April 2020

On April 21, 2020, Office 365 became Microsoft 365. Despite having a new name, your subscription will stay the same price while offering additional benefits. Everything you currently enjoy will still be available, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, as well as Outlook apps and 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. Your subscription can also still be shared with up to five other people. The name, automatically changing later this month, is not the only change you’ll see. In Microsoft 365, you will be able to seamlessly connect your financial accounts, using Money, to view, manage, and gain insights into your personal finances all in one place. Microsoft Editor will provide intelligent writing assistance plus a growing catalog of premium templates, fonts, and photos will be available to create high-quality and personalized content. To learn more about the new perks you can soon enjoy, visit here.

Calling all Work From Home (WFH) folks.  This means just about everyone due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the impact on in-office working.  The good news is every new challenge is met with creative solutions.

For anyone who is already using Microsoft 365 for email or their Office applications (Word, Excel) your license generally entitles you to use of One Drive, Sharepoint, and Teams.  Even if you do not have Microsoft 365 currently, Microsoft is offering free use of Teams during the COVID-19 crisis so you may be able to take advantage of Teams regardless.

One Drive is Microsoft’s file syncing service which allows you to access your data on the cloud from any machine.  Any changes made from the cloud will automatically sync back to your primary storage.  The service comes with 1TB of data which for most anyone will be enough for a lifetime.

Sharepoint is Microsoft’s enterprise cloud storage platform.  Using Sharepoint integrated with your internal network, it is possible to provide cloud access to corporate shared data in a similar fashion to One Drive but to be shared amongst your company, customers, and vendors.  This article could not do justice to all the uses of Sharepoint, but in this remote operating world, if you have interest please reach out to the office.

Teams is Microsoft’s collaboration tool.  It allows you to chat, have Teams calls with other Teams users in and out of your company, video chat, as well as integrate the use of Sharepoint to reference files within conversations and avoid sending emails with attachments.  Again Teams has huge remote use possibilities.  Let us know if you would like to explore further.

Lastly being able to remotely access applications you may have on your server environment is a key to conducting business in these times.  Using Microsoft 365 as a web platform we have been able to set up access to web applications in your office for use without any SSL VPN or other remote access tools.  There are some limits to this but it can be very useful.

All of these tools and more may already be in your IT stack.  If so please contact the office so we can determine if they will benefit you.  Even if they are not currently in your IT stack it will be worthwhile to explore in the future given our “new” normal.

As if we didn’t have enough going on this month, a San Franciso-based security company, ZecOps, is reporting a vulnerability flaw involving the Mail app that may affect iPhones and iPads. This exploit only requires victims to download, not necessarily open, an email, which could allow hackers to install malicious software on their device.

The vulnerability has existed as far back as iOS 6, with six targets identified for the attacks. This reportedly includes 1. employees of a telecommunications company in Japan, 2. a large U.S. firm, 3. & 4. tech companies in Israel and Saudi Arabia, 5. an individual in Germany, and 6. a European journalist. Emails used to launch the malicious code have since been deleted so ZecOps is unable to examine the code. Apple is seemingly aware of the bug, with fixes in place in the latest iOS beta, but not in the most recently publicly released version of iOS.

Discovered bugs like this one remind us the importance of always upgrading to the latest version of iOS and macOS. To learn more, visit here.