Tag: Workplace Tips

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Technology

Why (and How) You Need to Maintain Your Servers

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It is impossible to understate the importance of a server to today’s businesses. We talk a big game as to how important data is, but we don’t often broach the topic of how important it is to ensure that your server is well-maintained. Below, we discuss how to determine what your servers need for optimal performance, and how you can be sure that they get it.

What Can Cause Problems in Your Server Room?
Of all the potential issues that your servers can face, the smallest ones can create some of the biggest problems – literally. For instance, there’s always the worry of dust.

Dust, and other similarly-sized contaminants, can easily make their way into your server’s components, where they build up and become an insulator. As a result, your equipment can become up to 30ºF warmer – and just like in human beings, a rise in internal temperature to this degree can be lethal.

Other contaminants include things that human beings generate, like skin particles and dander, or even the result of wear on the devices themselves, like belt debris from the climate control systems and metal shavings from the hardware. The worst culprit, however, is actually the soles of your feet. Approximately 80 percent of the most damaging debris can be introduced to your server room this way.

Mitigating Issues through Maintenance and Prevention
Consider what would happen if your server was to suddenly fail. All of the data you had worked to preserve and protect, investing in the infrastructure to house it and the solutions to mitigate external threats to it, would be gone. Therefore, it is important to remember that protecting your servers against inadvertent internal threats is just as critical as protecting them against external attacks. This is accomplished in two overarching ways: first, strict standards of cleanliness, and secondly, avoiding the introduction of contaminants.

Keeping it Clean
The less dust and grime there is in your server room, the easier it will be to keep the room nice and cool for your infrastructure. While the big cleaning jobs should be left to experienced professionals who have a history with cleaning computing equipment, there are some jobs that you should be able to handle.

After all, some cleaning may have to be done on a daily basis, especially if your server room is a high-traffic area. Careful vacuuming will help get rid of that notorious sole-grime that comes in, as well as a considerable amount of other dust. To clean your server components themselves, use an antistatic cloth to gently remove the grime, using compressed air to get into hard-to-reach places.

Avoiding Contamination
If possible, you might also want to make some changes to help reduce the amount of dust and grime that enters your server room in the first place. Installing air filters inside can help, as can (assuming you are able) creating a buffer room between your office and the server room itself, where special mats can be installed to help minimize contamination. Hats and booties can also help reduce the amount of human-borne contaminants entering the area.

Finally, do your best to stay out of the server room if at all possible. Avoid bringing potential contaminants into it, like cardboard, and clean off any tools and equipment before they are brought into the server room.

For more best practices to maintain your business’ crucial technology, reach out to COMPANYNAME at PHONENUMBER!

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Best Practices

Tip of the Week: 5 Windows Tricks

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The Windows 10 operating system is the most common operating system for business use, which is what makes it surprising that so few know how to adjust its appearance to suit their preferences. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a few ways to adjust what you’re seeing and/or looking at for maximum productivity.

Quicker Settings
Your settings are your greatest tool to control your Windows 10 preferences. If you need to change a setting on the fly, you can pull up the menu by pressing CTRL + I or Windows Key + I.

Zoom In/Out
Whether it’s a graphic you want a closer look at or text that’s just a smidge too small (or the opposite cases) the ability to zoom in or out on the entire screen can quickly become a handy trick to know. You have options here: you can either press CTRL + (+) or CTRL + (-) to zoom in or out, or press CTRL + Scroll Wheel to accomplish the same. Pressing CTRL + 0 will reset the screen to normal.

Changing Active Applications
If you’ve really got a good groove flowing as you work, pausing to switch windows with your mouse can really trip you up. With some practice, you can use a keyboard shortcut instead, eliminating this inconvenience. Holding Alt as you press Tab will bring up smaller versions of your active windows, and using the directional keys (while still holding Alt) will allow you to select a different one to work in.

Switching Monitors
Workplaces are seeing more and more multi-monitor setups in use. A shortcut makes it easy to move application windows around and across screens. To move a window to the other monitor, press Windows Key + Shift + Left/Right. Whether you choose left or right depends on which way you want your window to move.

You can use a simpler version of this shortcut to dock an application or browser window to the side of its current monitor, too. All you press for this one is Windows Key + Left/Right.

Shortcuts like these can turn you into a Windows power user in no time at all, with a little practice. Do you have a shortcut that you use frequently enough to make it second nature? Share it with us in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: 5 Tricks to Using Windows

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There’s a lot more to the Windows operating system than first meets the eye, especially where handy shortcuts are concerned. Today, we’ll cover five of the shortcuts baked into Windows that may be beneficial to your productivity.

Rename File
Every so often, you will discover that the name of a document isn’t entirely accurate anymore. Naturally, this file name should be changed to accurately reflect its contents. While you could right-click and select ‘rename’ for each one you have to change, it is much faster to simply select the file (or files) that needs a name change, and press F2. If you change the name of multiple files to the same thing, it will even automatically add the number to the end to differentiate them.

Active Window Screenshot
Screenshots can be very useful, but they can also be a pain to capture. Fortunately, there’s a way to easily take a screenshot of just the active window. By pressing Alt + Print Screen, the active window will be captured cleanly.

Problem Steps Recorder
Every so often, you may need to record your steps exactly, whether you’re replicating an issue for IT to check out or outlining a procedure for training purposes. Windows offers the Problem Steps Recorder, which is an easy-to-use action recording program that outlines and illustrates each step you take while the program is observing you. It then generates a step-by-step report to be reviewed. Creating one is especially simple – the hardest part is typing “psr” into the Windows search bar to pull up the program.

Easy Open Applications
The taskbar is extremely useful for storing your most-used programs and files for easy access. Windows has incorporated a shortcut that makes accessing them even easier. First, figure out which number your desired application is in sequence, then press the Windows key + the sequence number to open that application. This also works to maximize and minimize these windows.

Minimize/Maximize
Another way to quickly minimize and maximize your open windows is a little silly, but effective. If you want to minimize all but one of your windows, simply click and hold the window and shake it. All the rest will minimize. The same action will also reverse this, maximizing all of your windows again.

What other neat Windows tricks and shortcuts do you know about? Share them in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Budgeting for IT Can Benefit Your Business’ Bottom Line

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Your business depends on a budget to come out in the black at the end of the fiscal year, and the way you invest that budget will have a considerable impact. As you create this budget, your IT needs to be one of your top considerations – after all, it is what effectively powers the modern business. Here, we’ll discuss how diligently incorporating your IT into your budget can help your business be more successful down the line.

How to Approach Your IT Spending
When determining an IT budget, perspective is an important part of the process. It can be tempting to view your IT as just another cost of doing business, but it really is more than that. Your technology (and the state it is in) has ramifications that spread to your entire business, so if it is lacking, everything will be. Employee morale will suffer, your productivity will slow, and your incoming cash flow will falter.

After all, an IT budget needs to account for a lot. There are the costs associated with acquiring and subsequently upgrading your information technology, as well as training your staff to properly leverage these solutions. However, a good IT budget will also account for the odd inconveniences that will require some financial spending to resolve. Furthermore, with your budget in mind as a reference, explore some of your options as far as cost-savings go… are you paying for more resources than you need? Are you leaving money on the table anywhere when those funds could be used more effectively contributing to another goal? While information technology is hugely helpful when leveraged properly, it can become a financial burden if over-invested (or even under-invested) in.

This is how you should actually consider your IT budget: an investment. While some of it will be classified as a business expense, much of your spending will be into endeavors that help your business, either by increasing efficiency or reducing waste. Either way, your IT can be used to put your company in a better financial situation.

Encouraging Financial Well-Being with an IT Budget
If you’re unsure of how to proceed with budgeting your IT, we’ve compiled a handy list of things you should (and shouldn’t) do during the process.

  • Have a set budget for your IT. In order for your business to be able to utilize the caliber of technology solutions it needs for success, you need to put forward the investment into those solutions.
  • Invest in business-enhancing solutions. Whether you’re boosting your internal productivity or fortifying your business against threats that could keep you from conducting business as usual, your IT budget should be spent in ways that directly benefit your operations.
  • Don’t shoot from the hip. Like we alluded to above, if you aren’t investing in your IT solutions correctly, you could find yourself in a worse spot than before. It is crucial that you go about investing in your IT strategically, directing funds to where they are needed and where they will help you to generate more revenue.

Alexa von Tobel, CEO of LearnVest.com, said, “We all have pretty much similar dreams, and at the root of all those dreams is being able to be in control of your money.” We agree, which is why we’re dedicated to providing you with the most value in our IT services without emptying your coffers. To learn more about the easily-budgetable services that we have to offer, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Know Your Tech: A/B Testing

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A key component to effectively attracting your audience is to better understand their preferences. Even the most seemingly insignificant change, like changing the color of the buttons on your website, can have a major impact on how effective your materials are. Fortunately, through a process called A/B testing, observing the impact of these changes is somewhat straightforward.

A/B Testing, Defined
Running an A/B test is the process of comparing a single variable to deem which option, Option A or Option B, is the more effective of the two. The key to an effective A/B test is to only change one thing between the two test subjects – otherwise, you have no way of knowing exactly what it was that was the influential change.

A/B tests can be used to make a wide variety of choices, from something as simple as an adjustment to a call-to-action to a different layout to a particular page. In this case, Option A should be the way things currently are to serve as a control for the experiment, while Option B displays your proposed change. Each option is then presented to an equally-sized segment of your audience to deem which of the two is the more effective.

Setting Up an A/B Test
A/B testing can be used to make a vast number of decisions, as long as they are approached one at a time. As we said before, if multiple variables are involved in a single test, that test isn’t going to deliver reliable enough results to make any well-supported decisions. It is also worth mentioning that A/B testing tends to work better when comparing options for relatively minor changes, like calls-to-action or images included in an email or on a landing page, rather than big ones.

The first step will be to decide which variable you intend to test, followed by your determination of a metric to base your observations against. Does this change boost engagement? Increase the time spent on page? Improve your click-through rate?

Once this has been accomplished, you’re ready to state what your control option will be, and what your change will be after that. Your control group should be whatever you currently have in place, so you can accurately judge if a change would be an improvement or not. Then you need to settle on a sample size, or the number of recipients that will be a part of this test.

Not all changes will be accurately measured with a sample size alone. Some changes would be better left running until a statistically significant data sample has been collected. Speaking of statistical significance, you will also need to decide how significant your results have to be before a change is deemed to be worthwhile.

Running An A/B Test
There are two real keys to running a successful A/B test: first, you have to give it enough time to collect the data you’ll need to come to a conclusion, and second, both options need to be tested at the same time to prevent other variables from affecting your data. Of course, if the variable that your A/B test is evaluating is timing, this doesn’t apply so much.

In short, A/B testing is a relatively simple way to make sure that you’re having as large an impact on your audience as possible. Can you think of any times that you’ve done something similar to test out a proposed change? Tell us about it in the comments!

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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!