Macro Systems Blog

“I just wanted to take a second to thank the sponsor of this video, [insert VPN provider here], for supporting the channel!”

If you’ve been on YouTube in the past few years, this message likely sounds pretty familiar. Virtual private network providers have been taking advantage of the trend of influencer marketing to spread awareness of their largely obscure product, usually offering an enticing deal. While we have and will continue to promote the use of a VPN for business purposes, we wanted to clarify something here: these are not the VPNs we’re saying you should use.

When your technology gets older it has a tendency to become less effective. This can be a major roadblock to organizational productivity and have devastating effects on your business. These include major downtime events and overwhelming inefficiency. Listed below is a look at some ways that you know that it’s time to focus on reinvestment. 

Google continues to build its Workspace platform up with new and innovative tools that can help businesses be more successful and efficient. One such tool is a new solution being offered to select businesses using work or school platforms of Google Workspace: custom building blocks.

Every year we take a look at the most interesting new smartphones that are being released. Over the past few years, fewer companies are making smartphones and throughout the whole industry, innovation has seemed to slow. Whether this is a result of rigid market dynamics, supply shortages, or the extraordinary costs it takes to manufacture and source components, it has taken some of the largest technology companies in the world, such as Amazon, LG, and HTC, out of the market and presented limited opportunities for other global technology leaders such as Microsoft, Sony, and Nokia. 

Have you ever been so mad at your crummy printer that you referred to it as a piece of excrement? Well, it turns out that printers and toilets have more in common than you may have thought.

2018 included many rumors regarding foldable screens on mobile devices, but no manufacturer has created an OLED display flexible enough to fold in half… until now. In fact, there are numerous manufacturers out there that have committed themselves to producing foldable screens and devices in 2019.

Sustainability is a hot topic these days, from how we conduct ourselves in our personal lives to how businesses go about their respective business. If this is something that you want to promote in your business, we figured that the day before Earth Day was as good a day as any to share some of the ways you can do so.

The increase in wearable technology that you see coming into your business has significantly increased over the past couple of years. People are doing a better job of tracking their health and using wearable technology to improve their work lives. This creates a problem for the business because every single device brought onto a network is a potential threat and threats have to be managed. Listed below is a look at how people are using wearable technology and what you can do in response to this trend. 

Data backup is a must-have for every business, but it isn’t enough to just copy your data; you need to have a data recovery strategy in place to ensure that your business can effectively respond after a data loss incident. Listed below is a look at why considering your recovery strategy early is imperative, and how to prioritize it with everything else going on with your business.

The keyboard that you're using to access this blog is, in a word, gross. While we aren’t going to go into too much detail about what makes keyboards so grimy, we did want to outline how you can easily clean up your keyboard every so often, just to make sure that it’s A: more hygienic, and B: less likely to malfunction at some point.

Most of today's organizations have digitized their businesses to at least some degree without really putting much effort or thought into it. This massive and often unconscious change has created a lot of benefits for businesses with perhaps one of the most overlooked being document digitization. Listed below are the great benefits that come from this initiative and why your business should consider it.

The business telephone solution: you know you need it, but you dislike working with your current telephone provider for a number of reasons. You know you can get a better deal if you look around, but we bet that the best deal around is a hosted Voice over Internet Protocol solution from Macro Systems. How can our VoIP solution save your organization time, energy, and resources?

AI has been a popular topic in recent months and years, which only makes sense. Not only has it been used in more public applications, but it has also caused controversy as it seems to “compete” with people. Back in September, art made by using an artificially intelligent platform caused a stir by winning an art competition, and workplace fears of a computer taking one’s job have seemingly become more well-founded than ever.

For many years now, there’s been a bit of a fear of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace, all while it has been put into practical use more and more often in many businesses. This all ties back to the work of Alan Turing, who, amongst his accomplishments in computing, created the Turing Test as a means of gauging how intelligent a computer is. 

Many jokes have been made in the IT world about the perfect place to hide something being page two of Google; just hang out with some IT professionals, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear it. Alas, Google is making a change to its search results that will make this joke irrelevant.

There’s no denying that at the moment the economic forecast is a bit bleak, with murmurings of a recession growing louder by the day. As this situation develops, many organizations are likely seeking out opportunities to trim the fat. However, despite this, we anticipate that artificial intelligence will actually see a bit of an uptick. 

For the average business, the database plays a large role. How large of a role? Your business won’t function the way you want it to function without it. In order to manage your databases correctly, you need a solid database management system (DBMS). Listed below is a discussion about the DBMS and how it works to assist your business computing.

Every piece of technology we regularly use these days was once earth-shakingly innovative, regardless of how mundane and common it seems now. Think about it: people once had endless questions about the Internet, about computers…even about electricity. Listed below are some modern innovations that we have many questions about now, but may someday be just as much of a given as the other tools we so commonly use today.

In what seems to be the final stage of a plan that Microsoft has been moving towards for years, Microsoft Office will apparently be phased fully into the Microsoft 365 brand. Consider what we know so far about this change.

Artificially-intelligent image generation has become a hot topic lately. Not too long ago, an artist created a stir for winning a competition with an image that he largely created using an artificially-intelligent tool. Now, Microsoft has announced that similar AI-powered image generation tools will be integrated into many of their applications.