FormaTech IT Services Blog

Have you noticed that the difference between this year’s latest and greatest smartphone isn’t much different than the one you shelled out big bucks for last year? You aren’t alone.

Managed IT service is a great way for the small business to save money on their IT support costs while still getting the coverage they need. One of the ways that an MSP is able to keep their costs down is by proactive maintenance. If an MSP had to fix every computer problem a company had after it became a problem, the service would largely be untenable for the small business. Today, we look at the proactive maintenance feature of our IT management strategy and how our clients save a lot of money as a result.

Ahh, the Internet. It’s an incredible tool that helps people all over the world get work done on a daily basis. It’s often thought of as a tool to achieve a means, but like any other tool, it works best alongside others just like it. Plug-ins are additional ways that web-based applications and software solutions help make your use of them even better.

The Internet of Things can be used to create a lot of opportunity for your organization, but there are considerable risks that your business can’t forget about, no matter how tempting it is to take advantage of them. Even though security remains a prime concern for businesses, it’s clear that the Internet of Things isn’t going anywhere. Therefore, you might as well embrace it, or at least prepare for it.

An assistant has long been a greatly desired resource in the office setting. Typically, assistants do all the “grunt work” that the executives don’t have time for. Executives have long relied on a steadfast helper to make their professional lives easier, but capital for additional help may not be there. To counter this, small business owners are now using devices like Amazon’s Alexa to help them manage their busy schedules. You can too! Here’s how.

Voice over Internet Protocol can be a mighty attractive piece to any organization’s communications strategy. Any solution that eliminates huge upfront costs and allows an organization to scale their solution to fit the needs of their business is one that is truly beneficial. Today, we take a look at the pros and cons of instituting a VoIP solution and how it can put your organization in a good position.

Google has just completed an overhaul of its G Suite productivity suite in efforts to improve collaboration and make the software more secure. To understand what the marketing giant was looking at, we’ll go through some of the changes they’ve made and explain why the changes were necessary.

Communication is a crucial part of any business, which means that a business will require the tools that allow it to communicate effectively. There are many solutions designed to fulfill that precise need with assorted features and functions. One of these tools is Microsoft Teams. Let’s review some of what it has to offer a business user.

This week for our Intro to Your Tech series, we’re going inside the heart of the computer. Random Access Memory, better known as RAM, is an important part of your computing experience. RAM is often cited as one of the main components listed when someone is looking to sell a computer, but what is it and what does it do?

Communication is crucial in all walks of life, but especially so in the business world. In order to maintain ideal operations there must be reliable lines of communication connecting each and every employee to every resource they need to accomplish their goals. Unified communications are an excellent way to accomplish this.

Any business owner will tell you, the more you know about your business and its relationship with its customers, the better decisions you can make. For years, small and medium-sized businesses have been rolling out solution after solution to try and make their business run as efficiently as possible. Today, we’ll go into the concept of business intelligence, how it works, and why your business needs it.

The small business owner has to be much more diligent in the way they spend their company’s resources. Technology, and the automation that it often brings, can work to make your business more agile and efficient. The problem with implementing this technology is that it typically comes with large capital outlays and committing to spending big chunks of money can be impossible. We’ll take a look at how other small businesses have been investing in technology to help you determine what you should be prioritizing.

Computing is based on data - manipulating it, accumulating it, and transferring it. These transfers have names that most will find familiar: uploads and downloads. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at these activities, and how they present themselves during regular business use.

How often have you thought about how much money your printer is eating? Today’s blog will help your organization save as much money as possible on printing costs so that you can cut down on the waste your business suffers from. It all starts with calculating the individual cost of each of your pages.

For our Tech Terms, we sometimes dig into the inner workings of your computer or other technology hardware, but sometimes we like to dig into details of new or emerging technology that’s taking the industry by storm. Today, we’re doing just that by discussing what a blockchain is and how it works.

From Anakin being the possession of Watto the Toydarian junk dealer in the Phantom Menace--to Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewy being stuck warding off the Dianoga inside a trash compactor in the first Death Star in the original--to Rey picking junk off the crashed Star Destroyer and selling them to the Crolute Unkar Plutt on Jakku in The Force Awakens--Star Wars lore is filled with junk technology. If the back room of your business is starting to look like Watto’s shop, you may need to adjust your disposal strategies.

It doesn’t matter how large your company is, or how much information technology that you have to maintain and collect, keeping it organized can be challenging. With any company with a lot of different and important operations, it’s crucial that you have processes put into place that documents where and how each of your moving parts is being used. To this end, having a way to inventory your technology can be helpful for keeping track of where your devices, and more importantly, your data is.

If there’s one piece of computer hardware that almost everyone knows about, it would have to be the hard drive. However, it is not so easy to say that everyone knows what it does, how it works, or even the differences between the two types. That’s why we’re exploring hard drives for this week’s Tech Term!

A slow Internet connection should be the least of our worries, but somehow, this most minor of inconveniences can be one of the most frustrating experiences in modern computing. Fortunately, there are a few ways to potentially improve your connection. At the very least, they might help to explain why your connection suffers.

Words are always changing to meet the needs of the times. As they grow in usage, new words are added to dictionaries on a daily basis. Today’s Tech Term, dongle, is one of these words. Have you ever heard it being used before? It might sound a bit silly at first, but dongle is a word that is used in technology more often than you might think.