LEVEL UP: NEWS & VIEWS FROM RED LEVEL

10 Things to Look for in a Managed Services Provider

As businesses start to grow, so do their technology needs. Growing businesses often find that they save time and money by contracting with the right Managed Services partner. Managed Services allow you to augment your existing IT staff and infrastructure by partnering with a dedicated IT firm to take care of your network, servers, computers, and all your technology needs. This is the perfect solution for companies who need to operate at peak efficiency but do not have the resources to manage a large on-site IT staff. Choosing the right partner for your Managed Services needs is important. Here are 10 Things to look for as you are evaluating a managed services provider: Evaluating a Managed Services Provider Availability You don’t [...]

2019-05-14T14:00:23+00:00By Red Level|Managed IT Services, Managed Services, Managed Services Provider, Uncategorized|

Top 3 Reasons to Recycle Your E-Waste This Earth Day

To celebrate Earth Day and welcome spring to Michigan, Red Level brought our clients, business partners, and community together to recycle their outdated technology at our annual Spring Cleaning events in Grand Rapids and Novi. The events encourage our communities to act on protecting the earth through proper recycling and helps them to retire outdated technology that leaves their organizations vulnerable. This year we were able to recycle 5,260 pounds (2.58 tons) of old servers, laptops, scanners, printers, and PCs at our Spring Cleaning events. When it comes time to clean out your tech storage bins don’t just toss your old technology equipment. Recycle it. Recycling outdated technology benefits your business in three major ways: Efficiency Devices that are over [...]

2019-04-22T15:44:39+00:00By David King|IT services|

Nintex User Group: Simple workflows can use simple approaches

Sometimes technology makes some scenarios worse. At our last Nintex User Group in Detroit, I presented an approach for solving small scale static approval processes (it was met with raving reviews – and lots of questions). The issue: The use of Nintex Flexi-tasks and Approval tasks are the standard tools to notify and gather approval feedback. They are feature-rich, scalable, and easy to use. However, they present a few barriers: Reporting: The SharePoint list item and process data are not in the same data-set. Since approval tasks are stored in a separate list, and their comments, in order to get a consolidated view of both the SharePoint list item and process approval history, you have to combine the one to many data sets [...]

2019-04-01T16:57:05+00:00By Ryan Charnock|Forms, Nintex, SharePoint, Workflow|

C/D/H now Red Level Nominated for Valo Partner of the Year 2019

C/D/H now Red Level has been nominated as a 2019 North American Valo Partner of the Year finalist. Each year the Valo Partner Awards recognize the contributions and successes of partners who have show a special dedication to ensuring client satisfaction throughout their intranet life cycle. “To be named as a Valo Partner of the Year Finalists a company must shine through their Valo journey but also have a desire to help employees collaborate and engage with their community by using Valo solutions” said Jenni Mattinen, Marketing Communication Specialist, Valo Intranet. “C/D/H is one of those Valo Partners that has instantly taken Valo as it was their own product. As a Valo partner since 2018, C/D/H has been actively sharing #ValoLove [...]

2019-04-30T15:06:06+00:00By Megan Testani|Awards, Valo|

Top 5 Infrastructure Trends for 2019

We’ve bid 2018 farewell and welcomed 2019 with open arms. So what's next? What’s going to happen in 2019 from an infrastructure perspective? The answer for 2019 is similar to that of recent years. Cloud and security are still the top priorities. Let’s take a quick look at what may impact your infrastructure focus. 1. Exchange Migration Migrations from Exchange on-premises to Exchange online and upgrades from older versions of Exchange to the latest version are both projects going strong in 2019. We continue to support our clients who are going through these Exchange migration and upgrade processes and predict that Exchange migrations, upgrades, and support will continue to be a trend with our clients. 2. Multi-Factor Authentication To add [...]

Curia Announces Master Timeline To Exhibition Planning and Management System

Curia has announced the addition of a "master timeline" feature to the exhibition planning and management system, marking a major enhancement to the system's capabilities. Designed for use by museums in planning, staging, and managing exhibits, Curia provides users with a centralized cloud-based tool enabling stakeholders at various levels of the museum hierarchy to collaborate effectively together within a single system. The tool effectively replaces the usual cumbersome array of tools and applications museums use for this purpose, streamlining workflows and establishing a single secure "source of truth" for tools, information, and materials related to exhibits. Developed in cooperation with the Perez Art Museum Miami as a response to requests from about 40 clients and prospects, the master timeline [...]

2019-04-24T13:54:14+00:00By Jack LaPan|Curia|

Red Level Acquires C/D/H to Expand Business IT Services Across Michigan

Partnership will enable digital transformation for businesses throughout the state Novi, MI — February 5, 2019 — Red Level has announced its strategic acquisition of Grand Rapids, MI-based business and technology consultancy C/D/H. As of February 1, the combined companies will give businesses across Michigan access to a broader array of IT services — including custom application development, business analytics and collaboration tools — all under Red Level, one of Detroit’s leading comprehensive technology and managed services providers. “C/D/H has an outstanding reputation for providing the best IT services and consulting throughout Michigan for the past 30 years, and Red Level is excited to build upon that strong base,” said Red Level CEO David King. “We expect this partnership will [...]

2019-02-05T20:08:48+00:00By David King|News & Events|

Phase out, Check-in and Check-out?

With shared storage of documents, overwriting other author’s work has historically been a concern. Two people would open the same document and made changes to the same content and whom over saves last wins and the other work is lost….. So as good technicians we have historically fought that scenario by requiring Checkout before editing. SharePoint would do this for us as soon as a user edited the file. A lock would be placed on the file until it is closed. Brilliant! I know those were good days. Question: With SharePoint online and the co-authoring options, is check-out and check-in a required default. I am sure there are still scenarios when you need to check out the file for [...]

2019-04-30T14:53:43+00:00By Ryan Charnock|IT services, Microsoft, Microsoft Partner, Microsoft Word, SharePoint|

The 7 Secrets to Project Management Success

The digital revolution is already underway. Both individuals and organizations must adopt new habits, modes of thinking and ways of living if they want to thrive in an increasingly technology-driven world. Whether you’re automating existing processes or designing cutting-edge digital-first strategies, implementing new technologies can make your business more agile, competitive, productive, and ultimately, successful. But implementing new technologies also has the potential to be disruptive. To reduce this friction, you need to have a carefully designed project management plan in place. Whether you’re ensuring workstation compatibility in the wake of a merger, carrying out a routine hardware upgrade, or performing an enterprise-level cloud migration, follow these pro tips to ensure that your project runs as smoothly as possible. 1. [...]

2019-01-25T17:43:13+00:00By Andrew Cipolla|cloud infrastructure, Project Management|

Top 5 Software Development Trends in 2019

In the world of software development, you’ve likely heard a lot of fancy terms; machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, the list goes on and on. But how many of those have been proven to last and will remain impactful to us in 2019? Let’s take a look what’s here to stay in 2019 and how they may affect you. 1. Big Data is Just Data Now Big data was a hot topic a while back. But, it’s no longer, “hey, big data is coming.” The notion now is “bigger data is here.” What used to be constrained as too much data to process is all possible now thanks to cloud providers. Data is now decentralized from [...]

2019-04-30T16:44:43+00:00By Red Level|App Development, Application Development, Software Development|