Out of the Box Solutions Blog

Out of the Box Solutions has been serving the Michigan area since 2002, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses

Three Issues Your MSP Can Help You Figure Out

The decision to outsource your company’s IT decisions to a managed service provider is significant, and the importance is not lost on us. After all, you're essentially handing over the keys to your company's assets and resources, and it's crucial to ensure you make the right choice for the future of your business. Fortunately, gauging the suitability of a managed service provider can be made much easier by asking three key questions.

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The Dos and Don’ts to Successful Video Conferencing

Today’s business world is full of technology, one of which is commonplace now thanks partly to the pandemic: video conferencing. While the trend was on the rise before COVID, it’s seen as a necessity, particularly for businesses with remote teams. It’s important to ensure that you practice good video conferencing etiquette; otherwise, you could suffer from poor—or worse, boring—meetings.

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What Can Be Done to Avoid Network Bottlenecks?

Your network is your business’ nervous system, enabling all of your operations. At least, that’s what it’s supposed to do. Unfortunately, network bottlenecks—the lack of available bandwidth limiting the capacity for data to move about—can put a stop to this. Let’s talk about a few ways to avoid such a bottleneck.

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Four Errors Small Businesses are Making and What to Do to Fix Them

Using the right technology can streamline operations, enhance customer engagement, and boost overall productivity. Despite its potential benefits, many small businesses often make significant mistakes when it comes to technology implementation. Let’s explore some of the biggest technology blunders small businesses make and how to avoid them.

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When Trying to Maintain Your IT, Proactivity is the Best Policy

We could (and usually do) talk about managed services all day long…and to be honest, it’s easy to do, just because there are so many ways that they benefit a business. Today, we wanted to focus our attention on one specific benefit that managed services offer: the inherent proactivity they feature.

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Want to Boost Your Productivity? Focus on Communication!

If you’re anything like me, you’ve always got a thought in the back of your head regarding your business and how you can make it more productive. While there are a lot of different ways you can do so, we wanted to focus on one that might not be the first to come to mind: communicate more.

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Critical Thinking is Crucial to Solid IT Management

One thing that will always be useful in business and in life is the ability to think critically. You might find that it’s even more helpful when considering decisions related to your IT infrastructure, too. Let’s go over how you can foster these skills within yourself and your employees.

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4 Things You Can Do to Improve Security When You Work From Home

Is your business prepared to handle the many challenges that come from remote work, chief among them security? If you aren’t, then the transition to remote or hybrid operations is going to be a rough one, to say the least. Let’s discuss how you can implement secure remote or hybrid work policies that are sure to protect your business now and in the future.

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Review Your Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy for 2023

When a disaster strikes your business and your important data is compromised, can your business recover? Can it recover quick enough for it to not be irreparably damaged? Could you even conduct business without the lost data? How much downtime can your business even take? 

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Use These Tools to Help Ward Off Phishing Attacks

It’s all well and good to practice caution when clicking on links in your emails, but chances are you’ll eventually have to commit to clicking on one of them, whether you like it or not. In cases like this, it’s best to go against these links armed with as much information as possible about what they are. Let’s go over how you can check their legitimacy quickly and effectively.

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How to Have More Productive Employee Monitoring Habits

With more remote and hybrid employees than in the past, many employers feel like they need to work harder to monitor their employees to keep them productive. Some businesses have invested in software solutions designed to monitor employees while out of the office, but research suggests that this might have the reverse effect desired.

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Build a More Productive Business with Technology

Productivity is the measure of how your business operates. Without a certain standard of it, any business will stagnate or fail. The overall productivity of your business comes down to a combined effort of the tools you deploy and your employees’ ability to maximize individual productivity. This week, we will take a look at how the emergence of technology built specifically for your business directly correlates to higher degrees of productivity.

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4 Things You Can Do to Promote Smartphone Productivity

Smartphones are a critical part of your business’ productivity, but sometimes you and your employees might have differing views on how to translate that productivity into profitability for your business. If you want to avoid the pitfalls associated with smartphones, well, today’s article might just be for you. Here are four tips and tricks you can use to get your smartphones to work for you.

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3 Network Cable Best Practices

Not every piece of technology works best on your business’ wireless network. For those components, having an idea of how to best attach your network resources via cables is important. This week, we give you three best practices our technicians use to efficiently and effectively connect those components to your network via wires. 

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Is Standing During the Workday as Beneficial as You’ve Heard?

Standing desks have become quite popular, especially as people grow more health-conscious post-pandemic. These desks are a little on the pricey side, so you might be wondering if they are really worth the investment. Can the benefits make implementation worthwhile for standing desks? The answer might surprise you.

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Is There Really Anything to a Four-Day Work Week?

Picking up on the fact that the workplace is changing isn’t exactly difficult nowadays—the past few years of remote work and mass resignations have made it abundantly clear that today’s employees are looking for more control in terms of balancing their work lives with their personal ones. One means of doing so that has gained steam is the idea of a shorter workweek.

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Preparing for the Worst Means Prioritizing Strong Data Recovery

No matter where your business calls home, it will be vulnerable to some sort of disaster, whether it’s a natural disaster that wipes your office off the map or a cyberattack that cripples your data infrastructure. You don’t have to resign yourself to this fate, though; with the appropriate tools, your business can survive just about anything and keep operations going even under the worst circumstances.

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Monitoring Your Network and Infrastructure Can Keep Big Issues at Bay

There are a lot of threats out there that can place some pressure on your business to think and act a certain way, but unless you are actively searching for threats on your network, you might find yourself coming up short in regards to network security. Why is monitoring your network so important, even with preventative measures in place? It all starts with imagining the worst-case scenario.

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Technology Protection Tips for Holiday Travelers

Traveling is one way that many of us are attempting to feel less isolated and alone during the COVID-19 pandemic, but a certain level of caution must be exercised when it comes to the technology we use while we travel. Here are some ways you can keep your technology safe and in check while traveling this holiday season.

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Tip of the Week: A Short Guide to Outlook Keyboard Shortcuts

Just like the other Microsoft products in the Office suite, like Word and Excel, Outlook has several keyboard shortcuts that you can use to be more productive. We’ve put together a handy guide of some of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts you should keep in mind to get the most out of Outlook.

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