Practical IT advice for small businesses — problems our team has fixed, explained plainly.
Most businesses set up Microsoft 365, assign licenses to everyone who needs one, and then don’t think about it again. People leave. Roles change. A contractor finishes a project. Someone gets a second license by accident when they get a new computer. The licenses stay, quietly billing every month. This was always a minor annoyance. … Read more
Your internet just went down. Before you call Rogers — or TELUS, or whoever your ISP is — spend five minutes on this checklist. About half the time, the problem is inside your building, not outside it. And if it is inside, the fix usually takes ten minutes, not a two-hour service window. Step 1: … Read more
Here’s a question we ask at every new client engagement: how does your team handle passwords? The most common answer is some version of “everyone does their own thing,” or “they have to be x characters long.” Which usually means: the same password reused across multiple accounts, maybe with a capital letter and a number … Read more
We often get this call. A client phones us and it’s urgent — one of their employees has been working from home for months, and now something isn’t working. Email won’t connect, access to the shared drive is gone, video calls keep dropping. No one has ever looked at the employee’s home setup. It turns … Read more
At some point, most small businesses outgrow whatever they started with for email. Maybe you’re still using your internet provider’s email and you’ve lost messages. Maybe you’re on an old Exchange server that someone set up ten years ago and nobody fully understands anymore. Maybe you’ve had the same Gmail account since the business launched … Read more
The call came in on a Tuesday morning. Bit of a frantic energy to it. “Paul, I think we’ve been hacked. There’s a message on the screen and it won’t go away. It says to call Microsoft.” I asked her to read me exactly what the message said. She read it out. Large red screen, … Read more
Of all the things that make people irrationally furious at technology, printers are the undisputed champions. They work fine for months. Then, the moment you need to print something important — a contract before a client meeting, an invoice, the boarding pass you forgot to save — they decide to stop. No error message. No … Read more
Ransomware used to be something that happened to hospitals and big corporations. Companies with data worth millions. Targets big enough to make the news. That’s not the world we’re in anymore. In 2026, ransomware still disproportionately hits the smallest businesses — Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found ransomware was a factor in 88% of … Read more
Every few months, someone asks me some version of this question. Sometimes it comes from a business owner who just got hit with an unexpected bill — a server failure, a ransomware attack, an emergency repair that cost three times what a monthly IT plan would have. Sometimes it comes from someone who’s been quoted … Read more
Microsoft 365 provides three places to store files and almost no guidance on which to use. The practical rule: OneDrive is your personal work drive for files only you need, SharePoint is the shared filing cabinet for anything the whole team or company needs long-term, and Teams is your active project workspace — which stores its files in SharePoint anyway. This post also covers a 2026 storage change (new OneDrive accounts capped at 150 GB) and explains why Microsoft 365 files are not automatically backed up the way most users assume.