Email is an important and necessary part of your business. It provides an economical and instant means of communicating with staff, customers, and vendors – that’s both simple to use and enables increased efficiency. An email policy is required to protect this necessary business tool.

An email policy is a legal document that details your organization’s definition of acceptable use for the company email system. It should indicate who emails can be received from or sent to, as well as outline what constitutes appropriate content for work emails.

In additional, having a company email policy will:

Protect the Organization from Liabilities: When all employees read and sign an email policy, it proves they are aware and agree to the information contained in that policy. Should an email be sent that is not considered appropriate content according to the email policy, the employee, not the business, would bear the brunt of liability for any damages or suits brought as a result of their sending an inappropriate email.

Promote a Professional Environment: If email is used only in a professional manner in the workplace, you can be sure that embarrassing mistakes will not occur. For example, if staff are using work email to communicate with friends, the content in those emails are likely to be sloppy, unprofessional, and informal. If those emails accidentally get sent to clients or other professionals – the company image may become damaged. If an email policy does not allow for personal use of the work email system, your staff will remain in a professional mindset and eliminate the potential of personal emails going out to customers.

Increase Productivity: Email tends to be a distraction for employees who are using it for non-professional reasons. If an email policy prohibits the use of work email for personal use, your employees will stay on task more and avoid the distractions that come from sending and receiving personal emails during work hours.

Establish Systems for Email: If the email policy outlines appropriate content for an email sent during work hours over the company email system, it can also help establish systems to ensure all staff members are contributing to the brand or image of the company. Have each staff member use a template for email responses and set up signature lines that appear in all outgoing emails to further establish the company’s professionalism and image in the eyes of individuals who may receive email from your staff. Setting guidelines for content and use of email creates a single, comprehensive image of the company that helps keep the organization aligned with its mission.

An email policy is a document that provides your business with certain legal protections involving misuse of the email system by employees. Because it is a legal document, many businesses elect to have a lawyer draw up the email policy, or at the very least, review the policy before it is implemented within the organization. Having a lawyer review or prepare an email policy may seem like an unnecessary upfront cost, but has the potential to save you in legal fees in the future.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roger_DeReu

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Most small business owners understand the importance of their data and the need to back it up.  What’s amazing however, is just how many small businesses we encounter that continue to operate with either inadequate backup solutions or without any backups whatsoever.

Recently we were contacted by a client that turned on her computer one morning only to be greeted by a message on her screen that the hard drive was not found.  Upon investigation, we found the hard drive had failed and everything on it was gone.  Her email, accounting data, documents, and photos – all gone.  Luckily, she had a backup, but unfortunately, it was several months old.  While it wasn’t a total loss for her, she did lose some critical emails and she had to manually re-enter her lost accounting data and recreate several documents and proposals.  In the end, she lost some critical data that could not be recreated and of course it cost her several days of lost productivity.  The client estimated the value of their losses to be several thousand dollars.  A good backup solution would have cost a fraction of what the resulting expenses were.  Needless to say, she now has a solid backup solution in place.

What about your business?  Do you have an adequate backup solution in place?  What would the cost of an unexpected data loss be to your business?

Backing up your critical business data doesn’t have to be expensive – contact us today for a backup solution designed to meet your needs.

We frequently field questions from our customers about purchasing new computers for their business.  Very often they’re surprised by the prices when compared to the ads they’ve seen from local electronic stores.  The problem is, this is not an apples to apples comparison.

There are distinct differences between consumer and business class computers.  While the specifications between the two may appear to be very similar, business class computers are typically built with higher quality components offering a higher degree of reliability.  Business computers also don’t include all the special offers and trial software that bogs down so many consumer PCs.

Here are some additional key differentiators of business class computers:

• Longer warranty periods and support options including next business day on-site support.

• Professional level operating systems – better suited to business software, security, and network requirements.

• Life expectancy – availability of drivers will be updated and maintained for years to support business and industry that rely on sustaining their technology.

The bottom line is that business should never purchase computers from local big box consumer stores.  The initial cost may be lower, but they will cost you more in the long run and likely need to be replaced sooner.