The end of the year is the perfect time to check those pesky maintenance items off your to-do list and start the next twelve months with a clean slate. Use this helpful list of common office technology maintenance tips to start fleshing out your own year-end checklist and start 2014 right:
- Clean up your hard drive: Purge your hard drive of programs you’ve barely used in the last twelve months and get rid of expired trial versions that may still be installed.
- Reorganize your cloud or intranet file system: Take a good hard look at your digital filing system and evaluate it for ease of use, logic (Are like files stored together? Are they where you would expect to find them?), and unnecessary duplication.
- Revisit your tech-related policies: Technology changes in the blink of an eye, often leaving company policies in the dust. The end of the year is a good time to evaluate whether the existing rules still apply and to consider adding new policies and practices like telecommuting and social media guidelines.
- Update your operating system: Operating systems automatically prompt you to update, but this is a good time to check in and make sure you’ve gotten the latest versions of all patches.
- Evaluate your cybersecurity: Is your antivirus protection up-to-date and are you doing everything you can to prevent a cyberattack or security breach?
- Examine your year in web traffic: Pinpoint your highest traffic moments throughout the year to inform your marketing strategy going forward. Identifying the most-visited portions of your website can also help you improve the rest of the site.
- Visit your website with fresh eyes: Think of the information most visitors to your site will be looking for and see how long it takes for someone new to the site to find that prime info. Also, fact-check your information – if it’s out of date, take it down. As your company evolves, it’s easy for old website copy to fall through the cracks.
- Perform a similar check on your e-commerce sites.
- Set your social media calendar for the year: Social media is the perfect medium to react to your industry’s environment in the moment, but you’ll be well equipped to weather a slow news week if you schedule out as much as possible and prepare to promote your company’s big events ahead of time.
- Evaluate your storage usage: If you’re reaching the capacity of your onsite servers, it may be time to consider off-site storage companies to back up your files.
Happy Holidays!
By Prasana William
Original Image: AJC1 on Flickr