Did you know over 40 percent of us check our phones within five minutes of waking up in the morning, and nearly half check up to 25 times a day, according to a 2015 study by Deloitte? Consider detaching from your phone and other electronics this upcoming holiday season. This will give you more time to spend with loved ones, and help you sleep better. To get started, here’s seven ways to break your technology habit: End idle moments.  Use tech to help you stay off tech. Don’t rely on willpower. Unplug before bed. Start small. Turn off notifications. Plan… Read More

Not everyone has access to Photoshop, so to edit a photo in a pinch, many people use a free online photo editor app called Pixlr Editor.   Pixlr is an online photo editing tool. It is fast, simple and has enough features to make this a great find for low- to moderate-level photo editing. Users can create a new image, upload an image, or grab one directly from a URL location.   Pixlr is actually a web company that has various tools for working with pictures. The one used most commonly is Pixlr Editor, with the second most used tool also being a free photo editing app called Pixlr Express.  To… Read More

Microsoft’s Power Business Intelligence (Power BI) is a KCIT-delivered service that creates useful and powerful visualizations from your data. With visualizations, it’s easy to tell the story you’ve always wanted to tell but couldn’t get the staff of graph paper on your side. The analytics piece of the program allows you to test and explore ideas. KCIT is delivering Power BI training Dec. 6 for the incredibly low price of $75.00. Sign up and become your team’s newest superhero. Register here.

In light of a recent email phishing attack titled “King County Employee Feedback” KCIT would like to remind employees to be alert for phishing and spam emails, and to not open them. KCIT is seeing an increase in phishing and spam emails being delivered to King County employees. Phishing is an attempt to obtain information from you which gives outsiders access to King County systems. Remember, if you receive an email asking you to provide any information, especially your login name and password, this could be phishing and you should be suspicious. In addition, be… Read More

Many of you say that Outlook prompts you to put in your credentials several times a day. This video shows how to put an end to that.  

On Oct. 14, Google Chrome becomes the first browser to significantly step-up security notifications. If a website lacks a special security authentication, this is what people will see:   But not KC webpages that manage health data, financial data and other private data. KCIT inventoried all pages weeks ago to ensure data pages are secure and encrypted and users will NOT see that notification when submitting data like credit card information to a county website. However, because King County has thousands of pages, it was difficult to secure ALL non-data pages by the… Read More

KCIT makes security and other updates to your computer while you are sleeping, but we can’t do it if your computer is off.   So when you go home at night, hit “Restart” instead of “Shutdown”. That cleans up your computer AND allows KCIT to rollout the necessary upgrades and patches so your device is up-to-date the next day.    

Tired of calling the IT Customer Support Services HelpDesk everytime you forget your password or get locked out of your computer? You can enroll in the Password Reset program and you’ll (almost) never have to contact KCIT again! This one minute video shows you how.

The Skype for Business (Lync/UC) account on your computer is a simple and effective way to have meaningful (remote) meetings with clients, partners and customers even if your client, partner or customer doesn’t have a Skype for Business account. We’ll show you how it works in two minutes.