How does IT support stay updated with the changing technology? What are these specialists doing to make sure your company is getting the most optimized services needed? Some IT experts spend more time on research and monitoring than they do on actual work. Surprisingly, sometimes this approach works the best.

1. Finding Time

The most important part of staying up to date is finding the time to do it. According to experts from managed IT support from Ottawa, IT specialists set time aside specifically to do the monitoring.

Even if they have large projects in the works, these experts structure their time to fit in some research and monitoring.

If it seems that IT support specialists are taking too long to get a certain task done, they may be busy looking for ways to optimize their approach.

2. Looking for Leaders

A simple way to stay on top of the game is to find innovators in the niche and follow them. These people have blogs, social media accounts, and websites, where they share their thoughts and discoveries.

By following leaders online, IT specialists get a chance to discover the newest changes in the industry faster than the majority of users.

Even though this approach seems easy, it is time-consuming. There can be more than one such leader, and the experts spend their time following all of them.

To avoid wasting time on following too many industry leaders, it’s important to find influencers in your particular niche. Numerous IT magazines provide their readers lists of the most active influencers in the IT world every year.

3. Attending Conferences

Many new technological innovations are presented during conferences and trade shows. It’s the IT expert’s responsibility to monitor the most important conferences and attend them.

Going to such conferences and trade shows is an excellent opportunity to interact with industry leaders, make new business connections and discover the most popular trends.

If IT experts don’t have an opportunity to attend such events in person, they can watch streams and listen to recordings, which are always available online.

In the majority of cases, IT experts can’t attend these conferences due to large volumes of work. It’s important to understand that the ROI of such conferences is so high that it can change the course the company is taking.

Investing company funds in making new connections, finding new clients, and educating employees is vital to the company’s success.

4. Building a Network

IT specialists often have many friends and acquaintances, who are working in the same industry. They can either build a network or join one to monitor what’s going on in the world.

IT forums, blogs, and social media are an excellent source of information. Joining an IT community can pay off tremendously. Make sure to follow the news on at least one of the open-source communities.

If you have enough time, it’s possible to start a community. Before bringing your community out into the world, you can test it with friends, family, and coworkers. Find out what they would like to read about and what type of interaction they need.

The key to creating a network and then a community is providing high-quality content. With time, you’ll notice that you aren’t the only content provider in the community. Your community members could become the sources of information to stay up with the changing technology in your industry.

While it may be time-consuming for one single expert to create a community (after all, there is other work to be done), it’s possible to ask for assistance from other members of your network or for funding from your company.

5. Joining ISACA

ISACA stands for Information System Audit and Control Association. It’s a centralized source of information for the players in the IT industry. By joining this organization, you can get the most important news quickly.

Organizations similar to ISACA exist in every large city. All IT experts need to do is do a little research. Joining them can cut the time IT support spends on information searches every day.

Even if you don’t have such an organization in your town, you could join several of them remotely.

6. Taking Courses

An IT specialist has to learn something new on a regular basis in order to stay up to date with the changing technologies.

By taking courses, these experts don’t just discover innovations, they interact with their colleagues, make new acquaintances, and get important information about the competitors. 

The companies IT experts work for often sponsor such courses. However, even if such sponsorship seems unavailable at the time, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask.

More often than not, company leaders don’t realize how important certain courses are for the qualification of their employees. It’s up to the expert to find the courses and ask for sponsorship. You may be surprised at how well that works.

7. Reading

Reading is an integral part of staying up to date in any industry. News, blogs, newsletters, and many more resources are currently available for IT specialists. The only problem they face is figuring out which of the sources are worth their attention.

8. Making Experiments

IT experts are often so busy with the projects provided by their company, that they forget to hone their creative skills. By taking up a separate project, you could stay on top of your game.

More often than not, all projects you work on for one company have similar specifics. Allow your creativity to shine by taking up something challenging simply to improve your skills. Such a project can help you learn new things about the industry, and enjoy something fresh in your free time. Who knows? Such a project may become financially successful and change your life.

9. Reading Reports

One of the less exciting ways to stay updated with the latest technologies is to read industry reports. Even though they may not contain information about what’s to come, they could help you make a prediction about the future.

Reports of what companies in your industry have found could help you get important insights into your current work.

10. Signing Up For News Notifications

Instead of pouring over large volumes of information, some IT experts opt for special notification services. Some web sources give you an opportunity to receive notification whenever an article related to your niche or area of interest appears.

You can also sign up for “new feature” alerts from big industry-leading platforms, such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Final Thoughts

A top-notch IT specialist spends at least 10% of the work time to keep up with the latest technologies. Their key goal is to stay on top of their game and ahead of the competition. 

If you want to keep the time you spend on research to a minimum, you can take advantage of the above methods and smart tips hidden inside.

The post How Do IT Support Stay Updated With The Changing Technology? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

The most popular tools for modern business presentations are Prezi and PowerPoint. A dozen similar programs exist, but the majority of companies prefer the above two.

These programs come with a big set of similarities and differences. How can you tell which one is the best for your purposes?

In this article, we’ll give you a short comparison between Prezi and PowerPoint to make your struggle easier.

Remember, even an ideal presentation can be ruined by the wrong choice of tools.

What is Prezi?

What is Prezi anyway? It’s a rather young (compared to PowerPoint) piece of software, which takes an innovative approach to presentation making.

Instead of using slides, which everyone is used to, Prezi created a large canvas filled with points, each of which can be zoomed in on. The Prezi platform supports text, images, and videos.

For presentation makers, who haven’t had experience with Prezi, the platform offers a formidable choice of templates. Even though they aren’t highly customizable, they are suitable for a wide variety of purposes.

Prezi has a drag-and-drop interface, which isn’t as easy to work with as PowerPoint but could be preferable as soon as you get used to the idea. It is the king of diagrams, graphs, and other visual ways to present information.

Prezi allows storing presentations on the cloud so different users can access the presentation simultaneously for editing or for watching.

One of the highly-valued features offered by Prezi is analytics. The platform offers real-time analysis of the presentation that helps presenters understand which points were appreciated by the audience and which need improvement.

What is PowerPoint?

Not too many people in the world have ever heard of PowerPoint. Next year, the program is celebrating its 30th birthday. More than 500 million people use it worldwide. PowerPoint is a market leader in the presentation industry. Its popularity is often attributed to its ease of use.

Schoolchildren use it to make presentations in classrooms. Meanwhile, executives without any coding experience can take advantage of PowerPoint to create a good presentation.

PowerPoint has had sufficient time to deal with all its bugs and come up with numerous useful features. It uses a slide-by-slide presentation approach, allowing the user to go back and forth between pieces of information during the presentation.

The program has many different PowerPoint business templates, which can be customized. It comes with excellent support from the developers (Microsoft) and numerous communities.

If you have a question about PowerPoint, just Google it. There is a 99% chance that the answer has been discussed online several times before you graduated from high school.

Let’s go further to compare and contrast the two popular presentation-making tools.

Suggested:

Create Excellent Presentations With Free PowerPoint Templates.

 1. Platforms To be Used On

These days, mobility is king. If your presentation can’t be accessed on a mobile gadget, you can send it to the trash can. Sounds too harsh? It’s true. More than half of the world’s population is using mobile gadgets. How likely is your audience to be among it?

PowerPoint comes with iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone apps. However, Prezi currently offers only iPhone and Android app options.

This may not be a deciding factor for some businesses. However, it’s nice to know that apps are available for the majority of platforms.

2. To Pay or Not to Pay

For the majority of business owners, pricing matters. In fact, more often than not, price becomes the deciding factor.

Both tools are similarly priced. However, for PowerPoint, you’ll pay about $2 more per month. Meanwhile, PowerPoint doesn’t have a free trial available. So you can’t test it before making the final choice.

Free Prezi software is good enough to get an idea about its suitability to the needs of your company.

3. Business Suitability

When it comes to making business presentations, size matters. If you are a small or medium-sized business, both PowerPoint and Prezi can work fine. However, if you are an enterprise, you should stick with the good old PowerPoint.

According to presentation designers at PresentationGeeks, the majority of enterprise owners choose PowerPoint for their business presentation purposes. The reason is the set of proper tools needed for sizeable presentations.

4. How Easy Is It?

Another thing to consider when choosing between the two tools is the learning curve. Microsoft PowerPoint is much easier to use than Prezi. Of course, you still have to spend some time learning how to wield different features with PowerPoint.

However, with Prezi, learning is bound to take longer. Unless you have experience with Prezi, you need to allow some time to get the hang of it.

5. Innovation vs. Reliability

While PowerPoint has been on the market for decades, Prezi is the “new kid on the block”. It takes a different approach to presentation making, giving presenters an opportunity to add more visuals to the process.

In a world where visuals are gaining popularity faster than light, such an approach could be highly valuable. The eye can process an image in just 13 milliseconds, which is much faster than it processes text.

However, the good old PowerPoint is suitable for more purposes than Prezi. When it comes to business presentations, visual innovations offered by Prezi aren’t always acceptable.

Prezi Advantages

Here is a list of Prezi advantages you should consider:

• The Zoom function offers a new way to present your information. The presentation looks like a big canvas packed with info. When you want to focus on the topic, you zoom in on it.
• It comes with a free web-based version so you don’t need to download any software to your computer.
• You can insert images at any angle (unlike horizontal and vertical image insertion in PowerPoint.
• Media insertion is simplified.
• It’s easy to embed Prezi presentations in blogs and websites.
• It’s easy to go back and forth between the slides. You don’t need to search for the right slide if you have to go back to certain information.

PowerPoint Advantages

PowerPoint has some interesting advantages over Prezi:

• Unlike Prezi, PowerPoint is easy to use. Many people have already used PowerPoint in school or college.
• You can change premade layouts without too much effort.
• PowerPoint offers high-quality slide transition effects.
• You can print the presentation out.
• You can insert hyperlinks.
• The clarity of slides is often preferred over the overwhelming number of images and dizzying zooming of Prezi.
• Since the software has been around for many years, all the features are tweaked to excellence.

Suggested:

How To Make an Appealing Presentation With Free Google Slides Templates?

PowerPoint Presentations With Thousands Of Free Templates From SlideHunter.

Tips On Using A Presentation Deck To Boost Company Image.

Which One Should You Choose?

Marvel or DC? Coffee or tea? Gandalf or Dumbledore? Prezi or PowerPoint? When it comes to business presentations, the choice may be hard to make.

If you want to impress your audience with visuals, Prezi is the right way to go. However, you have to be ready for the lack of important features and a bit of unprofessional appearance. Prezi can be an excellent choice for e-business presentations. Using it is a great way to show your strive for innovations and new angles.

If you want to experience, reliability, and power, PowerPoint is the answer. Business owners have been using it for decades.

The post Understanding Prezi vs PowerPoint – What’s The Best For Your Business Presentation appeared first on Tricky Enough.