SMART Blog

Smart Services has been providing independent agents with proactive, fast, and expert technology services since 1991.

Tip of the Week: How to Work with PDFs

Tip of the Week: How to Work with PDFs

One of the most common file types you hear about is the Portable Document Format file - although you probably know it simply as a PDF. PDFs are so well known because they are the best way to save a document so that, regardless of the device it is viewed on, the file will always appear the same. Did you know that you can do more than just look at a PDF? Here, we’re providing some tips on how you can make your PDFs work for you.

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Tip of the Week: Keeping Track of Your Own IT Isn’t Easy

Tip of the Week: Keeping Track of Your Own IT Isn’t Easy

Quick - when was the last time your routers were updated? Not sure? How about your servers, or every other piece of technology in your office?

The truth is, maintaining a business’ IT requires more than just running a virus scan every once and a while, or updating a mission-critical program on each workstation. It requires an in-depth understanding of each component and its history, assisted by the use of specialized tools and extensive record-keeping.

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Tip of the Week: 3 Considerations When Securing Personal Information

Tip of the Week: 3 Considerations When Securing Personal Information

Personal information is precious, especially in this increasingly digital day and age. This makes it incredibly important that you are doing everything you can to protect it in your business - whether it is your own or belongs to somebody else. Here, we’ll go over a few tips to help you better protect the data you’re responsible for.

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Tip of the Week: Restoring Your Android Applications

Tip of the Week: Restoring Your Android Applications

While there aren’t many reasons that you would want to restore your existing Android applications, the ones that do factor in are pretty compelling. Here, we’ll take you through the process of doing just that.

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Tip of the Week: Turn It Off and Turn It On, Again

Tip of the Week: Turn It Off and Turn It On, Again

The people that support a business’ information systems are widely renowned as a bunch of nerds sitting in a basement office waiting for someone that matters calls them upstairs. Now, we think this characterization is unfair (of course), but since our jobs are so technical, it can be hard to relate with clients all the time. Fortunately for us, the most useful tool we have in our repertoire is excruciatingly simple. To fix your computer problem, have you tried turning it off, and turning it back on? 

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Tip of the Week: 3 Leading Causes of Slow Internet

Tip of the Week: 3 Leading Causes of Slow Internet

Slow Internet may be a nuisance in any case, but it has a particularly negative impact on the workplace. Technology should improve your operational efficiency, but if your solutions depend on a connection to the Internet, any issue there can effectively bring your productivity to a halt. In light of this, we wanted to go over a few of the most common issues that might be slowing down your connection, and perhaps tip you off to the problem.

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Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts Using the Windows Key

Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts Using the Windows Key

Keyboard shortcuts have long been used to move things along faster. In 1994, just about the time that Windows 95 was released, Microsoft produced the new keyboard layout that incorporated the brand-pnew Windows key (or Win Key). When pressed, the Windows Key would immediately open the start menu, which debuted in the software.

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Tip of the Week: Avoid These Types of Android Apps

Tip of the Week: Avoid These Types of Android Apps

The Google Play Store has a massive selection of applications available for users to download. Unfortunately, just because they’re available to be downloaded, doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be downloaded. In fact, many of these apps should be avoided. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a few categories of application that you shouldn’t download in the first place.

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Get More Done on Your Smartphone with these Tips

Get More Done on Your Smartphone with these Tips

The modern smartphone has a lot of computing power. It has enough to be a dynamic tool for today’s workers. It can also be a major distraction. Today, we are going to share a couple tips that will help you be more productive with your smartphone. 

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Tip of the Week: Customizing Google Docs’ Dictionary

Tip of the Week: Customizing Google Docs’ Dictionary

Google may know a lot, but believe it or not, it doesn’t know everything. For instance, you may be trying to write up a document in Google Docs that Google doesn’t recognize. Maybe it’s one of your services that you’ve created a name for, or even the name of your business. The problem is that Google likes changing words it deems “wrong”. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over how to stop it from changing words you meant to use.

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Tip of the Week: How to Improve Your Access Control

Tip of the Week: How to Improve Your Access Control

There is no denying that a business’ security--notably, its access control--is absolutely crucial to consider. Here, we’re offering a few tips to help you improve your business’ security through improvements to your access controls and their policies.

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Tip of the Week: Work Better From Home

Tip of the Week: Work Better From Home

Thanks to the coronavirus, many office workers are working from home to avoid the spread of the virus. For many, this can feel like a nice change of scenery, while others might have a tinge of additional anxiety from it. Regardless of where you stand, working remotely can be both effective and productive, if done right.

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Taking a Short Look at Windows 10’s Action Center

Taking a Short Look at Windows 10’s Action Center

Windows 10 has been out for almost five years. Now I ask you, have you ever used the Windows 10 Action Center? If the answer is yes, good for you. If the answer is no, it is time to talk about the almost hidden part of Windows 10, and tell you how you can use it to your advantage.

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Tip of the Week: Getting More Mileage Out of PDFs

Tip of the Week: Getting More Mileage Out of PDFs

PDFs--Portable Document Format files--are a common enough thing to see. However, many people may not realize the extent of what can be done with them… like editing them. For our tip this week, we’ll go over a few of the ways you can create and edit a PDF file.

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Tip of the Week: How Cloud Solutions Can Preserve Your Productivity

Tip of the Week: How Cloud Solutions Can Preserve Your Productivity

We spend a lot of time considering cloud solutions, and as a result, we have a very easy time seeing how much they can do to help support your office’s productivity (especially now, when it isn’t really recommended that anyone congregate in the office). That’s why, for this week’s tip, we wanted to go over how you can help even your remote workforce be more productive by using cloud technology.

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Tip of the Week: How to Adapt to a Business Disaster

Tip of the Week: How to Adapt to a Business Disaster

“Stuff” happens. While this may not be the kind of thing you want to consider in terms of your business’ operations, it is something that must be done if you want to be prepared for the moment when all of that “stuff” hits the fan (as so many businesses are now learning firsthand). We wanted to share a few best practices and tips to help you stay positive during this, and other, serious crises.

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Tip of the Week: Monitor Your Hardware While Out of the Office

Tip of the Week: Monitor Your Hardware While Out of the Office

Businesses are just now starting to reopen as stay-at-home orders are lapsing or going to lapse. For many of those businesses, remote solutions have got them through this ordeal and for many others they continue to deploy a remote workforce. For companies still promoting telework, monitoring your local IT environment is something that you need a solution for. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss some of the best practices you can use to monitor your IT while out of the office.

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Tip of the Week: Four Essential Network Management Practices

Tip of the Week: Four Essential Network Management Practices

Businesses depend on their networks to effectively complete the tasks they need to accomplish, making it critically important that the one you rely on is managed properly. Let’s go over a few tips and best practices that can help you ensure that it is.

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Tip of the Week: Three Ways Collaboration Can Be Improved

Tip of the Week: Three Ways Collaboration Can Be Improved

Collaboration is critical for a business’ success, but with more teams than ever split amongst their homes, it is arguably even more crucial to their operations. For this week’s tip, we’re going over three ways that your team can collaborate more effectively while making remote operations work.

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Tip of the Week: Backup’s Value, in Two Scenarios

Tip of the Week: Backup’s Value, in Two Scenarios

Each week, we try to provide some tips to help you out in some way. This time, we want to take a somewhat different approach and instead present you with two potential scenarios that your business could encounter—one with and one without a backup solution in play—and let you see the benefit that our tip this week (protect your business with a backup solution) can present.

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