Cloud Connect August 2017

/in

This month’s newsletter contains some very special announcements.

IOTAP Special announcement:

Our online store is live! We have been working hard on a new platform to better serve our customers for the past few months. IOTAP Online is live now. IOTAP Online is our effort to provide you the one stop shop for your Digital Transformation needs. You will be automatically directed to your regional store.

IOTAP online provides an automated self-service website for you to manage and run your all your productivity and technology needs. You’ll find the same great cloud services you know and use every day; Office 365, Barracuda, Microsoft Azure, as well as new bundled services for your convenience and peace of mind – all at a discounted rate.

These services are designed to help you with the trends you are currently witnessing around a Modern workplace, Business Applications and Infrastructure in the cloud along with the Data and AI being at the center of the change. Visit the registration link here to create your account.

Microsoft Special Announcement:

Microsoft announced a new productivity suite centered around Small/Medium Business, Microsoft 365. By combining three great services that are already widely used amongst our customers;

  • Windows 10
  • Office 365
  • Enterprise Mobility and Security

Microsoft has created a turnkey solution for businesses that want to create a secure collaborative working environment, complete with mobile device support. Microsoft 365 is will be available later this year.

Tips and Tricks:

Do you have an ongoing project with someone outside your organization that you need to include in group emails and file sharing?

Guest access to Office 365 Groups enables you and your team to collaborate with people from outside your organization by granting them access to group conversations, files, calendar invitations, and the group notebook.

Access can be granted to a guest—including partners, vendors, suppliers, or consultants—by any group owner.

  • Step 1A group owner adds a guest to the group or a guest is nominated by group members. The group owner approves the nominees.
  • Step 2The group owner is informed of what the guest can access within the group. A combination of text and icons give all group members a clear indication of guest participation.
  • Step 3The guest receives a welcome email and can participate in group conversations, receive and respond to calendar invitations, and access the group files.
  • Step 4Guests can leave the group at any time via a link in the footer of all group emails and calendar invites.

There’s more info here, and as always, feel free to contact us if you need assistance setting this up!

A question of the Month:

What are my options for enhanced communication in Skype?

We often get questions about PSTN calling and conferencing in Skype for Business in Office 365. Most people think that since they’re in Office 365, that they’re locked into going back to Microsoft to expand their capabilities in Skype for Business. This simply isn’t so!

We’ve announced our partnership with CallTower previously on the monthly newsletter, but we’ve created a tool to show anyone interested in acquiring PSTN Dialing & Conferencing in Office 365 what their return on investment would be if they chose CallTower for their business’ phone needs.

Feature Update:

For our customers who routinely attend Skype for Business meetings – we have a way to improve Voice & Audio quality for your meetings – even across continents!

With Regionally Hosted Skype for Business Meetings, attendees to meetings no longer should worry about poor connectivity or unintelligible speech. This is remedied by changing which Microsoft datacenter each attendee connects to.

Previously, if a meeting was hosted in North America but an attendee was in Australia, their Skype client would have to connect to a data center in North America. Naturally, this was predisposed to create connection quality issues.

Now, we can set your Office 365 tenant in such a way that any one of your users that connect to a meeting connect to the closest Microsoft datacenter for Skype for Business hosted meetings, providing an immediate boost in call quality.