This month’s email management strategy is:  Allocate!

If the email message requires action, categorize it by action needed.  If it will take more than 5 minutes, go one step further and turn it into a Task (be sure to split out each action step).

Any questions?  Give IT Radix a call.

This month’s email management strategy is:  Automate!

Wouldn’t it be nice to automatically file non-critical mail?  Highlight critical mail?  Group people together?  Memorize a series of commonly used steps?

Did you know that in Outlook you can: 

Create rules for senders who usually post informational messages.

Email management strategies are essential to keeping your in-basket manageable and SPAM free.  Strategies will help you work more efficiently, productively and smarter.  This month’s strategy is: Segregate!

Keep your business email consolidated by banishing non-business communications elsewhere.

Want to use less words but still get your point across.  Sometimes, a symbol is a great way to communicate creatively and www.CopyPasteCharacter.com makes using symbols even easier.  CopyPasteCharacter.com is an online resource with characters and symbols you can use to spice up your Word documents, emails, tweets and more.

If you’re like most people, you’re more likely to have your smart phone with you in the moment than your camera.  Here are a few tips to get good results using your smart phone’s built-in camera.

Keep it clean—the lens, that is.  Fingerprints and smears on the lens can be an issue.

At our last Lunch'n'Learn, we heard some great strategies to improve our productivity with Outlook.  Here's one more: 

I've been using an Outlook add-in called SimplyFile for several years and simply can't live without it.  It watches your email filing habits and learns where would typically file an email message from a particular person or with a common subject line.

So, what are some of the technical ramifications of the proliferation of video?  I’m glad you asked! We covered just the topic in our joint Lunch’n’Learn with Grey Sky Films in April. 

The faster Internet speeds available to today have fueled the explosion of new ways of using video.

As many of you are returning to business as usual we would strongly recommend a quick but thorough check of your internal IT systems.  In particular, we recommend: 

Hurricane Sandy from Space

Verifying your backups are working properly by doing an actual restore
Reviewing your server error logs, especially the Windows System log and the hardware manufacturer logs, for any potential hardware problems that may be lurking as a result of inconsistent power or hard server shutdowns
Testing your power strips and UPS units to ensure that they are still able to protect your computer equipment through future power events.

I'm always looking for ways to use my software, especially Outlook, more effectively.  Here's a few of my favorites:

Outlook Tip #1: Was an important message sent to the Junk E-mail folder? If an item gets moved to your Junk E-mail folder by mistake, select the message, and then press CTRL+ ALT+J.

Outlook Tip #2: Keep track of messages that require action.

Do you Google all the time like we do? Don't like clicking the Next button to see the next 10 results?  You can bypass this limit by using Google's advanced search feature and increasing the number of results per page (choose between 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100 results per page).

Cut your search time in half!

Fair warning:  If you clear your browser cache, it will reset to the default 10 results per page.