The phone remains one of the first points of contact businesses have with their customers. That’s why so many companies are upgrading to affordable and hi-tech "VoIP" systems. Voice over IP solutions are a smart investment given their longevity and more.

Office 365 is chock full of so many apps that it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of them all. Sure, you have the most popular tools like Word and Skype for Business, but there are three tools in the lineup that seem like they could be used the same way: Outlook Groups, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams.

How many new technologies did your business adopt last year? Too many? Too few? You’ve officially made it through 2017 and there’s no better time than now to review which IT fads were worth investing in, and which ones should be left in the past.

Gone are the days when you have to spend a large amount of money each month on the telephone bill. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology has made it cheaper -- and in most cases, free -- to place and receive calls. Whether you’re a business owner or an individual user, there is a VoIP option that suits you.

At the Ignite conference in September, Microsoft announced that the Teams app will eventually replace Skype for Business as the primary communication tool for Office 365. This is a huge development, and there are undoubtedly many questions that need answers.

As a convenient cloud solution, Office 365 boasts nearly 30 million users. But that’s nothing compared to licensed versions of Microsoft’s productivity suite, which have more than one billion users. Office 2019 was announced in September and it will mean big changes for businesses that want simpler versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more.

In late August 2017, Hurricane Harvey caused widespread power outages and floods across Texas and certain parts of Louisiana. Weeks later, Hurricane Irma hit the coast, affecting Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina businesses. Now, experts are saying there are more storms to come, which is why you need a good disaster recovery (DR) plan that has you prepared for the worst.

Employees don’t usually prioritize managing files and photos because they can be tedious and time-consuming. Those who have to deal with a high volume of files and photos across different devices often depend on the auto-sync functions of Google Drive or do manual backups on external drives or SD cards.

Preceding its general availability, Microsoft has recently rolled out a major update for Microsoft Teams -- Window’s version of the cloud-based team collaboration tool, Slack. The latest bundle of features will kick things up a notch, allowing you to do more than IM your manager about your weekly meeting or ask your colleagues to remove the “view only” setting on Google Docs.

Migrating your organization’s unified communications (UC) to the cloud seems like a no-brainer: it’s practical, it’s cheap, it’s the future. Big-name companies such as Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Verizon now offer Unified communications as a Service (UCaaS), and it’s only a matter of time before it takes over the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) space.