Practical IT advice for small businesses — problems our team has fixed, explained plainly.
Onboarding a new client starts with a question, not a technical task: what do you have? Which computers, which logins, which vendor accounts, who has admin rights to what. More often than our team would like, no one has an answer. Not because the business is careless — because their previous IT company never handed … Read more
The warning pops up in the middle of saving a document: “This PC is running low on storage space.” No explanation of what’s taking up room, and now you have a decision to make that doesn’t have an easy answer. Pay for more online storage, another recurring bill for as long as you keep the … Read more
Someone on your team works from home two days a week, connects to the office VPN, and never thinks twice about it. Same setup for years — log in, green padlock, done. And it’s exactly the kind of setup attackers have been going after hardest. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security keeps putting out the … Read more
A renewal notice comes with a new line item: cyber liability coverage. A few hundred dollars a year, easy to discount — the same instinct you’d use on an extended warranty upsell at checkout. A fee that mostly pays for someone else’s peace of mind, not yours. Good instinct. But wrong. Before writing off the … Read more
An employee leaves. Their account is disabled the same week — routine offboarding practice. Eight months later, someone needs a contract that person negotiated, or an email thread that explains why a project went off the rails. And they go looking. The mailbox is gone. The OneDrive folder is gone. Nothing was deleted on purpose … Read more
A customer call started with a hardware quote. “It seems our server’s at end of life. I’ve got a quote on my desk for two new ones — hardware, licences, data migration, it’s more than ten thousand dollars. Can you take a look before I sign it?” This is a twelve-person professional office. There’s an … Read more
You’re working on an email reply when your screen goes blank. “Microsoft Outlook is not responding.” You wait, the screen comes back, and you keep working on your emails. Twenty minutes later, the same thing happens again. The third time it happens, you compose your emails using a two-step process: write the draft and save … Read more
Picture a Tuesday morning in a well-run office. The inbox is full, the phone is ringing, and somewhere in that pile of email is a message that looks like it’s from a supplier the business uses — same logo, familiar name, invoice attached. The person who opens it isn’t careless. She’s busy. She processes forty … Read more
Every office has one. The computer that takes ten minutes to be usable in the morning, so its owner turns it on and goes to make coffee. The one where everyone knows you don’t open the big spreadsheet and Teams at the same time. Nobody replaces it, because it still works — and spending money … Read more
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