Microsoft has renewed our Gold status for the 5th year running confirming that we satisfy their strict criteria and demonstrate our technical capabilities by way of appraising our clients. Gold status demonstrates expertise with Microsoft technologies and also a proven ability to consistently meet our customers' needs.

As a Gold partner, we receive a rich set of benefits including enhanced training and support. This one benefit alone gives us the ability to truly deliver world class solutions with the backing of the biggest company in the world!

With these continued accreditations and awards, we no longer just provide IT Support in London, but IT services for the world.

Like it or not, Email is here to stay and if you're anything like our executives here at The Internet Group, you will receive anything from 50-250 emails per day. Furthermore if you use your inbox as your ‘to-do list’ then you probably shudder every time your inbox beeps to alert of a new email.

So what to do? Well firstly there are some really quick wins to aid you in creating emails and also speed up reading them. Abbreviations are not only the domain of text messages and work really well when sending emails. Below are some examples of commonly used terms that can be turned into acronyms.

It’s probably wise to teach your staff these simple terms as sending them is only effective if the recipient understands them!

Another good piece of advice is do not make email subject lines cryptic e.g. when you send an email, don’t use unfinished subject lines such as ‘we must...’. We recommend that you put the exact matter in the subject line i.e. ‘we must discuss Dave’s work experience ASAP’. This allows the recipient to speed read their email and assess if the email needs actioning straight away.

Another recommended technology would be an archiving solution such as Quest Archive Manager. This solution will catch all emails that go in and out of your network, even if they are deleted. While it’s busy capturing all your emailed information it will also index all of your email content, including attachments! This will allow you to quickly and easily search through your emails with a much greater efficiency and speed than you would be able to within outlook.

Another tip we recommend is to question yourself when creating an email is as to whether the recipients actually need to be recipients i.e. do they all need to know? Quite often people use emails to ensure everyone is informed of a matter but the reality is that not all recipients actually need informing. This practice will ensure that the emails you receive are sent to you because they actually need your intervention and not just sent to you because ‘we know you like to know everything that is going on’.

The lesson learnt is that Email is definitely your friend and can ensure your business thrives through efficiency. However, abuse it and it will take over your life and you will always be a slave to your inbox.

Talk to us about our mail archiving solutions today by calling 0800 007 5797.

Today we were officially awarded our 3 Stars by the SDI!

After months of hard work we have been awarded for our customer lead service and shows that we provide a high level of excellence and maturity in all aspects of service delivery.

See below the pictures of how happy our team are at the official presentation ceremony. Also see the award and plaque which was presented to us by Howard Kendall, Chairman and Founder of the SDI.

Read the exclusive news story here.

Unfairly every company’s IT support team get a lot of stick. People tend to only talk to them when they are stressed-out with a computer problem and rarely do people take the time to understand how they work. We act as the IT department of dozens of companies so we know most of the big misconceptions people have about people who work in IT.

• "They Only Tell You To Switch It Off and Back On Again" – The classic response from an IT department is to try switching it off and back on again. The reason this is suggested so often is because so frequently it solves the problem; software is the usually the problem and reloading often instantly solves many problems.

• "They’re Lazy" - Sometime IT departments can have a reputation for being lazy, and in almost every situation this perception is wrong. People often want to have a face-to-face contact but they don’t appreciate how much time it would take to deal with every problem in person, and they don’t understand that most IT problems can be solved more easily remotely so going to their desk won’t help solve the problem a lot of the time.

• "They Don’t Know How To Fix Anything" – IT support is a huge area; encompassing networking, software and hardware, all require different areas of expertise and knowledge. You don’t know everything about every area of your industry, so you can’t expect the same of every member of the IT team.

• "They Block Facebook to Spite You" – Unfortunately for IT departments, they often have to be the enforcers of policy which other people have created. If the firewall of your office blocks a particular website or restricts the amount of time you spend on a certain site, the chances are the IT team didn’t make that decision; they only have to follow it through. And with Facebook estimated to be costing UK business’ as much as £123 million a day. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk) Can you blame the management for thinking about banning certain sites?

• "They Talk In Another Language" – Next time you have a departmental meeting trying an make a note of every time you use an acronym or a piece of jargon an outsider wouldn’t understand. There will be lots. It’s the same with IT departments - they won’t always realise they are using words you don’t understand. Ideally, they should be able to use language everyone can understand.

If you work in IT you might have suspected it for a long time, but the chances are if you work in IT you have a higher IQ than everyone else in your company. We recently came across this study from the University of Wisconsin which plots some of the most common professions in the US with a typical range of IQs and in most offices IT comes out on top. http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

Although IQ isn’t perfect it’s one of the best ways of measuring intelligence of a group of people like the study mentioned above. Each IQ test measured something slightly different but largely they focused on three distinct skill areas; analytics, mathematics & spatial. Looking at these three categories it’s not surprising that IT professionals do so well in IQ tests as the analysis and understanding of abstract concepts and mathematical understanding is just part of the job for an IT professional.

But what professions have a lower IQ than IT support?

• Police & Emergency Services – The test grouped together all the emergency services. Typically people working in this profession need different skills which don’t necessarily match with high IQ, and the IQ test backed this up.

• Managers – Not every manager is like Bill Lumbergh in Office Space, but a lot are! The survey doesn’t break down what type of managers they included in their survey but they all came below the category which IT staff fall in to. High School Teachers – They might know their times-tables but that doesn’t mean high school teachers have a high IQ!

• The Clergy – The clergy were grouped together with social workers; the bottom of the range given by the study. The clergy have similar IQs to computer specialists.

• Sales Managers – Despite reputations, not all sales people are one-dimensional, honest. Being confident and assured it seems doesn’t correspond with high IQ.

Who Beats the IT Department in the IQ Stakes

• Doctors – Perhaps not surprisingly medical professionals topped out the chart for IQs, but after that long in medical school and spending all that money on tuition fees you’d hope so too...

• College Professors – Maybe they interviewed people like Stephen Hawking for this group and he skewed all the results!

• Mathematicians – On a test which has a lot to do with maths it’s not surprising that professional mathematicians fluked a top result. They probably designed the test in the first place.

• Lawyers – Apparently people working in the legal profession also have a high IQ, probably all that Tort helped with their analytics scores in the test.