This is not a Jeff Foxworthy bit – pinky promise – but if you’re familiar with “the doldrums” you might be a sailor passing through the area where the northeast and the southeast trade winds converge, right between Africa and South America.  

Or maybe, just maybe, you’re a huge fan of the Norton Justor classic The Phantom Tollbooth.  

No matter how you disambiguate it, the term always refers to a place that’s dull, slow, and listless. Adjectives you probably don’t want to be associated with you or your team, unless you’re professional sloths. 

If you came here looking for Minneapolis-St. Paul content, otherwise known as “The Other MSP” around these parts, you’re out of luck. This is a blog all about Managed Service Providers, not Kirby Puckett’s famous Game 6 home run. 

And that’s okay, Kirby! We don’t mean any disrespect, none of us can hit like you could. But we think we have more experience taking care of some difficult digital tasks for our clients through our version of the MSP abbreviation. 

Document management is a tricky thing. While management may believe files are stored digitally and easy to access for those who need them, the rank-and-file who sift through the rank files will likely tell you a different story. Studies find that sorting through documents to find what your team needs adds up to over 21.3% of all productivity loss, and professionals take an average of 18 minutes to find each document they need. 

No matter what Nick from the sales department tells you about his financial scheme – you know, the “inverted funnel” one – someone promising you’ll get rich quickly is lying.

In favor of a more direct approach, our goal is to simplify the useful tech we use every day so that the endless options we're all inundated with every day feels a little more manageable. 

This is all a fancy way to say we really love to geek out on tech stuff. Seriously. It’s all we talk about. Stand around our proverbial water cooler and see what we chat about. It’s usually tech. And for today’s blog, we’re geeking out on Microsoft Planner and all of its incredible usefulness. 

The IT world is full of phrases that could come off as odd or confusing to those who aren’t full-time in the industry. It’s not uncommon at all – there are definitely some really odd phrases farmers or shoemakers or chefs all use that might make us scratch a hole in our heads. But when it comes to today’s topic, penetration testing is a wildly straightforward concept, at least as far as naming conventions go.  

If you’ve never heard the phrase before, just stop right here and take a stab at it.  

… Good.