The biggest misconception about getting a technology upgrade in your business is the fact that it’s not always the actual hardware that requires upgrading.

In this article, we will outline some of the easily missed opportunities when reviewing your business technology.  As well as how it “plugs in” to your day to day tasks.

First off, we have to give a special mention to Windows 7, Microsoft Server 2008. January 2020 sees the end of support of both these operating systems.

What does this mean for your business?  Insecurity.  Microsoft will no longer be releasing security updates to either of these operating systems.

If you have this software running in any part of your business, it’s time to upgrade today.

Microsoft Office 365 is now an evergreen product.  This means that it’s constantly being updated. upgrade

There comes a whole suite of business productivity apps and tools.  Noteworthy mentions over the last 24 months include:

• Microsoft Teams

We have covered this extensively in the past.  This app is still going to be a hot trend in 2020.

• Microsoft Planner

Another app included in Office 365.  This is a scaled-down version of Microsoft Project.  You can easily create tasks lists, assign tasks to colleagues and process flows.  Best of all, you can integrate this seamlessly into Microsoft Teams.  Perfect for collaboration.

If you ever hear the words being muttered “my computer is slow” then I have to give a special mention to solid-state drives.  These have become popular in the last 5 years.  However, there are still workstations that do not include these devices as standard.

Swapping out a standard computer hard disc drive for an SSD is probably the biggest performance boost you’ll see from a hardware perspective.

That 5-10-minute boot of Windows gets reduced to seconds.  Do the math.  Over 10 workstations and you can save over a day of lost work a month by upgrading the entire fleet to SSD’s.

Do you have manual laborious tasks in your business?  An audit of your processes is probably going to highlight a handful of processes that are manually done which could quite easily be automated with the right technology.

There are many examples of business automation.  Office 365 now comes with an automation platform.  Formerly called Microsoft Flow, the new name is “Power Automate“.

This service allows drag and drop automation approach.  Meaning, the skill requirement for automating basic functions is no longer limited to computer programmers.

If you would like information on any of the IT upgrades mentioned in this article, please get in touch with us today. 

Please email info@connectservice.com.au or call 1300 766 455.