Ferrum Technology Services Blog

While phishing awareness is an important practice to teach to a business’ employees, some methods are better than others, as GoDaddy—the domain registrar and web-hosting company notorious for its run of risqué ads—is learning the hard way. On December 14, GoDaddy’s employees received an email that seemed to be a holiday bonus from the company… only to find out (the hard way) that it was a phishing test that their employer had run.

People are known to consider good communication as the foundation to forging and maintaining successful relationships. For businesses, this couldn’t be more true. Solid communications both in the operations of a business and with its customers can set it apart from other businesses that are trying to do the same things. This month, we thought we’d take a look at how small businesses can build a successful communications strategy that allows them to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. 

Collaboration is an important capability for your team to share, particularly with the recent upsurge in remote work. Fortunately, many of today’s solutions are designed to facilitate this critical collaboration. Let’s review some of the tools available to your business that can help support its operations.

A VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) signal uses the Internet instead of using a traditional phone infrastructure. Let's review the concept of VoIP and how companies can use it to their advantage.

With so many businesses experiencing drastic changes with continued social distancing recommendations and suspended operations, it is important that one of the most critical groups associated with any business remains in the loop: its clients and customers. Therefore, it makes sense to do so using a tool that is readily available (and that most people use): social media.

The differences between VoIP and the traditional method behind telephone services are pronounced enough that comparing them isn’t so much a consideration of one team versus the other—VoIP is in another league, practically an entirely different sport. Let’s go over what makes VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) so different, and how this offers greater benefits to businesses.

“Un pour tous, tous pour un,” was made famous by Alexandré Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. The collaboration of the Musketeers: Athos, Aramis, Porthos with the brave and clever D'Artagnan makes for great fiction, but for the average business, the act of working together for a single goal possible is less heroic, but still mandatory. Let’s take a look at modern collaboration.

Communication plays a critical role in the way you develop relationships and clients. To optimize communication with your clients and customers, proper use of technology is essential, but it also makes for a much nicer experience from an operational standpoint. How can your business utilize this powerful communications technology?

Like a well-oiled machine, any business needs its internal components to line up correctly, interacting with the others to accomplish the ultimate goal of the device. This is more or less how we always describe collaborative processes in the context of your IT. Here, however, we’re going to focus our tip on ensuring these processes are directed by employees who are ready to collaborate as well.

There are many reasons why a hosted Voice over Internet Protocol telephone solution (also known as hosted VoIP) is popular for small businesses. This is due to the many benefits that a small business can glean from such a solution, both in its security and its overall operations. We’ll review some of these benefits here.

While email remains an important facet of professional business communications, the instant message is of rising importance in office environments everywhere. While any one of many factors may contribute to this shift, it provides those businesses that adopt it great advantages to their internal processes, and might even aid in their cybersecurity.

You provide a good or service to your clients, and therefore, could be considered a vendor to them. Similarly, your organization depends on the goods and services of other organizations, making your business a client as well. All of this can become quite complicated and convoluted, which brings up the question of how you’re managing all of these loose ends. Are you keeping your vendors managed as well as you should be?

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, has been widely accepted by the business community as an excellent communication tool. This is due to both the cost savings that VoIP offers, as well as the many, many features that are inherently bundled into the solutions available. There may be more of these features than you may realize. Here, we’ll review some of these features, and disprove some misconceptions along the way.

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.

Science fiction is filled with incredible technology, especially in terms of how the characters communicate. This is especially true in the epic space opera Star Wars. Fortunately for viewers like you and me, some of the communication devices and technologies used a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, may not be so far off.

As the world of technology grows increasingly mobile, emojis are appearing in the most unlikely of places, like business communications. Even though emojis may seem rather cute and innocent, their use by employees may cause more problems than they’re worth. :-O

To become a grammar expert takes years of education--a luxury that few modern workers have. Thankfully, there are tools available online that can make anybody a grammar expert. One such tool is Grammarly, a free Chrome extension and web-based app.

What’s the difference between a cafe and a café? By definition, there’s no difference, but to a coffee aficionado, that symbol above the ‘e’ makes all the difference. But how do you type special characters like this? Here are two easy ways.

To maximize your business' communicative abilities, you need to produce content. Content is found almost everywhere and it is an essential variable in every form of written communication. Innovators don’t miss out on the importance of content, and have developed content-writing software. Yet, this poses an important question: can a robot truly imitate prose written by a human?

Ever since the world adopted the Internet, email has been a part of the picture. Initially, email seemed like a dynamic tool compared to faxes and metered mail, but now, the average worker despises their email inbox for its unreasonable demands on their time and its hindrance to productivity. Are there any options that can replace email in the workplace?