As a small business owner, no one understands or cares more about the success of your company than you. That’s why having a backup and business continuity plan in place should be a priority, not just because it’s best practice but because it’s good for your bottom line as well. In a recent blog titled Data Backups: The Cost of Doing Business, we discuss the importance of data security and the financial burden of not having data backups in place.

Microsoft Office 2016 was released at the end of 2015 which has given us some time to really digest some of the new features and changes. At first glance Office 2016 doesn’t appear to be a great departure from Office 2013, but there are certainly a number of nice new features that could make for a compelling reason to upgrade.

Yes, that’s right. Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana, is now integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. If you’re using Windows 10 on your PC or mobile device and your organization is set up with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, it’s easy to set up and get started.

If you’re a Mac user, there may be times when you need to connect to your company’s Windows server to access files or folders. You can do this easily even if your Mac isn’t joined to a Windows domain.

Here at Beringer Associates, data security is of the utmost importance.  Ask any member of our team and you’ll find everyone is constantly backing up their data and creating effective redundancy throughout the day.  Any expert in the field will tell you that keeping current data backups is important, but have you ever sat down and wondered why?

There’s no one size fits all for the definition of the word HACKER.  Everyone hacks for a different reason.  In the case of LinkedIn the professional  social network company is finding out a breach of the network that happened in 2012 has fueled Hackers to sell 117 million login passwords on the black market.  But wait, why would this have any real big consequence?

So which is better, the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 or the Apple iPad Pro? For most users it really boils down to usability and price so lets take a look at both.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows users to capture their daily activities in an number of different ways. The product natively offers a handful of activities like emails, phone calls, appointments and tasks, but it also allows you to define and create your own custom activities. Working with these activities in the CRM user interface is very intuitive, but importing the data through the API comes with some challenges, especially when creating the CRM activity parties.

Does your company have invaluable data across multifarious applications, but isn’t using it to its full potential?  What if you could capture metrics of that data within visualizations in one central location to ascertain your company’s performance?   As I pointed out in a previous blog, Microsoft’s Power BI offers an attractive feature for creating dashboards with interactive visualizations from multiple data sources.

When using SQL Server, proper setup of the Database, Log Files, Memory and Disk I/O play a key part in the overall SQL Server performance. The same rings true when running SQL Server in the cloud, whether it be Azure, AWS or other. What complicates things is the myriad of choices you have for the underlying virtual infrastructure in the cloud.