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Does Your Business Have Enough Bandwidth?

Obviously, if your business is experiencing bottlenecks, the answer to this question is no. Unfortunately, many organizations will simply adjust and adapt to these inefficiencies and “make it work” (to a point, at least). Despite this, you need to be sure that you at least know how much bandwidth your business should have to meet its needs.

In addition to this, it is important to be sure that your Internet service can support your needs. With so many options—including Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modem, Fiber, Wireless, Satellite, or Broadband over Powerlines (BPL), and more—you need to know if your capacity is sized to match your consumption, and that you’re getting all you can for your investment.

Digital Seattle can help you figure this out by evaluating your broadband needs and work with your ISP to ensure you’re getting everything they should be delivering.

When it comes to your broadband, here are some important things to keep in mind:

Run a Speed Test

A speed test is a great way to establish your current access to bandwidth and whether it is sufficient for your productivity. An internet consultant will have plenty of testing tools to use, but you should also take a moment to visit speedtest.net or another speed testing utility to help inform your conversation with them.

Here are some measurements to examine:

• Ping, or latency, is how you measure the reaction time of your connection. For instance, how quickly a webpage can recognize that another tab has been opened. Issues here could come from your Internet service provider (ISP), an improperly configured firewall, router, or modem, and your overall bandwidth. A ping of about 20ms is good, as a lower ping indicates a better-performing connection.
• Upload and download speed are another important consideration, as the speed of the data that you push out of and pull into your computer will help you evaluate your bandwidth. As downloads are typically more common than uploads in the business setting, it is normal for bandwidth to be more focused on downloads.

How Wi-Fi Will Factor In

Wi-Fi is a significant utility in any office, especially with the mobility that so many offices rely on nowadays—particularly when personal space is as large of a concern as it is now. This makes the prospect of losing connection in the office such an issue.

Unoptimized wireless can seriously hinder business productivity, and these issues are only worsened by insufficient bandwidth. Productivity issues are often the inciting factor behind the use of shadow IT, where these obstacles lead employees to install and utilize unapproved software without your knowledge.

Does Your Business Need More Than You Have?

If its bandwidth is insufficient for its needs, your business simply won’t have the capability to support its services sufficiently for your customers. In this way, your bottom line could be seriously impacted by any holdbacks—especially with so many of your customer-focused services being based online.

Your broadband is what also allows your team to work productively. Today’s popular conferencing solutions require a large amount of bandwidth to work effectively, and while VoIP isn’t all that resource intensive, it does require some reliable bandwidth availability. Without the resources to support your processes, they are guaranteed to become a problem sooner or later.

Lean on Us for Help with Your Connectivity

It isn’t a secret that the Internet plays a mammoth role in modern business, in such a way that a prepackaged, one-size-fits-all strategy just won’t sufficiently fill. With Digital Seattle in your corner, you’ll have a resource to turn to so that you are sure to get the connectivity you need to compete and grow.

For any assistance with your company’s use of technology, give us a call at (206) 709-9556 today.

Examining the Email Issue

We’ve all been there: staring down an inbox filled to bursting with messages. Mixed with the important ones are promotional messages, internal messages that you don’t need to know about right now, and all the ones that you’ve kept for future reference. This can make it very difficult to keep track of where to find these messages and the like.

Fortunately, Outlook has a feature that enables a user to automatically highlight certain messages based on certain conditions. That way, when scanning your inbox messages, they’ll stand out and be easier to find.

How to Highlight Messages

So, you have a message that you need to pay attention to. For the sake of our example, we’ll say it’s from your direct manager, the person you regularly report to.

• In Outlook, locate the View menu at the top of the window. Doing so will give you access to your View Settings. Click into them.
  
  
• From there, click into the Conditional Formatting option. You’ll see a list of preloaded options included with Outlook, along with buttons that say Add, Delete…, Move Up, and Move Down. Click Add.
  
  
• You’ll see a new rule added to the list of options called Untitled. Rename it to whatever works for your purposes.
  
  For this example, we’ll call it Manager.
  
  
• Click the button that says Condition… to establish when this rule comes into play. This can be based on a variety of options: whether a word or phrase is included in specific parts of the message, who it is from, the time it was sent, and even whether the message was directed to you specifically or to a larger group of recipients. Some of these can be disabled by unchecking the appropriate box or leaving the field blank.
  
  Let’s stick to simply specifying that these messages are ones sent directly to you, from your manager.
  
  
• You’ll be brought back to your list of rules in Conditional Formatting. With your Manager rule still selected, click the Font button.
  
  
• There, you can adjust the way messages that meet your conditions will appear in your inbox. You can change the font, the font style, its size, add strikeout or underline effects, and even change its color. In this example, we’ll simply say that the messages should be highlighted in red.
  
  
• Click OK once you’re satisfied, continuing to do so until all the dialogue boxes are resolved.

You should then see your changes reflected in your inbox. In our case, any messages coming from your manager should appear red in your inbox list, making them much easier to see. Rinse and repeat for any other messages you want to be able to pick out quickly from the group, and your emails should be far more manageable.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for a reminder whenever we’ve posted something new, and for any more assistance with your business’ IT, reach out to Digital Seattle at (206) 709-9556!

What the “Power” Symbol Means

The symbol that appears on the power button looks somewhat unique. However, this makes more sense when you consider that it’s just what you get when you smoosh the “|” for on and the “O” for off into a single symbol.

How the Power Button Can Be Used

Hopefully, you’ve already learned that your power button should really only be used to power up your system, or—if no other options are available—to power off the device after all your work is saved and your programs are all closed out (again, only as a last resort). Whenever you can, it is better to use the shut down option nestled into the operating system.

We take this so seriously because abusing the power button is just a convenient means to abuse the device itself. Improperly powering down your system in this way can lead to file corruption and potentially give the device a hard time when you start it back up.

Of course, with help from a technician, it is possible to remap your power button to do something different when it is pressed if you so choose.

Remapping Your Power Button

You have the capability to change your power button’s functionality, allowing you to set it to do something other than turn off your system when it is pressed—or, if you’re working with your laptop, your lid is closed when it's plugged in or running on stored battery power. In your Control Panel, under Hardware and Sound, find your Power Options and Choose what the power button does.

Your options as to its function include:

• Do nothing
• Sleep
• Hibernate
• Shut Down (when pressing the power button on a laptop)
• Turn off the display (when pressing the power button on a laptop)

Make sure you Save changes so that your settings are properly applied.

Interested in finding out more about your technology and how it can most benefit your business? Give Digital Seattle a call at (206) 709-9556 to find out more.