There’s nothing more satisfying than achieving your goals. Every IT professional dreams of rising through the ranks and attaining the topmost Microsoft certification in the long run. However, obtaining the highly covetable MCSA and MSCE certifications is never a walk in the park. But as tough as the journey might get, the prospect of enjoying the potential benefits of these certifications in the future should keep you going. This article outlines the key aspects of…
If you are working on Microsoft connected systems (Office 365, Azure, Windows Update…) and you see some odd behavior, it might not be you. The question then becomes, where can you go to see if Microsoft is down? We use the following five sites to see if Microsoft is having problems or is in a full outage: Windows Update Status: isitdownrightnow.com/update.microsoft.com.html Office365 Status: portal.office.com/Adminportal/Home#/servicehealth Azure Status: azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/status Microsoft in General: outage.report/microsoft XBox Status: support.xbox.com/en-CA/xbox-live-status
If you need to edit or create some Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents, Microsoft has created an easy and free way to give you that access. On any PC or Mac, just surf to www.Office.com and either sign in with your Microsoft account (or create a new one as we demonstrate in the video). Then you can easily work in the most current versions of Word, Excel PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Sway and more completely for free.
Sometimes Microsoft’s data centers for Azure and Office365 are referred to by city name and other times by region or country. It can be very confusing to figure out which Data Center is where. For instance, as per one of my customers legal requirements I need to set a storage pool to keep data Ireland but I could not figure out which site was Ireland. I certainly would have never guessed that Ireland is listed…
On Thursday Microsoft gave up the ghost on their internet browsers. “The Ghost” in this case is the haunting memory of just how big Internet Explorer was in the early 2000’s and how they let it all slip away. (See browser market share graph near the bottom of this page.) They announced that their Edge browser “engine” will be changed to Google Chromium over the next year. In the most straight forward terms, this means…
If you have sales or technical questions relating to your Office 365 account, you can call Microsoft and they will not charge you a fee. The only catch is that you have to be an administrator of your Office 365 account. If you are a standard user, you must contact your local administrator and they can phone. Office 365 Support Phone Numbers: United States or Canada 1 800 865 9408 Australia 1 800 197 503…
Today former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed and explained the LA Clippers Court Vision Augmented Reality. Courtvision allows the viewer to see estimated probabilities, predict player moves, change cameras, add computer generated highlights, overlay play by play audio and explain plays all in real time as the game is being played. If you want more detail on how Second Spectrum applies machine learning to create context (difficulty, probabilities, …) in live sports, watch this 9 minute…
We recently told you that there was no way to block the public Microsoft Store but allowing your private corporate Store and while true at the time, is now false. At the recent Microsoft Ignite conference, I tracked down a Store program manager and dug into the problem. He told me this has now been changed so I tested and confirmed the GPO setting works as promised. You can set the Microsoft Windows 10 Store…
Microsoft Office Lens is a free program for mobile devices (like your cell phone) that does many super useful task but the one I use the most is “straightening photos” on the fly. For example, instead of using the stock camera app on my Samsung Galaxy S9 I used the Office Lens camera app and with litterally no work on my part it calculated the angle of the screen, that the screen was what I…
Microsoft Teams started as little more than a web only SharePoint Template that encouraged: Inviting specific people and groups to the Team Note taking and comment making But that was 2017. At the recent Microsoft Ignite conference in Florida Microsoft likely mentioned Teams more than any other product. It was drilled on in the keynote, in demonstrations, in Teams sessions, in Stream sessions, in Office 365 sessions, in OneDrive sesssions, in OneNote sessions, and in…
It is difficult to understand what Microsoft if offering these days. It was hard enough when there was just Office 365 with the E1 E3 and E5 packages but today Microsoft is offering 3 different bundles (Office, Windows & Microsoft) each with their own E1 E3 and E5 sub-bundles. What is Office 365? In simple terms, Office365 is a bundle of software that (for most packages) provides Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and more on the…
Microsoft is using the term Advanced Threat Protection with several products so it can be difficult to find the information you need. In this article we are referring to Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection which is unrelated to Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. In case you want to play along at home, you can get to Office 365 ATP by: Logging into Portal.Office.com and clicking ADMIN (if you are not already there) Scroll to the bottom and…
At the recent Microsoft Ignite conference in Florida, Microsoft pitched using OneDrive For Business instead of the User State Migration Tool (USMT). This suggestion was largely based on the new ONEDRIVE > MANAGE PROTECTION OF IMPORTANT FOLDERS wizard. Previously you had to manually move your DESKTOP, DOCUMENTS and PICTURES folders to folders under your C:\USERS\<YourName>\ONEDRIVE – <BUSINESS NAME> or come up with an even more creative solution like building Junction Points. This was just not…
UPDATE OCT 18 2018 – You CAN now use a GPO to block the public Microsoft Store but keep your private corporate Store. See our short explanation HERE. After working on setting up a private Microsoft Business Store (businessstore.microsoft.com) I was shocked to find that I could not disable the Public Microsoft Store through any of the settings. I put a few hours into searching and reading but could not even find someone saying it…