Office 365 Archives

Microsoft’s Response to Education Institutions

Technology can play a vital role in reducing the impact of COVID-19 on people and organizations. Many schools and universities have moved to online courses to ensure everyone is still receiving an education during this time. Microsoft has introduced extended free trials and resources for clients to use to maintain collaboration, productivity, and security. Here is Microsoft's response for education institutions: New, Extended Free Trials for EDU Customers Office 365 A1 – Free versions to all educational institutions: This version provides unlimited chat, built-in group and one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. You also get real-time collaboration with the Office apps for web, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. No restrictions for # of users. Get started for free Technical documentation Microsoft Teams for Free (Individuals and IT roll-out – in Office 365 A1 above): Provides unlimited chat, built-in ...

Microsoft2023-02-16T16:01:23+00:00

Achieve More with the Office 365 Cloud Immersion Experience

We’ve all been there. We've had technology dumped on us, sometimes with no explanation. What we hear most often from our clients is that they have rolled out Office 365, but people are not adopting the technology. How do we solve that? People don't embrace technology, but they embrace solutions. Office 365 Offers Many Powerful Tools In the Office 365 environment, we see all these different opportunities to work with tools inside of the product. However, that can be overwhelming, and who has time to be overwhelmed in the workplace? “Empower & Inspire peopleby creating an immersive experience where they discover for themselveswhat’s possible in a Microsoft-powered organization.” Provide a Direction with an Office 365 Cloud Immersion Experience This Office 365 Cloud Immersion Experience is a chance for your users to become empowered. It’s a hands-on session to explore how to leverage the tools you already own to do more with less. We listen to what the needs of the business are. We walk through your business challenges one-by-one that way, we can see a clearer vision of ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:23+00:00

Top 7 Microsoft Exclusive Quick Starts

We developed a series of Microsoft Exclusive Quick Starts to help answers our client's everyday questions on Office 365 and Microsoft 365. Some of the biggest and most frequent questions are around: Where do I start? What do we need to do first? Where should we go from here? We've just bought Office 365, we've just moved to Teams, or were moving to SharePoint, what do we do first? Based on these questions, we developed a series of Microsoft Exclusive Quick Starts to help provide answers. Microsoft 365 Immersion Experience Quick Start Office 365 is way more than just email. Microsoft 365 is cloud storage, integrated voice, integrated messaging, file sharing, document collaboration, video sharing, and so much more. This quick start is perfect for anyone who is looking at Office 365 and wants to make sure that it’s the right fit for them. It is also ideal for companies that have just deployed Office 365, and want to ensure they are using it to the fullest. Office 365 Power Up Quick Start Dig into all the different layers of Office ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:24+00:00

Protect Against Spoofing

Office 365 Exchange Online is a robust email platform, but it’s still vulnerable to cyber-attacks. One such attack is spoofing. Spoofing is when somebody with malicious intent sends an email to trick you into thinking that the email is coming from someone you know within your organization or someone you receive emails from regularly. For example, I received one last week from someone that appeared to be from Amazon for Business the email was telling me to reset my password to click to verify and asking me to put in my credentials. It looked very similar to an Amazon email. It had the Amazon logo, and the form was professionally done. However, I do not have an Amazon for Business account, so I knew it was a spoofing attempt. Here are a couple of examples of what you might see when someone has sent you a spoofed message: The display ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:26+00:00

Phase out, Check-in and Check-out?

With shared storage of documents, overwriting other author’s work has historically been a concern. Two people would open the same document and made changes to the same content and whom over saves last wins and the other work is lost….. So as good technicians we have historically fought that scenario by requiring Checkout before editing. SharePoint would do this for us as soon as a user edited the file. A lock would be placed on the file until it is closed. Brilliant! I know those were good days. Question: With SharePoint online and the co-authoring options, is check-out and check-in a required default. I am sure there are still scenarios when you need to check out the file for exclusive access and control. Like you want to format the whole thing or apply document-wide content or settings. What is the process and best use of the document check-in and ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:30+00:00

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365

Imagine this all-too-common scenario: someone in accounting receives a large invoice by email and pays it. It’s several months before you discover that the invoice originated from a compromised or spoofed email account, that your vendor never received the funds, and that you’re now obligated to provide the FBI with evidence for a criminal investigation. How long would it take you to locate the suspicious communications? Especially if they’d been deleted months before? As business email compromise and spear phishing attacks grow in sophistication, we’re seeing more of these unfortunate scenarios, but we also regularly encounter less dramatic circumstances in which our clients discover an urgent need for backups of emails or files —backups that may be easy or impossible for them to find, depending on the recovery solution they’ve set up beforehand. Whether these incidents are minor glitches or will result in a devastating loss is entirely contingent upon ...

Robert Tessanne2023-02-16T16:01:31+00:00

Check and Configure SharePoint User Permissions

Ever have a SharePoint gotcha problem before? It’s highly likely that your answer is yes and you are not alone. SharePoint has lots of gotchas and it can be difficult to troubleshoot sometimes. However, there are some really simple yet powerful features that are built right into the interface. Site collection administrators will find these features easily accessible and usable to trouble shoot why somebody doesn’t have access to certain resources. This blog covers the features that allow you to check guest permissions in SharePoint. Scenario 1: Problem - Users are granted access to a site and they start navigating until they can’t add or update items. Solution - Bring up list setting and check permission dialog Type in the user name in question and check their permissions to the list Review all the permissions that the user is assigned throughout the site Alter and modify the additional permission and ...

Clay Osborn2023-02-16T16:01:31+00:00

Azure Information Protection

How do you ensure your organization's confidential documents are accessible by approved eyes only? Fear not. Azure Active Information Protection can be your trusted friend to ensure that the sensitive data is well protected when appropriate groups or policies are set up and implemented. Specifically, Azure Information Protection, which is data loss prevention (DLP) for documents can be utilized to secure your confidential data. This blog provides a high-level overview of the DLP solution for Microsoft Azure. There are some different ways to start leveraging the platform and protecting your sensitive documents. Labels Place appropriate labels on your documents - you can have these labels applied by the users as they're editing documents Using client application and plugins into the office applications to apply labels when editing documents Customize your labels to control access to the documents by department or personnel. Create visual marking on the documents, such as header, ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:33+00:00

OneNote: How to use it in an organization

What is OneNote? OneNote is, as its name implies, an electronic notebook. It excels as a personal tool for recording ad hoc, unstructured information that you need to write down quickly without the need for a lot of planning and organization. Information such as: Names, addresses, phone numbers Outlining/brainstorming documents Research notes Planning schedules and appointments Meeting notes Note that many of these information types may have a better place to record them in a structured way for sharing in the organizations. For example: Contact information can be stored in Exchange, either in your personal contacts or in shared contacts; or in a CRM system. Finished documents should go in a document management repository. Research notes and meeting notes, however, are particularly good candidates for long-term storage in OneNote. Meeting notes also take advantage of a second key feature of OneNote—the power to share notes and even co-author notes with ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:42+00:00

Right-Sizing IT – Power & Flexibility for Growing Companies

Growing a business is never easy, and properly managing that growth can be even harder. A growing company has countless “moving parts” that must be considered, accommodated, and forced to work in synchronization. Head counts have to match resource requirements; facility size has to accommodate head count; budgeting, provisioning and resource allocations have to scale in symmetry with the company’s growth path. And one of the most critical – and difficult – moving parts to manage has historically been IT. Consider the case of Teijin Advanced Composites America. Although its corporate parent is a vast Japanese chemical and pharmaceutical firm, this pioneering Red Level Client is nonetheless subject to most of the same challenges and constraints as any other emerging start-up—and some extra ones besides. When we first became acquainted with TACA, it was in the earliest stages of a collaborative agreement with one of America’s largest manufacturers, and at ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:54+00:00