Are you inadvertently sharing information with your competitors, coworkers, or colleges that you may not knowingly wish to share?
An attorney client of mine forwarded me an article today from a legal publication about attorneys that inadvertently share “meta data” with the opposing party.
For example, if you use the markup and editing features of Microsoft Word frequently you need to pay close attention to this.
Let’s say you finished making revisions to a document and accepting changes that were made by one of your peers and now your ready to send the document. If you send the final copy in Word format you risk the chance of sharing “meta data” inadvertently. In other words, its possible that the person you are sharing with could see all of the markups, notes, and editing history.
This could be potentially dangerous, embarrassing and costly if done unintentionally. The best practice is to print the document to pdf and then distribute the pdf electronically. PDF readers are widely distributed and most pdf printers allow you to add a password to restrict what can or can’t be done with the document.
Now if your intention is collaboration, then you ought to review the “meta data” in the word document and be sure that it does not contain anything that you wish to keep confidential.
This mostly comes down to training your employees and keeping your companies policies up to date. This is especially critical for small businesses.
We live in the information age. Staying up to date on best practices and understanding how to take full advantage of the technology you have at your fingertips can be a competitive advantage. Not keeping up to date can be costly.
Q: As a small business owner, how often should I upgrade my server?
A: Great question. It really depends on your business goals. As a rule of thumb I tell clients to plan on changing out thier computers every three years. That includes servers.
Server requirements change fairly rapidly. To keep up in a changing marketplace and improve the productivity of your employees it is important to invest in technology. Just think. If you have 30 employee’s and your new server add’s an extra 30 minutes of productive time. That is an extra 15 hours a day… Almost like having two additional employees at a cost that is far less than hiring someone.
For more information on how we can help you with your server upgrades visit our main site at http://www.ccnsteam.com
Setting up your linksys wireless router is pretty straight forward. I don’t anticipate you having any problems.
Even if you are pretty ‘green’ when it comes to technology.
I’ve included this video to make it easy for you to follow along. Before you do anything though… I strongly urge you to use the CD that came with your router. It will make life much easier if you follow the step-by-step instructions that are on the CD.
1. Unpack your wireless router and make sure you have a router, two ethernet cables (one yellow and one blue), a usb cable and a power cable.
2. Determine weather you are going to install the router all wireless, wireless with ethernet or wireless with USB.
In most cases you will probably install the router wireless with ethernet but if you have all wireless computers it would probably be easier to install just wireless.
3. Assuming you are intalling just wireless… plug the router in and turn on your computer.
4. In windows vista and xp look at the bottom right hand corner of your computer (after its booted) in the system tray. You will see a wireless or network connection icon there. Double click on the wireless icon and select ‘linksys’ from the list of possible network connections. Double click on it to join the network.
That’s all you need to do right out of the box. Now for more details watch the video.
-Nathan
Here is a video I created to help you setup your linksys wireless router. This is useful if you have some device or program on your network that needs to access the internet directly. Like your Xbox.
