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Today I thought I would update you on all the services we offer. Often people are surprised at just what we can do and outsourcing jobs to us is often a way to get things done more efficiently and cheaper. I have also included some Office 365 news as usual.

Outsource Your Tech Today

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We have been in business here in Australia for 20 years. Some of our staff have more than 25 years’ experience in computing and business. We have been active in the web since 1995. As a result, we have a significant skill set that you can take advantage of.

First some reasons why.

Can your business afford?

  • Missed sales and opportunities
  • Negative feedback – people talk about your business in social media
  • Wasted money

Common Mistakes of DIY

  • Buying unsuitable equipment on “special”
  • Incorrect licensing of software
  • Making the assumption the cloud is free
  • Untested backups, DR and BCP
  • Leaving it to untrained Gen Y staff
  • Inappropriate use of social media for business

Some of the products and services we can offer you

  • Advice – we employ professionals in these areas:
    • Business Architecture and Digital Strategy
    • Web Development and Design
    • SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
    • SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
    • SMM (Social Media Management)
    • Reputation and Brand Management
    • Photography and Graphic Design
    • Sys Admins and Database Experts
    • Office Productivity Gurus
    • Writing and Content Development
  • Hardware:
    • Computer sales, repairs and upgrades – from basic business PCs to high end graphic design and gaming PCs
    • Mobile devices (phones, tablets) – sales, upgrades and connection
    • Internet connection – ADSL, NBN and Mobile Broadband
    • Wired and Wireless Networks – design, installation and security– design, sales, installation and configuration, racks and data storage
  • Software
    • Office 365 connection, setup and installation
    • Data migration – office accounting systems into the cloud, data storage into cloud
    • Website development, new sites, upgrades, ecommerce platforms, integration to store
    • Social Media - policy, setup and account management
    • Excel VBA development – spreadsheet design, automation, reporting tools and budgets
  • Training
    • Microsoft Office training – productivity and efficiency gains guaranteed
    • Website management
    • Social Media Use and Management

Talk to us about significant advantages to your business by OUTSOURCING YOUR TECH

Office 365 News

Using Skype for Business? If not why? Either way here are 8 features you didn’t know you needed for online meetings.

New Feature: Filtering common malicious attachment types in Email. Learn more about creating organisation wide settings to limit attachments of malicious file types. Ask us if you want this feature enabled.

Upgraded feature: The People Profile experience is being updated in Office 365. We are already using the new profile pages and it is a definite improvement when working with Delve. Ask us about how to improve your organisations information usage and sharing.

New feature: Integrate Dropbox into your Office 365 online experience. Ask us to talk through and plan this upgrade if you are heavy users of Dropbox.

Office 365 is changing all the time, schedule your free 6 monthly audit with us to see how you can take advantage of the tools that are available in your subscription

Follow Us On Social Media

As always Jethro is your web, cloud and technology specialists. I am constantly learning new things and spending time researching, playing and testing new systems and reading about other people in the IT world doing the same thing. If you want to follow along with what I share in various spaces, then connect with me:

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The Paperless office was envisioned years ago but it hasn’t really eventuated in most businesses I visit. But there are many little things you can do to avoid using more paper than you need to. Some of these include using cloud storage for files, moving your accounting system into the cloud, and sending and receiving statements and invoices electronically.

We have recently shifted to cloud accounting (don’t know why it took me so long) and have experienced a real productivity gain in data entry with bank accounts syncing transactions straight to our accounts. In addition, we are starting to shift our paper invoices and bills into electronic formats and save them online.

One thing you can’t get rid of all together is the paper receipt needed for business from a EFTPOS terminal. However, you don’t need to keep them. Scanning them and then saving them online is the best way to do this. And you don’t need an expensive scanner. Most good ones designed for document storage start around $500 or more. Simply use the Office Lens App on your Android iOS or Windows phone and you can scan straight into OneNote – and thence into your cloud accounting system.

Talk to us about the significant advantages to your business by reducing Paper and By using Cloud Accounting.

OneDrive For Business Syncing

Are you using OneDrive for Business or SharePoint? If so you may have had a bit of a bumpy ride recently with updates to the sync tool. The new sync tool is here and is far better, removes the old limitations and works – well let’s just say – as it’s supposed to! Read on for more info if you have had issues.

Office 365’s cloud storage in SharePoint and One Drive for Business is wonderful – gives you access to your data anywhere, version control and collaborative editing and sharing amongst many other features. However, the sync tool used to sync libraries to your PC has been buggy and had some limitations. To be fair these were mostly legacy issues that didn’t matter back when the size of libraries online was so much smaller. Now we expect to store large quantities and Office 365 certainly gives your business a heap of space.

The OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client is now available for Windows 7, 8 and 10 machines (coming to Windows 8.1 in the first quarter 2016 sometime) and for MAC )S X 1.9 and above now. However, it is not rolled out in regular windows or office patches but needs to be deployed.

At the moment it does NOT support Windows 8.1, or SharePoint libraries - though these capabilities will be added soon. It can run alongside the current tool and works just fine. I have been running the pre-release version since November with ZERO problems – not something I could say about the previous tool.

This Office Support Article has all the details as well as guides for Windows and MAC for deployment.

If you need assistance then please do not hesitate to call or message and we can discuss your options or do it for you

Follow Us On Social Media

As always Jethro is your web, cloud and technology specialists. I am constantly learning new things and spending time researching, playing and testing new systems and reading about other people in the IT world doing the same thing. If you want to follow along with what I share in various spaces, then connect with me:

Welcome to 2016! As I get older (and aren’t we all) don’t the years just seem to fly by! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year and are hard at it back at work!

This newsletter is a first week back jam packed bumper edition. I even have a HOW TO article on making automatic rules in Outlook.

Automating Outlook – Rules, Conversations, Clutter, and Quick Steps

clip_image001Most information workers spend a considerable amount of time in email. Nowadays there are multiple ways to access email including Outlook, mobile apps and online. However, Outlook is probably the best tool for productivity workers because it contains so many features. Some of those features are actually designed to make it easier to use the other tools. My mobile email management is so much easier because of the ways I have automated email management in Outlook. Check below for the ways in which you can speed up your use of Outlook.

Clutter

Clutter is turned on by default in Office 365. It is a machine learning system that analyses your email for newsletter and bulk emails and stores them in a separate folder, freeing your inbox from them and improving your ability to see the email that you need to deal with more easily. Like any machine learning tool, it can get things wrong so you can help it learn by “training” it. Move items to Clutter yourself (either by drag and drop or right clicking an email and choosing Move to Clutter. Likewise, you can move items back from Clutter to your Inbox. Note emails in Clutter are physically removed from your Inbox folder so will not show up on your mobile device without explicitly going to the Clutter folder.

Rules

Rules are a fantastic way of automating email delivery and management. You can create simple rules that simply delete email based on subject headings, to complex forwarding and filing processes. The options are large and can be complicated, however there are some shortcuts.

Right Click on any email and go to the Rules section. You can quickly create a rule to always move emails from a particular person to a particular folder.

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If you need to create more complicated rules this can be done as well by using the other options, Create a Rule or Manage Rules and Alerts.

Quick Steps

clip_image004Quick Steps are shortcuts that you can create that will mark items as read, move them to folders, forward emails to preselected team members and many other customisable actions.

Click on an email and in the ribbon select the quick steps box. You can open the manager and look at the default ones, modify or duplicate them and play with the options. More help online to manage Quick Steps.

I use these all the time to file emails from clients, staff and family.

 

 

File in folder – Move Conversation Messages

clip_image005Moving emails to folders is a good way to manage email, filing by customer, task, staff member, or even just for grouping things together. Once again the Right Click option gives access to a short cut to conversation filing. Conversations (grouped by subject) can then be completely removed from your inbox.

clip_image006Further conversation tools are available from the ribbon in the Home Tab. You can choose Ignore to delete an entire conversation (including future emails in the conversation). The Clean Up options give you the ability to remove duplicate emails (caused by replying and forwarding which includes the original email.) Be careful using this is you need an audit trail of what was sent to whom and when.

If you need help setting up or managing email management systems on your devices, talk to us today.

Windows 10 now on over 110 Million devices

We have now moved a significant portion of our customers to Windows 10, and without a single problem so far. There are significant compelling business reasons to do so as soon as possible – specifically the free upgrade that is only available until July.

Talk to use about the significant advantages to your business about using Windows 10. We can upgrade you over a weekend to avoid Down Time.

Windows 10 HP Stream for Sale $99

I have for sale a 7” tablet running the latest version Windows 10 Home. It is a 32GB device so small but very functional and it can take a Micro SD Memory Card. It has Bluetooth so can pair with an external keyboard and mouse. The Atom Processor gives it a very long battery life. Great for travellers, children or students.

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Here is a review of the device (with US Prices – it retailed in Australia for $199).

Contact me today if you want to buy this – first in first served.

the Tax Office is Going Digital – maybe You Should Too

If you hadn’t already seen their news release the Australia Tax Office has announced its Digital by Default Initiative and has requested feedback on it. Your business will need to prove why they can’t use the digital services and must qualify for an exemption. While there are many business processes that can’t be digitised, the world has seen remarkable growth with the onset of the Digital Revolution. And it makes sense to digitise whatever you can in your business where productivity gains can be realised. Just like you we are migrating our business slowly to the cloud wherever possible with the reduction of paper, cloud based accounting, digital delivery of information, and collaboration tools.

With the ATO’s announcement now might be timely for you to engage us to conduct a digital audit and look at developing a digital strategy, or if you think you might qualify for an exemption let us help you with that also.

New Office 365 Features and Announcements

Improvements to Office 365 kept flowing through the holiday season, bringing even more value to Office 365. The new Skype for Business for Android is here! The Power Pivot data model in Excel 2016 got smart rename support and Access 2016 Runtime became available. For business, the popular First Release program added more services, the Office 365 Compliance Center became the Office 365 Protection Center, Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery arrived and the Office 365 Planner preview started rolling out. To help you schedule meetings faster, there’s a new Outlook add-in called FindTime. The big news for developers is the availability on GitHub of Matter Center, an Office 365 Add-in and SharePoint-based document collaboration solution designed to increase productivity for legal professionals.

There are lots of things being introduced, updated and changed – check below for a quick summary and contact us if you need more information.

Skype Meeting Broadcast – New Office 365 Feature

Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you conduct meetings on the Internet for up to 10,000 people. They can attend in a browser on nearly any device. Meetings include real-time polling and sentiment tracking. Plus Yammer, to enable dialogue during the broadcast.

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Organise Teamwork with Office 365 Planner – Coming Soon

Office 365 Planner Preview rollout is starting and will be available soon to Office 36 customers.

What is it? Office 365 Planner, a new experience in Office 365 offers a simple and visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for teams to create plans, organize and assign work, share files, chat about what everyone is working on and get updates on progress.

Planner preview started rolling out to commercial First Release customers in the United States 16 Dec 2015. Microsoft expects to complete rollout of Planner Preview to commercial First Release customers worldwide over the next several weeks. Office 365 tenant admins will get detailed directions on how to enable Planner within their tenancy. The expect to make Planner generally available to all eligible Office 365 commercial and education customers in 2016.

Learn more about Office 365 Planner.

If you are interested in this tool we can give you a demo once we get access to it.

Office 2016 – Auto Update in February

Beginning February 9, 2016, Office 2016 Current Branch for Business will be available. The First Release for Current Branch for Business has been available since September, and we Microsoft is now making this broadly available to Office 365 customers.

How does this affect you?

Current Branch for Business is the default update branch of Office 2016, for Office 365 ProPlus subscriptions.

What do you need to do to prepare for this change?

We recommend that you review upgrade guidance and develop a plan to manage the upgrade of your existing Office 365 ProPlus installations. Auto-upgrades for Office 365 ProPlus and Office 365 Business clients will begin later in February 2016. If you wish to disable auto-upgrades refer to the following KB article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3097292 .

Contact us if you have concerns about moving to Office 2016. If you have CRM or other customisations that only work in Office 2013 please talk to us now

The New OneDrive For Business Sync Client is here

Now available for Mac and Windows 10 the new OneDrive for Business sync client solves most of the problems we were experiencing with files and folders not syncing correctly. No support for Windows 8.1 until the second quarter of 2016 though – another reason to upgrade to Windows 10 now.

Follow Us On Social Media

As always Jethro is your web, cloud and technology specialists. I am constantly learning new things and spending time researching, playing and testing new systems and reading about other people in the IT world doing the same thing. If you want to follow along with what I share in various spaces, then connect with me:

All content © Tim Miller. Feel free to share or send these emails on. If you want to unsubscribe just reply with Unsubscribe in the subject.

Christmas is almost here – and that brings great opportunities in business. People are shopping, using your business services and hopefully hitting your website and social media. Do you have a plan to engage and attract customers in this holiday season? Are you sure your website is secure? And if you are shopping yourself are you sure your personal data is secure? We would love to help with any of these things.

Can you be sure your personal data is secure?

The Veda 2015 Cyber Fraud Report published in October has some alarming statistics.

Sydney, Australia: Wednesday, 7 October 2015 – Australians’ love of online commerce and sharing on social media is making us unwitting pawns in the global fraud marketplace. A new fraud report released today reveals that fraudulent credit applications involving identity takeovers in Australia rose 59% in the past two years – and 17% in the past 12 months.

It shows that the online playground for hackers is getting serious, with 50% of credit application fraud in Australia now occurring online – an increase of 33% compared to the previous financial year. This compares with a 23% fall in credit application fraud incidents occurring at bank branches in 2014-15, compared to 2013-14.

Overall, credit application fraud rose almost 13% in 2014-15, across the four main types of fraud – falsifying personal details (accounting for 58% share), identity takeover (22% share), undisclosed debt (9%) and fabricated identity (8%).1

Of Australians who have suffered from fraud, 20% claimed their computer had been hacked – for example by malware – 18% stated that their mobile phone had been hacked and 18% claimed that one of their online accounts or their social media account had been hacked.2

The good news is that most Australians now use anti-virus software (90%) and PayPal for online payments (85%).

Following is a checklist to see if you or your business has exposure in any of the most obvious areas. Can you tick these items off?

Your Passwords are strong

  • Passwords should not be connected to your date of birth, middle name, children’s birth dates or names, or even your pets names. Rather they should be at least 9 (preferably 12) characters containing a mixture of upper and lower case letters numbers and punctuation symbols. Passphrases that include these may also work well. E.g. “I ate the dog’$ hoM3work”
  • Passwords should be changed regularly, and if you don’t have different ones you should at least have several levels – e.g. banking, email, online social medial accounts, and they should not be the same!
  • WiFi passwords are secure and your WiFi network is locked against casual users.
  • If you use someone else’s computer to conduct any banking use a private session and close the browser afterwards.

Physical devices should be reliable, secure and access restricted to authorised personnel.

  • Does your building or office have security, alarms or physical access restrictions (eg swipe cards)
  • Do you have a notification plan around lost or stolen data or devices with an escalation based on severity of the problem?
  • What is the time gap between a critical piece of infrastructure failing and its replacement allowing for continued business activity? Eg Router/modem, switch, server, PC, POS terminal etc.

The security of your business is important to us. We will assist you to work through the different threat levels, exposure and security risks and evaluate your current plans for failure points or missing pieces. Then we can help you plan and implement the missing pieces.

Act now BEFORE you experience a breach or loss. Contact us today for a security audit of your business and get yourself peace of mind.

Guides for Sharing Information Online

Recent research from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that phishing, hacking and ID theft was reported in over a quarter of all scams in 2014 and this is continuing to grow as more and more data is put online.

  • Be aware of what you (and your family) share online. Ensure your kids particularly aren’t giving away information that shouldn’t be kept private or could be used to compromise you.
  • Clear your cache regularly and use in private sessions when banking or doing other shopping.
  • Always check that the https:// protocol is in place when shopping. The S is the important bit.
  • Google your self occasionally – just to see what is out there

If you need help setting up or managing you or your families online profiles or devices, talk to us

Windows 10 update is available now

Microsoft just released a major Windows update to the world. This desktop update is packed with nearly 200 new capabilities, many of which were developed directly as a result of feedback from Insiders like you. Check out Terry Myerson's blog for more details.

With Windows 10 on now more than 110 million devices with 12 million of them business machines it is rapidly being installed everywhere.

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Talk to use about the significant advantages to your business about using Windows 10. We can upgrade you over the holiday period.

Follow Us On Social Media

As always Jethro is your web, cloud and technology specialists. I am constantly learning new things and spending time researching, playing and testing new systems and reading about other people in the IT world doing the same thing. If you want to follow along with what I share in various spaces, then connect with me:

All content © Tim Miller. Feel free to share or send these emails on. If you want to unsubscribe just reply with Unsubscribe in the subject.

Today’s newsletter has an article about your Business Security and the rest is mostly about Office 365. Most of you are using it but probably only scratching the surface with what it can do. I would love to hear back from you via this very quick survey created inside Office 365. Click this survey link.

Can you be sure your business data is secure?

Have you ever sat down and thought just how your business would cope if you lost all or even some of your data? Whether your critical applications are email, CRM, accounting or intellectual property the first line of defence is your IT infrastructure. And unfortunately in many cases the first point of attack is poorly planned and deployed infrastructure.

If critical data is corrupted, lost or stolen then there may be drastic business consequences. Maybe the inability to locate customer’s information or data, maybe the loss of sensitive information, or maybe the inability to trade could have a serious impact on your business’s profitability or even its continued existence.

Following is a checklist to see if your business has exposure in any of the most obvious areas. Can you tick these items off?

Your network is secure and reliable.

  • Mobile devices are securely connected and monitored and can be remotely wiped or deactivated.
  • Network access is only via security protocols requiring user authentication.
  • You can quickly detect and quarantine threats
  • WiFi passwords are secure and your WiFi network is locked against casual users.

Your backup and restore plans are tested regularly.

  • Does your backup plan include all your data and applications?
  • How often are your backups scheduled? And to what media? And with what redundancy?
  • Have you recently tested restoring your data or your systems?
  • How far back to the past can you recover data?
  • Is your backup onsite, offsite or a combination?

Physical devices should be reliable, secure and access restricted to authorised personnel.

  • Does your building or office have security, alarms or physical access restrictions (eg swipe cards)
  • Do you have a notification plan around lost or stolen data or devices with an escalation based on severity of the problem?
  • What is the time gap between a critical piece of infrastructure failing and its replacement allowing for continued business activity? Eg Router/modem, switch, server, PC, POS terminal etc.

The security of your business is important to us. We will assist you to work through the different threat levels, exposure and security risks and evaluate your current plans for failure points or missing pieces. Then we can help you plan and implement the missing pieces.

Act now BEFORE you experience a breach or loss. Contact us today for a security audit of your business and get yourself peace of mind.

New Office 365 features

So many new features, so few newsletters or time to explain them all. If you haven’t had your free business audit yet then please contact us. We will go through what you are using, show you the new features that you could be using and identify use cases where you could gain productivity or efficiency as a result.

Here are just some of the new things you may not be aware of.

Groups in Office 365 – available now

The first apps to take advantage of the Office 365 Groups service include Outlook, OneDrive for Business, OneNote, Skype for Business, Power BI and Dynamics CRM. Yammer, Delve and Planner will also soon take advantage of this service.

With the new Outlook Groups mobile app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, you can now engage with your group on your phone while on the go—continue conversations, view files, @mention colleagues and even discover other relevant groups.

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/introducing-availability-of-office-365-groups-in-outlook-2016

Office 365 Planner – Coming Soon

Office 365 Planner offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/introducing-office-365-planner

Updated App Launcher

If you're new to the app launcher, you might be wondering what it is and how to use it. The app launcher is designed to help you get to your apps from anywhere in Office 365. When you click (or tap) the app launcher icon App launcher icon, you get a menu of apps and services depicted in tiles like this:

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How many and which tiles you see depends on what services and features are available to you as part of your Office 365 subscription. For example, suppose that you're using Office 365 Business for work, and Office 365 Home for personal use. In this case, the app launcher you see when you're signed in to Office 365 Business will look a little different than the app launcher you see when you sign in to Office 365 Home.

Reminder – end of Mainstream support for Office 2010

As a reminder, mainstream support ends for Office 2010 on October 13, 2015.

Office 365 is designed to work with any version of Microsoft Office in mainstream support. We encourage you to update your Office installations by uninstalling Office 2010 and installing the Office 365 ProPlus subscription. Instructions can be found at http://aka.ms/uninstalloffice2010.

New OneDrive for Business Sync Tool – coming soon

The new client (available for both PC and Mac) offers improved reliability and selective sync, as well as removing the 20,000 file sync limit and extending support for files up to 10GB in size.

Simplified OneDrive browser experience

Microsoft has completely refreshed the browser experience, employing the best practices from the OneDrive consumer experience used by millions every day. The resulting browser experience is clean, intuitive and beautiful. A highlight of the new browser experience is the ability to switch between a list and preview tile view which makes it easy to identify key files. All of the key actions you want to take on a file or folder, such as preview, edit, share and delete, are conveniently located on the toolbar or by right-clicking a specific file or folder. This new browser experience makes managing your work files easier than ever. Read the link for more information including enhanced sharing, better mobile access and security.

https://blog.onedrive.com/meet-the-new-onedrive-for-business

Office 2016 – have you upgraded yet?

Some highlights:

  • Outlook 2016 provides the smartest inbox yet, delivering lightning fast search, removing low priority mail automatically and making sure everyone on the To: line has the right access to modern, cloud-based attachments from OneDrive.
  • We also have significant new updates to OneDrive for Business coming later this month across sync, browser, mobile, IT control and developer experiences. The highlight is the preview of the next generation sync client for Windows and Mac, offering improved reliability and selective sync, as well as increased file size and volume limits.
  • Tell Me helps you easily and quickly find the right Office feature or command, and Smart Lookup brings insights from the web right into your documents. Previously available only in Office Online, Tell Me and Smart Lookup are now available across the Office 2016 client apps.
  • Excel 2016 now includes integrated publishing to Power BI and new modern chart-types to help you make the most of your data.
  • The cloud-powered most recently used documents list allows you to pick up right where you left off in seconds, because it travels with you across your devices whether working in Office Online, the mobile apps or in the 2016 client apps.

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/thenewoffice

Follow Us On Social Media

As always Jethro is your web, cloud and technology specialists. I am constantly learning new things and spending time researching, playing and testing new systems and reading about other people in the IT world doing the same thing. If you want to follow along with what I share in various spaces, then connect with me:

All content © Tim Miller. Feel free to share or send these emails on. If you want to unsubscribe just reply with Unsubscribe in the subject.

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I have been using Jethro for Website management for around 3 years now for my various websites & domains, but particularly my photography business. During the initial setup of my website, I found them exceptionally helpful in regard to hosting solutions & suggestions, and getting the email addresses & redirections set up. Over the years, I have never had any downtime, and have always found they give very prompt service & responses when I have required changes to redirections, emails of setups of any of the sites. I will be definitely using them well into the future.

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