Directive Blogs

When it comes to addressing bullying in our schools, whether it is ‘traditional’ or cyber, communication is critical to not only support victims of bullying, but also to prevent it. We’ve been following debates held by the Cooperstown PTA to discuss how to handle bullying and wanted to share our thoughts. Although bullying and cyberbullying are very tricky subjects, we feel that we can learn a lot about how schools handle these sensitive issues and share these insights with other businesses.

Blockchain is one of the most popular emerging technologies, and it’s easy to see why. While the technology behind blockchain was once looked at as having no practical application in the workplace, it is now taking a seat front and center as a security tool for a modern business environment. Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the world of blockchain.

Email is one of modern society’s best ways of staying in contact on both a business and personal level, but only if you’re effectively utilizing it. We’ll help you implement best practices and other methods to get the maximum benefit of your chosen email solution.

Modern businesses have a lot more room for flexibility than in the past, particularly in regard to meetings. With the inception of conferencing solutions, organizations have access to more dynamic tools to make the most of their meetings. Determining the best one for you, though, is not easy. We’ll help you make that choice in the simplest terms possible.

Your relationships with your customers and clients are reliant on one thing more than any other: communication. In order to optimize this communication, many businesses are leveraging technology solutions, and are enjoying a variety of operational benefits as a result. Is your business one of them?

Messaging applications have carved out a foothold in businesses, clearly proving their operational benefits. However, it simply isn’t responsible to leverage a solution without making sure that the solution is secure. There are a few criteria that you should consider to determine how secure your chosen application really is.

For many businesses, communication is a major contributing factor to their success. Technology--when it’s properly implemented, anyway--can play a big part in keeping communication productive, but with certain solutions, it can be difficult to determine context. Here are some ways that you can help your employees be as clear and concise as possible with specific communication methods.

These days, our society is infamously connected, especially in the business sense. This can make it jarring to not receive a reply back from an email. While we all need a break every now and then, we also need to get back to our contacts efficiently - this is where the ‘out of office’ message in Gmail comes in.

For any business to be successful, its inner workings need to be able to work together seamlessly, each with a defined role and purpose. While we usually stick to talking about how to make your IT more collaborative, we’re devoting this week’s tip to ensuring that your employees are also capable of effective collaboration while using these solutions.

Email is a solution that needs to be protected, lest you expose important information to any onlookers while messages are in transit. Encryption is one of the key ways you can make sure that your messages are safe, but email hasn’t always used this method to secure messages. In fact, it wasn’t until relatively recently that encryption became a staple of the major email providers.

Instant messaging is commonplace in today’s society. It used to be primarily for social interaction, but its success was so overwhelming that business professionals have implemented it into their daily communications. Although, despite the advantages that instant messaging can provide, you still have to jump through some hoops in order to bypass what it’s become; an immense annoyance.

There are some facets to IT that are universally accepted as important, such as security. However, there are also others that create some conflicting opinions between management and IT personnel. When surveyed, business leaders and IT management held vastly different opinions as to the importance of various IT tasks. Is there a way to unify these priorities?

If you’re trying to run your business without considering communication, you’re crippling your business unnecessarily. One of the ways that you can improve communications is by capitalizing on a modern phone system that uses the cloud. You might be surprised by how great a cloud-hosted VoIP solution works for your business--especially if you haven’t thrown out the traditional telephone handset yet.

Communication solutions for business are changing rapidly, and most of the new solutions go a long way toward using existing technologies that allow these organizations to save money and get more for the services they already pay for.

You serve as a vendor to your clients, providing them with a necessary good or service. Likewise, you have vendors that provide you with the goods and services that enable you to do so. However, how well are your vendors managed?

Are your employees putting your organization’s security at risk due to poor email practices? This is a question that all business owners need to consider--especially if you deal in sensitive information. We recommend that all businesses utilize a two-pronged approach to email security, including both technology measures to secure communications on the technical side and training to secure on the human side.

As technology keeps leading us into the future, it can be easy to lose sight of traditional leadership methods. Since the newest gadgets are so appealing, it's tempting to have technology automate our decision making as a crutch. Can technology really replace the old school business leadership practices?

Is there anything more important to your business’ success than communication? If you’re not ready to communicate, it becomes difficult to collaborate and make strides on major projects. Thankfully, like many topics in business, technology allows for more effective communication and collaboration than ever before. Let’s take a moment to review some of the best technologies to streamline communication in the office.

Grammar is quite complex, and it can be a problem for some people who don’t write or compose documents on a daily basis. One way that you can correct your writing, as well as learn why your writing needs correction, is by using a free Google Chrome extension called Grammarly.

Have you ever wondered how the Internet is capable of connecting countries on the other side of the world? You may already be aware of this, but the Internet’s cables run deep underneath the ocean’s surface, all around the world. In fact, you might wonder how we could even keep these cables safe when they’re submerged underneath such an immense amount of water.