Spring Cleaning During the Winter - Florida Winter That Is

With winter upon us ― by South Florida standards ― many people are beginning to do some "winter cleaning" at home. It's also a good time to clean your electronic files and email to free up space for the coming year.

To get started, make a list of all the locations where you save or retrieve information, such as network drives, office computer hard drives or your Outlook email account.

Next, use your Outlook calendar to set aside a little time each day to go through the items on your list and decide if you need to keep it, delete it or use it. Delete items you no longer need and keep items you are currently using in descriptive folders so they can be easily found.

Important documents should be moved to a network drive. If multiple people use these documents, think about uploading them to a SharePoint site.

Advantages of keeping documents on a network drive:

• Accessible from any computer with a connection to the Internet or through a virtual private network (VPN).
• Backed up daily and able to be restored, if necessary, by Enterprise Technology Serivces upon request.
• Accelerates the setup for a temporary back-up computer if you experience problems with your office computer.
• Quicker computer replacement process.