Ferrum Technology Services Blog

In last weeks’ tip, we discussed various ways you can prepare for a big presentation, including the content development stage, audience definition, and practice sessions. This week, we’ll be discussing ways in which you can ensure that your presentation goes off without a hitch, so that your audience (and you) can benefit from it as much as possible.

When working in Microsoft Word, it can be helpful to view more than one page at a time. Did you know that Word allows you to view up to eight pages at once? Here’s how you do it.

It’s fun to find new ways to customize your PC’s desktop to fit your taste and personality. In fact, we bet that your current wallpaper image speaks volumes about who you are. Did you know that you can even adjust your desktop’s icon sizes?

It’s always important to know about what you’re investing in before you take the leap of faith. In the world of business and managed IT, we understand that jargon and abbreviations can potentially kill a sale. This is what we call “geekspeak,” and while it’s generally avoided as much as possible, it can cause some business owners’ eyes to glaze over and zone out.

We love our toys here at Ferrum - and one of them we'd like to share with you.  It's a screenshot tool called LightShot which is a free app you can download on the internet - http://app.prntscr.com.

When’s the last time you rebooted your PC or mobile device? If you’re drawing a blank to this question, then you should take the minute or two it takes to reboot as soon as possible (or 15 minutes if you’re still using Windows XP). To a computer, rebooting can be likened to getting a full night’s sleep; without it, performance will suffer.

Recently I was asked by a new Switchvox customer if they could set up their phone to have it ring in different ways depending on the type of call.  “It’s something our old system did” they said.

Digium’s Switchvox platform offers many options to access voicemail: one-touch access from a desk phone, remote access from any phone, Web access to your Switchvox Mailbox, or email access from your favorite email client or smartphone. Listen from anywhere, and mark messages read or unread as appropriate. And of course when you buy a Switchvox solution you get all of the above for one low price.

As the developers at Digium continue to build new features into Switchvox, every so often the need to open additional ports on your firewall arises. This is an updated list of those ports and applies to 5.x.x versions of Switchvox. For more information on managing Switchvox on your network, please click here.

We are frequently asked “How do I set up a phone using Switchvox that does not have a voicemail box?” This is a really easy process if you know where to go. So, I figured I'd help everyone out and show you a trick or two.

Need click to dial from a web browser? You may remember that you can use Digium’s Firedialer for Firefox which dials any phone number displayed in a web page, dial recently called numbers, as well as highlight phone numbers on a web page you’re navigating. A tool I’ve used since its inception. Which is mostly why I’ve been a faithful Firefox user for so long. A lot of us use this every single day - we like our toys :)

One of the most important things in the business world today is data. Whether it’s customer data, sales data, employee data, whatever is important to you. A loss of critical data due to a failure in equipment can be crippling to any business. The data on your phone system is equally important. You can protect yourself with warranties in case of hardware failure. But what do you do to protect yourself against data loss, should the worst happen?

Despite what many people think, Microsoft Word is far from a normal word processor. Microsoft has thrown all sorts of nifty new toys in there for its consumers to enjoy, such as a built-in citation machine for all of your research needs. When writing a white paper, you want to use specific examples and you want to give others credit when it is due. That's the only professional way to do it.

After you've finished with that incriminating file (you know which file we're talking about), you will drag and drop it into the Recycling Bin. You may think that just because you selected "Empty Recycling Bin" that the evidence is gone forever, but that's not exactly how the Recycling Bin works. You will need a more permanent solution to completely cover your tracks.

The computer mouse is a great tool that has made our operating system navigation much easier. However, our dependence on the computer mouse has naturally led to an independence from its counterpart, the keyboard (aside from everyday word processing). Here are a few awesome functional keyboard shortcuts that everyone has forgotten about.