The Power Up Project: Recent Episodes
Ben Love & Ben Dampney
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Part 5 of our five-part cyber security series – Conducting Security Audits
What is a cyber security audit?
A wrap up of our cyber security podcast series
Transcript: In this episode, we talk about conducting security audits.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project. It’s fantastic to have you here as we round out the final episode in our five-part series on our top cybersecurity defences for your business. So far in this series we have spoken about intelligent firewalls. We’ve spoken about cyber insurance. We have spoken yet again about multi-factor authentication. And in our last episode, we spoke briefly about cybersecurity awareness training for your staff.
So in this episode we’re going to talk about security audits. Now, this is a very open-ended discussion. A security audit can be very simple, and cheap, and easy. A security audit can be very in-depth, and prolonged, and expensive. So it really is a bit of a piece of string here as to how you perceive the risk to your business, if you have any particular requirements for compliance with any particular regulations for example, or if you have a board who are concerned about this and need to be put at their ease.
So at the simple end of the process, there are a number of routine scheduled checks that you can conduct yourself if you like, every three months perhaps, maybe more, maybe less, and check on some of the most common areas that can be a threat to your business. For example, one of the really easy ones that we see is user accounts left in place for staff who have left the business.
So of course we all have a seamless process in place where our HR is tied into our IT department, so as soon as a staff member leaves the business, of course that automatically triggers down closure requests to the IT department to close down all the user accounts. We all have that, right? Of course we do. But sometimes a user account can slip through the cracks and be left in place when it shouldn’t be.
So it’s a very simple matter then to run some reports, to log onto your systems, to check the user accounts in place, and tick them off against maybe a payroll report or something similar to make sure there are no extraneous user accounts left by the by. Now, that is just one simple example of how you can run these routine checks yourself to pick up on some of the low hanging fruit I guess, the easier and most common areas that are worth checking with a bit of a routine audit.
As we climb up the scale in terms of sophistication and also, therefore, expense, we get into more technical audits, until we get to the high end of the scale when we’re talking about things like penetration testing, we’re talking about real-time monitoring of infrastructure with intrusion detection, we’re talking about a lot of these big words here. And when you get to that end of the scale, this is when we start talking, probably not to your generalist IT partner, but this is when we start talking to specialist cyber security firms who live and breathe this type of audit, and protection, and defence, and activity.
So, again, it depends what end of the scale you would like to take this, but at the very simple end, it’s pretty easy for you to put in place a little reminder in your calendar, and maybe every quarter you run through a list of checks, run some reports on some key systems, make sure the things are the way they are. And you would be surprised how effective these routine audits can be in order to tease out some of those gaps that we inadvertently leave in our security.
That brings us to the end of our five-part series on our top most effective cybersecurity defences. I do hope that everybody got some value out of this. It really is a constantly changing and rapidly evolving landscape though. So it is something that, as business people, business owners, business managers, we do need to be staying in touch with and well aware of at all times. This is not simply a matter that we can leave to the IT people. This is a business-level issue, and we need to make sure we understand it at a business level, and not simply just delegate it down.
Thanks for joining us at the Power Up Project over the past five episodes to talk about the important topic of cyber security. Have you got any questions? Please, make sure you pop over to the website or the Facebook page and send us a message. We’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Part 4 of our five-part cyber security series – Cyber Security Awareness
Why cyber security is a very hot topic in business today.
Everything you need to know about Cyber Security and why your organisation should be aware.
Transcript: In this episode we’ll be talking about cyber security awareness.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project. It’s great to have you here for the next in our five part series on our five most effective cyber security defences for your business. So far in this series we’ve spoken about having an advanced intelligent firewall, we’ve spoken about the importance of cyber insurance, and we’ve also spoken again about the multi-factor authentication.
Today what we’re going to talk about is something that brings it back to what is usually the weakest link in any of our cyber security defences and that is our people. When we look at cyber security breaches, in the majority of cases it comes down to people, it comes down to humans who have essentially taken some action which has bypassed or compromised security and has allowed the malicious actors to gain a foothold in the business network.
We can put all of the best technology in place, we can put fancy firewalls, we can put multi-factor authentication, we can do all of this but at the end of the day what we really need to be addressing is our people. Now our people and our staff, they want to do the best thing. None of them are out there looking to get breached by a malicious actor, so what we need to help them with then is recognising these threats and training them on how to respond when they do detect or recognise one of these threats.
The most common form of threat that we see coming through is a malicious e-mail. So these e-mails, phishing e-mails, are definitely the most common at the moment. We’re seeing a rapidly increasing number of whaling and spear phishing and more targeted phishing attacks but the e-mail vector really is still probably the biggest one that we see out there in the wild. So this is when a staff member in your business will receive an e-mail that looks legit, it looks like it’s coming from legitimately from one of your suppliers or from a business that they do business with personally, maybe not even part of the fact that they’re a staff member with your organisation, and they click on a link in that e-mail and that link let’s the bad actors in. From there bad actors have access to your network and then it’s just a case of how quickly can we respond and lock things down and protect your digital assets.
What we need to do is provide that training for our staff on how to recognise these malicious e-mails, dodgy websites they shouldn’t be going to, and so on. There’s a number of ways we can do it. This doesn’t need to be a big expensive exercise, it doesn’t need to be super intrusive either. One of the most common ways that we see people going about this training at the moment is what we kind of consider to be called a friendly phishing campaign. This is when we actually send these pretend malicious e-mails to our own staff and we see who reads them and we see who clicks on them, and of course, if they do click on them that’s okay because it’s not truly a malicious e-mail, it’s just a pretend one and it will log the fact for us that this happened so we can gather some statistics on how well our people are actually avoiding these threats or how maybe unwell they’re actually clicking through to them. But we can then also lead that staff member onto a little bit of training.
We can take them to a webpage, for example, which is not a malicious webpage but it’s a friendly webpage that says, “Hey, you know what? Gotcha! That was a malicious e-mail. Here’s why you should have recognised that that was not a legitimate e-mail. Here’s what you should do with it next time you see something that matches these particular criteria.” So it’s a very friendly non-intrusive way of helping to train our staff and keep it a little bit front of mind that they do need to be on the lookout for these particular attacks.
Now you can take that training up a little notch and you can send your staff away on training courses that could be disruptive obviously, because you’re without a staff maybe for a period of time. The other option too of course is to bring a trainer into your business and run some lunch and learn type training sessions, which can be very effective. They can be short, sweet, 20 to 30 minutes, people can sit around and have a sandwich and you can deliver some training to your people to raise their level of awareness about these cyber security threats. You could even deliver that training in a webinar style if you do have people working from multiple locations.
My homework for you today: have a think about your staff’s cyber security awareness. I can probably guarantee that it is not as high as you would like to think that it is and consider whether it may be worthwhile investing in some awareness training for your staff.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Part 3 of our five-part cyber security series -MFA
What is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)?
Why is it very important that MFA is enabled?
Transcript: In this episode, we talk about the next in our five-part series of most effective cyber security defenses which is Multi-Factor Authentication.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. Great to have you here. Today we’re going to be talking about the next in our series of five top cyber security defenses for your business and this is one that we have spoken about a number of times before in this podcast. So, for those people who’ve heard this all before, I do apologise but, it is a very, very easy, cheap and important one that you will need to be taking very seriously. And that is Multi-Factor Authentication.
So far in this series we have touched on having an advanced, intelligent firewall in place, we’ve spoken about cyber security insurance, and now we’re going to talk about Multi-Factor Authentication. Now, Multi-Factor Authentication in most cases is free or at least very low cost, is very easy to implement and, in my opinion, is possibly the most effective way we have at the moment of protecting our user accounts from malicious actors.
So, what is Multi-Factor Authentication? Multi-Factor Authentication is something that we are all going to be familiar with in business. It’s when we need another form of authentication in addition to our normal username and password in order to log on to an account. For example, we should all be familiar with this, with our internet banking. We log on to our internet banking with a username and a password but then in order to take any action within that account such as transferring money out of the account, we must enter another code. In my case, I have a little keyring dongle with a six digit numerical code that changes every sixty seconds and I simply read that code off my keyring dongle and I type it into the internet banking and my transfer goes through. So, that is Multi-Factor Authentication.
Multi-Factor Authentication within Microsoft Office 365 is there, ready for us all to use. It’s very easy to turn on and you can receive that secret code in a number of ways. You can receive it by text message to your mobile phone or you can receive it using the Microsoft Authenticator app which is a little app you can put in your smartphone that even lets you not have to type in a code but, simply press another button which says “Yes, approve.” But the point is, it is another level of authentication and specifically it’s another level of authentication that is based on something that you have. You have your mobile phone that receives that code, you have the keyring dongle that presents the secret key.
Multi-Factor Authentication is available in almost all modern cloud applications that we’re going to be using within our business. It’s available in all of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite, in Xero Cloud Accounting, in things like Confluence, it’s available for your social media application such as Facebook.
So, my homework for you today, given I’m not going to go on ad nauseam about Multi-factor Authentication yet again. My homework for you today is to write down a list of all of the applications and systems that you use in your business especially those ones that have something to do with the internet such as your email, such as your internet banking, your financial package, social media, those things. And then, I need you to Google each of those apps with the words Multi-Factor Authentication after it and check and make sure that that application does indeed support Multi-Factor Authentication and I can tell you in almost all cases the answer is going to be Yes. And then, I need you to have a look at your user accounts within that platform and make sure that Multi-Factor Authentication is actually turned on and enabled for all users. And it really does need to be all users. We certainly see some people who only like to enable Multi-Factor Authentication for those user accounts that they think are riskier targets or high profile targets. The unfortunate thing though about cyber security is that it often comes down to the weakest link. And the weakest link in terms of your network security maybe that one user account that you didn’t think really needed to have Multi-Factor Authentication turned on. So write the list, do a little bit of Googling and then go and have a look at all the user accounts in those systems and make sure that Multi-Factor Authentication is actually turned on. Of course, if you need any help, your IT people are there to help with this as well.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review where ever you get your podcasts and, until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Part 2 of our five-part cyber security series – Cyber Security Insurance
What is cyber insurance?
Why your business needs a cyber insurance policy.
Transcript: In the second of our five part series on cyber security defences. We’re going to be talking about cyber insurance.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project. Great to have you here and welcome to episode number two in our five part series on our most effective cyber security defenses for your business. Last week we touched on the importance of having an intelligent firewall in place within your business. In this episode we’re going to talk about cyber insurance. Now cyber insurance is exactly what it sounds like. It is an insurance policy specifically designed to come to your aid in the event of a cyber security breach. This is not a bit of technology. This is indeed an insurance policy that you need to be talking to your insurance broker about. So it’s been really interesting watching cyber insurance policies evolve very rapidly over the last few years because they really are quite new and a lot of insurance brokers particularly, but also some insurance providers, some insurance companies don’t really seem to yet have a good handle on what cyber insurance is.
In the early days, just a few years ago, when you fill out the disclosure form to take out a cyber insurance policy, it was a very short form. It didn’t have a whole lot of questions on there around your technology, around what you were doing to protect yourself in terms of cyber security risk, that sort of thing. It did ask the usual business and financial level questions, I guess, so that the actuaries knew what degree of value (I guess) they were insuring. But interestingly enough, they didn’t really know what questions to ask in order to properly assess their risk. Now every year since when the forms come back out to renew a cyber insurance policy, the forms are getting longer and longer and longer. So the insurers are really starting to learn what questions they need to be asking in order to assess the risk associated with a particular business.
So, some of the policies that we’re also hearing about now are starting to go into detail about what your business is doing to mitigate that risk. They’re starting to ask fairly detailed questions about what type of firewall you have in place, who manages your IT, how often a certain parts of it audited, things like that. Now of course the depth of all of these questions and so on will depend on the insurer, depend on the nature of your business and so on. But the point of cyber insurance really is to come to your rescue when a breach has actually occurred because you may very well find that a lot of your other insurances will not cover you in such a situation, which is why you need a specific cyber insurance policy.
So my big hot tip for today in this episode is talk to your insurance broker and ask them about cyber security insurance. And, pro tip, if they don’t really know what they’re talking about, you’ll be able to tell if they do or don’t know. If they don’t, I would suggest that you need to find yourself a different insurance broker. There are some very, very good insurance brokers out there who will work long and hard on behalf of your business. And a lot of them are very, very clued up about cyber insurance and it is really becoming a non negotiable part of our insurance policies that we protect our businesses with.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review where ever you get your podcasts and, until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Part 1 of our five-part cyber security series -Firewalls
Why every business needs to set up an intelligent firewall
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we’ll be talking about the top five most effective cyber security defences for your business.
Hello and welcome back to the Power Up Project. Great to have you here. Today we’re going to be kicking off the first of a five part series where we talk about the top five most effective cybersecurity defences for your business. Now we all know that cyber security really is the hot topic at the moment. It is the hot topic at the moment for a very good reason. This is not just companies, IT, vendors etc., trying to push the new thing for the sake of it. Cyber security is a very real risk to all of us at the moment. We are seeing a lot of cybersecurity breaches on a very, very regular basis. Some of them are very high profile, others are less high profile, but certainly just as risky with potentially huge disruption to the businesses that have been compromised.
The terrible thing too is that in a lot of the cases where a business is compromised, it is not necessarily because they’ve done anything wrong. This really is a bit of an arms race between the hackers, the malicious actors, if you will, the security vendors out there who are producing defensive products for the rest of us to deploy in our businesses and also us, as business owners, and IT people to make sure that we are continually assessing our cybersecurity stance to make sure we’re doing everything that’s reasonably fair within our powers, and our budgets of course, to to protect our businesses. So today we’re going to talk about number one on the list of our top five most effective cyber security defences. And I’m going to talk now about firewalls. Now that is a term that everybody, I’m sure will have heard at some point, but there is a little bit of subtlety in understanding what we’re talking about here.
So essentially when an Internet connection connects into your business, there is a point of contact there at which the public internet, the public facing Internet there, hits what needs to be a secure line of defence and demarcation between that public internet and the internal network of your business. Now, in a lot of cases, what we see playing that role there is not really so much a firewall device, but it is more a routing device. So for example, at home you may have an Internet router, right? It might be ADSL router. It might be something that’s been provided to you by your NBN provider and that provides the point of demarcation there. But those devices are very simple devices. They do provide a level of firewalling security and protection for you. But it really is a very basic level.
In a business, given the current threat landscape, it’s becoming very important that we all look at what we have in place in our business in that position and make sure that we don’t just have a simple router, a simple firewall, but make sure that we do have an advanced firewall, an intelligent unified threat management firewall. Now this device plays the same role as the router, but more. It intelligently scans the Internet traffic that is passing between your internal business network and the Internet, back and forth. It filters that, it scans that, it looks for potentially malicious activity. It helps protect your users, your staff from browsing to websites that may be particularly threatening. It can also help in other ways such as helping to enforce internal policies, for example, to stop staff from browsing to inappropriate websites, not necessarily a site that may be a security threat, but maybe a website that is just not the type of content that’s appropriate in the workplace.
So how do you know if you have an intelligent firewall in place? Well, the best way to find out really is just to ask your IT people. But there are some more common brand names that we are seeing in Australia in these devices. There are names such as, Sophos, names such as Meraki, Sonicwall, WatchGuard. These are all the names of intelligent firewall appliances, intelligent firewall vendors, that do an extremely good job of protecting your business from that external threat, but also protecting it from those internal risks as well, as I touched on. Now an intelligent firewall is going to cost you more than a basic router or basic firewall. They usually also come with, an ongoing subscription cost because these devices are constantly in touch with their vendor platforms. So for example, the Sophos XG firewalls are constantly talking back to Sophos headquarters if you will, and updating their rules, their intelligence, their patterns, their knowledge of what is a threat and what is not.
So you do pay for that privilege. So there is an ongoing subscription cost that comes with these appliances. But again, this is just becoming the cost of doing business with connectivity to the Internet these days. So that’s number one on our list of the top five most effective cyber security defences for your business. So my homework for you for this week, find out whether you do indeed have an intelligent firewall appliance in place within your business there. And secondly, find out and make sure that it is actually in place with an active subscription. The devices will sit there, even if you don’t have an active subscription, but they’re not going to do a whole lot of good. So that second question you might have to ask your IT person about, but they’re the two things you need to be looking at for this week’s homework.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review where ever you get your podcasts and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Windows 7 free support will be ending early next year.
Why it’s important that you let go of Windows 7 and update to the latest OS.
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we talk about why Windows 7 must die.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I’m your host Ben Love, and today we’re going to be talking about why Windows 7 must die.
Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, that this is a very old operating system. Now, don’t get me wrong, it was a real favourite of mine. I was big fan of Windows 7, but it was released in 2009. Now, it’s currently 2019, that’s 10 years. That’s 10 human years, and technology is working even faster than dog years, so 10 years is a long time for an operating system like this to be around.
So Microsoft have announced, and have been talking about it for a long time, that Windows 7 will be going end of life in early 2020. Now that’s not far away. That’s a little over six months away, as of now. But so what does this actually mean for the operating system to go end of life, or EOL? Well, let’s take a little bit more of a step back, and say, what does is mean to be running a 10-year-old operating system? First of all, there’s a good chance that if you are running Windows 7 on a 10-year-old operating system, you may actually have 10-year-old hardware out there as well. Now, 10-year-old hardware is going to be slow, and it’s going to be problematic. That is the first thing. You’ve also got the 10-year-old operating system, which means that you’re are missing out on a huge amount of features and usability that is being introduced and developed in the years since.
But very importantly, too, is we’re starting to see compatibility issues where Windows 7 will not run a lot of the apps that people are really wanting to run these days, particularly with such massive uptake of Office 365, and a lot of the newer stuff there. You don’t want to be on Windows 7 trying to use this stuff.
We’re also seeing, because Windows 10 is becoming so prevalent in organisations, where those organisations do have a handful of computers left still running on Windows 7, there is a very inconsistent user experience between them. Sitting down and using a Windows 7 machine, is actually very different to using a modern Windows 10 machine, so it’s a lot harder to convey training, and staff productivity between staff there, when you’re talking about essentially how to use very different systems.
So what does all of this mean for you? It means one thing, it means you need to understand whether you have any Windows 7 computers still in your fleet, and you need to factor replacing those into your rolling upgrade cycle. Now, just on that point, you do have a rolling upgrade cycle? Don’t you? By that I mean, that if we assume a useful working life for a computer in a business environment of three years, then that sort of tells us that every year we probably have to be budgeting to replace proactively, a third of our computers. Now, you don’t have to be as proactive as that, especially in smaller networks and smaller environments, but it is a very good thing for you to be thinking about replacing your computers proactively on some sort of a three to five year cycle, so that you are keeping things current, and you’re not waiting til computers get slow, and buggy, and problematic, and start really damaging that productivity.
So your take home for today, the thing I need you to do, is understand if you have any Windows 7 computers in your fleet, and that is a very easy question to ask, you just need to talk to your IT provider, to your MSP, and ask them, because they will be able to provide you with a full list, a full report on all of your computer hardware out there, including what operating system it’s on. And if you do have any Windows 7 machines out there, let’s get rid of them. Hey. Put it in the budget, get it done straight away, get it done in six months, but don’t let it sit there, let’s move those Windows 7 computers onto the great computer operating system pasture in the sky. Their day is done.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT, and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
Breaking news about the end of Microsoft’s enforced password policy.
What it means for you and your business.
How you can secure your account now that Microsoft won’t be forcing a password expiration anymore.
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we talk about why expiring passwords is no longer a thing. Well, according to Microsoft at least.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I’m your host Ben Love, and today we’re going to be discussing the expiration of passwords. Now, you should know what I mean by that, because we’ve all been caught by it, and it can be really annoying. That every 60 days, maybe every 90 days, we get that message popping up on our computer saying, “Your password is about to expire. You need to choose a new password.” And then, of course, we go through the process of trying to choose a new password. Do we use an old password and just change it very slightly or did we already use that one? Anyway, you understand what I’m talking about. We’ve all been there. Well, the interesting thing is that Microsoft have recently updated their security baseline recommendations, and the big news that a lot of people are talking about is that they are no longer recommending the forced expiration of passwords. What the?
So I just want to dig into this a little bit deeper because we need to understand what’s going on here. This is a quote from Microsoft. “There’s no question that the state of password security is problematic and has been for a long time. When humans pick their own passwords, too often they are easy to guess or predict. When humans are assigned or forced to create passwords that are hard to remember, too often they’ll write them down where others can see them. When humans are forced to change their passwords, too often they’ll make a small and predictable alteration to their existing passwords, or forget their new password altogether.” Does that sound familiar to anyone? I know it certainly does to me.
So, what they’re saying there is that the previous recommendation to force expire your passwords is actually adding very little value to the security discussion. It’s not that they’re saying don’t expire passwords or telling you to never expire passwords even, but what they’re saying is that this is a very low value add activity when it comes to improving the security of one of our network environments.
Here’s another quote from Microsoft. “This reinforces a larger important point about our security baselines. While they are a solid foundation and should be part of your security strategy, they are not a complete security strategy.” And so what does that mean? Well, what Microsoft is saying there is that network security needs to come from many directions and in many layers using many different methods, and passwords are really only one piece of the picture. We’ve spoken many times on this podcast, in blog posts, at seminars, you name it, about multi-factor authentication. Okay, so that’s one example that Microsoft do not talk about in their security baseline, but they do very heavily allude to.
So what do you need to do about all of this? Well, here are the take-homes that I need to leave you with today. First of all, changing passwords is still a good idea.
Secondly, use a different password for different systems. So try not to use the same password for everything from your Uber Eats account through to logging onto your corporate email to your internet banking. Next, try and use a passphrase where possible. So, a passphrase is a series of words, it is a phrase that may mean something to you, it may be nonsense, but it is probably a lot easier for you to remember than some cryptic random string of characters in a password. But curiously enough, passphrases can often be a lot harder for hackers to brute force and to crack. So, not all systems out there will let you use a passphrase instead of a password, but if you can, definitely a good idea. And the last point that I need to leave you with regarding this is multifactor authentication. I sound like a broken record on this, but it is really important. It is very easy to enable on enterprise systems such as Office 365. We can also enable it on our Facebook, for example. Absolutely on things like Xero and on your internet banking. Multifactor authentication is currently the single most effective method that we are seeing of helping with network security. So there’s the take-home, folks. Microsoft is no longer recommending that you expire passwords periodically, however, it’s still a good idea. Use different passwords, use passphrases, and use multifactor authentication.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
The latest updates in your Office 365 suite
What can these new features do for your business?
Transcript: In this episode of the Power-Up Project, we do a quick recap of the most recent Grassroots IT webinar.
Hey. Welcome to this episode of the Power-Up Project. My name is Ben Love, and I’m your host for today’s episode. What we’re going to do today is a little recap on the webinar that we hosted about a week ago now on some of the latest updates from Office 365. Now, I’m not going to take you through the entire webinar. There was a huge amount of content in there, but you know what? The recording of the webinar is up on our website. Just go to grassrootsit.com.au to the blog, and you will find the recording there.
What I did wanna do, though, is just call out a couple of the more important points that came out of that webinar, and particularly some of the ones based on the feedback we had from attendees on that webinar and from the discussions that have come out the back of it as well as to what really peeked people’s interest the most.
Probably the first thing, it’s a really important point, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Skype for Business is going away, and it is being replaced by Microsoft Teams. If you have not already started the transition from Skype for Business across into Teams, and if you do actively use Skype for Business, obviously, then now is the team. You really must be looking at this. We do have some cheat sheets up on the website, and we will link to them again in the show notes here in case you need to go and have a look at Microsoft Teams and just work out how it’s going to work for you because it will work for you, it’s a great tool.
The other really interesting point of discussion that came out of that webinar was around Microsoft’s To-Do product. It’s a little bit of software called To-Do, Microsoft To-Do. As you would have guessed, it is a to-do list manager. A very simple tool that lets you create to-do lists, add some notes to it, tick them off once you’re done, couple of other little features on the side, but in the essence, that’s what it does.
For those of you familiar with Wunderlist, which still is a very popular list tool, that’s actually owned by Microsoft. A lot of the functionality and favourite bits of that are all being brought across into To-Do. But the interesting point of the discussions that we had after the webinar was the fact that To-Do is now synchronising with Microsoft Outlook, and specifically within the tasks section in Outlook. If you are a user of tasks, or I guess if those things could be of benefit to you, have a look at that because we actually had some people on the webinar pretty excited about the fact that tasks in Outlook and To-Do items in the To-Do mobile app are now actually synchronising.
I haven’t been into the use cases with those people yet, but I will be digging into that a bit more because I am curious. But for now, that’s a really good thing for you to know.
The other interesting point that came off the back of that webinar too was a bit of discussion around where the various project management and, I guess, task management tools from Microsoft all fit in. At one of the spectrum, we have Microsoft To-Do, which I just explained. It’s a fairly simple list maker that you tick off items on the list as you go. It has some basic collaboration and sharing features in there, but not hugely intended for that sort of role. It’s sort of more for one person to keep track of their own task lists.
The next step up in the family of products from Microsoft is Microsoft Planner. Now, for those of you familiar with other [inaudible 00:03:43] style tools, such as Trello, you’ll be very familiar with Microsoft Planner. It works in the concept of buckets, and then within the buckets you’ve got cards or items. You can drag and drop those items around between lists and change their status from in progress to completed and so on. Cards and items can be assigned to other people in your team, you can have multiple people looking at this board simultaneously. It really is a very simple but very powerful and effective way of helping a small team of people really stay on point with what it is they’re meant to be working on and who’s attention is where.
We start off with Microsoft To-Do, which is the simple one person end. We take the next step up into Microsoft Planner, which is better and more capable of dealing with teams and keeping a team of people on track. Then at the next step up, we move up into Microsoft Project, which is a fully fledged project management tool with a lot of the very powerful project management features that you would expect. It is the sort of the tool that, to be honest, unless you are a project manager, unless you have a little bit of training and some experience in that area, it may be a little bit too much. It may be not what you’re after. But of course, for the project managers who are listening, you’ll probably already be very familiar with Microsoft Project and all of its bigger team and larger project capabilities up at the top end there.
They’re probably the key points I just wanted to call out from the webinar that we hosted last week. Of course, as I said, the recording of that webinar is available on our website. There will be a link in the show notes to that recording. If you do want to have a bit more of a deep dive into what the latest updates are in the Microsoft 365 family of products and services, please check out the show notes and head on over.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power-Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
>Where is Skype for Business going, what’s it being replaced by and when is it happening.
How will your business be impacted by the change.
Download the Quick Start Guide to Microsoft Teams at the base of the blog post.
Transcript: In this episode of the Power-Up Project, we talk about the impending change over from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, and what you need to know now so that you don’t get cutoff.
Hey, welcome to this episode of the Power-Up Project. I am Ben Love, and I’m your host for this episode. Today, we’re going to touch on something that we have certainly mentioned a number of times in the past, and that is that Microsoft is actively retiring the Skype for Business product. In its place, they are pushing forward with Microsoft Teams.
Now, the two products reached what Microsoft call “feature parity” last year sometime. That basically means that Microsoft Teams has all of the features in it that Skype for Business has. What we are now seeing happen and the reason this is very important for you to hear is because we are actually seeing this happen in the wild. This is not just Microsoft talking about it, we are actually seeing clients who go to use their Skype for Business one day, and it no longer works. The reason it no longer works is because the upgrade behind the scenes for Skype to Business into Microsoft Teams within their tenant has been done without them necessarily being aware of that. So, they go to use Skype for Business one day and it simply doesn’t work.
Now, this is just part of the phase upgrading and retirement of Skype for Business, it’s something that Microsoft has been very open about, they are publicising it all. At this stage, we are not sure of when individual client tenants are going to be upgraded. We’re seeing if we can get some of that information from Microsoft. To be honest, I don’t like our chances at this stage. What it does mean is that you really need to be actively thinking about Microsoft Teams, especially if your business relies on Skype for Business.
What does that mean? It means you need to look at your usage of Skype for Business and how you’re using it. Are you using it for chatting, for meetings, for video calls? Are you using it for webinar style presentations? Are you using it for your main telephony instead of a more traditional telephone system? There’s a lot of ways in which people have been using Skype for Business.
Now, all of those things are now available in Microsoft Teams. Teams is a very good product. I use it really heavily here at Grassroots IT with my team of people. We’re spread out across three different countries, quite a number of client sites, etc. It’s a fantastic tool, and we really love it, okay?
So, if you are heavily using Skype for Business, have a think about how you’re using it and go out and have a look at Microsoft Teams. It is probably already installed on your computer, if not, it is very easy to install it.
You just go to teams.microsoft.com, and there’s a button there that you can use to install it, okay? Now, what I’m going to do in the show notes for this particular podcast episode is we’re going to leave a link to a little cheat sheet on Microsoft Teams**, and how you do various things in there, how you have a chat with somebody, how you schedule a video meeting, how you do all of these things. It should be nice and quick for you to get up and running with Microsoft Teams.
Of course, if you have any questions, just reach out. We are more than happy, of course, to help with the transition there in any way. But remember, your action point for this episode, if you are actively using Skype for Business, you must go out and look at Microsoft Teams instead because the change is coming.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power-Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, keep powering up.
**Here’s the link to the Quick Start Guide for Microsoft Teams:Download Now
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
What is Microsoft Exclaimer all about?
How to leverage your email marketing with Exclaimer
Transcript: In this episode of Power Up Project, we’re talking about leveraging email signatures for marketing punch with Exclaimer. Welcome back to the Power Up Project. I’m your host for this episode, Ben Love. And today we’re going to be talking about a great little tool called “Exclaimer.” And specifically, we’re going to be talking about how Exclaimer can help you manage and, indeed, get some extreme value from your email signatures.
So let me walk you through a scenario we’re probably all familiar with. We all have businesses that use email, we all have staff and multiple people who use email. And I can almost guarantee that all of those people have got an email signature. Now, it would be a very safe bet, I would say, that if I would look at all of those email signatures across your business, I would see, let’s say a little bit of inconsistency.
I would probably see some different fonts in use, some different alignments, maybe the colours could be a bit different. Some people present mobile phone numbers, some people don’t have a phone number at all. Some people put a job title, other people don’t. Some people have still got the old logo there from before you changed it two years ago.
Does that sound like a common situation that you might have come across in your business? Here’s another one. Let’s say you’ve got a situation like that, and let’s say maybe even that your email signatures are fairly consistent. You do a fairly good job of keeping them all consistent, even though it means that every time there is any single change to be made across the organisation, every single person in your organisation needs to manually edit their email signature.
And of course, then you ask them to do that, they’ve forgotten how to edit their email signature. Some people might be using email signatures, other people might be using email stationery. Some people might have a different email signature for emails sent from their mobile device than when they send it from Outlook on the desktop computer.
So, these are all problems. There are all situations that are extremely common, but there is a very simple, and very affordable solution. And that solution comes in the form of a little product called, “Exclaimer.” So, what Exclaimer does, is it allows us to centrally manage all of the email signatures across our organisation.
Now, because we leverage them centrally, it means that we create those signatures once based on a single template, or we can have multiple templates if we really want to. But we create them centrally, and they are automatically applied to everybody’s email. No matter where that person sends that email from, whether it’s a computer, a spare laptop, their mobile device, whatever.
The same signature is automatically applied as that email is sent. So what we’ve got now, is we’ve got consistency. We’ve got consistency of visual design, colours, logos, layout. We’ve also got consistency of info. So all of your people are now sending email signatures out, delivering the same consistent information, such as a mobile phone number and a web address. The other thing that it lets us do though, is it lets us be very nimble and agile, and it opens up opportunities to use email signatures in a different way.
What we can do now, is we can start to use email signatures to communicate more effectively with all of those recipients, whether they be clients, suppliers, or other partners. Because what we can do is, from our centralised administration portal, we can very quickly and easily update the email signatures across our entire organisation with some new information.
So, you might have some office-closing hours over Christmas. Well, what you can do now, is you can very easily add a little line of text at the bottom of everybody’s email signature that announces those closure hours to everybody who receives an email from your business. You don’t have to rely on every staff member in the business to individually go in and add that line. You don’t need to worry about inconsistencies of design and font and colour. You don’t need to worry about them just not doing it at all. Forgetting to do it, it was a bit too hard, they couldn’t remember how to edit a signature.
Because now you’re doing it centrally, and you’re doing it for them. And it automatically applies to all staff. Take that a step further. Maybe you could start using your email signatures for a little bit of marketing. Have you won an award lately that you’d like to tell people about? Why not add that to the email signatures going out? Do you have a particular promotion coming up soon, a particular sales campaign? Maybe you add that in there.
Do you have an event, maybe the next webinar or the next training workshop? You could add a little line into everybody’s email signatures with a link that would take people back to the registration page. So, I hope that’s given you some ideas to think about. Not only how you can get your email signatures across the business under control, but then how you can take that a step further and how you an start to leverage your email signatures to communicate consistently across the organisation, and out to your customers.
Now, the wonderful thing about Exclaimer as well, is that it’s bloody cheap. So, the pricing does work on a sliding scale depending on how many users you have. But to give you a quick idea, for 10 users, if you have 10 users in your business, it’s approximately 20 dollars per month. It’s very quick and easy to set up, it is very quick and easy to edit those email signatures once they’re in place. It really is a very simple tool, and it absolutely baffles me why more people aren’t using it.
So I hope that’s given you some good ideas to think about, with how you can take control of your email signatures. I’d love to hear how you’re using your email signatures in order to do more than simply put that necessary stamp on the bottom of your emails. Are you using your email signatures to promote upcoming events or sales campaigns? How effective have you found that? And another question there, how do you know how effective it is? How are you measuring the ROI on the effectiveness of those email signature-based campaigns? Let me know, I’d love to know.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT, and Digit IT. Please, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
An amazing new feature from Microsoft Streams
How can AI power up your Teams meetings?
Transcript:
In this episode of the Power Up Project, we're talking about Microsoft Stream introducing facial detection and automatic transcription. Hey, welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host for this episode, Ben Love. And today we're going to be talking about one of the Microsoft products that we've mentioned before, which is Microsoft Stream. It's kind of like a private organisational YouTube, if you will, where you can upload your videos. But specifically we're going to be talking a bit about some amazing new features that Microsoft have brought to Stream where they're really bringing the power of a lot of their artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities to bear on the Microsoft Stream products. Now, the good thing is of course you don't need to worry about it being AI and machine learning and all of this jargony stuff. All you need to know is that there are these great new features in Microsoft Stream. So let's get started on that. There's a couple of little things that I think are really powerful here, but I'm kind of AI stuff, so I'm going to touch on these other ones first. The first thing is that you can watch videos in Microsoft Stream on the go, that is on your mobile device, while you're offline. Now this is fantastic. So, that means that there is a little caching feature building in there so that your device can actually pre-download some of these videos for you so that if you're sitting on the plane or your bandwidth is rubbish, wherever you happen to be travelling, you can still get access to those videos and watch those videos. Now this could be particularly useful as well combined with another excellent little feature that's come through, which is when you use Microsoft Teams to conduct meetings, for example, video conferencing meetings and we're all using Teams, right? Because, it really is the big thing at the moment. It really is where Microsoft is putting a lot of their focus. It is also the thing that's going to be replacing Skype as well, and that particular timeline is accelerating. So, if you do use Skype for some of these things and you haven't yet had a look at Teams head on over to have a look at Teams, it's something you really need to be doing. So of course, given that we're all conducting our video meetings and our conference calls using Teams these days, one of the powerful features of that is that we can record the meeting. So, just click on the record button in our meeting there and Teams will automatically capture what happens there, the video, the audio, so on and so forth. But the good thing now is what it then does with that video recording, because what it does now is it automatically puts it into Stream. It automatically puts it into your Microsoft Stream video library. That means that it can then be made available to anybody on your team who happened to miss the meeting. There's always somebody isn't there, there's somebody who says they're going to be at the meeting, but then now they, I don't know, they call in sick, which is fine, or they get called out on an important client meeting or you know what? They just don't turn up. We've certainly had that in the past. So at least this way the meeting is automatically recorded, automatically uploaded into your Microsoft Stream video library for that person to catch up on. And of course now they can also catch up on it on their mobile device and even offline, which I think is pretty cool. So let's move on to some cool new AI powered features though. The first one is facial detection. Now this is a bit of AI that Microsoft to bringing to bear on Stream videos, which they're really using for what they call speaker timelines. So what that does is it means that the video will be annotated with information about which speaker, as in which person is speaking when.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
a new feature of the Microsoft Teams' suite: the Shifts app
How the Shifts app can help with rostering your frontline staff
Transcript:
In this episode of Power Up Project, we talk about using Microsoft Teams to roster and schedule your frontline staff.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Love. And today we're going to be talking about a great new feature in Microsoft Teams, which is called Shifts. Now, this is a fairly new-ish feature to Teams. It used to be a separate product from Microsoft called Staff Hub, but they're kind of phasing that one out and integrating the functionality into Microsoft Teams. As a side note, they are doing with a whole lot of other stuff as well. So if I haven't said it before, I know I have, but for the sake of repeating myself 'cause it's important: Microsoft Teams is getting a huge amount of attention from Microsoft. So if you haven't had a look at it yet, go and have a look. Pay attention because this is turning into a bit of the focal point for what they're doing over the next few years. But look back to the topic at hand. We're talking about a feature in Microsoft Teams, which is called Shifts. Now, Microsoft used the word Shifts, and they refer to frontline staff and how you can use Shifts to schedule your frontline staff.
Now, that's the Microsoft. It's a little bit American with the lingo there. To my way of thinking, I kind of think of a more, for those businesses who are using casual and rostered workers, particularly maybe around industries like retail and hospitality where you have different staff coming on at different times of day to meet different peak loads in your how busy the store's going to be and so on. So what this feature lets you do is roster or create the shifts, I guess, for these particular team members. And it really is a very simple tool, but it does seem to work so, very, very well. So if you are in Microsoft Teams already, you will find it there, down the left hand side is one of your options there. If you can't find it, give me a call. We'll find it for you. It's in there, okay? So what you do is you go into Shifts, and the first thing you do is you create a schedule. And this schedule is for a particular team and covers particular data ranges. And then plain and simple, you can allocate or assign certain employees to different shifts on that schedule. So once it's on there, the team member themselves will see that appear on their calendar within Microsoft Teams.
But more than that, from within there, they can also manage some of it themselves. They can update their own availability. They can request shifts. They can request time off. They can make shifts available for swapping and they can swap shifts with other team members who are also part of that schedule, part of that roster. So it's available in the Microsoft Teams desktop interface, so the version that you use on your computer, on your laptop or desktop computer. It's also definitely there in the mobile app for Microsoft Teams because that's a big focal point for how it's really intended to be used. A lot of shift workers, a lot of rostered workers wouldn't necessarily have their own computer that they would sit down at to access these tools, but they would probably have their own mobile devices, their own smartphones. It really is becoming such a ubiquitous way to communicate and coordinate amongst all of our staff. So if you are in the sort of business that works with rostering your staff, maybe have a look at Microsoft Teams Shifts. Have a look if it will suit your purpose. I think it will in a lot of cases. It is quite simple but it does seem to tick a lot of the boxes that you need in that particular scenario.
I'd love to hear how you go with Microsoft Shifts. I'd really love to hear if it does suit your business and if so, how effective you have found it.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
What is Microsoft To-Do all about
How simple is it to use Microsoft To-Do
Can you integrate Microsoft To-Do with other Office365 applications
Transcript:
In this episode of the Power Up Project, we're talking about keeping things simple with Microsoft To-Do lists.
Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host for this episode, Ben Love, and today we're going to be talking about powering up your business with Microsoft To-Do. In fact, we're gonna flip that around a bit and we're gonna talk about keeping it simple with Microsoft To-Do.
Now when I say Microsoft To-Do, I'm talking about a product from Microsoft. You see, back in about 2015, Microsoft bought I guess one of their competitors, they bought another tech company called Wunderlist. Now Wunderlist was, and to a degree probably still is, I guess, a really popular application and app you could have on your phone which basically did to-do lists. So, pick up the groceries, buy milk on the way home, book the dog in for a haircut, all of that sort of stuff.
So Microsoft bought Wunderlist back in 2015 and since then has been working on their version of it and converting it over to their version of it, which they've called To-Do. So, Microsoft is obviously very creative when it comes up to naming their products, so that's what we got stuck with. Microsoft To-Do. Essentially, though, it is a very powerful product. It is very simple and a lot of the power comes from that simplicity that you can have a look at this product yourself. It's out there. Go and have a look. ToDo.microsoft.com is the website. There is also a mobile app. You can log on to that with your existing Office 365 account if you have one. If you don't you can log on with any Microsoft account, such as a Hotmail account or apple.com, it'll all link in there together.
So let's run through a couple of the features of this very simple organisational tool. The first thing you can do in Microsoft To-Do is you can create multiple lists. Now a list is simply that. It is a list of to-do items that helps you organise all of your to-do's a little bit better. So your list might be shopping list, for example. Or your list might be organising for your upcoming holiday. So you can create all of these separate lists and within a list you can add these items.
Now when you add an item, it's very, very simple. They call them tasks, actually. So when you add a task, there is quite simply a little plus button that says, add a task. You tap on that and you type in your task. Once you've typed in your task, it will then appear in that list and you can then work with some more detailed information within that task if you want, but you absolutely don't have to.
Next to the task that you've created, is a nice big dot, or check box that you can tap on to say, I've completed this task. Now when you go into one of these tasks that you've created, you can add a certain amount of additional information about that task. You can add a reminder, you can add a due date, you can add attachments which is interesting. That's a fairly new feature addition. You can also add a repeating schedule on this particular task, so it'll keep coming back for you.
One of the other things you can do in there is that you can add steps. Now a step is essentially a sub-task. So you can add all of these steps if you wish. So your top level task might be publishing new episode of the Power Up project podcast. And then underneath your sub-tasks, or your steps as they're called, you would have things such as identify the topic, research topic, record audio, edit audio, publish podcast episode and as you go through those steps, you can take each of those off individually until you've completed the actual task.
So you can see, it really is a very simple to-do list organising application. There are a couple of little features, though,
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉How can the holiday break help you and your business for the upcoming new year
〉Why it is important for you and your business to enjoy the holiday downtime
Transcript:
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we talk about why your business needs you to take a break.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I'm your host Ben Dampney and today we're going to power up your business
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Canva is a web-based graphic design application perfect for creating awesome marketing graphics
〉Allows collaboration and provides a very user-friendly alternative to other complex graphic design tools
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we'll be talking about a free, web-based app called Canva. Hello, I'm Annie, and today I am taking over the sound waves from the two Bens to talk to you about a topic that's quite close to my heart. I'm the community manager at Grassroots IT, so I look after our branding and marketing. And, today I wanted to talk to you about a free web-based graphic design programme called Canva. In the history of graphic design programmes and software, years ago, there was a programme called Quark. It was really expensive, and really took some special skills from graphic designers in order to be able to use it.
Then, Adobe came on the scene, with their programmes such as Illustrator, and InDesign, and Photoshop, and really took over the industry. They have an amazing array of creative programmes, and many of them are still used today by most graphic designers. But what happened in 2012 was that a new guy came on the scene, an Australian company that brought in a free, web-based app called Canva, and really, what this did is brought the power of graphic design to everyday people and their businesses.
So, Canva is a free, web-based app, and it really enables people to put together their own graphic images, which they can then use on social media, or blogs, or websites. Now, I should put in a disclaimer here, that I think it is really important that you employ the services of a professional graphic designer in order to put together your branding strategy, so when it comes to things like logo, and colours, and fonts, you are putting out the right message into the world about who your business is and what the personality of your business is. I'm also very passionate about that branding message being consistent across the different channels.
Now, where Canva is great, is that once you have your branding strategy in place, you can then put together your own images, for social media channels. You can use it to make posters, or business cards. You can create images or you can create PDFs that you can send off to a printer, to have professionally printed. When you're within the Canva app, it is super easy to use, and you have access to lots of different functionality. There are many fonts, and colours, and lines, and graphics. There are thousands of stock photographs that you can access for a small fee. There are predefined templates that you can customise for your own designs. There are different templates for various social media channels, so for example, if you want to create a Facebook post, it is the right dimensions for a Facebook post, or Twitter, or YouTube channel art, et cetera, et cetera. You can think of it. Canva's probably got it.
Now, while the free version of Canva is awesome, we've taken as step up, and we use the paid version, which is called Canva for Work. Now, while it is a paid version, it is not super expensive. It's about $150 per year, which is a small percentage of some of those professional design packages. You can pay that monthly or yearly. You can pay an additional charge if you want multiple team members to access that same account.
Now, where Canva for Work comes into its own is, I think, its ability to resize images. So, if you for example, set up an Instagram image, and then you decide you also want a version of that image to appear on Twitter and on Facebook, you can, with the click of a button, copy and resize that image, and it will automagically put it into the right dimensions for those other social media channels.
Now, if you've spent time fiddling around with images, trying to get them the right size, then you will know that this is worth its weight in gold. So, I think that is awesome.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What is Microsoft Officevibe?
〉How can it help you and your organisation?
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, I'm going to introduce you to a great little tool called Office Vibe.
Welcome to this episode of The Power Up Project. I'm Ben Love, your host for this episode. Today, I want to talk to you about a great tool that we use here at Grassroots IT called Office Vibe. Now, Office Vibe is a web based application that helps you to measure and monitor your employee engagement. Now, this can be extremely useful for your managers at a HR level at all different levels of the organisation because, I mean, let's face it. We all think we've got a good handle on our team culture. We all think all of our staff are beautifully engaged, but the fact of the matter is that there will be a lot of stuff happening there in the organisation that you are not aware of.
A tool like Office Vibe can actually help you uncover that information because if you don't have the information, you can't do anything with it. If there is a problem emerging there with your team engagement, with your team culture, if you're not aware of it, you can't fix it. What Office Vibe does is that it will automatically and very, very anonymously survey your team on a regular basis across a wide range of questions of different areas which all come back to that engagement piece, and then it will present you with reports both a high level number, but then also broken down into different areas of engagement. And, not only that, it'll take it the next step further, but it will help give you advice and guidance on how you can address individual areas of your staff engagement that may need a little bit of work.
We found it to be an extremely valuable tool. I have certainly uncovered a various things happening within my organisation that I wasn't aware of, but with the benefit of people being able to submit anonymous feedback, people feel a little bit more empowered I guess to share that information. And so, I can take that information, and then I can make changes within the organisation. I can work within individual people. I can take whatever steps I need to help increase employee engagement and help make this a better place for everybody to work.
If you do have staff, I would encourage you to think about having a look at Office Vibe. You can find it on the internet. It is free for a lot of users. You can pay a little bit more to get some premium features. I don't. I just use the free functionality and it does a great job for our purposes.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Power Up Project brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcast and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉There is a new Autosave Feature in the desktop versions of Microsoft Office apps
〉What you need to look out for in your workflows if you're used to the traditional saving methods Microsoft Office
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we talk about the new auto save feature in the Microsoft Office apps.
Hey, welcome to The Power Up Project. I'm your host for this episode, Ben love. So, Microsoft have just released a great, new little feature into the Microsoft Office apps. By that I mean Word and Excel and so on, that you use as part of your Microsoft Office 365 subscription.
The new feature that they've released is auto save. Now, this is something that those people who've been using the web app versions of this software for a little while now will be very familiar with, but it is new to those of us who are using the desktop installations of Word and Excel and so on. Essentially, what it means is that rather than having to remember to click save on your documents progressively as you're using them, the system simply automatically saves your changes as you type. It literally does it in near real time. So, it's a constant type thing.
Now, I personally think this is a fantastic feature. Like I said, I've been relying on this feature for a while now, when I use the web apps of Word and Excel, which I do a fair bit. But it's great that it's now there with those desktop apps. You can tell if you've got it and if it's turned on by having a look in the very top left hand corner of your application.
For example, if you have Microsoft Word open, have a look in the very top left corner there when you've got a document open in Word, and there'll be a little toggle switch, which turns auto save on and off. Now, it does default to on and it will really only work actually for documents that are saved in your OneDrive or that are saved within SharePoint. But honestly, for a lot of us, that's really where our documents are all saved these days. For those people, it's just going to be there automatically for you.
If you do have your document saved on a traditional file server, for example, or if you have it saved locally on your computer on the C: drive, for example, the auto save feature is not going to do what it should. It's not going to be able to work its magic.
Now, this sounds like a great new feature. But anecdotally this is catching a couple of people unawares. The particular situation here is if you're the sort of person who takes an existing document and uses that almost like a template. You might open up an existing letter that you had written to a client, you might make some changes to that for different client, and then you might click on the Save As button, and save a new version of that for the new client.
Now, that was all well and good when we had to click on the Save button. But if you think about that, what's happening now is that with auto save turned on as you're typing, you're actually going to be saving those changes over the top of your original letter, and you probably don't want to be doing that if this is the way you've been using your documents.
If you're the sort of person who does that, if you do open up a previous document that you've used and intend to use that almost like a template for a different purpose, what I'd suggest you do is maybe copy that document first. Copy paste, duplicate that document on the file system and then open up the copy so that you can do that auto save. Either that or as soon as you open up that document, before you start making your edits, click on Save As and save it as a new document. So that as auto save then does its thing, you will not lose that original content.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Power Up Project brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT please leave us a review where ever you get your podcasts and until next time keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What are Dashboards?
〉How can dashboards power up your business?
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we talk about the power of dashboards. Welcome back to the Power Up Project, I'm your host Ben Dampney. Today, we're going to power up your business with dashboards.
Dashboards are a single page that show key pieces of data in an easy to digest format. They can range from graphs, charts, gauges to heat maps or flashing alerts on a page. This can be a webpage, it can be an online document, it can be an updated Excel spreadsheet, for example. Now, every business can benefit from financial dashboards. They give you a visual representation on a single page of current and historic financial performance. These can be created in most modern financial accounting packages, such as Xero. They can also be generated using Microsoft Power BI connected to older packages that do not include this sort of functionality, things like MYOB or Reckon for instance.
The beauty of financial dashboards is they turn numbers into gauges and graphs that can be read easily and allowing you to quickly understand your financial metrics. However, I'd encourage you to think about the key metrics or performance indicators in your business. For our IT business, outside of financial reporting, we're actually interested in a couple of different indicators. We have a dashboard that shows client servers if they're down, service tickets that require attention, and clients that are awaiting a response from us around a service item. Being aware of these items and numbers allows us to ensure that key components of our customer service delivery don't get overlooked. We actually have a big screen in our office that shows these key metrics, and everyone at any point in time can look up and see exactly where those key indicators are at. Ideally, we're trying to get to zero, which is green, which means no one's waiting for us to do work for them, we're proactively managing our clients and their systems.
Now, another dashboard we have shows us engineer billable time and open tickets. It's a great way to ensure our engineers are being utilised correctly without being overburdened. We can also use this dashboard to make employment decisions, as we can easily see trends in engineer workloads, if one's getting too much work for instance, we can then look to employ someone based on some of these metrics.
Another example might be for a transport company who may be interested in average weekly trip times, vehicle service intervals, driver load times, all of which can affect your profitability and ideally let you know what your utilisation is of your vehicles and your staff.
Now, in all instances, I'd encourage you to ensure that the dashboard you use is clean and simple. This is a really important part of dashboards, in my mind, the critical part. They need to show the five or six key drivers that will have the most effect on your business. Now, these should align directly with your business goals. If you follow the trends in the dashboards you have, you have information that enables you to manage your business with precision, rather than feel. You feel busy, but what does the stats and dashboard exactly show you around your staff utilisation, your sales delivery, etc.?
So I encourage you to check out dashboards, they're awesome. Power BI's a really simple tool to use, there's lots of plug-ins and templates you can go and grab it and start straight away. Xero has some great financial dashboards that you can look at and set up. There are many other products out there that will do dashboards according on your data .
Thank you for listening to the Power Up Project, brought to you by Digit IT and Grassroots IT, and please remember to leave a review for us wherever you found this podcast. Until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
My three takeaways from running our live event, The Small Business Download, in October 2018, including:
〉Being with other people who understand that you "don't know what you don't know"
〉The value of collaborative learning
〉Finding the low hanging fruit
〉Join us for a free webinar on 22 November: Office 365 in the Real World Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we recap on The Small Business Download 2018.
Hi. Welcome to this episode of The Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Love, and today we're going to be recapping on a recent live event that we hosted, called The Small Business Download 2018. This was a fantastic event. It was a learning event which we put on for our clients, our partners, anybody else who wanted to come along. We had a panel of five industry experts, covering a range of business and technology topics, who were there to talk to us, to take questions, do a little bit of workshopping, even, at the end of the night there, around some of the problems and questions that our attendees had.
So what I wanted to share with you today is the three top takeaways that I really got out of the entire thing. The first one, you don't know what you don't know. Now, this is obviously a truism which we've all heard before, but what I'd say about this is that one of the real values of investing time in events such as The Small Business Download is that it gives the gift of being in the company of other business leaders who recognise that, at some level, there are things that they don't know, so they are consciously making the decision to invest the time, the money, the effort, to come along to events like this and to learn.
Now, this may sound fairly self-evident to a lot of you out there, but a lot of people do not go out of their comfort zone to put themselves in the situation where they will potentially learn something that they weren't aware of previously. A lot of people are confident in their own knowledge, a lot of people are quite comfortable that the way they're doing the job right now is the way that it should be doing, and so they don't take that next step. So the first lesson that I really learnt out of this is just reinforcing that, that you don't know what you don't know, and it's good to step outside and just expose yourself to some opportunities, cross-industry perhaps, to see what else is happening out in the big wide world.
Lesson number two that I took away from The Small Business Download 2018 is that collaborative learning is powerful. Now, one of the wonderful things about getting all of these people in the room, facilitated by our panel of five experts, was that we had people there across a broad range of industries, across a broad range of organisational profiles of size, of nature. We had some commercial organisations, we had educational institutions, we had non-profits, and everybody was there, sharing in the experience and collaborating together. There was a lot of sharing of stories, war stories in some cases, successes and victories in others. There was a lot of questions that arose from one industry, which interestingly enough, some people were able to map into an entirely different industry, to gain a unique perspective on something that may have been sticking them up for a little while now. So lesson number two was collaborative learning can be powerful, cross-industries, cross-organizations.
And number three, and this is the great one, and this is my important takeaway for you out of this episode, there is plenty of low hanging fruit. So some of the things that we touched on, on the day, in a very tactical sense are, for example, that a lot of people are not using a large part of their Office 365 subscription. A lot of organisations will subscribe to something like Office 365 for a particular component, such as the email for example, but with the money that you are paying every month,
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Why data encryption is important for data security
〉Simple steps on how you can start protecting your data
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, I'm going to be talking about why you should be encrypting the data on your laptop.
Hey, welcome to this episode of The Power Up Project. I am Ben Love, your host, coming at you directly from Orlando in Florida. If you can hear 'The Girl From Ipanema' playing gently in the background there, please excuse the distraction. Today's topic is encrypting the data on your laptop hard drive. I'm going to start with the first question around that though is 'Why would you do that?' Well, we all know that encryption is basically scrambling the data that you have stored in such a way that only you can read it. If that data gets into somebody else's hands, they will not be able to read it. Why would you want to do that? Well, let's say that you lose your laptop. Let's say that it gets stolen from the office. Let's say that you leave it in a taxi.
That means if you have an unencrypted hard drive, it means that the person who stole that laptop can very easily take that hard drive out of your laptop, put it in another computer or put it into a little USB caddie, and they will have full access to every bit of information that's on that hard drive. Now, that's quite terrifying, particularly if you work with really sensitive information, particularly if you have personal information for your client, such as credit card details or healthcare related information. You can really see it could be a very smart idea to make sure that your laptop hard drives are encrypted.
Now, in Australia, we also have a thing called the Mandatory Data Breach Notification Scheme. This is basically a law that states that if information is lost from your organisation somehow and that information has the potential to cause significant harm for other people, then you must notify the authorities. Now, this can be quite a daunting thing to face for organisations, but one of the great ways to make sure that you don't have to notify is to make sure that the data on that laptop hard drive is encrypted because in that case, nobody will actually be able to read the data. Now, I'm not a lawyer, that is not legal advice, but that is anecdotally what we're seeing happening in the industry. We can probably agree by this point that it is a good idea to encrypt the data on your laptop hard drive. How do we do that?
Well, in Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise, there's a great little feature called BitLocker. On macOS, there is a feature called FileVault. They all do basically the same thing. Basically, they run behind the scenes there and will encrypt every bit of information on your laptop hard drive there so that you and only you can access it. Now, there are various requirements to be able to turn on BitLocker in Windows 10 primarily around the hardware in your laptop. You need a little thing called a TPM chip, but most of the business grade laptops that are out there that Grassroots IT works with will have a TPM chip in there. The macOS hardware already has everything that it needs in there as well, so you should be good to go.
After that, there's just a few little settings that need to be turned on to enable that file encryption. Now, that can either be turned on manually per computer or if you have a fleet of computers in your organisation where we need to turn on BitLocker, we can do so centrally with what's called a group policy. We can talk to your IT person. We can just push that out to all the machines in your network and make sure that's done. It is a very easy process to step through, it is very secure and reliable, and it will potentially save you a whole lot of heartache further down the track. But, the question remains then: 'Are there some cases where you might not want to encrypt the data on your hard drive?
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Transcription tool in Office 365 products.
〉What can the transcription tool do?
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project we talk about transcription in office products.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project, I'm your host, Ben Dampney.
Today we're going to power up your business with transcription in office products. We have the ability in the Modern Suite of Office to transcribe our speech into documents or words in those applications. The applications that are currently waxing is Word, Outlook, OneNote, and PowerPoint, and I think this is a fantastic tool that people should take advantage of and try.
It's a way that you can use your voice to get your thoughts and create a document in any of those products. That's going to lead to increased speed and accuracy of what you're producing but also maybe give you some options you may haven't previously been able to do. Things like diary writing, letters, seem to come more naturally, I guess, if you're speaking them rather than typing them. This feature is built into those products now in the Modern Suite of Office, you'll see it as a transcribe or dictate button in the top right corner in those suite of products.
You can also add it into, for example, OneNote for Office 2016 and 2013 by going to the garage, the Microsoft Garage gives you the ability to download that product and add it in. Now, another feature that you may be aware of is some of the Office will also have a read aloud option that will read emails out to you. This is a great way to get through content that you may have, if you're working on other things you can listen to those documents while you're using your mouse and cursor on other locations on the page.
Now, a really exciting development that's coming out that I think businesses should maybe consider is the fact that Microsoft is going to add automated transcription capabilities for one draught for business for both video and audio files slated for release later this year. This is a powerful, powerful offering that Microsoft is bringing. The ability to be able to get a video transcript or an audio transcript of content means that you can search for it in one drive, means that you can send message or meeting notes after the fact with details of exactly what's been said in either a video or a meeting or recording in some fashion.
This is a fantastic service that previously up to now has been unavailable, using human labour, I guess, to the extent that that this will be available. It's going to be automated, that's what Microsoft is telling us, and will give us some fantastic insights into our data but also the ability to get more from our data that we have. Keep your ears out for that, that's all I have today. I'd encourage you to all go out and try, firstly, the transcription services that are available in the Office Suite of products. Also, keep an eye out for the transcription of media content that's coming later this year. I'm excited about it, I think we'll to get way more for our content on the this.
Thanks for listening to the Power Up Project brought to you by Digit IT and Grassroots IT. Please remember to leave a review for us wherever you found this podcast and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Recap on what Microsoft Stream is
〉Amazing news about Microsoft making it more accessible Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project we touch on Microsoft Stream and how it's now available to even more Office 365 users. Welcome to this edition of Power Up Project, I'm your host Ben Love.
So we've spoken before about Microsoft Stream, which is one of the components of the Office 365 Suite, which so many of you use. Now Microsoft Stream just as a recap, is kind of like your own private ... Private, that's not the right word. It's like YouTube where you can upload videos but it is private and secure to your organisation, so it's not a public service, like YouTube is, that anybody can access. It's part of your Office 365 tenant. It's really primarily intended for internal use by other members of your Office 365 organisation. So it's secured, it integrates really well with SharePoint and with Microsoft Teams, and with all the other cool bits of Office 365. But, up until now it's only really been available either as a standalone purchase or in some of the higher end Office 365 plans.
Well, a recent announcement from Microsoft, finally, they're bringing this thing down into some of the Office 365 business plans. So Office 365 Business, Business Premium, and Business Essentials, which are just three of the plans that you can choose from, will start to include Microsoft Stream. So this I fantastic news, mainly for those I guess smaller organisations that aren't on the larger Enterprise E3, Office 365 plans, either because the don't have the head count requirement or they don't need some of those more advanced features. Well now we're seeing Microsoft Stream as part of those plans.
So a lot of what we talk to our clients about, around this piece here, is how fantastic video is and stream is a great enabler of that for internal staff and team communications, for training materials, for documenting processes, huge range of uses there. So great news there. Microsoft Stream if you're on one of the Microsoft Office 365 business plans, rather than the Enterprise level plans. It's coming your way.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grass Roots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What is Microsoft Teams Inline Translation
〉How to enable Inline Translation
〉Does it work and how accurate is it? Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Podcast, we share a little bit more information on Microsoft Teams Inline Translation.
Hey, welcome back to the Power Up Project podcast. My name is Ben Love. I'm your host for today.
Now a few episodes back, I shared some new features. Well, one particular new feature I want to touch on in Microsoft Teams, which was the Inline Translation. So just to recap, Microsoft Teams is a product from Microsoft, part of the Office 365 family that lets you do, amongst a lot of other things, a text chat so you type chat messages back and forth. So it's a real head-to-head competitor with Slack, which a lot of people have been using and also Hipchat, which less people have been using, but still one of the big ones.
So what we touched on last time is that Microsoft released a feature which was inline translation within chats in Teams. So what that means is that if somebody in a chat enters some words there, a sentence or whatever in a language that is not your native language, Teams is able to translate that automatically for you into whatever your native language was.
Now, at the time that we mentioned with this, we hadn't had a chance to play but, I have since had a chance to play and I just want to share a couple of things that I've learned. First of all, you need to enable this feature using some funky behind-the-scenes stuff called PowerShell. Now, for an IT person that's pretty straightforward. For your average user, it's probably not. So if you do want this feature enabled, get in touch with your IT person and I'm sure they can switch that on for you. I imagine at some point soon they will move that into a nice little on-off button somewhere in the settings. But for now, you need that PowerShell script run to enable this feature on your Teams, on your tenant.
The next thing is that this Inline Translation feature is not available in the newly announced free version of Microsoft Teams, so if you are an Office 365 user, you're good to go, but if you are not and you're taking advantage of the free Microsoft Teams version, apparently this inline translate is not part of that particular package. So be aware of that.
The other thing I wanted to follow up onto is how it actually works. So, we've done a little bit of testing here. The accuracy of the translation between a couple of different languages into English and vice versa seems really good actually. It's using one of Microsoft's cloud translate micro services, so that's a micro service that is part of the larger Microsoft as your suite of stuff that you can actually use yourself, build it into your own software products and whatnot. It's very cool.
But Microsoft are leading on that to provide this translation service within Teams, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. That's what micro services are really intended for. The accuracy of the translation is really, really good subject of course, to some of the vagaries of how people use language colloquially and some of the different grammatical constructs that you can use in some languages to the other, but in terms of actually communicating and getting the message across, it's actually really, really good. But, what you need to understand too is that in order to translate a line of text in a chat, you still need to click a button so it's very easy to do. I mean, right next to the actual line of text you wish to translate, you just pop open a little menu and say translate, so it's very quick and very easy to do, but it does not automatically recognise that a line of text needs to be translated. If that makes sense.
Now, I'm wondering whether they're going to bring this automatic real-time translation into the product at some point in the future. I imagine they will, to be honest,
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What are Hosted Phone Systems
〉Is it expensive to have a Hosted Phone System?
〉What the benefits of a Hosted Phone System and why you would you need one Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we talk about hosted phone systems.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Dampney. Today we're going to power up your business with a hosted phone system. A hosted phone system is a phone system that is hosted, funnily enough, on a remote service via in the cloud. We recently moved a client of ours from an old, digital, on-the-wall phone system to a new hosted phone system using the existing cabling infrastructure. We deployed a mix of IP handsets, which is a traditional desk phone. You are using your IP cabling or managed cabling. Also, soft phones. Now, a soft phone is a phone application on your desktop or laptop. It can also be on a tablet or a mobile phone.
Now, the beauty of this is that you can be connected through those devices using a headset or through the speaker and microphone natively to make and receive calls, which can actually dramatically reduce the cost of deploying these sort of solutions, without putting a handset on a desk so to speak. It also allows for hot-desking and travel, meaning you don't need to be tied to the phone that's on your desk. You're actually able to use your device wherever you have your laptop, or potentially tablet or mobile phone with the application.
These hosted phone systems can lead to reduced call costs. They're often traditionally very much cheaper than your big tier-one phone system guys, particularly the big T and others. It also gives you flexible provisioning, so you don't have to buy 30 handsets if you have 30 staff. You can only deploy what you need at that time that you need it, particularly on the soft client side or the soft phone side. You just run up an extension when you need to use it.
Also, as I alluded to earlier, it gives you remote access to your phone system. A fantastic example of this was the phone system we recently deployed for someone. The business owner was overseas in Thailand for work, and he was able to work using the soft phone client on his iPhone and the hotel wifi where he was staying. He had the ability to make calls as though he was sitting in his office, which is incredibly powerful, but also his staff had the ability to see his presence. They knew if he was on the phone or available to take calls, so they could transfer incoming calls from the phone system on their main number, through to his soft phone client on this mobile phone. As far as his clients were aware, he was working and available as though he was in the office, which is a really powerful tool.
Hosted phone systems also are incredibly easy to programme these days. They give you so much variability in call flows, as in how a call moves through your business. One of the key factors we find people taking them up for is that they would like to more directly get calls to the people that need them, rather than going to reception and then through the accounts and then to one particular person. Automated systems can be used to get calls directly to the people that need them answered more quickly and more efficiencies and cost-savings in your business.
Voicemail to email is another fantastic feature of hosted systems or virtual PDXs, in that you can receive a voicemail via email, meaning you get the voicemail immediately on whatever device you have. If you're out of the office, it gives you some powerful ability to more easily and quickly react to someone's query. We all know these days people like to get information or be able to contact you as quickly as they can.
Call presence I also talked about earlier, but it's a powerful feature as well. It gives you the ability to know where your staff are and who's on or off a call, if they're in a do-not-disturb status.
This episode is brought to you by The Small Business Download, live at The Loft, on 18 October 2018. Click here for tickets.
https://youtu.be/T9JZx7zq1gE
In this episode, we talk about:
two recent updates from Apple you might actually care about
the 'screen time' feature to help keep control of time spent on screens for you (or your kids)
the Apple Watch 4 which comes with heart-monitoring
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we talk about two new features from Apple that you may actually care about.
Hey, welcome to this episode of the Power Up Project. I'm Ben Love your host for this episode.
If you're anything like me, you're probably a little bit blasé about all the new announcements that continually come out from all the tech companies. Now, Apple is one of those tech companies that has their big annual event about this time of year where they have this massive keynote and it's all very flashy. They release all of these amazing new products and new features.
Now, they've just had that over in the U.S. and yes, they announced a lot of new products and new iPhones and whatever else. But, to be honest, I don't really care much about that. It's a phone, you do a lot of cool stuff with it. The new ones have got bigger screens, they cost more money, etc. But you know what? There are two features that Apple did announce at this big keynote that I actually think are really cool and actually very useful. I wanted to take you through those two if you're an Apple user.
Now, the first of those is a feature that comes in iOS 12, so that's the operating system that runs on an Apple iPhone or, I guess, an iPod if they've still got those, the iPod Touches. This feature is called screen time, and what screen time does is basically measures how much time you use your screen, or in this case, obviously, your Apple iPhone. It gives you a great little breakdown of what applications you're using, how much time you're spending on each, how many times you've picked up your phone over the course of a day, whether your time is being spent on social media or productivity apps or what have you. They give you pretty graphs and all sorts of interesting information.
It's actually pretty useful because if you're anything like me, if you're anything like my wife, if you're anything like my children, then you probably spend a little bit too much time with your screens. This is a great app giving you some insight into how much time that actually is.
Now, apparently, this thing has also got some parental controls in there for those of you may need to control yourself or maybe control your children's use of screen time. You can actually restrict that screen time. I haven't had a chance to play with those features yet, but being the proud father of two, I have plenty of opportunity coming up, I'm sure. I will report back when I learn more about how screen time parental controls work in the new iOS 12.
Now, the second cool thing that Apple announced is the new Apple Watch 4. Now, I'm not so fussed about the fact that there's a new Apple Watch out. I actually don't wear a watch to be honest, I haven't worn a watch in many years. The fact that there's a new one out, meh, you know what. Probably a better screen, probably costs more, all the usual things. But interestingly enough, there is a feature on there, which is a real standout. That is the fact that the Apple Watch 4 is actually an FDA approved ECG device. What that means is that this thing can produce an electrocardiogram ... Well, this thing can monitor your heart and produce electrocardiogram charts and analysis and whatever of what's going on with your heart.
Now, this is pretty amazing because the potential of this thing is that you can use this device to monitor your heart, it can alert on, well, abnormal findings if you've got an abnormal heartbeat, what have you else. I've also seen it written that it will be able to alert third part...
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What is Xero?
〉Why should you back up your Xero data? Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we're going to talk about whether you should be backing up your Xero data.
Hi, welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host for today's episode, Ben Love. Today we're going to be touching on the topic of whether you should be backing up your Xero cloud accounting data. Now, I'm going to touch specifically on Xero in this case but the same discussion holds true for any other cloud accounting system you may be using. You might be using MYOB Online, you might be using QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks. There's a few of them out there but Xero is definitely one of the more popular ones around at the moment. It's the one we use here, at Grassroots IT, so it's certainly something that I can talk about and that I'm familiar with.
Xero is a cloud-based accounting package. We put all of our financial information in there. Some us invoice from there. Some of us, it's our CRM, where we keep our client information, supplier information. It's pretty fundamental to running our business. So are we confident that that data is safe up there in the cloud? Look, I'm confident that the data is secure, that Xero themselves are doing a fantastic job of making sure that their platform is reliable and no one can access my data without my authorization. I also am confident that they're doing a good job of backing up that data, right. So they take their own backup, so if they have internal failures within their system, they know that they've got copies of that data everywhere.
But you know what? I still want a copy of my Xero data for myself, because what does happen if Xero themselves do have a catastrophic failure? What happens, perhaps, if maybe some of that data in there gets corrupt? What happens if it's human error, even? Perhaps I have a trainee bookkeeper come and join my organisation here who makes a heck of a mess of my books and we don't discover that for a day, or a week, or a month later. How do I roll back to a previous backup or how do I look and see what the books are meant to look like? Interesting question, isn't it?
Well, the good news is that there are options for backing up your Xero data. I actually had to reach out to some of my professional peers on this one. I've got friends who specialise in the world of cloud accounting, and the answer they came back with was a little product called ControlC. You'll find it if you Google it, control-c.com. It's a New Zealand-based company and they provide a product which does exactly this; it backs up your Xero accounting data.
It does some really interesting things, too. So it'll take the daily backups, it gives you full access to historical data, so it keeps all of that history of those backups so if you need to go back and reference a particular point in time, you can. It gives you the option of local storage so you can actually store it in New Zealand data centres, and they also have other options in other countries if that's of interest to you. But one of the really interesting things here is actually about the restoration or the restore if you actually need to get into one of those backups to get some information out. The way ControlC works is that they have an app and it gives you full access on your computer, in your office there, totally offline, you don't need an internet connection once you've obviously got the backup down, to go through your historical accounting information and get access to what you want.
It's also very cheap. It starts at about $5 a month, so for a little bit of peace of mind around your Xero accounting data, if that is something that interests you, I'd encourage you to go and have a look, control-c.com, but obviously, Google it, or of course, talk to your IT people. See if they've got any other products they suggest to do this job.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉How to set up virtual meeting in Outlook.
〉How Skype helps in making a scheduled video conference call happen. Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project we talk about turning your Outlook meetings into video conference calls.
Welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Love, and today we're going to power up your business by using Outlook, and those Outlook meetings that you're already using there and with one click turning them into video conferences for all of your attendees.
So, there is one assumption that I'm working from here and that assumption is that you are using Microsoft Office 365 for your email and as part of your Microsoft Office 365 subscription that you have Skype for Business. Now, in most cases, you're going to have all those bits of the puzzle and so many people are using Microsoft office 365 these days for these pieces of their IT infrastructure it's almost a given.
So let's get straight into it. We're going to be short and sweet today.
We all know Microsoft Outlook, and we all know that Microsoft Outlook has got the calendar section in there. This is where you can keep track of all of your upcoming meetings but what you can also do is you can create new meetings in there and invite other people. Now you probably already know this, so you would go to your calendar in Outlook, you would click on the area you want and click on new meeting or new appointment and up comes the little appointment window. You can type in the subject and location, you can invite attendees.
There is a button at the top there that says invite attendees. This is where after you click that, you type in the names, or the email addresses of the other people who you would like to join you at this meeting, and they will get an email in their inbox with all the details of this meeting. And on that email they can click on accept or decline, whatever the case may be.
And Outlook with all of its magic will track who has accepted your meeting invitation and who has not. Now, what we are going to do today is take that one step further though, and what we're going to do is we're going to use that meeting or that appointment invite and Outlook to coordinate a Skype meeting. And when I say a Skype meeting I mean a video conference. So if you're trying to coordinate a meeting here between multiple people who are not in the same office, but they're all sitting at a computer and ideally they've all got a web cam on their computer, then what you can do is you can click the little button at the top of that meeting request page that says Skype meeting.
It's literally as simple as that. Now there is a whole lot of magic that's happening behind the scenes right now when you click that button but what you will actually see is that within your meeting invite there, some blue text is going to appear there, which is actually a link, which says join Skype meeting.
Now, really simply, when the time comes for this meeting to actually occur all of your meeting attendees will be able to open their meeting invite from their calendar, and they will click on the blue link. A whole lot of tech-o magic behind the scenes is going to happen. Skype for business is going to open on their computer and on your computer and you will all be automatically joined into the one meeting with one click of that little button.
So, that's it. It really is as simple as that. If you've ever struggled to coordinate multiple people, getting them all in the one video call, inviting other attendees, losing the original attendees, you know the song and dance, then try doing this. Use Microsoft Outlook, create a meeting and in that meeting click the button at the top that says Skype meeting and Outlook will automatically do all the coordinating behind the scenes to coordinate that video conference call.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project brought to you b...
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Should you be backing up your Office365 data?
〉Can you trust Microsoft to protect your data?
〉How to back up your Office365 data. Transcript: Today on The Power Up Project, we're going to ask the question should I be backing up my Office 365 data?
Hey, welcome back to The Power Up Project. My name is Ben Love and I'm your host for this episode, where we're going to be checking in on the question should you be backing up your Office 365 information? Fantastic question.
Office 365, just to recap, is Microsoft's big platform in the cloud there, which these days is really where all the focus is going for hosting our email and our file storage and our team communications, and our phone systems and video libraries. You name it, all that sort of stuff. We are putting so much of our vital corporate knowledge and content up in that cloud and we're putting all that trust in Microsoft, that they will keep that information safe. The question? Is our trust being put in the right place? Are we right to trust Microsoft with this? There are two parts to the answer. Well, it depends specifically what the question is that you're asking, I guess.
Can we trust Microsoft to actually protect all that information in a security sense? The answer is yes. Microsoft do an incredibly good job of security around Office 365. Can we trust Microsoft to protect all of that information in terms of a backup? What happens if Office 365 itself fails or crashes? Could we lose all of that information that we've stored in there? The short answer on that is theoretically yes, but in practise I'm confident that the answer is no. Microsoft have invested so much money and have designed an architecture around Office 365 that is so massively redundant and resilient that there is no chance that that information is going to be accidentally lost. However, does that mean that we should not backup that data ourselves? On that point, I'm going to say no, it does not mean that.
For example, when Microsoft backup and protect our data in Office 365, they're not doing so for archival purposes for example. When we delete a mailbox or we delete some data out of our Office 365 tenant, that information will be deleted from that Office 365 tenant. Now, Microsoft will hold that for maybe 60 days or 90 days, or something or other. You may be able to get it back, you may not, during that recovery period. The point is, at no stage there has Microsoft failed in what they were intending to do. They protect your live active data, and they do that very well. But, there are definitely scenarios under which you would be advised to have your own backup of your Office 365 data. It's not because Office 365 is going to crash, it's for other situations.
How do you do that? The answer, thankfully, is very easily and also really quite cheaply. There's a number of products on the market at the moment that are getting very, very good. There's currently various tussles for leadership of which is going to be the better product. They leapfrog each other every few months, as these things tend to do until they all settle down. The product that we're using at the moment with a lot of our clients, which is doing a fantastic job, is one called Backupify. There are absolutely other alternatives out there on the market that also do a very good job. By all means, google it yourself, or of course, touch base with your IT people, but these solutions themselves are also cloud based. They're based in other data centres somewhere, not in the Office 365 cloud, for obvious reasons. You subscribe to them on a monthly basis or an annual basis and you pay a certain amount of money based on how many users you have in your Office 365 tenant that need to be backed up.
The pricing is not expensive. It could be $10 or $100 or something, depending on how many users you need to backup. Very easy to set up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What is Office365 Secure Score?
〉How does Office365 Secure Score work?
〉How to increase your Office 365 Secure Score?
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we talk about the Office 365 Secure Score.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Dampney, and today we're going to power up your business by increasing your Office 365 Secure Score. So this episode is for the Office 365 users out there. Specifically, we're talking about Microsoft and it's Secure Score which they give you on your Office 365 service. This score is based on a number of best practise factors. The idea is that you set a score that you'd like to achieve, up to 470 points, and Secure Score can give you an action list to help you achieve this. So to get there you go up in Office 365 and go to the Security and Compliance Admin Centre. Alternatively, you can actually go directly via the securescore.microsoft.com website.
Now, at the Security and Compliance Admin Centre you can view lots of different reports and dashboards about your Office 365 tenant. But more specifically, we're looking at the Secure Score on that home page, there. Now, there are two components to Secure Score - the dashboard and the Score Analyzer. The dashboard gives you your account score. It allows you to set the target score that you'd like, whether it's basic, balanced, or aggressive. And then you can view the recommended actions in the queue and compare your score.
So the target score can be set to your specifications but it's starting at balance will be a reasonably achievable setting for many businesses. Aggressive would take a rather in-depth configuration and basic, I think, probably doesn't cover many of the things that I would consider to be critical for your Office 365 security. Now, the actions in the queue that you have there are basically open activities for you to complete to progress your score. So some examples might be, multifactor authentication, which is the subject of another Power Up Project podcast. There's mailbox auditing, reviewing malware detections, or reviewing mailbox access, to give you an example.
Now, you can compare your score, which shows how you compare to other 365 users of a similar size to your business and also against others in your industry. Now, this could be important, for instance, if you're in the medical industry and you'd like to know how you compare against other medical practices, how secure you are in comparison to them. The Score Analyzer shows your score over different time periods and also your completed and incomplete actions. Now, by selecting an incomplete action, you can apply that setting. So, for example, one might be Enable Client Rules Forward Block. A bit of a mouthful but if a user has a client-created email forward, so, therefore, a rule in Outlook that automatically forwards an email to an external email account, to a Hotmail account as an example, you can disable this at a system level. So you're able to apply exceptions to this rule, also by clicking Learn More, it tells you what you're about to change and how it will affect users so you can say, "Okay, do I actually want to do this? Is this relevant to my business?"
And then once you apply the change it tells you the points increase, but more importantly, what was potentially affected by the change. So in my example, when we enabled Client Forward Rules Block, it told me that there were potentially three rules that it affected and in this instance it didn't actually have an effect on those. So we didn't have an adverse effect to what was already in place. So, look, that's a really simple explanation of how that works. There is a More option on each of those actions or activities that gives you the Microsoft website link where you can go into greater detail. But I'd like to encourage you to check out Microsoft Office Secure Score.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What lesson can we get from the “minor” network error on Coles that kept the supermarket chain closed until late morning?
Transcript: Welcome to the Power Up Project. In this episode we talk about Coles' nationwide outage.
Ben Dampney: Welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your co-host Ben Dampney, here with Ben Love. How are you, Ben?
Ben Love: Mate, I'm really well. But I tell you what, I'm glad I was not planning on doing the shopping this morning.
Ben Dampney: That's right. So, it's a Sunday morning here in Australia. And we saw, came across a news article that was quite interesting about one of the very large supermarket chains having some problems. Tell us about it, Ben.
Ben Love: [00:00:30] Well mate, this is directly from the ABC News homepage, "Coles supermarkets open after early morning technical glitch kept stores shut across Australia." So, Coles supermarkets across the country were unable to open on time this morning due to a network error. Ouch.
Ben Dampney: Indeed, ouch indeed. Yeah, that's a massive outage for every store in the country to be closed. It obviously shows the widespread effect that their particular network outage had. What's the lesson here for us, Ben? As business owners and IT consultants?
Ben Love: [00:01:00] Mate, the lesson here I think, is that outages can and probably will happen, even if you've got the resources behind you of Coles, bad stuff can still happen. So, in our businesses, we certainly don't have the resources of Coles to keep everything running and nor do all of our clients, but there are ways to be ready for when this does happen, and that's called business continuity.
Ben Dampney: [00:01:30] Yes, indeed. So having a plan in place to make sure your systems are functional to some degree. Whether or not that's ... hey, even back to paper. Having something that you can rely on to do your business and your trade is really important.
Ben Love: Absolutely. Hey, I've got a quote here from a Cole's spokeswoman. And I love some of the lessons this brings to us. "Earlier this morning we had some minor IT problems, in some of our supermarkets, which were out of our team members control." So just think about all those key words that that spokeswoman has put in there. This was not a major problem. This was not a catastrophe. This was nothing in their control. But look at the flow an effect, their stores have been closed for a period of time. Can you imagine the money that did not go through the cash registers for Coles. And this was 'minor' IT problem that caused that. Anyway, we're talking in circles here. The lesson for your listeners though, is that bad things do happen, no matter how prepared you might be or how many resources you throw at this. So, move your thinking a little bit sideways, away from purely technology and think more about business continuity planning. If or when your technology does fail, how are you gonna keep your business running?
Ben Dampney: [00:02:30] Good question. Something worth thinking about. All right. Thanks Ben. And thanks for listening guys, we'll catch you on the next episode. Bye.
Ben Love: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT and Digit IT. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Recap on Multi-factor Authentication(MFA) topic.
〉Reasons why you need to enable MFA.
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we are going to talk about multi-factor authentication again.
Hey, welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host for this episode, Ben Love. Today we're going to retouch on multi-factor authentication. Now, we have touched on this before across many channels. We've spoken about this in blog posts, in podcasts, in YouTube and Facebook videos. We're gonna touch on it again, because this is a really ... this is low hanging fruit, folks. This is a really powerful way of improving the security of your systems and it's easy to do.
So what I want to do, first we're gonna recap. What is multi-factor authentication? Multi-factor authentication can otherwise be known as MFA, two factor authentication, 2FA, so on, you get the idea, is an additional layer of security on your user accounts that you use to access things such as e-mail or your accounting system and so on. Normally you would use your username and your password to log on to these systems. When you have MFA enabled, there is a third step.
Now, usually that third step will be a randomly changing numeric code that you get from a little key fob or an app on your smartphone and you enter that code in and then it allows you to log on to the system. What I want to talk you through today, three reasons why you need to enable multi-factor authentication. First of all, it is free. Pretty much every modern application, especially the cloud based ones, which obviously we're all moving towards in a big way, have MFA functionality built in. All you need to do is turn it on. Simple as that.
If you are using older legacy systems, MFA functionality may not be built in, so you may need some sort of a third party product on top of that to give you MFA functionality. If that has to happen, there will be cost involved because of the third party application. But we are seeing less and less of those legacy systems around these days. Most of your systems, you will probably find, have some MFA support in them. Ask the question. Go to Google. Search for the name of your application and then MFA. See what you can find.
Point number two. It is super easy to use. It really is. Most MFA on cloud apps, for example, is provided via an app on your phone. Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator are the two main ones that most of the platforms seem to choose between. It is very easy. You go to log on your application exactly the same way you normally would. You may enter your username and password the same way you normally would. But then there will just be this extra step. All you need to do is open the app on your phone, it will give you a code, normally about six numbers. You type that in as part of the login process and you're done. That's it.
With a lot of the Microsoft stuff it's even easier. When you go to log on to your application, the app on your phone will simply pop up a message saying, “This login is in process, would you like to approve it to proceed,” and you just tap the button on your phone saying, “Yes, approve this authentication attempt.” Very, very easy to use.
Point number three is that it is massively effective at increasing the security of your user accounts. Now, security needs to come in many layers. We need firewalls, we need anti-virus, we need best practise configurations, we need all of these things. There is no silver bullet. There never will be. But MFA is an extremely effective way of protecting those user accounts, because those user accounts are the keys to the front door of all of that important information and all of that authority and power that happens within your organisations.
MFA is a very, very important piece of the whole security picture. Please, have a look at MFA if you haven't already.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉How to power up your business with videos for staff training.
〉How you can power up your process of knowledge transfer.
〉Powerful tools for uploading and streaming your training videos.
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Podcast, we talk about powering up your staff training with video.
Welcome back to the Power Up Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Love, and today we're going to power up your business with two fantastic tools that we use here at Grassroots IT all the time. One of them is called Snagit, and the other one, Microsoft Stream. What am I talking about here? What I'm talking about is developing a library of video content that you create yourself in your business to help with staff training, knowledge retention and that knowledge transfer. The reason this came to me that this was such a good thing to talk about is that I was meeting with the client early this week. Lovely group of people. Simply because of the nature of their business, they have a fairly high staff turnover. One of the things that they always have to pay attention to is the onboarding of new staff, training, and really not losing that organisational knowledge as that knowledge walks out the door as staff turnover, just through the course of business.
One of the points that we discussed was using video to capture a lot of this knowledge to pass on to newer staff members. How do we do that? There are two parts to this. The first part is using a little tool on a Windows computer called Snagit. It is a commercial tool you need to pay for but it's not very expensive. Do a Google search for Snagit and you'll find it. If you're working on a Mac, then you can actually just use the QuickTime player that's built in and it will do exactly the same job. What Snagit and the QuickTime player can do is record your screen. Everything you move around on your screen, the mouse clicks, the applications you open, et cetera, can be recorded into a video. If you have a microphone on your computer, I suggest a headset just for the quality of the audio there. You can record a running commentary on what you're doing at the same time.
What you can do, let's say you have a particular process that you need to follow to create an invoice for a client. Oftentimes, writing that down step by step in written language can be quite laborious and as such, often doesn't get done. It gets put in the too hard basket. With a tool like Snagit, all you need to do is click the record button on Snagit and then actually start doing the process. Actually generate an invoice for a client and talk out loud into your microphone while you're doing it. All that knowledge will be recorded into a video. It is very easy to do. It's remarkably easy to do. At the end of all that, you'll have a file saved on your computer which is the recording of that particular process or workflow you've just stepped through. But what do you do with it now? How do you make sure it's available to all of those staff members, the rest of your organisation? This is where the second piece of our puzzle comes in.
This is a little tool called Microsoft Stream. Essentially Microsoft Stream is part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite of products and services. If you use Office 365, which most people seem to be doing these days, you probably already have Microsoft Stream. Go and have a look for it. Essentially Stream, it's like a YouTube, if you will, in that you can upload videos to it and then people can browse them, search them, play them, so on and so forth. It's private and secure for just your organisation. If you're recording some confidential information in your videos, you don't need to worry about that information getting outside the organisation. Upload the video to Microsoft Stream. It really is super simple. You just need to go to Microsoft Stream and you can access it through your Office 365 portal or from any other Office 365 app...
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Two fantastic new updates from Microsoft Teams.
〉What is Microsoft Teams?
Transcript: In this episode of the Power Up Project, we talk about two fantastic new updates from Microsoft Teams.
Hey, welcome back to the Power Up Project. We've got some great updates today from the world of Microsoft Teams. So there's a couple of interesting things that have crossed my newsfeed in the last couple of days. The first one is that Microsoft Teams is now available in a free version.
So just to recap for everybody, Microsoft Teams is, in a very simplistic sense, it's a team chat tool, similar to Slack or Hipchat, or one of those ones. But, Microsoft Teams is so much more because instead of just having a chat channel in there, you actually use Microsoft Teams to bring together a whole lot of the other features and services within the Office 365 ecosystem.
So for example, when you create a new Team within Microsoft Teams, you will also have a SharePoint site sitting behind that to hold files that you might share with that team. You also have a OneNote file. You can also have a whole lot of other stuff in there, like it also still does just have that text chat. Teams on the longer term roadmap, is also slated to replace Skype for Business, or more accurately, the Skype for Business functionality, which is voice and video calling, is going to be merged into the Teams product set.
So keep an eye out for Microsoft Teams. It really does seem to be getting a lot of attention from the development world at the moment. So back to these updates that came across the newsfeed this morning. Like I said, the first one is that Microsoft Teams is now available in a free version. So to date, you could only use Teams if you used Office 365. Now I know so many of us use Office 365 these days, but you know what? There are still some people out there who don't. So for those people, you can actually access Teams for free. That's very exciting.
The other really cool part, and I love this. This is kind of, you know, the kind of big Cloud geeky bit. Microsoft has announced that Teams is now supporting in-line message translation. So think about that for a minute. In-line message translation. This is like BabelFish stuff for typed chat. So you can be chatting with multiple people, by text here, this is not spoken words here, this is not verbal. You can be text chatting with multiple people in multiple different languages, and Microsoft Teams is now capable of translating those other languages, on the fly, to whatever your selected base language is.
How cool is that? This stuff just blows me away. Isn't technology amazing? Anyway. This is just a brand new announcement from Microsoft. It is apparently out there in the Teams Enterprise Tenants. I have not enabled it on our Tenant yet, but I will be doing so within the next 24 hours, and testing this bad boy out because I think that's really cool.
We've got, I don't know whether you remember this, but Grassroots IT, we have staff in multiple locations, so this may be a really fun too for us to test out, to communicate a lot easier with our staff over in the Philippines, and of course with our staff over in New Zealand. So stay tuned as we enable this fantastic new stuff and test it out. I will report back once I've had a chance to play.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Power Up Project, brought to you by Grassroots IT, and Digit IT. Please leave us review wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, keep powering up.
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Testing your backups.
〉How to make sure you can restore your business after a power outage?
〉How important ensuring an effective data backup is.
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project we talk about testing your backups.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Dampney, and today we're going to power up your business by making sure you test your backups, or perhaps that should be making sure you can restore your business in the event it powers down.
So you have backups right? We certainly hope so. Now, we consider data backed up when we've used the three-two-one method. That's three copies of any piece of data, be it a Word document, picture file, email, et cetera, and that's stored on two different types of media. For example, on a network share and also on a USB hard drive. Now one of these backups must be at a location where the data is not usually stored, so a great example offsite, at your house or maybe in a cloud service.
Now, what types of data should be backed up? Typically, your onsite data, such as your My Documents folder, server file shares, maybe your application database and also cloud services, such as Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, G Suite, and also your financial packages, such as Xero, MYOB, Reckon, et cetera.
Now, presumably you get reports that the backups are completing okay, or perhaps your IT provider get these alerts and lets you know if there's an issue. But more importantly than that is, are the backups tested? Now, it's critical not just to complete a backup but to actually test them. Imagine the feeling that someone has when a critical file is deleted. You might think to yourself, "Okay, well, it's not a problem, we have backups. We can go and restore the file." Yet, when you attempt to recover the file, the restore process fails. Depending on the file, you may be able to recreate it or maybe not. If it's a very large spreadsheet with lots of details about a supplier for example, that could be very difficult to restore or recover or reenter.
Even worse than that, if a CryptoLocker attack on your network encrypts all your files so you cannot access them, that's really disastrous if you can't get a recoverable backup, say if it's a few months old since it was last functionally working for you. According to a major antivirus vendor, one in five small businesses that get affected by CryptoLocker go out of business. Most businesses can recover from data loss for a certain period. For some, it might be a couple of hours. For others, a few days. So I'd like you to take the time to think about any particular system or file in your business, what sort of window could you recover or restore or recreate, and how you might go about doing that.
Testing your backups can mean exploring a backup and restoring a single file, but it can also mean a full disaster recovery test, restoring servers, databases and applications to a test environment to make sure that we can functionally get it working for you. And, I guess, how often is regularly, is a pretty flexible question. It really depends on how you are testing. If you're manually testing, then exploring a backup might occur once a month. But for a full disaster recovery, maybe it's every three to six months. However, some of the products that we recommend, such as StorageCraft and Datto, can actually automate the testing of your backups and some of these are done daily. It certainly helps us, as IT providers, sleep at night.
Most importantly, I think it's critical for managers and business owners to understand where their backups are stored, how often they are being tested, and what timeframe recovery is likely to be. Testing can obviously help you with this understanding. So as part of any good disaster recovery and business continuity plan, you should have an understanding of the process, and whilst you can rely on a good IT provider to...
In this episode of the Power Up Project, we're going to talk about:
〉What is Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)?
〉How MFA can help you avoid cyber attacks.
〉What systems you can use MFA on. Transcript: Hey, welcome back to the Power Up Project. I am your host for this episode, my name is Ben Love. Great to have you with us. Today we're going to be talking about multifactor authentication, otherwise known as maybe two-factor authentication, MFA, 2FA, whatever, they're all acronyms, they all mean the same thing. Basically, it means adding another authentication step in addition to your username and password to access a system.
Now it's very simple to do, but it's also becoming very, very important that you do this. A lot of us have got little physical dangles from the bank that are attached to our keyring and it's got that little code that constantly changes, so if we need to do a transfer of money from our business bank account, the internet banking site will pop up another window saying please enter your code. And that's when you need to enter that ever-changing code from your little keyring before the transfer will be authorised. That is multifactor authentication. That's exactly what it is.
So you are already using this on your bank accounts. But what you may not be using it for is to access other pieces of software such as Xero, your cloud accounting platform or MAIB online, or any of your Office 365 environments such as your email or your SharePoint or your One Drive files
Now what we are seeing across our client base is that multifactor authentication is becoming critical to the point of becoming non-negotiable in most environments because it is the single most effective thing that we're seeing at the moment for stopping user accounts being compromised. So what would happen if your account, if your password were to be compromised somehow by a malicious party, by a hacker we'll call them. They would know your user name, and they would know your password, and they would then be able to log on to, let's say your email.
They would then be able to log on to your email as if they were you. So we're seeing a lot of things like this occur now. We have seen a couple of our clients targeted with this, but it's also in the news. You might have heard about it. They're calling it, well, you've heard the term phishing, which is an email spam type attack. And then there's spear phishing where it's an email that is sent to specific people and customised to try and get their attention and get them to click on a malicious link or compromise their security in some way.
Well the next step on that, that we're seeing is called whaling. This is where the malicious parties identify the whales within your organisation, so that might be the CEO, the CFO, somebody with a particular authority. And if they're then able to compromise, let's say the email account of your CFO for example, then they could send emails around purportedly from the CFO requesting all sorts of activity, mainly that money be transferred to certain bank accounts. Now this actually is happening in real life. People are falling for this, and money is being lost with this particular approach.
But think about this. If the malicious party had your username and password to access your email to be able to send these emails, if you had multifactor authentication in place, if you had another little random security code that was constantly changing on your keyring or your smartphone app that you needed to enter in to your email before you could log on, then it would not matter that that malicious party had your username and password, because they would not have your randomly changing code. So what we are seeing is that multifactor authentication is really becoming absolutely critical, especially for those people in an organisation who have the most authority, who have the most access to different systems.
So what I really want to encourage you to do afte...
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉What can you do to keep your business running when your Internet connection suddenly fails you?
〉Why you should consider getting a second internet connection such as an ADSL connection or NBN connection.
〉Why you should consider having a 4g backup connection.
Transcript: In this episode of The Power Up Project, we're going to be talking about how to keep your business running when the internet fails.
Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I'm your host Ben Love and today we're going to be talking about how to keep your business running when your internet connection fails. You see, we had a hell of a week last week. One of the major upstream internet providers, we don't know who at this stage, could have been APT, or Vocus, or Telstra or one of those, had a fairly major outage in some equipment somewhere.
Which meant that quite a few of our clients were impacted with either a total internet outage, or in some cases the internet was still kind of working but kind of really not. In either case, some of those clients coped better than others with that particular internet outage. That really can depend in a lot of cases on the nature of the business that is being done. Some businesses are very time critical and depend on that internet connection. Other businesses, you know it wasn't such of an issue to be offline for a couple of hours.
What do you do when your business suffers an internet outage like that? What would the impact be on your clients, on your staff, on your productivity? Would it make a big impact or would it really not? Could you go and have a coffee and just wait for it all to pass by?
If you do need to really keep that internet connection going because your business really does depend on it, and those outages can cost you a lot of money, or a lot of goodwill with your clients; you really need to have a backup internet connection. It really is as simple as that.
That backup internet connection could be your mobile phone, for example. You could tether your laptop to your mobile phone hot spot and keep working that way. We certainly have a lot of clients who do that and not just small clients, but big clients too with a significant head count who use that method. It works very well.
That's particularly useful when some or all their services are up in the cloud, because it doesn't matter how they connect to the internet to get to them or where they connect to it from.
Some other options you might like to consider for that continuity piece for your internet there, you could get a second internet connection into the building such as a ADSL connection or maybe an NBN connection. The thing you need to keep in mind when you're dealing with internet connections like that is that they all come into the building via a physical cable.
A lot of the times when you do lose that primary internet connection, it can be because there has been some physical damage to the cable coming into your building. You might have some roadwork going on down the street, or you might have some linesmen doing some work on the cables and maybe a backhoe or bobcat has accidentally dug through some cables.
If your primary internet connection and your secondary internet connection both come in on cables through that same hole in the ground, there's a fair chance that both of those internet connections are going to be offline while those cables get repaired. That really doesn't do you much good, does it?
Probably one of the best options we're seeing at the moment is 4G, leaning on the mobile phone networks for that internet connectivity. As I said, you can certainly hotspot to a mobile phone. You can get standalone 4G routers, which are separate little devices. They're not expensive.
You put a sim card in them with your favourite telecom, might be Telstra or Vodafone, whoever. That can provide connectivity for your office.
Welcome to The Power Up Project!
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