Windows 10

Want A Walkie-Talkie? Now You Can Use Your Phone and MS Teams

Posted on by Andy Miller

Microsoft has announced that it is introducing a “push-to-talk experience” to its ‘Teams’ collaborative platform that turns employee or company-owned smartphones and tablets into walkie-talkies.

No Crosstalk or Eavesdropping

The new ‘Walkie Talkie’ feature will offer clear, instant and secure voice communication over the cloud.  This means that it will not be at risk from traditional analogue (unsecured network) walkie-talkie problems such as crosstalk or eavesdropping, and Microsoft says that because Walkie Talkie works over Wi-Fi or cellular data, it can also be used across geographic locations.

Teams Mobile App

The Walkie Talkie feature can be accessed in private preview in Teams in the first half of this year and will be available in the Teams mobile app.  Microsoft says that Walkie Talkie will also integrate with Samsung’s new Galaxy XCover Pro enterprise-ready smartphone for business.

Benefits

The main benefits of Walkie Talkie are making it easier for firstline workers to communicate and manage tasks as well as reducing the number of devices employees must carry and lowering IT costs.

One Better Than Slack

Walkie Talkie also gives Teams another advantage over its increasingly distant rival Slack, which doesn’t currently have its own Walkie Talkie-style feature, although things like spontaneous voice chat can be added to Slack with Switchboard.

Last month, Microsoft announced that its Teams product had reached the 20 million daily active users (and growing) mark, thereby sending Slack’s share price downwards.

Slack, which has 12 million users (a number which has increased by 2 million since January 2019) appears to be falling well into second place in terms of user numbers to Teams in the $3.5 billion chat-based collaborative working software market.  However, some tech commentators have noted that Slack has stickiness and strong user engagement and that its main challenge is that although large companies in the US use it and like it, they currently have a free version, so Slack will have to convince them to upgrade to the paid-for version if it wants to start catching up with Teams

Apple Watch Walkie-Talkie App

Apple Watch users (Series 1 or later with watch OS 5.3 or later, not in all countries though) have been able to use a ‘Walkie-Talkie’ app since October last year.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For businesses using Microsoft Teams, the new Walkie Talkie feature could be a cost-saving and convenient tool for firstline workers, and the fact that it integrates Samsung’s new Galaxy XCover Pro will give it even more value for businesses.

For Microsoft, the new Walkie Talkie feature, along with 7 other recently announced new tools for Teams focused firmly on communication and task management for firstline workers are more ways that Teams can gain a competitive advantage over rival Slack, and increase the value of Office 365 to valuable business customers.

Tech Tip – Tidy & Focused

Posted on by Andy Miller

If you’d like to quickly clean up a messy desktop in Windows 10, and if you’d like to stay focused by clearing away all open apps except for the one you’re working on, here’s how:

To hide desktop icons quickly:

– Press and hold (or right-click) the desktop.

– Select ‘View’ and ‘Show desktop icons’ – this will clear the desktop.

To get the desktop icons back, select ‘Show desktop icons’.

– To clear your workspace of all open apps except the one you’re working on:

– Select and hold the window you want to stay open.

– Give your mouse (or finger) a back-and-forth shake.

– All the other open apps will automatically minimise.

Tech Tip – Format Painter

Posted on by Andy Miller

If you’re preparing a Word document in Windows 10 and you like the look of the formatting in one section and you’d like a quick and easy way to apply the same formatting to other sections, try using ‘Format Painter’.

You can find Format Painter on the top left of the screen – a paintbrush symbol. To use it :

– Highlight a paragraph in your document which has the formatting you like.

– Click on the Format Painter symbol.

– Click in the document next to the section you’d like to change to that formatting (you’ll see the paintbrush symbol appear) and highlight the new section.

– The formatting you like will automatically be applied.

New Phishing Tracker For Office 365

Posted on by Andy Miller

Microsoft is launching a new “campaign views” tool in Office 365 that is designed to offer greater protection from phishing attacks by enabling businesses to be able to spot the pattern of a phishing campaign over individual messages.

Context and Visibility

Microsoft is in a good position to leverage the large amount of anti-phishing, anti-spam, and anti-malware data and experience that it has across the entire Office 365 service world-wide to identify campaigns. It is this information that feeds into the campaign views tool.
The idea is that the extra context and visibility that campaign views provides gives the full story of how an organisation has been targeted. This additional dimension of defence means that an organisation and its users can see if/how defences have held up against popular attacks, and adjust its own defences accordingly, based on these insights.

What It Shows

The kind of information that the ‘campaign views’ tool can reveal to security teams includes:

  • A summary of a phishing campaign i.e. when it started, it’s pattern and timeline, the size and spread of the campaign, and how many known victims there has been (and see if users have clicked on the phishing link).
  • A list of IP addresses and senders associated with the attack, plus a list of all the URLs that were used in the attack.
  • A look at which messages were blocked, delivered to junk or quarantine, or allowed to get through to the inbox.

Today’s Attacks ‘Morph’ To Get Around Defences

Today’s email attacks are often the sophisticated output of factory-like cybercrime operations where new templates and variances can be rapidly created, generated, and scaled-up in a way that is designed to offer the best chance of maximising financial gain while evading detection and capture.

For example, in a single campaign, the attackers can make multiple changes and variants (morphs) e.g. changes in the sending infrastructure, the sending IPs and sending domains, sender names and addresses, URLs, and the hosting infrastructure for their attack sites. These morphs can, therefore, enable attackers to get around popular defence tactics such as blocking known bad URLs, sending IP address, or sending domains.

Value

Microsoft says that the extra context and visibility that ‘campaign views’ gives security teams means that they can be more effective and efficient. For example, once armed with the information that ‘campaign views’ provides, security teams can be better at remediating compromised/vulnerable users, improving the general security posture (by removing configuration flaws), investigating related/similar campaigns, and hunting and tracking any threats that have the same indicators of compromise.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Email is one of the main ways that cybercriminals can gain access to company systems and phishing campaigns are an all-too-common way to dupe businesses into clicking on links in often convincing-looking pages, thereby releasing the malware that causes so much damage, or imparting password and financial information. ‘Campaign views’ appears to be another potentially valuable tool in the cyber defences of businesses with its main strong point being that it gives a much fuller picture of real-world attacks. This additional context and data can help businesses to become much better prepared and more proactive in finding and closing the door on rapidly evolving email security threats.

Tech Tip – Read Without Distractions

Posted on by Andy Miller

If you need to read a web page without the distractions of adverts or unwanted recommendations, Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 provides an easy way to do this.

– In Microsoft Edge (top), click on the “Reading View” icon (open book symbol).

– Alternatively, type Ctrl+Shift+R.

The Battle Between ‘Slack’ and ‘Teams’

Posted on by Andy Miller

With Microsoft’s announcement that it’s Teams product has 20 million daily active users (and growing), sending Slack’s share price downwards (Slack has 12 million users), the battle is well underway in the $3.5 billion chat-based collaborative working software market.

What Is Slack?

Slack, launched in 2013, is a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services. It provides mobile apps for iOS and Android, and is available for the Apple Watch, enabling users to send direct messages, see mentions, and send replies.

Slack teams enable users (communities, groups, or teams) to join through a URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner. Slack was intended to be an organisational communication tool, but it has gradually morphed into a community platform i.e. it is a business technology that has crossed over into personal use. Slack recently introduced an “email bridge” into its platform that will allow those who only have email to communicate with Slack users.  Back in May last year, ‘Slack’ introduced a new ‘Actions’ feature that made it easier for users to create and finish tasks without leaving by having access to more 3rd party tools.

In October this Year Slack announced that it has 12 million daily active users, which is 2 million increase since January.

What Is Teams?

Teams, announced in November 2016 and launched by Microsoft in 2017, is a platform designed to help collaborative working and combines features such as workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. Described by Microsoft as a “complete chat and online meetings solution”, it normally integrates with the company’s Office 365 subscription office productivity suite. In July 2018, Microsoft introduced a free, basic features version of Teams which did not require an Office 365 account, in order to increase user numbers and tempt users away from Slack.

Microsoft Teams is also the replacement for Skype for Business Online, the support for which will end on 31 July 2021, and all new Microsoft 365 customers have been getting Microsoft Teams by default from 1 September 2019.

Share Tumble For Slack

Slack’s share value fell earlier this year after it announced that its projected sales growth would be lower for the second half of the year. Slack became a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in June, and investors have been saying that it will need to maintain an impressive growth rate to compete against competitors like Microsoft (with Teams), Alphabet (Google) and Facebook.

The recent announcement by Microsoft that Teams has 20 million daily active users compared to Slack’s 12 million and has increased daily active users by more than 50% from June caused another downward push on Slack’s share value.

Slack’s Challenge – To Get More Large Paying Customers

Slack, which enjoys popularity in the U.S corporate workplace has been trying to emphasise that it is not just a chat/messaging app, but that it can connect to companies’ other applications in a way that can streamline workflows and aid real value addition and savings.  Slack is, however, facing a challenge in convincing big businesses that it is worthy, paid-for alternative to its more well-known competitors, and according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew Eisenson, less than 1% of Slack’s customer base are large customers that spend more than $100,000 a year. One of the problems that Slack has is that although large companies in the US use it and like it, they currently have a free version, so Slack will have to convince them to upgrade to the paid-for version.

Despite having lower user numbers than Teams, some tech commentators have noted that Slack has stickiness and strong user engagement which help to attract businesses that want to get into using workstream collaboration software.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Microsoft has the advantage of a very well-known and trusted brand with huge reach, Teams already integrates with Office 365’s subscription office productivity suite, and there’s now a free version that doesn’t even require an Office 365 account.  Also, Teams is set to replace Skype for Business Online next year, and Microsoft has made sure that Skype for Business Online customers know that Microsoft’s investment and interoperability will make the migration to Teams a fairly painless one.

All this means that Teams appears to be in a very good position to continue what has been a rapid growth this year, and despite Slack’s positive features, Slack will have to fight hard to get big businesses interested in order to compete.

For users, there are now several good collaborative working services to choose from, but at the present time, the facts that investors don’t know when Slack is going to be profitable, coupled with a fall in revenue have led some commentators to think that Teams is looking as though it could come out on top.

Tech Tip – Quickly Re-Open a Closed Tab

Posted on by Andy Miller

If you have several tabs open on your browser and you accidentally close an important tab, there is and fast and easy way to re-open it.

To re-open an important tab that you’ve accidentally closed:

– Press command+shift+t on a Mac or control+shift+t on Windows PC.

– Your tab will then be restored.

Tech Tip – Record Your Screen (Easily)

Posted on by Andy Miller

Although the built-in Windows 10 feature ‘Game Bar’ was designed for ‘screenshotting’ games, it can actually be used by anybody as a fast and easy way to take and use a screenshot.

For example:

– Press Windows Key + G to open the Windows 10 game bar.

– Click on the ‘Take Screenshot’ option, top left ( The screenshot will be saved to C:\Users\Admin\Videos\Captures  )

– Or, Press Windows Key + G again and click on ‘View Captures’.  From here you can choose to open the file location of your screenshot (and see it saved in the folder), delete it, share it to Twitter, copy it, and even create a ‘meme’.

The End of Life … for Windows 7 …  is Nigh

Posted on by Andy Miller

Microsoft’s Windows 7 Operating system, introduced in 2009 and only intended to upgrade windows in the wake of the much-disliked Windows Vista finally reaches its end of life date on 14 January 2020.  Looking back, it was an unexpected success in many ways, and looking forward, if you’re one of the 39% of Windows users still running Windows 7 (only 44% are running Windows 10), you may feel that you’ve been left with little choice but to move away from the devil you know to the not-so-big-bad Windows 10.

Big Success For Microsoft

Evolving from early codename versions such as “Blackcomb”, “Longhorn,” and then “Vienna” (in early 2006), what was finally named as Windows 7 in October 2008 proved to be an immediate success on its release in 2009.  The update-turned Operating System, which was worked upon by an estimated 1,000 developers clocked-up more than 100 million sales worldwide within the first 6 months of its release. Windows 7 was made available in 6 different editions, with the most popularly recognised being the Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions.

Big Improvement

Windows 7 was considered to be a big improvement upon Windows Vista which, although achieving some impressive usage figures (still lower than XP though) came in for a lot of criticism for its high system requirements, longer boot time and compatibility problems with pre-Vista hardware and software.

Some of the key improvements that Windows 7 brought were the taskbar and a more intuitive feel, much-improved performance, and fewer annoying User Account Control popups. Some of the reasons for switching to Windows 7 back in 2009 were that it had been coded to support most pieces of software that ran on XP, it could automatically install device drivers, the Aero features provided a much better interface, it offered much better hardware support, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 could handle a bigger system memory, and the whole Operating System had a better look and feel.

End of Life = End of Support = Danger

After looking back at the successes of Windows 7 it seems a shame to have to focus on the impending ‘end of life’ on 14 January.  End of life isn’t quite as final as it sounds. Windows 7 will still run but support i.e. security patches, will no longer be available for it.

For Azure customers, the Windows Virtual Desktop does still mean that there’s the option of an extra three years of extended support as part of that package, but there may be some costs incurred in migrating to the cloud service.

Yes, ‘Extended Security Updates’ can be also purchased by customers with active Software Assurance for subscription licenses for 75% of the on-premises annual license cost, but this should only really be considered as a temporary measure to ease the transition to Windows 10, or if you’ve simply been caught out by the deadline.

Embracing the Positive

It may even be the case that in the process of worrying about the many complications and potential challenges of migrating to Windows 10 you haven’t allowed yourself to focus on the positive aspects of the OS such a faster and more dynamic environment and support for important business software like Office 365 and Windows server 2016.

Planning and Time

In order to maximise security and finally get round to taking the plunge and migrating to a new operating system, it’s worth noting that IT project deployment can be slow, some remedial work may be required in the transition, and you will need to make sure that you have identified any issues that you have in your environment.  This means that although the deadline is technically a couple of months away, there will be the interruption of the Christmas and New Year break to consider, and it may be wise to allow yourself enough time to gather all the information and to plan the project so that everything goes smoothly.

What To Do Now

The deadline to end of support/end of life for Windows 7 is just around the corner, but the stats show that, if you’ve not yet done your homework and planned your move of Windows 7, you’re not alone.  Ideally, a slow and measured approach to an upgrade of this kind and scale would allow enough time for planning and for the smoothest of transitions. Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury of time and although there are some possible OS alternatives to Windows 10, these could bring their own challenges and risks that you may not yet have considered.

For most businesses then, there is a realisation that the threat of no more support means that continuing to run Windows 7 presents a real risk to the business e.g. from every new hacking and malware attack that comes along after January. If you choose to upgrade to Windows 10 on your existing computers, you will need to take into account factors such as the age and specification of those computers, and there are likely to be costs involved in upgrading existing computers.  You may also be considering, depending on the size/nature of your business and your IT budget, buying new computers with Windows 10 installed, and in addition to the cost implications you may also be wondering how and whether you can use any business existing systems or migrate any important existing data and programs to this platform.

One thing is clear: if you’re still running Windows 7, the time to act is now.

Tech Tip – Save a Web Page as a PDF

Posted on by Andy Miller

Sometimes, when researching online, it’s helpful to be able to collect information in a form that can easily be printed out, so here’s how to save a web page as a PDF from three popular browsers:

Google Chrome:

– Top right (three-dot icon), choose ‘Print’ (or use Ctrl + P)
– In ‘Destination’ choose ‘Change’
– In ‘Select a Destination’, under the heading ‘Print Destinations’ choose ‘Save as PDF’
– Work through the preview options and select ‘Save’

Microsoft Edge

– Choose ‘Print’ (top right of the browser) or Ctrl + P
– Under the ‘Printer’ drop-down menu select the ‘Microsoft Print to PDF’ option
– Go through the other options (margins and scale) and select ‘Print’

Firefox

– Use the Windows 10 Microsoft Print to PDF function
– Press Ctrl + P to display the print menu
– Select ‘Microsoft Print to PDF from the printer options, and click on ‘OK’
– Select name and save location and click on ‘Save’

Safari

– Under ‘File’ choose ‘Print’ (or Command + P)
– Select ‘PDF’ from the left-hand corner of the window
– For a basic save, select ‘Save as PDF’.