Macro Systems Blog

Everyone dreads presentations, but for different reasons. Some people are just afraid of public speaking, or they are just overall unorganized. In the end, well designed presentations are essential for your company's success, whether they are given to clients or to your employees. Thankfully, there are ways to minimize the stress that giving a presentation can cause. One of the best ways to prepare a presentation is to use a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow as an aid.

However, it's very easy to fall into "PowerPoint Purgatory", a place filled with overburdened slideshows that last for hours on end. The amount of professionals who don't use PowerPoint effectively far outweigh those who do. Macro Systems is here to help by providing you with some useful tips to make your presentations both easy for the presenter and for the audience!

2014 has been a year of technological advancement, but with any kind of advances such as these, there will always be those who want to steal the work of others. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center and , as of March this year, there have been 204 instances of data breaches this year alone. These affected companies are perfect examples of why web protection is important. Macro Systems can provide you with this protection and peace of mind. Here are a few of the more unbelievable breaches, most of which could have been easily avoided.

Is your wireless router an older model? If it is, then you owe it to yourself to upgrade the latest model. Depending on your Internet connection, upgrading your wireless router may be the easiest way to increase your bandwidth. Next-gen routers also come with new easy-to-use security features that don't require passwords, making an upgrade worth the effort.

Cloud computing is making everything easier. Companies that operated IT infrastructures of their own before the cloud know firsthand how much easier it is thanks to the cloud. A brief comparison of doing business before and after the cloud will show just how much cloud computing is changing things.

April 7th 2014 was a big day for the world, not only because Microsoft ended security support for Windows XP, but because a massive security flaw was found in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. This problem, called the Heartbleed bug, was found by Google Security, and it leaks information from any applications and services utilizing OpenSSL. The problem, however, is not that it was found; the problem is that over two-thirds of the entire Internet contains sites that utilize the OpenSSL/TLS protocol specification. It also doesn't help that this bug has been active since December of 2012.

Admit it, you've thought about moving some of your computing infrastructure to the cloud, but just couldn't take the leap because there is a perception out there that suggests cloud-based computing systems are less secure than the ones that you house within the confines of your office. The fact of the matter is that every piece of computing infrastructure has the same shortcomings as far as security goes. Whether hosted in a cloud or in an enterprise data server, the thing that makes data security work for business is having the right people managing your information.

Let's say that you're on the phone with a client going over a major proposal and they utter four words that fill you with dread, "Fax it to me." It's not that you don't know how to send a fax, but you dread faxing because you know that you're in for a big waste of time, especially considering how many pages your proposal is.

How long does it take to boot up your computer when you start your workday? Most people would be fine with a one minute boot time; five minutes can get a little annoying, and anything longer than ten minutes warrants a coffee break. You may not have realized it, but a few extra minutes of boot time can impact the productivity of your company in a big way.

The number of employees using their personal devices for work purposes (BYOD) continues to increase rapidly. According to Juniper Research, BYOD will account for over one-third of all mobile devices being used within the next few years. Not adjusting procedures to accommodate for this trend can leave your company's sensitive information vulnerable.

As the global economy experiences recovery and growth, businesses have extra capital freed up to spend on information technology. IT spending is surging, but where exactly is all of this money going? In a recent study, Gartner shines some light on IT's hottest trends.

It's no surprise that technology is taking over our lives. It's everywhere; from the workplace to every inch of our homes, new technology exists where it wouldn't have twenty years ago. Bluetooth-connected kitchen appliances allow their owners to turn them on and off from a distance. Cars can connect to the Internet. Google has produced glasses that allow you to browse the Internet. There are tons of innovative, new inventions that have had a huge impact on the way small business owners manage their workplaces, but nothing can compare to the significance of being able to receive text files from anywhere in the world via email and fax.

If you're like most heavy Internet users, you've got multiple Google accounts and you have to think twice about which Gmail address to give someone. It's not like you set out to have three, or five, or even ten Google accounts. It just kind of happened over time. Can anything be done to streamline your different Google accounts?

Just because you hit the delete button when using Microsoft Word doesn't necessarily mean that your information is gone forever. Thanks to Word's Track Changes feature, all of your deleted sentences can be easily retrieved. This is a very handy tool to help you out of a jam, but it can also be misused to leak secrets if you're not careful.

Just because you have an IT technician on staff, doesn't mean your technology needs are 100% covered. The people making up your IT department are just that, people, and because they are people, having reliable coverage can be difficult. Outsourcing your IT department is the perfect way to get the extra coverage your business needs, especially when your IT team can't be there for you.

Whenever you hire a new employee, you essentially incorporate their social network into the networking reach of your business. With this reality in mind (along with the measurable influence of an employee's use of social media) you have to ask yourself, "Is a connected employee more valuable than a non-connected employee?"

Remember when you upgraded to a flat screen TV or monitor just a few years ago? You may have marveled at the increased picture quality and celebrated getting rid of your old and bulky equipment, but do you know what happened to the old CRT monitor after you threw it out? Unfortunately, the answer doesn't bode well for the environment.

Not too many years ago comedian Jeff Foxworthy became a star with his trademark "You Might Be a Redneck If..." jokes. Rednecks are an interesting breed that do things backwards because they stubbornly believe that it's the best way, and like all of us, rednecks use technology. Are you a technology redneck? Check out our redneck technology list to find out.

We've reached a point with technology that we're totally dependant upon it to accomplish most mission-critical business tasks. This is great for getting business done efficiently, but being dependent upon technology makes operations virtually impossible when technology fails. This is called downtime, and your business needs to be prepared for every downtime scenario possible.

Small business owners accept that they need to find alternative solutions to issues that larger organizations can just throw money at. Money is often tight for a small business and no where is this more evident than when dealing in technology. Larger organizations can afford state-of-the art IT, but thanks to the cloud, your business can experience enterprise-level IT at a price that makes sense for your budget.

You may have been using a PC long enough to remember just how awesome Microsoft Word 98 was. When Microsoft first released their Office 98 productivity suite with programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, there was really nothing quite like it on the market. Unfortunately for some businesses, Word 98 isn't nostalgia, it's a daily reality.