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Safety Concerns with Allowing Guests to Access Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has become a widely adopted platform for communication and collaboration in both professional and educational settings. It offers a range of features that enable seamless remote collaboration, including the ability to invite external users as guests to join Teams. While this feature brings convenience and flexibility, it also raises several safety concerns that organizations must address. In this blog post, we will explore the potential risks associated with allowing guests to access Microsoft Teams and discuss strategies to mitigate these concerns.

Continue reading → Safety Concerns with Allowing Guests to Access Microsoft Teams
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Why Businesses Using M365 Should Go Passwordless for Their Users

As cyber threats continue to evolve, traditional password-based authentication methods are no longer sufficient to protect sensitive business data. Passwords can be compromised, stolen, or hacked, leading to costly data breaches and reputational damage. In response, many businesses are now turning to passwordless authentication as a more secure and user-friendly alternative.

Microsoft 365 (M365) is a popular suite of cloud-based productivity tools used by millions of businesses worldwide. M365 includes several features that enable passwordless authentication, providing a more secure and seamless user experience. In this article, we’ll explore why businesses using M365 should consider going passwordless for their users.

Continue reading → Why Businesses Using M365 Should Go Passwordless for Their Users
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Intune device management, not just for large businesses

As businesses of all sizes increasingly rely on technology to operate efficiently, it becomes more important to have a way to manage and secure the devices used by employees. This is especially true for small businesses that may not have the resources to hire a dedicated IT staff. Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based device management solution that can help small businesses simplify device management, enhance security, and boost productivity. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits of using Microsoft Intune for small business device management.

Continue reading → Intune device management, not just for large businesses
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Automatically apply a retention label to retain or delete content

One of the most powerful features of retention labels is the ability to apply them automatically to content that matches specified conditions. In this case, people in your organization don’t need to apply the retention labels. Microsoft 365 does the work for them.

Auto-applying retention labels are powerful because:

  • You don’t need to train your users on all of your classifications.
  • You don’t need to rely on users to classify all content correctly.
  • Users no longer need to know about data governance policies – they can focus on their work.

You can apply retention labels to content automatically when that content doesn’t already have a retention label applied and contains sensitive information, keywords or searchable properties, or a match for trainable classifiers. Now in preview, you can also automatically apply a retention label to cloud attachments that are stored in SharePoint or OneDrive.

Continue reading → Automatically apply a retention label to retain or delete content
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Apple Watch companion app removed from Authenticator for iOS

In the January 2023 release of Authenticator for iOS, there’s no companion app for watchOS due to it being incompatible with Authenticator security features, meaning you won’t be able to install or use Authenticator on Apple Watch. This change only impacts Apple Watch, so you can still use Authenticator on your other devices.

Personally I found the companion app very handy and its a shame that it has been deprecated. Will it ever return…probably not. So its back to reaching for the phone from the pocket like the old days

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How to Create a Test Environment for Office 365

Everybody knows that test environments are a very good idea, providing a safe place to try new features or configuration changes to products, develop scripts and tools, or provide training for your staff. Office 365 is no different, but a lot of customers that I talk to don’t maintain a test environment at all. And many of the IT pros that I talk to also don’t have their own person tenant for testing and training.

For traditional on-premises infrastructure the reasons for not running test environments are usually cost-related. Sadly, it is very common for IT teams to not have the resources such as hardware or virtualization capacity to build a separate environment that is a meaningful representation of their production environment. Continue reading → How to Create a Test Environment for Office 365

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Deploy Templates in Azure Stack using PowerShell

In this example, you run a script to deploy a virtual machine to Azure Stack Development Kit using a Resource Manager template. Before proceeding, ensure you have configured PowerShell

The VHD used in this example template is WindowsServer-2012-R2-Datacenter.

  1. Go to http://aka.ms/AzureStackGitHub, search for the 101-simple-windows-vm template, and save it to the following location: c:\templates\azuredeploy-101-simple-windows-vm.json.
  2. In PowerShell, run the following deployment script. Replace username and password with your username and password. On subsequent uses, increment the value for the $myNum parameter to prevent overwriting your deployment.
    PowerShellCopy
        # Set Deployment Variables
    $myNum = "001" #Modify this per deployment
    $RGName = "myRG$myNum"
    $myLocation = "local"

    # Create Resource Group for Template Deployment
    New-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $RGName -Location $myLocation

    # Deploy Simple IaaS Template
    New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment `
        -Name myDeployment$myNum `
        -ResourceGroupName $RGName `
        -TemplateFile c:\templates\azuredeploy-101-simple-windows-vm.json `
        -NewStorageAccountName mystorage$myNum `
        -DnsNameForPublicIP mydns$myNum `
        -AdminUsername <username> `
        -AdminPassword ("<password>" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force) `
        -VmName myVM$myNum `
        -WindowsOSVersion 2012-R2-Datacenter
  3. Open the Azure Stack portal, click Browse, click Virtual machines, and look for your new virtual machine (myDeployment001).
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New Office 365 Security Score Features

Since Microsoft  announced the general availability of Office 365 Secure Score we the community have been giving them a lot of  feedback on how it could be optimized for our needs.  It seems that Microsoft have listened…two requests that came up regularly were that organizations wanted Secure Score to award points in situations where a control was being met by a third party product and the ability to ignore a control because it was not relevant to them. Based on this feedback  these two options are now available.

Continue reading → New Office 365 Security Score Features

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Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it’s just Microsoft 365

office-appsMicrosoft is squishing its major biz products into a single solution called – wait for it – Microsoft 365, CEO Satya Nadella announced at Inspire, Redmond’s annual event for businesses that flog its wares.

Office 365, Windows 10, and enterprise mobility and security, will be peddled in two flavours: Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business, Nadella said. The latter, which adds device and licence management from a single location, will be available for preview on August 2.
Continue reading → Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it’s just Microsoft 365

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New business apps in Office 365 Business Premium help you run and grow your small business

To make Office 365 more valuable for your small business, we are announcing three new applications coming to Office 365 Business Premium:

  • Microsoft Connections—A simple-to-use email marketing service.
  • Microsoft Listings—An easy way to publish your business information on top sites.
  • Microsoft Invoicing—A new way to create professional invoices and get paid fast.

We’re also introducing the Office 365 Business center, a central place where you can manage these business apps and get an end-to-end view of your business. In addition, we’re adding MileIQ, the leading mileage tracking app, as an Office 365 Business Premium subscription benefit. These new services—along with the recently added Microsoft Bookings and Outlook Customer Manager—help you win customers and manage your business.

Continue reading → New business apps in Office 365 Business Premium help you run and grow your small business