Productivity - Part 16

Time is of the essence, especially for small- or medium-sized businesses. To keep up with your competitors, spending most of your day rummaging through your inbox won’t help. Use these Gmail tips and tricks and spend less time in front of the monitor and more time enhancing your bottom line.

The post Have you used these 6 Gmail tips yet? appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

25 Jul, 2017 / by Complete Technology Resources / in Productivity, Tips category

Time is of the essence, especially for small- or medium-sized businesses. To keep up with your competitors, spending most of your day rummaging through your inbox won’t help. Use these Gmail tips and tricks and spend less time in front of the monitor and more time enhancing your bottom line.

Undo Send
We've all had an email or two we wish we could take back. Gmail has a neat feature that gives you a short period of time to recall a mistakenly sent message. After activating Undo Send, quickly retrieve the email and it's as if nothing ever happened.

Canned Responses
Dubbed as ‘email for the truly lazy,’ Canned Responses is a Gmail Labs feature that allows you to save time and reuse an email that you designate as a Canned Response. Working like an email template, it saves copious amounts of time since you won’t have to retype the same responses over and over again. It comes in handy for businesses that send plenty of routine emails.

Send large attachments with Google Drive
With Gmail, users can easily send attachments reaching 25 MB. But say you have a huge zip file for a photo shoot that the clients want to review -- you’re going to need more space. If you use Google Drive with your Google account, you can send larger files on Gmail. Copy the large file to your Google Drive, then click Compose in Gmail and type your message. When you’re ready to attach the large file, click the Google Drive icon (next to the Attachment icon that looks like a paper clip). Insert the files you want to attach and send your message.

Turn on Priority Inbox
As hinted in the name, Priority Inbox will organize your messages by their importance. You’ll be able to divide your inbox into five sections, where the messages will be displayed in the following order: 1. important and unread messages, 2. starred messages, 3. [customizable section], 4. [customizable section], 5. everything else. To enable it, go to Settings > Inbox > Inbox Type and choose Priority Inbox.

Back up your messages
If you ever need to back up or migrate your Gmail messages, Gmvault can help. It is an open source solution that can back up your entire Gmail directory or just a handful of messages. The email data is then available whenever you need to restore or recreate your Gmail folders. You can also use it to migrate messages from one account to another.

Gmail Labs
To get the latest Gmail features, you should sign up for Gmail Labs. This is where Google tests up-and-coming features before making them part of Gmail. Access Gmail Labs by heading over to Settings.

Spending the right amount of time with emails while managing other crucial business areas is a balancing act many business owners find difficult. If you have questions or need further assistance regarding Gmail or IT in general, feel free to contact us.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. Source.

The post Have you used these 6 Gmail tips yet? appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

Microsoft’s MyAnalytics was designed for employees to monitor their individual performance. An updated version, Workplace Analytics, is a significant upgrade because it can be accessed by managers. It not only provides managers with insight into an individual employee’s performance, but it also helps them plan and create strategies around increasing productivity and improving employee output and engagement.

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18 Jul, 2017 / by Complete Technology Resources / in Office, Office 365, Productivity category

Workplace Analytics measures productivity

Microsoft’s MyAnalytics was designed for employees to monitor their individual performance. An updated version, Workplace Analytics, is a significant upgrade because it can be accessed by managers. It not only provides managers with insight into an individual employee’s performance, but it also helps them plan and create strategies around increasing productivity and improving employee output and engagement.

How it works

Now available as an add-on to Office 365 enterprise plans, Workplace Analytics extracts behavioral insights from data gathered from Office 365 email, calendar, documents, and Skype. This means that any data an employee types into their email and calendar -- whether it’s on the subject line or the main content itself -- can be used to indicate their productivity status.

The program has an overview dashboard that provides specific information:

Week in the Life provides an overall view of how the entire organization spends time and how members collaborate
Meetings shows the amount of time spent in meetings
Management and Coaching gauges staff-manager one-on-one meetings
Network and Collaboration takes a look at how employees connect to colleagues

What does it aim to do?

Workplace Analytics aims to address what, according to Microsoft, are businesses’ most common challenges: complexity, productivity, and engagement.

Using Analytics data, managers and human resources departments can form productivity strategies for the entire company. If, based on Workplace Analytics data, a majority of your employees are spending 60% of their time attending meetings and not enough time doing creative work, they can come up with a strategy that reduces meeting time and focuses more on productive tasks.

It also identifies how employees collaborate with internal and external parties. Suppose one of your sales staff frequently communicates with certain contacts. By using Workplace Analytics data, the employee’s manager would be able to determine whether this particular collaboration pattern is helping the employee hit sales targets or whether he or she is missing out on other more critical contacts. Also, based on this info, managers would be able to determine which employees are most likely to meet or exceed their targets and set company-wide standards accordingly.

Data gathered by Workplace Analytics also allows managers to determine an employee’s level of engagement (i.e., whether the organization’s collaboration patterns are good for the company) and whether workloads are fairly distributed among workers and/or departments.

Is it useful for small businesses?

Large corporations have been using Workplace Analytics, but small businesses can also benefit from it. For one, the data used to provide the insights are all based on data generated by employees themselves -- how much time they spend on meetings, whom they frequently communicate with, and how much time they spend on productive tasks.

Aside from letting managers examine their staff’s working behavior, Workplace Analytics also provides an overall look into what happens at an organizational level. If you want your organization to harness the capabilities of Workplace Analytics and other Office 365 tools, give us a call today.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. Source.

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Office 365 receives dozens of changes every month, which explains why some get overlooked. While Office 365 Planner or Microsoft Teams are great tools for maximizing productivity, there are hidden functions and tricks you can use to make life a bit easier for yourself.

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14 Jun, 2017 / by Complete Technology Resources / in Office, Office 365, Productivity, Tips category

Office 365 tips to make your life easier

Office 365 receives dozens of changes every month, which explains why some get overlooked. While Office 365 Planner or Microsoft Teams are great tools for maximizing productivity, there are hidden functions and tricks you can use to make life a bit easier for yourself. Check out our six tips to improve your user experience with Office 365 below.

Declutter your inbox
If you’re having trouble managing the overwhelming amount of emails in your inbox, then using Office 365’s “Clutter” feature can clear up some space. To enable this feature go to Settings > Options > Mail > Automatic processing > Clutter then select Separate items identified as Clutter. Once activated, you need to mark any unwanted messages as “clutter” to teach Office 365. After learning your email preferences, Office 365 will automatically move low-priority messages into your “Clutter” folder, helping you focus on more important emails.

Ignore group emails
Are you copied on a long email thread you don’t want to be part of? If so, simply go to the message and find the Ignore setting. Doing this will automatically move future reply-alls to the trash so they never bother you again. Of course, if you ever changed your mind, you could un-ignore the message: Just find the email in your trash folder and click Stop ignoring.

Unsend emails
In case you sent a message to the wrong recipient or attached the wrong file, Office 365 has a message recall function. To use this, open your sent message, click Actions, and select Recall this message. From here, you can either “Delete unread copies of this message” or “Delete unread copies and replace with a new message.” Bear in mind that this applies only to unread messages and for Outlook users within the same company domain.

Work offline
Whenever you’re working outside the office or in an area with unstable internet, it’s a good idea to enable Offline Access. Found under the Settings menu, this feature allows you to continue working on documents offline and syncs any changes made when you have an internet connection. Offline access is also available in your SharePoint Online document libraries.

Use Outlook plugins
Aside from sending and receiving emails, Outlook also has some awesome third-party plugins. Some of our favorite integrations include PayPal, which allows you to send money securely via email; and Uber, which lets you set up an Uber ride reminder for any calendar event. Find more of productivity-boosting plugins in the Office Store.

Tell Office applications what to do
If you’re not a fan of sifting through menus and options, you can always take advantage of the Tell Me function in your Office 2016 apps. When you press Alt + Q, you bring up a search bar that allows you to look for the functions you need. Suppose you need to put a wall of text into columns on Word but can’t find where it is specifically. Just type ‘column’ and Microsoft will help you with the rest.

These tricks and features themselves will definitely increase productivity. And fortunately, there’s, there’s more coming. Microsoft continues to expand Office 365’s capabilities, and if you truly want to make the most out of the software, don’t be afraid to explore its newly released features.

For more Office 365 tips and updates, get in touch with us today.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. Source.

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Formerly known as Springboard, Google Cloud Search is the newest tool available to business customers that allow users to search across G Suite products such as Drive, Gmail, Sites, Calendar, Docs, Contacts and more. It’s been described as something like Google Now exclusively for enterprise workers.

The post Why G Suite users should use Cloud Search appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

01 Mar, 2017 / by Complete Technology Resources / in Productivity category

Why G Suite users should use Cloud Search

Formerly known as Springboard, Google Cloud Search is the newest tool available to business customers that allow users to search across G Suite products such as Drive, Gmail, Sites, Calendar, Docs, Contacts and more. It’s been described as something like Google Now exclusively for enterprise workers.

Google Cloud Search is designed for larger corporations where different groups and individuals have access to different files. This search engine respects file-sharing permissions, so users can only access what’s available to them, whether that’s company-wide resources such as a policy manual, team projects or documents only they are able to see.

On top of retrieving work documents, Cloud Search also acts as a directory service that allows users to look for their colleagues’ contact information, while simultaneously viewing the events and files they have in common. When viewing a contact’s information in the search results, users will be able to click and start an email, phone call, or a Hangout.

Much like Google Now, Google Cloud Search utilizes a card-style design that presents information to you, whether you’re accessing the search service through your phone or laptop. Google Search also takes advantage of machine intelligence to highlight information it thinks you need to know. In these “assistant cards”, Google Cloud Search will reveal recently accessed files, meeting reminders, notes and more.

Adding machine intelligence to enhance its productivity tools has been Google’s recent focus; this goes hand in hand with the G Suite rebranding. In fact, the company announced a number of machine-powered features such as “Quick Access” in Drive that predicts which file you need before you even begin typing. According to Google, this reduces up to 50 percent off the average time to locate the right file.

The goal of this predictive search service via Google Cloud Search is to offer a productivity boost for G Suite users. Google notes in this blog post announcing Cloud Search, that workers spend 20 percent of their week searching for and consolidating information; the new service aims to reduce that figure. Google Cloud Search is now rolling out to new customers using G Suite Business and Enterprise editions, Google plans on introducing more features and will integrate with third-party applications.

By knowing how to leverage the latest technologies to your advantage, not only will you get a leg up on the competition, you’ll also streamline work processes and drive greater revenue. For further questions or more information, feel free to give us a call or send us an email anytime!

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. Source.

The post Why G Suite users should use Cloud Search appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

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