.

Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by: Ridley Scott.
Written by: Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples from a novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick.
Starring: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah.
Summary: Blade Runner is set in 2019 Los Angeles and features former police officer, Rick Deckard (Ford) who works as a Blade Runner, someone who hunts down and retires replicants–artificial beings who seem as human as the humans themselves. In the course of action, it’s hard to determine who is in the right, as the lines are completely blurred between replicants and the people tasked with killing them.

How the A.I. stacks up to modern A.I.: The replicants in Blade Runner were man-made men (and women). From their appearance to the fact that they implanted human-esque memories in the machines told a story about how dangerous it can be when people try to play God. So, while it makes for great cinema, the replicants being indistinguishable from their human counterparts is questionable. There hasn’t been any technology developed to make machines more human, they have to be told to try to do things the way humans do in order to learn as humans do, making the whole premise impossible to implement with today’s limited A.I. technology. However, Google’s most recent new development, called Google Duplex, will allow Google Assistant to make phone calls for you. For example, if you ask Google Assistant to make a haircut appointment for you, it will call your salon, as if it were a person, and negotiate a time to fit your schedule. The results are both really cool, and a little creepy, but in the end, if Duplex can save you a few minutes here or there and not make business think they are getting fake auto calls, we’re all for it.

WarGames (1983)
Directed by: John Badham.
Written by: Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes.
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, John Wood, Dabney Coleman.
Summary: David, a hacker a decade before hacking became commonplace, breaks into NORAD and programs the WOPR, a military strategy computer, to play out war games until it has launch codes and launches hydrogen-bomb-tipped missiles at the Soviet Union. After finding the key to disarm the missiles, David and his friend Jennifer (Sheedy) track down the system’s creator to help keep the U.S. from launching Global Thermonuclear war.
How the A.I. stacks up to modern A.I.: WarGames examines the nature of a machine learning computer and how its role could be critical for the sustainability of the human race. The answer, as hokey as it is, to keeping the WOPR (also called Joshua after the developer’s dead son) from launching missiles is Tic-Tac-Toe. The WOPR learns that nuclear war and tic-tac-toe are pointless. That is the kind of fundamental application that modern A.I. could work out, and while we don’t suppose the U.S. military is looking to integrate A.I. to our national missile defense, the A.I. of WarGames was a pretty good representation of how A.I. could learn what are typically very human lessons.

Her (2013)
Directed by: Spike Jonze.
Written by: Spike Jonze.
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde.
Summary: Set in the very near future, recently divorced writer, Theodore Twombly (Phoenix) purchases a companion bot named Samantha (Johansson). She is an A.I. assistant but is exactly what Twombly needs and ends up falling in love with it. As their relationship develops, he becomes happier, then stagnates and is forced to break it off when Samantha describes how she can be in love with thousands of people simultaneously. How the A.I. stacks up to modern A.I.: The movie Her provides a fair amount of foresight to where the virtual assistant program is going. If you spend any time thinking about the future of technology it becomes evident that the more engaged you can get with your virtual assistant, the better it will work for you. Samantha has a superior understanding of language, fluidity to “her” voice, reasoning, planning, and most importantly for our purposes, obvious learning capabilities. The fluctuations in its emotional state don’t do the representation of the A.I. justice, but all-in-all Her is an interesting character study about how artificial intelligence could be designed to treat humans down the road.

Ex Machina (2014)
Directed by: Alex Garland.
Written by: Alex Garland.
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander.
Summary: A billionaire, Nathan Bateman (Isaac), fixes a contest to get one of his employees, Caleb (Gleeson) to come to his remote laboratory to take part in a Turing test of a new A.I. that he’s developed. The A.I. is kept in a humanoid android named Ava (Vikander). When she convinces Caleb she is being tortured, and he finds out Bateman’s dirty little secret, he tries to help Ava bust out, only to be duped and left for dead after Ava kills Nathan. She escapes alone on a helicopter.
How the A.I. stacks up to modern A.I.: First, I’ll say that this is one of the coolest of the A.I.-based movies because there is a sense of mystery, much like that inherent with A.I. The solitary genius theory is one of the most used when it comes to A.I. movies (or monster movies) and while the A.I. itself showed well, there is no way that a single person, even one with unlimited resources, could create a functioning A.I. automaton. As far as the deep learning capabilities, the Ava android is what we both aspire to and hope to avoid–which is kind of a good metaphor for the discipline as a whole.

There are dozens of movies with artificially intelligent characters. With people building new A.I.’s every day, the way they are used in reality remains to be seen. In movies, however, they will continue to astound and thrill. Here are some other titles that feature A.I.:

  • Star Wars
  • Short Circuit
  • Alien
  • Terminator 2: Judgement Day
  • The Matrix
  • Bicentennial Man
  • I, Robot
  • Iron Man
  • Transcendence

Do you have a favorite A.I.-fueled film or television show? Are you of the opinion that the A.I. systems we can interact with are close? Are they necessary? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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You Deserve a Better Way to Manage Your Business Documents

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A file cabinet might seem like it’s necessary for operations, but it’s actually not as useful as it used to be in the past. This is primarily due to the implementation of new solutions such as the document management system. By taking advantage of a new digital storage system for your business’ documents, you can optimize operations and ditch that filing cabinet for good.

What is a Document Management System?
In short, a document management system is a software that allows you to scan all of your paper files that have accumulated over the years and store them in a secure digital database. Better yet, this database is accessible from anywhere, as long as the user has permissions to access it. You can think of it as one big electronic filing cabinet. Since it’s hosted in the cloud or on your in-house infrastructure, you can integrate a document management system in whatever way best suits your organization’s needs.

Why You Might Want One
Imagine an office without filing cabinets, paper files, or printing costs. Any room that is being used to hold these bulky objects and any loose paper files can be freed up for other uses. Imagine never having to dig through countless files just to find one particular document again. Any documents you might need can be found just by going to your document management system via your smartphone or desktop. This makes for much more efficient use of your available resources as a whole.

Going Paperless
It’s easier to search for a digital file than it is to dig through a physical file folder. If you go paperless, this is one of the many benefits that you receive from a digital file storage system. Since you’re going paperless, you’ll be spending less on ink, paper, and printer maintenance–all of which totals up to a considerable cost. Since you can save time on accessing, editing, and saving documents, you’ll see improvements in productivity.

Let’s imagine that your organization is hit by a crippling disaster. It wipes out all of your filing cabinets and internal infrastructure. If you keep your document management system in the cloud, all of these files will be saved from the destruction. This keeps your data backed up in a secure location where it can be restored at a later date.

Perhaps one of the most notable ways your organization benefits from paperless technology is that you reduce your carbon footprint. If you waste a lot of paper, you contribute to a lot of environmental problems such as air pollution, water pollution, and deforestation. The United States alone wastes four million tons of office paper every year, so you can do your part to keep the environment clean by going paperless.

Does your business need help implementing such a solution? COMPANYNAME can help. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Tip of the Week: Changing a PDF in Microsoft Word

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Did you know that Microsoft Word can actually edit PDF files? Well… the most recent version of it can, anyway. Since Adobe Acrobat can be a considerable investment for each and every one of your employees, you can instead turn to the tried and true Microsoft Word for this purpose. We’ll show you how you can do this (as long as you have the most recent version of MS Word).

Open the PDF
First, you’ll need to open the PDF. To do this, open up Microsoft Word and select Open Other Documents from the left-hand menu.

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This brings up the Open menu. Next, you want to click on Browse.

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Another message will appear telling you that Word will convert the PDF to an editable Word document. If this sounds fine, click on OK.

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Your PDF should open up in Word now, but you might notice that there is still a yellow bar at the top of the screen that says PROTECTED VIEW. This is meant to secure your software from opening anything dangerous. If you can trust the document, click the Enable Editing button.

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Once you press the button, another notification will show you that Word will convert the PDF to an editable Word document. To close this message, just click on the checkboxor click OK.

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You can now edit your PDF.

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Once you’re done, you can save the file back to a PDF format. To do this, select File > Save As and set the type to PDF from the dropdown menu under the assigned file name. You will have to rename the document slightly to save it to a file folder.

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Once you’re done, your edited PDF will open in Microsoft Edge, or whatever your default PDF viewer happens to be.

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What are some other cool features of Microsoft Word that you would like us to cover? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to our blog.

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How to Use Technology to Make a Better Workplace

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In recent years, employers have offered more ways for employees to customize how they see their work environment. These extra features can often go a long way toward improving their productivity and comfort in the office, but they are often held in check by the problems that such technology can create. A smart office was created with the purposes of keeping these technological shortcomings from crippling employee productivity.

What Is a Smart Office?
A smart office takes the concept behind improving an employee’s workspace and applies it to the technology found in your office. Basically, technology should be used to make the workplace a better place to be, where an employee can feel both comfortable and productive. Cloud computing has already made great strides in helping companies create this environment, as well as other innovations in mobile technology, big data, and the Internet of Things, just to name a few. But how do these technologies help your organization improve the quality of the workplace? Essentially, smart technology provides a two-fold benefit to your organization: they make use of the aforementioned innovations, while also enabling employees to work in a smarter way.

Why Build a Smart Office?
A smart office can be a great way to provide several benefits for your staff–especially if you are a small business that can make changes relatively on-the-fly. Here are some of the best ways that a smart office benefits a business.

  • Improve the user experience: A smart office makes working much easier and more enjoyable, improving the user experience. Employees that are both happy and healthy are more likely to work harder and stick around for longer. Plus, attendance in the workplace is more likely to improve if the work that they are doing is engaging.
  • Encourage collaboration: Flexibility is incredibly important for the smart office. This gives the employees working within the freedom to create their own “dream office” of sorts, giving them leave to shape their work experience accordingly. This can provide employees with the freedom to collaborate as they see fit, changing environments in whatever way that is needed to facilitate optimal productivity.
  • Optimize the office design: Smart IT is often both visible and hidden in the background, improving the functionality of your office. Many companies have used the Internet of Things to aid with energy efficiency through the use of smart thermometers and lights, adjusting the settings as needed to ensure that they favor your bottom line.

Does your business want to take advantage of smart technology to improve the office experience? COMPANYNAME can help. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Sports Are a Training Ground for Smart Technology

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Smart technology and the whole Internet of Things revolution has been underway now for some time. One vertical market that has embraced this shift was that of sports and fitness. Of course, you’ve heard of (and possibly own) a fitness band that is designed to track your steps, your vitals, and some other things to allow you to be the best version of yourself. This technology has been around for years and, while useful, isn’t transforming the face of sports like the technology you are seeing being introduced today. Today, we’ll take a look at how the IoT is transforming the sporting world.

The Games
Sports are important throughout the world. With so many people claiming to be sports fans, and so much money spent on viewing sporting events annually, it stands to reason that one of the biggest technology trends in history hit the sports world (and athletics as a whole). To this point the Internet of Things has been a conceptual strategy in some industries. Not in sports, where athletes, teams, and leagues are using sensors and smart products to help quantify and track elements of an athlete’s performance, while using the immense amount of data that’s produced to formulate plans to make sports safer. The analysis of this data has become big business, and is, in some cases, transforming the games themselves

The National Pastime
One example is happening in baseball. Several years ago, the use of data began to change the way teams value players. Called sabermetrics, it took all the raw data that was collected from the game (and there is an awful large amount of data in every game), plugged it into algorithms that were uses to compare every player to every other player. This provided a map of how to put together a winning team for fewer dollars. Later named “Moneyball”, the strategy began to make its way through the major leagues, into the minor leagues, and beyond. With so much impetus put on the numbers, a lot of teams started finding new algorithmic approaches to try to get an advantage.

When the IoT was in its infancy, the shift toward analysis has only quickened the pace of innovations. Today, so much raw data is taken from a baseball game that all 30 major league teams have come to employ huge analytic departments to sort through and quantify the data. This has not just been used to determine the acquisition (and value) of players, it has been used to determine lineup configuration, defense configuration, pitcher effectiveness, and all in the name of situational advantage.

Once general managers, managers, and players knew what they were looking for, they began to use the newest technologies to track specific parts of a player performance. One way that IoT is working to improve player performance is by introducing technologies like SwingTracker that attaches to the bat and captures a player’s swing in 10,000 separate data points per second, and the mThrow wearable sleeve that pitchers can wear on their arms to measure pitching mechanics. Since millions of dollars are spent on contracts for players, teams are trying to be as diligent as possible as to not waste available capital. Beyond the dollars and cents, these IoT wearables not only help athletes fine-tune their craft, they do it in a way that helps them avoid injury.

Other major sporting leagues including the NFL, MLS, Premier League, NHL, NBA, and PGA all have incorporated IoT devices into the training and reporting strategies trying to both enhance the quality of their product while protecting (as much as they can) their resources (their players).

The Athletes
For the athletes themselves, the IoT has a myriad of potential uses. Today there are smart clothes, including socks, shoes, fabrics, and more designed to help the track and improve performance. Here are some examples of IoT devices that are helping individuals excel in their athletic endeavors:

  • The connected basketball – Ball handling and shooting are two of the most important offensive skills for a basketball player and there are now basketballs on the on the market that can help you improve your ball handling and shooting by incorporating sensors into the ball itself. The corresponding app presents you options to measure your dribbling and shooting.
  • The connected hockey stick – Using tape sensors, a hockey stick can help players measure their shot speed, their blade angle, and a player’s stick work.
  • The connected golf club – Golf has, somewhat ironically, been the one sport that has embraced technology most over the past 50 years. So, it is not really a big surprise that the IoT has already found its way into both clubs, and their grips. Today, there are many options for the tech-savvy golfer to improve their game using IoT technology.
  • Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for football – By sticking an RFID sensor in a player’s shoulder pad, coaches can now see where the location of a player, the speed, and the direction they’re going. This allows them to put together smarter game plans and improve team performance.

The Internet of Things is changing the world we live in, and it’s not happening slowly. Have you started using IoT-connected devices? Tell us about your IoT experiences today in the comments section below.