Blog

VOIP telephone service and cell phones have edged out landlines in how businesses and everyday people make phone calls. Landlines were a quintessential part of communication and home life for decades. It was the 80s when cell phones came along and the 90s when they became more common. But it...

The business world has been moving more and more toward a distributed workforce. And it makes sense. When a job can be done anywhere, business owners benefit from a much larger candidate pool and lower overhead costs. And employees can skip their morning commute and improve their work-life balance. But...

If you have a surveillance system in your workplace, you're automatically a step ahead of similar businesses regarding safety. But what type of camera system do you have? And how old is it? After all, technology constantly evolves, and upgrading your surveillance system might be necessary to maintain the effectiveness...

After telephones, sound and overhead paging were the second product installation line, RCI entered. In the 80s and 90s, it was a natural outgrowth of telephone systems because so many customers wanted to be able to use their telephone paging feature through overhead speakers. Today, in the era of cell...

Is it time to replace your phone system? We're four weeks into the new year. In previous January, we discussed the top tech trends of the previous year or decade or technology resolutions for the year to come. But with cyber security still in the news and the rise of...

In the last several years, the way people work has undergone the most significant shift we've seen in decades – maybe since the industrial revolution. And with any change comes pain points. Unfortunately, many of those pain points result from the friction of the tools we used to do things...

A few years ago, RCI put out a Thanksgiving blog. It's one of my personal favorites. That blog focused on the many things RCI employees and owners were thankful for that year. Today, we're going to combine that spirit with a little bit of the nature of the following day...

With Halloween here and mischief on the mind, it’s an excellent time to talk about a subject we haven’t brought up in a while, surveillance systems. These days, you can get a camera system from Sam’s Club, but that doesn’t mean it will give you the desired result. Sometimes with...

Last month, I shared the story of a trip RCI President & CEO John Whitcomb took to deliver a paging system part to a customer in Northern Virginia. Of course, that trip was all in the line of duty, but little did I know that this month, at the time...

Overhead paging was the next technology that RCI got into after telephone systems. It was a natural outgrowth. Many existing customers wanted to be able to page through their phones. Since then, we’ve gotten into several other IT services, including computers and surveillance systems. But, in the meantime, paging’s popularity...

You don't know what you don't know. It's an age-old problem. And nowhere is this more true than with Business IT solutions. As a business owner or manager, you have to be a jack of all trades, and you probably feel like you need to be an all-around expert. But...

What do a VOIP telephone system and a cell phone have in common? Besides each being a technology we use to make phone calls, they are both based on technology that was new a couple of decades ago, and both have come a long way. But where one is familiar...

In April, I wrote about the importance of working with a local IT company.  But there’s another side to working with local companies – IT subcontractors. Living in a global community means that we are often working with people from all over the world. Whether that means getting a product...

These days if you are hearing or reading about telephone systems you are probably hearing about VOIP, or even more likely, cloud. But what about digital business telephone systems? For decades they were the only game in town. What happened to them and can you still get one? Well, digital...

One of the most common questions asked about the cloud is "Are Cloud Telephone Systems Safe?" The answer isn’t straight forward. There are different definitions of “safe” and there are different schools of thought for each of those definitions’ answers. Like most questions and answers it’s not yes or no....

Determining if Local IT Service Matters As a business owner or manager, every thing you do is about making decisions. And every decision affects your bottom line. Not every choice is monumental but they all add up. You weigh them out: the pros and cons. Will they fit into your...

Getting the Technology You Need (and Avoiding Killer Robots, etc.) Science fiction has an entire (arguably dominant) subgenre of stories about technology that has gone too far.  Think Terminator, Blade Runner and most recently, Severance. Severance follows the story of employees at a fictional corporation who have had their work...

Passwords – can’t live without them, can’t remember them. But you can make cybersecurity easy, or at least easier. The video below is a great routine by British comedian Michael McIntyre on passwords from his Netflex stand-up special. You should check it out but I’ll sum it up non-funnily for...

What Are the Benefits of Local IT Services? IT services are notoriously varied in both scope and quality. That’s why everyone from your “tech savvy cousin” to national corporations offer their own take on IT. And because IT is so varied in its variety and definition, it can be difficult...

What will be the effect of the metaverse for business?   It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. - Yogi Berra   So let’s start by saying this is not going to be a very useful blog. I’m writing here about the metaverse the meaning of the metaverse...