Microsoft 365 and Teams for Hybrid Workplaces

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The “Hybrid office” — the new buzzword in business since COVID-19 — combines working at the office and from home and has become the reality for many companies.

A survey released by Zippia in February 2022 revealed that transformation has accelerated at break-neck speed, with 74 percent of U.S. companies already using a hybrid model or planning to soon.

Employers and employees both experienced the benefits of remote work during the pandemic, including cost savings, more flexibility and improved employee morale while actually increasing productivity.

Playing a large role in that transformation has been Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of productivity and collaboration applications, now known simply as Microsoft 365, which helps companies pursue a “Productivity Anywhere” hybrid approach to work. In fact, 63 percent of high-growth companies follow that approach now, according to the Zippia study.

Below we list how Microsoft 365 can optimize a productive hybrid office. Note that some features are already out, while others will release later this year.

1. Microsoft Teams & Expanded Features

Microsoft Teams might only seem like a messaging app or that annoying thing that starts up automatically when your computer starts and slows down your ability to get to work, but it combines the best features of virtual video meetings and messaging channels. It brings them together in a platform designed to be a secure online work hub.

MS Teams has come a long way in the last five years and the company continues to add more features to enable hybrid offices, including:

  • The ability to do webinar registration
  • Presenter modes that provide a more professional virtual presence
  • Increased security through features like smart links and smart attachments
  • A full business VoIP phone system add-on
  • The addition of a “metaverse” component called Mesh for Teams

2. New Meeting Options for RSVP in Outlook

The challenges of employees working in different locations include knowing when and how to “clock in” and “clock out” and determining if colleagues are available or working at home next week or the office.

To help hybrid teams better coordinate, Outlook will soon allow users to RSVP to meetings. This lets team members know if they will be attending virtually or in person.

3. Better Framing for More Engaging Meetings

We’ve all been horrified to turn on our cameras for an online meeting and find something embarrassing in the background. Camera positioning can also be problematic. One person’s face might take up 80% of the screen.

A new Surface Hub 2S Smart Camera will allow for better face framing in Microsoft Teams meetings. Features include adjusting the room view so people’s faces will be clearer and providing consistent sizing.

The video display will also automatically adjust as people join or leave a physical room.

4. Get Better Control of Your Video Using PowerPoint to Present

People often share a screen in a video call and present a PowerPoint presentation. It can be difficult to keep everyone as engaged as in-person meetings.

For example, in person, you can maintain eye contact. People can clearly see your facial expressions as you emphasize various things. That’s not always the case when presenting virtually. The app may push your video feed into a tiny box.

An upcoming feature for Teams called Cameo will allow you to seamlessly integrate PowerPoint with MS teams. You can decide exactly how you want your video feed to appear in relation to your presentation.

Another addition, Recording Studio, allows you to record professional-looking on-demand videos in PowerPoint. You can do it right inside the app.

5. Get Help With Your Presentation Skills

Microsoft has poured a lot of AI capabilities into Microsoft 365. One that will soon help deliver better virtual presentations is Speaker Coach.

This private and personalized coach can help hone your presentation skills. This improves your transition between online versus in-person presentations.

Some of the feedback it provides includes:

  • Use of repetitive language
  • Use of filler words
  • Speaking pace
  • Pausing for input
  • Intonation
  • Speaker overlaps
  • And more

Ask Us About Improving Your Hybrid Office Capabilities with Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 has a ton of helpful features but it does help to have an expert to navigate these capabilities. Contact FlexITechs today at 302-537-4198 or ericm@flexitechs.com to learn how Microsoft 365 can help your business grow.

For more information on Microsoft 365 products and capabilities, follow these links:

Article used with permission from The Technology Press.

Two Monitors More Productive Than One?

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Sometimes as my brain switches back and forth repeatedly between my two monitors and focus becomes more difficult, I wonder if I’m really more productive with the second monitor.

Common sense says we would be with a second screen to avoid time lost to switching back and forth between applications using the Task Bar or minimizing and maximizing screens.

But with so many windows open in so many applications, does a second screen actually improve productivity or does it just provide a second place for open files and windows to hide from us?

This Issue Has Been Studied …

As you might expect, someone has studied this phenomenon to determine if and how much a second monitor improves the typical employee’s productivity.

Jon Peddie Research looked at using two screens on a desktop computer or laptop for several years. It found that overall, employees in all types of jobs improved  productivity by an average of 42%.

Perhaps intuitively understanding that, companies increased their use of second monitors by an annual compound growth rate of 10 percent from 2002-2017, the study found.

The company’s namesake put it simply, saying “The more you can see, the more you can do.”

What Can Using 2 Screens Do For You?

  • A second monitor allows you to do more in less time because you can keep programs that need to be open all of the time, like email, always open on one screen while you work in other programs on the second screen.
  • Side by Side comparisons of data or files or images is also easier. Trying to get two windows up on a single screen side-by-side can be frustrating with time spent resizing the windows to get them to fit side-by-side on a single screen. With two monitors, you can fully open both windows in plain view
  • During online meetings or video calls, a second screen allows you to continue the meeting as you check email or review notes without minimizing the meeting window. With dual screens, you can choose which screen you want to share during meetings and still have apps open on the other screen that no one can see.
  • Laptops are great for portability but not so much for screen space. Connecting your laptop to a monitor can make it like working on a normal desktop PC. You can mirror your screen or make use of the laptop screen for some activities while using the larger screen for others.
  • A second monitor is a relatively low-cost productivity booster with a sweet ROI. A monitor can typically be purchased from $125 to $250 and for that your employees get a 42% average productivity increase with no significant learning curve.

For assistance in picking out and setting up second monitors for your employees, contact us at 302-537-4198, ericm@flexitechs.com, or our Contact page at https://flexitechs.com/contact.

Financial Advantages of Managed Services for Small Businesses

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Financial Advantages of Managed IT Services for Small BusinessesWe’ve released our latest Report, “The Financial Advantages of Managed IT Services for Small Businesses”, detailing how Managed IT Services from a locally owned and operated Managed IT Service like FlexITechs can save your small business money and increase uptime, productivity and security at the same time.

We’ve examined the wages and benefits for different levels of IT employees on Delmarva and Benefits nationally and compared the cost of internal IT staff or having employees do their own troubleshooting with assistance from external computer repair companies to the cost of having a Managed IT Service handle the typical Delmarva small business’s IT support.

You can obtain your copy of the report here.

As always, you can contact me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com or the company by phone at 302-537-4198 or by filling out our Contact form.

 

Can My Computer Handle Windows 11?

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If you’re buying a new computer that has Windows 11 on it already, you can rest assured that the computer can handle the new operating system as long as it’s not a cheap come-on spit out by a manufacturer to lure you into buying it.

Windows 11

The Top 5 Questions about Windows 11

However, if you have  an existing computer and wonder if you can upgrade it to Windows 11, it might not be that straight-forward.

In many cases you can open Windows Update and it will tell you if your computer is ready for Windows 11 or not.

Microsoft has also provided the PC Health Check utility that you can download and run to determine if your computer can run Windows 11. You can download it here.

These are Microsoft’s minimum requirements for running Windows 11 but you will likely need to double or triple the processor speed, RAM and hard drive storage:

  • At least a 1GHZ dual-core processor
  • 4 GB of RAM
  • At least 64 GB of storage
  • A graphics card compatible with DirectX 12 or later, with a WDDM 2.0 driver
  • 720p display, at least 9” diagonal size, with 8 bits per colour channel
  • TPM version 2.0
  • UEFI, Secure Boot capable firmware

As always, these upgrades can create conflicts with existing applications and hardware. So, if you need to buy a new computer, make sure your existing applications and peripherals will work with Windows 11. For an existing computer, we also recommend waiting a couple of months for the bugs to reveal themselves before upgrading.

Tomorrow’s Question — Is Office Available in Windows 11?

 

Beat Password Fatigue With a Password Manager

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By now, in 2021, you’ve most likely experienced at least one breach of an account password whether you know it or not.

Perhaps the fallout didn’t prove devastating, but could there be a time bomb lurking in that stolen password that could cause significant harm?

The answer lies in our use of a small number of passwords for a large number of login credentials. From online shopping and banking to social media to personal accounts like the local library, we use the same passwords over and over and over again.

Thus, while we often think to change the password on the breached account, we don’t often think about changing it on every single account that uses that password as well, and we certainly don’t think to change all of our passwords on a regular basis.

To do so would require spending hours to determine which other user accounts we use that password on and hours more to change them all on a regular basis.

Cyber criminals knows this and take full advantage of our password fatigue to try to break into more sensitive accounts once they steal a password themselves or purchase a breached password.

To corral the password monster, you should use a password manager. A password manager at a minimum should encrypt your passwords, generate complex passwords, warn you if a password isn’t complex enough, and be set to require passwords to change regularly.

Other Password Manager Considerations:

  • Automatic Logins
  • Web Browser Extension to manage web site credentials
  • Security Audit that scores your overall password strength
  • Alerts for weak and re-used passwords
  • A Dark Web data breach monitor to alert you when credentials have been caught up in a data breach
  • Secure storage of identity and payment information for online forms
  • Temporary Clipboard storage of copied passwords

If you suffer from password fatigue, contact us at FlexITechs to learn more about our password manager, which meets all of the above features.

Call us at 302-537-4198, email me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com, or submit our Contact form.

How Managed IT Services Reduce Unexpected Downtime Costs

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We hear it over and over. “This is NOT a good time to be having computer problems!”

Truth be told, there never is a good time to have computer problems.

A Managed IT Services Provider (MSP) such as FlexITechs can alleviate unexpected computer problems with remote monitoring and maintenance that first, prevents common problems and detects minor issues before they become major headaches resulting in downtime, and second, can do much of that work remotely and after hours so you don’t lose time working.

In short, we take the inconvenience out of computer problems.

We can see when your Internet goes down, see when software is installed or uninstalled that might cause a problem, restrict all of those Windows updates and their time-consuming restarts to after hours, detect that your hard drive is filling up and free up space, and a host of other issues and maintenance tasks to reduce the disruption of unexpected downtime.

Often, we will know you have a problem and take care of it before you know yourself.

We all know downtime can be costly, both with tangible and intangible costs.

In a 2020 survey of small and medium business owners, Infrascale, a cloud-based data protection company, reported that:

  • 37 percent of SMBs said they lost customers to downtime
  • 17 percent said they lost revenue to it
  • Almost 25 percent said their network has gone offline in the past year.
  • More than a third don’t know what the cost of one hour of downtime would be for their business
  • 27 percent said downtime would cost less than $10,000 an hour, 26 percent said it would be between $10,000 and $20,000, and the rest said above $20,000 per hour
  • 29 percent cited business disruption and 21 percent lost employee productivity as the biggest downtime risks for their company

With downtime creating so much risk, turning the nuts and bolts of the network over to an experienced MSP makes even more sense, particularly when the cost of doing so would be significantly less than in-house IT staff and probably less than handing IT tasks over to an employee with other responsibilities.

We will learn your IT setup so we can rectify any problems in short order, be available to answer employee tech questions, and most importantly, respond quickly when an issue does arise, with a 1-hour response time guarantee.

We will also take the time to understand your business, your goals, and how technology can help you achieve them.

On the financial side, you’ll have a budgetable flat monthly rate to pay instead of costs that match the unpredictability of downtime in unmanaged networks.

There’s no reason to wait until disaster strikes to start looking for help. Learn more by calling us at 302-537-4198, emailing me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com, or submitting our Contact form.

An IT service whose financial interests are aligned with yours

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I can still remember the first few years of our computer repair business in the early 2000s. We’d wake up in the morning and like our clients, have our schedule planned out for the day.

Then, boom! A frantic call for help would not only blow up our schedule, but the schedule of the client on the other end, too.

But, hey, at least we were getting paid, right? I mean, if things didn’t break, we didn’t make money.

It sure didn’t seem right, though, that FlexITechs could profit while the client suffered waiting for me to arrive with my big bag full of parts, pieces and tools to spend the better part of the day getting nothing else done while I toiled in front of the client’s broken computer.

Then in 2008, the terms “Managed Services Provider” and “MSP” first popped up in my computer repair forums.

It took awhile to figure out what those terms meant and how to become an MSP, but it took no time at all for me to recognize one of the primary benefits of Managed IT Services to our clients …

It aligned our financial interests with theirs.

You see, no matter how well-intentioned, we could not escape the simple fact of the Break / Fix IT services model that we only profited when our clients’ computer systems broke.

That all began to change when we added Managed IT Services to our portfolio.

Now, we charge a flat monthly fee with a guaranteed response time that aligns our financial interests with our clients’ financial interests by:

  • Costing us money if we don’t respond promptly to calls for help
  • Costing us money if we have to interrupt our day to respond to calls for help
  • Making us money when our clients’ computer systems run smoothly, just like our clients make money when their systems runs smoothly

If you want a higher level of IT service that proactively maintains your network and computer systems from an IT company whose financial interests are aligned with yours, we should talk about the FlexIT Managed IT Services program.

To chat, call us now at 302-437-4198.

Regularly Test Your Backups

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If you have a Managed IT Services Provider like FlexITechs, chances are good your backups are not only being monitored for failures but also being tested on a regular basis to ensure that files restore successfully when needed.

There would be nothing worse than finding out after a natural disaster, a fire, or a Ransomware attack that has encrypted all of your files that your backups either were failing or that they won’t restore properly.

If testing your backups was not discussed when you signed up for an automated backup plan or you simply don’t know if they are being tested, ask your backup provider or backup software company if they are being tested and if not, how to do this.

In general, to test your backups, perform the following procedures:

  • At least once a month, pick a random backup date and restore a handful of files to see if they restore successfully (be careful not to restore over the current version of those files)
  • At least once a quarter, perform a deeper restore operation of numerous files from different backup dates, again being careful not to overwrite the current versions of your files
  • At least once a quarter, check all files in the most recent backup to be sure that you are backing up all files that you would need to restore
  • On a daily basis monitor your backups for failures. Any good backup software will let you know whether the backup succeeded or failed with an email or within the software itself
  • If you see errors at any stage of the backup or restore processes, resolve those issues or have your IT or backup service resolve them for you.

Keep in mind that if your data is critical to the operation of your business, you should perform the steps above more frequently to minimize the risk of partial or complete data loss when you need to restore from your backups.

For help implementing a backup testing program or an automated backup program if you don’t have one, call 302-537-4198 or email me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com.

Benefits of Partnering with an MSP

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While a “computer guy” can satisfactorily serve residential customers and micro-businesses (a handful of employees and computers), that type of IT relationship doesn’t work well for most small- to medium-sized organizations.

A business that relies on technology to operate efficiently and securely but can’t justify the employment costs of a full-time IT person or department needs more than just a computer guy.

It needs a trustworthy partner that can provide the services of an IT Department at a far lower cost and whose financial interests in the relationship align with the client’s.

That’s what makes Managed IT Service Providers such as FlexITechs a good fit for small organizations with 10 to 200 employees.

Let’s start with the financial interests.

A break-fix computer service, no matter how well-intentioned, can only make money when your systems break down.

That obviously conflicts with your financial interests. You need your computer systems to run smoothly for peak productivity and profitability.

Because MSPs charge a budgetable flat monthly rate, like you, we can only be profitable when your computer systems run smoothly as  fixing broken systems cuts into our profit too.

Like our motto says, “We don’t want to fix your computers. We want to prevent them from breaking in the first place.”

From the moment we sit down with you (or Zoom with you for now) to learn your business and discuss your current and future technology needs, you will see that an MSP takes the partnership aspect of the relationship seriously.

MSPs become the de facto IT Department for SMBs with proactive remote monitoring, maintenance, repairs and a Help Desk for employees, using the power of the Internet and remote access tools to provide the same services as an in-house IT person.

A true MSP will also manage technology vendors on your behalf to keep the owner and employees out of the fray of the vendor blame game when they start kicking the ball to each other.

But beyond mere IT services, the best MSPs consult with you on an ongoing basis to ensure that your technology matches your current and future business needs. For instance, will you need remote access for your employees after the pandemic subsides? Should you buy another server or switch entirely to cloud-based applications?

MSPs do all of this for a flat monthly rate that you can budget for and do so with a guaranteed response time (FlexITechs’ guarantee is a 1-hour response time).

So, if your business relies on technology and needs your network and computer systems to run smoothly with minimal downtime, you likely need more than a “computer guy”.

If that’s you, whether you only have a computer guy now or have an IT department but could use more help there with mundane network management and maintenance tasks to free up your IT personnel for more productive pursuits, or you need to fill an opening in your IT department, do your business a favor and consider the FlexIT Managed IT Services Program before you make any decisions.

Just give us a call at 302-537-4198, email us at ericm@flexitechs.com, or submit the Contact form on this page.

Windows 7 — Upgrade or Replace?

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It seems like just yesterday we had to start replacing Windows XP computers with Windows 7 or above because Microsoft decided it would no longer provide support and security patches and updates for the Windows XP operating system. Now, less than six months away from the end of life for support for Windows 7 by Microsoft, the only question remaining is — Upgrade, or Replace. Learn more here …