Blue Ridge Technology

Can your business go green by switching to the cloud? While it isn’t a universal solution that makes sense in every single situation, switching to the cloud can deliver all sorts of benefits to many businesses. But what about its effect on your carbon footprint? Does a cloud migration help you go green, or does it just shift the ecological burden around? If you’re concerned about your environmental impact and are looking at your network and IT environment in that light, here’s what you need to know about the cloud. The Cloud and the Environment If you’re running everything in-house, you can probably get a read on how much your servers and so on are costing you. You can measure the electricity, and that’s a pretty good start. Yes, there are other environmental considerations, like how the hardware you’re using was made, but we’ll set those aside for a moment. Sometimes there’s this idea that moving to the cloud makes those impacts go away. The short answer: that’s not how this works. Mo...

Three new Teams features to look forward to We love Microsoft Teams here at Blue Ridge Technology. In fact, we think it’s one of the smartest new products Microsoft has introduced in years. This powerful collaboration app offers the kind of instant, lightweight team-based communication businesses love from Slack, combined with reliable videoconferencing of Zoom or Skype. But under the hood, Teams goes far deeper than Slack or Zoom ever could. Microsoft’s app just has so much to offer — and its full integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 office and productivity suite is a game changer for businesses already using 365. We aren’t the only ones that love Teams: the app now enjoys over 270 million users every single month. And Microsoft keeps innovating, regularly adding new features to Teams. This week, we’re sharing three upcoming features coming soon to your Teams environment so you’ll be ready to take full advantage when the updates hit. #1: Automatic SharePoint Updates The firs...

Three clever tricks to get more out of Teams Microsoft Teams is an impressively powerful productivity and collaboration app that’s included with every Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plan. We love the countless ways Teams is helping our customers work smarter and collaborate more naturally — whether their employees are on-site, remote, hybrid, or a mix of all three. Any app with a feature set as deep as Teams will have a bit of a learning curve. Users can easily get started with the basics without much guidance, but there are all sorts of hidden or less obvious tricks, shortcuts, and add-ons that can transform Teams into something even more powerful. Looking to get more out of Teams? Here are 3 great tricks you might not have heard of before. 1. Boost Your Own Messages with Mark as Important It’s great that businesses today have so many mechanisms for collaboration. But sometimes this proliferation can lead to notification overload. With chats and messages ringing in across multiple Teams...

SharePoint is one of the many apps included in Microsoft 365, and it’s one of the most powerful and complex apps in the suite. But many organizations don’t use it to its fullest. In fact, many individual users don’t even know what it is, or if they do, they don’t have a solid understanding of what it can do. We think it’s time to change that! Find out what this powerful app can do for your business in this quick explainer. What Is SharePoint, Anyway? Depending on where you look, Microsoft defines SharePoint in a few different ways. In one , it calls SharePoint “a cloud-based service that helps organizations share and manage content, knowledge and applications.” In another , Microsoft gets more to the point: “Organizations use Microsoft SharePoint to create websites.” In short, Microsoft SharePoint is an app designed to create internal intranet pages for your business. These pages can be just about as simple or as complex as you desire, as barebones or as graphically rich as you have re...