If you aren’t actively using social media for your yourself, you need to at least make sure you’ve secured it for your business. Find out visiting our blog.
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Continue readingHave You Adopted Messaging in Your Business Processes?
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Continue readingTech Terminology: PDF
While the world is still effectively split between PCs and Macs, we have at least one file format that bridges the divide: the PDF. This file format became standard in business communications,and is now used the world over.
Today, we’ll dive into the history of the Portable Document Format and why it is so well-suited to business processes.
The Creation of PDFs
Think about what a PDF is best known for: the capability to share information as it was created, period. The document looks and acts the same whether still digital or if printed, regardless of a user’s operating system.
Before the PDF was created, sharing information between two different operating systems was as difficult as… well, as doing anything else between different operating systems is today.
Over at Adobe Systems in 1990, co-founder John Warnock drafted a paper titled The Camelot Project, describing how limited prospects were when it came to digitally sharing information. Warnock would go on to assemble Team Camelot,the group that ultimately created the PDF to be what it was imagined to be – a universally-compatible document sharing platform.
However, the Portable Document Format initially wasn’t nearly as popular as it is today.
For one thing, it initially required the purchase of Adobe Acrobat in order to be utilized, and the long download times of the early Internet certainly didn’t help matters. However, Team Camelot continued to add functionality as the Internet grew in popularity, and the format was eventually adopted by the International Organization for Standardization and made an open standard format.
PDFs, and Their Advantages Today
Now, there are essentially three different kinds of PDFs, each with their own capabilities and limitations. This all depends on the makeup of the PDF and whether or not it has a ‘text’ layer under the ‘image’ layer.
Scanned PDFs – Scanned PDFs are effectively a photograph of a document, saved onto the computer as an image. As such, they are not natively searchable or editable, although certain programs can be added to them to change this.
Digitally Created PDFs – These PDFs are those that are created in the computer, with all components still able to be altered. This includes the images displayed upon the PDF.
Searchable PDFs – Remember how we mentioned that scanned PDFs can be made to be searchable or editable? That’s thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the fact that this process adds an editable text layer to the image layer. This enables greater interaction with these PDFs. Many document scanners come with software to convert a scanned document into a searchable PDF, and is the core foundation of a paperless office.
There are also numerous advantages to leveraging a PDF for your business purposes. Not only are they convenient to use and universally compatible, additional security can be set up to protect these documents and their contents.
Did you ever think that simple PDFs had such an involved history? Share your thoughts in the comments!
How to Select a Phone Solution (and How to Properly Use It)
Considering how long we’ve had access to the basic technology, telephones (and proper telephone etiquette while using them) haven’t changed all that much on the surface. What has changed is how the technology fundamentally works, and the options that are available for businesses.
Here, we’ll go over some of the options today’s businesses have.
Selecting the Type of Phone to Use
While many may be tempted to eschew the incorporation of telephony in their business, this temptation should be resisted. After all, most businesses still rely on a phone for communication purposes, so any business that doesn’t have one is cutting off a valuable source of client communications. This also makes the decision of what kind of phone to utilize an extremely important one.
There are a variety of options that a business has when selecting a phone to use, each with its own pros and cons. Admittedly, some of these options have slowly had their benefits phased out by current trends and through the introduction (and improvement) of these benefits by other approaches.
Landline
This is the phone system that, until relatively recently, was the option for anyone who wished to use the telephone. Utilizing the connections provided by the telephone company, a company would need to host PBX (or private branch exchange) hardware on their premises. A PBX system would allow for the creation of the company’s needed extensions as well as the incorporation of many of the business’ necessary telephone functions, including directories and call transferring.
While there is a high comfort level with these solutions, many service providers are gradually abandoning landlines, and the Internet access speeds that many companies require have allowed them to explore other options more easily.
Virtual Phone
Virtual phone systems can often be the middle ground between traditional telephony and a VoIP solution. With incoming calls potentially processed through traditional telephony and forwarded to employees through VoIP solutions, the features of this kind of system can give a business that relies heavily on its remote employees a means of unifying their communications, as well as some advanced features bundled in.
VoIP
A VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system is one that eliminates the need for traditional telephony entirely. Instead, VoIP utilizes the Internet connection that your business already needs for the rest of its tasks, or can be leveraged as an app on a smartphone. In addition, most VoIP solutions include the same enhanced features that a business would need, for a much more affordable cost. These can be leveraged in two ways, though an on-premise system, or through a cloud-based service. Each approach has its own pros and cons.
An in-house system will initially cost your business a tidy expense, as the equipment needed to host the system itself is not cheap. Furthermore, you will need to pay a monthly fee for the necessary components that allow you to make calls. Any maintenance or upgrades will fall to your staff, and will require some skill.
However, this also means that you are in complete and total control of your business telephony.
Utilizing a cloud-hosted system will mean that everything is handled for you – you may not need to buy hardware, and you don’t have any maintenance to worry about. This also means that if your phone system goes down, your provider is the only one who can do anything about it. You’re also susceptible to Internet outages, as that is what allows the system to function.
Despite all this, VoIP is a very reliable solution (especially with a good service level agreement), with little that you have to worry about besides the monthly bill.
At WheelHouse IT, we have the expertise to recommend and implement the right phone system for you. Call (877) 771-2384 for more information.