Cloud Connect January 2019

Tips & Tricks:

In Outlook for iOS, it’s now possible to convert an email message directly into a calendar event! Simply select the message in Outlook, select the ellipses at the top right of the message and hit ”Schedule”!

IOS outlook

Question of the Month:

“Is Microsoft backing up any of my data? I thought that was the whole purpose of moving into Office 365!”

While Office 365 has its own protections in place to make it hard to accidentally delete data, ultimately the protections that Microsoft puts in place is to ensure that they are not responsible for any data loss while your data is residing on their infrastructure. While this is an improvement for your data in terms of redundancy and safety of your corporate data compared to hosting your own Exchange Server, Microsoft is very quick to point out if any data loss is a result of accidental (or purposeful) deletion by a user or external factors such as malware or phishing attempts.

Microsoft will not help beyond what protections they have in place in a crisis. For example, if important emails are deleted from the “Deleted Items” folder in OWA or Outlook, Microsoft will politely explain that there’s nothing further they can do, those emails are gone forever! It’s the same with OneDrive and SharePoint – in cases that Microsoft isn’t directly responsible for the data loss, the data is gone forever!

IOTAP has a myriad of solutions to back up and better protect your data in Office 365.

Webinar Spotlight:
On January 16th, at 11 AM (EST) and on January 17th, at 11:30 AM (IST), we will be holding an Office 365 webinar for you, our most valuable clients! The purpose of this webinar will be to discuss security best practices in Office 365 as well as the various ways that IOTAP can secure your data. We’ll be covering:

  • Multi-Factor Authentication (Included in Office 365!)
  • Best Practices for Office 365 Admins
  • Options for Sharepoint, OneDrive and Exchange Online backup options.
  • And more!

Register for the Upcoming Office 365 Webinar!

For Eastern Standard Time – Office 365 Webinar
For Indian Standard Time – Office 365 Webinar

Cloud Connect November 2018

Tips & Tricks:

We’ve all seen it – the blue text that serves to highlight a Hyperlink in an email, a PowerPoint or an excel document. We can be frank; most people will disregard it. But if you’re creating a document that’s to be shown to other people, and there some ugly blue text marring your slide – is there a way to fix it?

Yes! The link text can be treated just like any other text anywhere in Microsoft Office:

  1. Select the hyperlink you want to re-color. (How do I insert a hyperlink?)
  2. On the Home tab of the ribbon, select the Font Color arrow to open the menu of colors.

screenshot1

It really works!

Question of the Month:

We’re an organization that due to our industry has to put disclaimers at the end of our emails. Presently, our employees are hand-editing this disclaimer. We also find that our employee’s signatures don’t have any sort of consistency from person to person. We’re aware of exclaimer – but this seems so simple. Doesn’t Office 365 have this functionality built in?

As of this year, it does indeed! You can add an HTML or plain text legal disclaimer, disclosure statement, signature, or other information to the top or bottom of email messages that enter or leave your organization. To do this, you create a mail flow rule (also known as a transport rule) that adds the required information to messages. The steps to get this done are here, but it’s 10 steps to complete. If you want us to do this for you, please let us know!

Product Spotlight:

We’re proud to announce our new partnership with SherWeb! SherWeb is a Cloud-facing Solutions Provider with many interesting add-on services for Office 365. In celebration of the new partnership (and the holiday season) we’re pleased to offer up to 3 free licenses of SherWeb QuickHelp for Office 365, this is over a $100 value. QuickHelp is eLearning for Office 365 it will arm your admins and users with the knowledge to work more effectively and efficiently within Office 365. Please let us know if you would like to take advantage of this limited time offer!

Cloud Connect October 2018

Tips & Tricks :

We’ve covered Microsoft Dictate in previous CloudConnect Newsletters. At the time, it was a piece of software that had to be installed from a separate site, and it was built under Microsoft’s “Garage” brand – meaning that it was experimental and while Microsoft knew they liked the idea, it wasn’t quite ready for a generalized release. 

The time for a general release has come – and it’s already baked into all brand-new Microsoft Office 2019, included as part of your Office subscription! All you need is a USB headset plugged into your PC and you too can speak to write emails.

Question of the Month :

Office 2019 is out?! But it’s still 2018! How do I get the latest apps?! 

Any new Office App installation downloaded from the portal will include the newest versions of the apps. Microsoft has updated the official instructions to indicate that Office 2019 is here. For anyone with an existing installation, hang tight! IOTAP doesn’t recommend uninstalling your existing applications for the sake of getting the new Office suite.

When you uninstall the Office 2016 suite, all your preferences and settings will be uninstalled as well. For example, you’ll have to go back into Outlook and set up your profile and mailbox again, ugh! Instead, the new apps will come as an update to your existing suite in the coming weeks. By updating this way, your settings and preferences will remain intact!

Product Spotlight :

Considering a growing number of questions and popularity of SharePoint among our user base, we’ve decided to extend a special offer for our partners who have Business Premium Office 365 licenses or better.

We can now offer a fully-built SharePoint Intranet Suite for your place of work for $1 per user per month. This is an 80% discount that will only be in place until the end of the year – so please reach out and let us build your intranet for you before it goes away!

Cloud Connect September 2018

Tips & Tricks :

Drag and drop your availability into emails to schedule a meeting! 
Within an email reply, can bring up your calendar and graphically drag and drop slots you currently have available on your calendar.  These are then shown as an availability card in your email. This update is brand new, we’re still seeing it propagate across tenants in Office 365, so if you don’t see it yet, hang tight!

Question of the Month :

Teams is great! But we’re still missing out on some features from Skype. We know that eventually, Teams will be succeeding Skype for Business. Is Microsoft planning on rolling these features over?

Yes! Several features are in the pipeline or have already been moved over to Teams!

Microsoft Teams Guest Access – In Teams!

  • Ability to add a guest to a team from outside the organization

Microsoft Teams – Unified Presence – Rolling Out!

  • This is one of the SfB messaging capabilities coming to Teams that supports unified presence between Teams and Skype for Business.

Microsoft Teams – Contact Groups – Rolling Out!

  • This is one of the SfB messaging capabilities coming to Teams and provides support for Contact Groups originally created in Skype for Business.

We understand that right now there’s a critical feature missing from Teams for our customers who use Skype for Outgoing calls. This feature is intended for a rollout of Q4 – as soon as we know more we’ll be working with you to get it enabled ASAP!

Product Spotlight :

IOTAP SharePoint Intranet :
Many of our customers look at SharePoint and see it for what it is: A tremendously powerful tool that requires a tremendous amount of configuration and knowledge to have it work effectively for your company!
We offer a SharePoint intranet that comes out-of-the-box with features tailored to fit your organization’s specific needs. Document Repositories, Announcement Sites and more!
IOTAP will work with you to build your intranet to your exacting specifications and support it for only $5/user/month.
Please reach out to learn more!

Cloud Connect August 2018

Product Spotlight :

We’re proud to announce that due to our ever-better relationship with Microsoft, we’ve been granted a (singular) Azure Cloud Consult! We’d love to use this opportunity to sit with you, our chosen customer, and go over your existing environment and see how we can use Azure to save you money and optimize business processes.

Microsoft is holding us to a deadline of August 30th to get this scheduled, so don’t delay! This consult will be scheduled on a first come, first served basis.

Question of the Month :

  • I got a notification from Microsoft that they’re adding anti-spoofing protections. I want this protection; how do I get it?

No actions required. Just wait until September 1st! In the past, this was a feature that was reserved for organizations with Office 365 Enterprise E5 licenses. Microsoft has now chosen to extend this coverage for organizations with Business Premium licenses or better.

After this change takes place, your organization will have access to enhanced anti-spoofing functionality that utilizes cloud intelligence, sender reputation plus patterns to identify potentially malicious domain spoofing attempts. The new functionality works in conjunction with existing standards-based email authentication checks (DMARC/DKIM/SPF). Once this feature is enabled, messages that fail our extended implicit authentication checks will be automatically sent to the junk mail folder. You can use policies to customize these actions and turn this functionality on and off.

We are also updating the Get/Set-PhishFilterPolicy cmdlet to allow you to block/allow domains that can send spoofed emails, as well as the Get/Set-AntiphishPolicy cmdlet to let you modify the policies applied to spoofed messages. After the cmdlet changes, we will also roll out policy options in the Security and Compliance Center.

If you have domain ‘allow’ or ‘safe’ sender policies or transport rules in place, they will not be impacted.

Policy options for these changes will be available after September 1. We’ll begin rolling this out and will be enforcing changes after September 21, 2018. We anticipate rollout completion in the following weeks.

  • What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

If you wish to disable enhanced anti-spoofing functionality, you will need to set policies before September 21, 2018. After September 21, we will begin rolling this feature out worldwide and will enforce the available settings.

To access settings and make changes you’ll need to use Get/set-Antiphishpolicy PowerShell cmdlets (after September 1). The same will also be possible via the Security and Compliance Center (under Threat Management->Policy->Anti-Phishing) once those changes are rolled out for EOP.

  • None of what you said makes sense! I just want to be protected from spoofing! Can you help me make sure I’m set up when the time comes?

Of course! Just reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to get you protected against spoofing.

Cloud Connect July 2018

Tips & Tricks:

It’s Friday, 4:59 PM. You mouse over to close your Microsoft Outlook for the weekend and head out of the door. One last email comes in. You know if you just type out a reply real quick, it will take just two minutes…so you start typing. Two paragraphs in, you feel your weekend slipping away – but you can’t step away now, you’ll have to wait until Monday to finish the draft!

Right?

No longer! With the latest version of Microsoft Outlook for iOS & Android, your drafts now sync to the Outlook client on your mobile device, and vice versa!

 

The question of the Month:

We frequently work with the same consultants or people outside our company. Can we add external users in Microsoft Teams?

Yes! Anyone with a business or consumer email accounts, such as Outlook.com, Gmail.com or others, can participate as a guest in Teams with full access to team chats, meetings and files. All guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365 and can be managed securely within Azure AD.


Once they accept the invitation, guests can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more. Teams with guests will be identified with text and icons throughout the Teams UI to give all team members a clear indication that there are guests on that team.

 

Product Spotlight:

Microsoft Whiteboard!

It’s a staple of the conference room – the ubiquitous, white dry-erase board. Every week, it seems like it’s updated with new, critical information, only to be forgotten and erased the following meeting and forgotten.

With Microsoft Whiteboard – not only is the information persistent every time anyone views the whiteboard, you can collaborate with your coworkers in real time. All on the same board, anywhere.

  • Give your ideas room to grow with Microsoft Whiteboard. Transform your work into professional-looking charts and shapes on an infinite canvas with an interface designed for pen, touch, and keyboard.
  • Bring your team together on the same virtual canvas, around the world and across devices.
  • Your whiteboards stay safe in the cloud until you’re ready to return to them, from the same or another device. No need to take photos of your whiteboards or mark them with “Do Not Erase.”

Watch a brief video explainer on Microsoft Whiteboard here!

Cloud Connect June 2018

Tips & Tricks: After a brief hiatus in late 2017, Microsoft FindTime has made its return to full-functionality, now as a part of your Desktop Outlook client! Originally FindTime was created as an experiment by Microsoft for Outlook Web Access. After such a great response in the test, Microsoft has released a full-fledged add-on for Outlook on your Desktop! […]

Cloud Connect May 2018

Tips & Tricks: As we mentioned prior – dictation for Outlook and Office programs is nowhere. Dependent on your Organization’s update channel (how quickly the latest Office 365 updates are received) you may begin seeing a “dictation” button in the ribbon of some of your office applications. Your PC will need a microphone in order […]

Cloud Connect April 2018

Hello, to our most Wonderful Clients! We find that there’s a lot of interest – and a lot of misconceptions – about Microsoft Teams in our IOTAP family these days. Thus, we’ve decided to devote this month’s Cloud Connect Newsletter to answering questions about Microsoft Teams and if anyone is on the fence, [email protected] I’m worried […]

Cloud Connect March 2018

Tips & Tricks:

It’s still common practice to send documents back and forth between colleagues in an organization. One party makes their changes, sends it back, the other party makes their changes, sends it back, the other party doesn’t like the changes that were made and then everyone gets a big headache over a simple document.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way that everyone could work on the same document at once? Maybe have a quick meeting on skype for Business or Teams and get everyone’s hands on it at the same time?

With collaborative editing in Office 365, you can.

  • When you and your colleagues want to collaborate on a document, use real-time co-authoring to see everyone’s changes as they happen. Collaboration is a simple three-step process:
  • You save the document to OneDrive or SharePoint Online, so others can work in it.
  • You invite people to edit it with

When they open and work on the document in Word 2016, Word Online and Word Android you’ll see each other’s changes as soon as they’re made.

If you need help setting this up, let us know!

If you’re interested in setting up Microsoft Teams.

A question of the Month:

It’s the busy time of the season for my business! I don’t have time to be sitting and sorting and reading through emails. I’ve been having my assistant read them to me, but he’s losing his voice and can’t answer the phones. Is there a way that Outlook can help with this?

Stay tuned! The outlook for Windows will be rolling out a “Read Aloud” feature in April! We’ll be sure to get more details as we have them.

Keeping Pace with Dynamics 365:

Are you consistently running out of storage in Dynamics 365? We have a way to help! Simple instructions below, but if you need help please let us know!

Steps to Resolve Storage issues on Dynamics 365

Install Organization Insights

  1. Login as global admin of Office tenant.
    2. Navigate to the Dynamics Market Place.
    3. Search for Organization insights solution.
    4. Click Download to install the solution.
    Evaluate and identify what is consuming Dynamics 365 space
    5. Post Installation, look for Entities consuming more storage.

Resolve

  1. If the issue is being caused by Email Attachments then, Download the Attachment Manager and enable it.
    7. Watch your expensive Dynamics 365storage free up on the server
    8. If email attachments are not the culprits, then contact us and let us help!