365

Password Manager coming to Office 365 Soon!

Last December, Microsoft announced updates to its Microsoft Authenticator app

If you haven’t heard of this app before, it is the default two-factor authentication that should be for any Office 365 tenants 2fa prompts due to Sim Hijacking.

The App update included the ability to store Website Passwords using Autofill , however as its in preview only if you have a Personal Microsoft Account registered to the device. Microsoft has not made this available to 365 users as of yet , probably because its in preview , until they iron out the bugs! They are allowing some organizations to be on this beta list. Click here to try yourself

When you visit a site or app for which you have saved a password, Authenticator offers to autofill it.




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Office 365 Document Collaboration LifeCycle

There are so many Office 365 apps sometimes customers get lost in the functionality and sometimes lose out in ways it can help their business. Some of these apps work in parallel for your Document Collaboration and building. These are the steps your document should go through

 

1) One Drive

 This is your personal storage like a home drive, documents here are only viewed by you. You should put all your Documents and Desktops here to protect them from accidental deletion or corruption. 

 

2) Teams

 This is a document storage for collaboration, e.g an Accounts Team would have a team site to work through 2018 Finances. People can upload their receipts to an accounting package or integrate into a personal one drive to a Teams folder. Once finished the accounts team would publish the accounts to Sharepoint for viewing by management.

 

3) Sharepoint

This is permanent storage for Organisation Company Documents

Companies should look at Data retention policies and have an information strategy to force documents to end up in Sharepoint rather than stay in personal One Drives and Team Sites.

 

4) Yammer

This is the solution to let companies know about changes on Sharepoint

Service Status

Here's a service status page for our cloud suppliers

BT Service Status:
https://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/service_status/

Easynet Status:
https://support.uk.easynet.net/support_status.aspx

Zen Broadband
https://status.zen.co.uk/

Office 365 Service Status
https://status.office365.com

Dropbox Service Status
https://status.dropbox.com/

Sales Force Service Status
https://status.salesforce.com/

Google Apps Service Status
https://www.google.com.au/appsstatus

Cloudflare Service Status
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

123reg service status
https://twitter.com/123reghelp?lang=en

Here is a service you can check to see if a website is down for just you or everyone

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

 

Skype for Business Broadcast ( Free GoToMeeting Webinar service for 365 Users )

Skype for Business has a limit of 250 Users ... how do big enterprises get around to showing Webinars for a user count larger than this?

Introducing : Skype Meeting Broadcast is a feature of Skype for Business Online and Office 365 that enables you to schedule, produce, and broadcast meetings or events to online audiences up to 10,000 attendees. The Skype Meeting Broadcast portal is where you schedule a meeting of this size.

Company's can use this for free if they have an Office 365 Subscription and send event invitations to internal and external users with automatic Language translation which makes it a great worldwide feature.

A few great use cases for company's

  • For existing Employee's - Great for announcements and feedback across multi region offices and remote users

  • For Existing Customers - Great for new product launches 

  • For New Customers - Great for promoting new products 
  • For the Public - Great for publically listed companies promoted annual meetings

After the meeting, this video can be downloaded to host online in 365 Video for people who missed the event and also a CSV file can be download to list all attendee's to follow up attendee's on future events or feedback

https://www.microsoft.com/itshowcase/Article/Video/598/Overview-of-Skype-Meeting-Broadcast-and-how-to-schedule-a-Skype-Meeting-Broadcast

Office 365 Roadmap

One of the benefits of an Office 365 Subscription is your monthly costs going towards free monthly improvements

These can all be found here : https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap#abc

Some ones we are excited about : 

Exchange Online Protection phishing protection

Admins will be able to add phishing levels similar to how they set up their spam levels

Outlook for iOS: Draft sync

Sync drafts between different versions of Outlook, so you can start a message in one place and finish and send in another.

Office 365 Secure Score - Active Seat Average Score

Secure Score will add the ability for you to see the average score of organizations that have a similar number of Office 365 active seats.

And easily 50+ Team Updates

 

Microsoft 365 Intune with EMS

If your organisation has Office 365 with Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), you’re probably already familiar with Intune, Microsoft’s solution for mobile device and application management.


You can use EMS as a Single Sign on Solution to over 1200 Software as a Service Cloud Applications such and salesforce and box across devices and browsers

Active Directory Premium gives you full Active Directory into the cloud so you don't need local servers for management of Active Directory , see here for a full list of differences

Group membership can be requested by users to the groups Owner and this can be approved from the cloud

User Password resetting can be done in the cloud and automated to be self service to reduce the time for users to fix their issues and load on helpdesk staff

Intune is also your go-to solution for managing shared tablets in limited-use mode. With Intune, you can bulk provision, secure, and centrally manage shared tablets configured to run in limited-use mode.

 

This makes IT’s a job a lot easier: you don’t have to configure settings on individual tablets, and you don’t have to do anything differently than you would for devices not in limited-use mode. With Intune, your transactions, inventory, and other information are protected, no matter what your tablets are used for.

Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5 Subscription Options for Small to Medium Options

What is Windows 10 Enterprise E3

This is basically Windows 10 for Enterprises with Software Assurance.

What's Software Assurance? It's something you purchase with Microsoft products as a subscription to give you future upgrades on the product such as the next version of Windows or new features free of charge, and also roll back functionality. Roll back to Windows 7 if you want ( good for software that is not supported on 10 however you need to license your enviroment ) 

Benefits of Going E3 Enterprise

Support from one to hundreds of users. Although the Windows 10 Enterprise E3 in CSP program does not have a limitation on the number of licenses an organization can have, the program is designed for small- and medium-sized organizations.

Deploy on up to five devices. For each user covered by the license, you can deploy Windows 10 Enterprise edition on up to five devices. E.G.
    
    Your Office Laptop
    Your Office Computer
    Your Office Tablet    
    Your Home PC
    Your phone!

Move licenses between users. Licenses can be quickly and easily reallocated from one user to another user, allowing you to optimize your licensing investment against changing needs.

Why do I need E5?

E5 adds a new security service called Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). This is a cloud service that takes behavioural data from sensors built into Windows 10 and provides insights, detections and recommended responses. No matter what anti-malware product is installed on a PC, it’s only as good as the known threats it has been designed to block, the ATP service looks at behaviour and reduces the impact of a compromise either of a device itself or a user interaction. 

While this can work with third party anti-malware tools, it can also be used to provide a complete Microsoft security system, effectively allowing replacement of other vendors as designed to integrate with the built-in Windows Defender anti-malware in Windows 10.

Microsoft Cloud Service Provider Surrey - Lock your 365 Subscription in before the Jan 2017 Price Hike!

 

Lock your 365 Subscription in before the Jan 2017 Price Hike!

Per our recent article here -> http://www.response-it.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/whats-brexit-means-for-uk-it-hardware-and-software-costs?rq=brexit

Due to the drop in the pound Microsoft will be increasing the price of Subscription services in the UK by 22% on 1st January 2017

If you purchase from a Microsoft Cloud Service Provider like Response IT , we can lock your subscription price for a year. Use the last days of 2016 to save your company money in 2017! 

Contact us today!

A few of our top 7 reasons for you to be in the Cloud

Cheaper Startup costs

For Small for Medium business especially new , a three pound monthly bill per user rather than an initial three hundred pound Office license is much cheaper during the first year not to mention more flexible. If the user quits the license the next monthly cost can be cancelled and email archived.

Stability

Economies of scale plays into this alot. Cloud providers ike Microsoft and Amazon invest heavilly into making sure they have multi layers of reduancy in regards to all layers of their infrasturcure as well as users existing on two datacenters just incase one gets destroyed in a natural diaster. Yes..... these services still go down from time to time however this will only get better with time! 

Collaboration 

The world is opening up wether Brexit or Trump proves otherwise! Small Business now can be under 10 people dotted around the world with the help of the internet. Internet connections from e.g. the U.K. to Australia are still not good enough yet to stream a Virtual Desktop Faultlessly. The cloud can now enable remote workers login to their local data center and work without the slowness of before.

Mobility 

Mobiles and Tablets are taking on much more of the processing them previously thanks to good development and hardware. Cost of building Web Apps are more complex thanever due to security and amount of devices. Cloud providers work on unifying their apps to work across platform which saves internal development

Latest and Greatest

Companies especially Microsoft now are writing new features and products directly into the cloud which means you get these in your existing subscription for the same costs and it happens automatically, no need to wait for updating screens!

Scalibilty / Speed

One of the great perks about cloud is  the scaling. You can start your organisation on a 5 seat E3 Office 365 license and grow up to 1000 seats by just increasing your subscription count! Let someone else worry about the building of new servers and data rooms while you continue to run your business. The amount of servers Microsoft have you can now start using this scalable resource for Business Intelligence straight into 365.

Intergration

Previously when you purchased some software for example Sage Accounting, to be able to export that data for example into Excel to be able to forecast and predict figures you  would have you build custom written macros for this. With the invention of cloud it has started getting cloud providers to build API's and work with other third partners for click of the button intergration! For example a great Accounting Tool we use called Xero. To be able to keep track of our workforces expenses, we can use a seperate thirdparty tool called Receipt Bank and this how enable employees to submit their expense forms and receipts into Zero saving out Accoutant lots of work!

Office 365 local UK datacenters now available for complete UK Data residency

Data residency refers to the physical or geographic location of an organization's data or information. Similar to data sovereignty, data residency also refers to the legal or regulatory requirements imposed on data based on the country or region in which it resides.

This will now help address renewed concerns from UK business around data sovereignty and privacy, particularly in the wake of the European High Court's recent decision to scrap the Safe Harbour agreement

However with the fallout from Brexit it is still unclear what agreements the UK will keep from the EU in regards to these, and it pleasing to see, Microsoft (as well as Amazon) are stilling launching their UK Datacenters

Industries effect the most by Data residency

  • Finance 
  • Legal
  • Defense
  • Government 

Microsoft’s “How to request your data move” page is clear that for UK customers the request period begins on 1 December 2016 and ends on 28 February 2017, the actual migration of the data can take up to 2 years