Everything Doesn’t Come Back

When most people get a new iPhone, they take it for granted that all their data and settings, etc. can be backed up to the cloud and then reinstalled on their new phones. Sorry, but that’s not always the case, and it will be a matter of greater importance when Microsoft makes you use the Authenticator app instead of SMS in your login process. It’s time to reset your thinking and the app.

Yes, it’s true that when you back up all your iPhone’s data to iCloud, you can have a high degree of assurance that your contacts, emails, photos, apps, etc. can be transferred from your old phone to your new one. But it’s not true for Microsoft 365 and the Authenticator app you need – or will need, come February – to access all your Microsoft accounts and shared workspaces, such as SharePoint.

In fact, SharePoint and the Authenticator app will require some special attention and planning once the Authenticator app is your only way to prove it’s you and your device that need access to the account. So, let’s reset your thinking on new iPhones, SharePoint and MFA. It’s important now if you’re planning on getting a new phone, and it will be critical in February.

Your best option is to call us to set up the Authenticator app on your new phone before you give up your old phone. It’s not always possible – if your phone dies or you lose it – but it makes life much, much easier. The process involves a lot of back-end work that’s all related to security. It’s work that Apple or your carrier won’t do when you activate your phone, and if you skip the step, you won’t be able to login to your Authenticator app without going through a complicated process.

When you have both phones, we can help you safely remove any sign-in methods linked to your old phone and re-register the app on your new phone. Because we do this a lot, we can make sure that no steps are missed as we go through all the on-screen prompts to link the app with your account.

Without having the old phone, you need to go through a number of administrative steps, which we can do if we are serving as your IT administrator. These include alternative verification steps that should have been set up. If they were set up with us, we should have the information available.

Whether you are getting a new phone or not, remember that starting in February, you won’t have SMS available as a backup for authentication. Therefore, it’s critical to make sure you have the most recent version of the Authenticator app on any device you will be using for SharePoint and other collaborative tools. If the app doesn’t work because it’s not properly registered, there is no way a SharePoint host, for example, will be able to allow you access.

We can help you and everyone on your team is able to transition seamlessly to a new Authenticator app with a new device. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to make sure we can be available to help you re-register while you have your old and new devices. We can also answer any questions you may have to make sure your authentication systems work without interruption after SMS verification goes away.

Power Automate Your Admin Routines

Most Microsoft 365 subscriptions include Power Automate, which uses AI to automate a lot of administrative tasks. It not only eliminates a lot of tedious copying-and-pasting routines, but it also lets you put many routines on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly schedule, taking the burden of remembering things off your shoulders.

Power Automate lets you create automated workflows between various applications and services, such as sending notifications, moving data between systems, and managing approvals. It also works seamlessly with Microsoft 365 tools like Excel, SharePoint, and Teams, as well as third-party applications in what Microsoft calls a “low-code environment” that lets users with little to no coding experience to create workflows easily. It has three types of workflows:

  • Cloud Flows that trigger automatically, instantly, or on a schedule
  • Desktop Flows that automate tasks on desktop applications and the web
  • Generative Actions that use AI features such as Copilot to determine the right actions based on user intent

Power Automate is suitable for any size user base, ranging from individuals to large corporations. Anyone with a work or school email address can sign up and register to access the platform through a web browser or the Power Automate desktop app available for Windows.

One of the ways I’m using it is to look for emailed reports that I get several times a day in Outlook. It takes the data in the reports and enters them into an Excel spreadsheet and color codes it to indicate which numbers have changed or remain the same. It also lets me know what numbers have not changed for two weeks. AI reads my invoices, and it scans data and puts it into a OneNote notebook that I can look at and decide what to keep.

I also use Power Automate to track my appointments and hours, and I now have a routine that sorts them all on the first of the month. Overall, I’d say all my routines saved me 17 hours of work in the last week.

While similar automation platforms are available, Power Automate integrates much better with Microsoft systems, including third-party apps that tie into Microsoft. To make it work effectively for you, keep these factors in mind.

  • There are limits to how many requests you can make in a 24-hour period.
  • You need to select the right triggers and actions to ensure your workflows are activated precisely when needed.
  • You need to clearly document your workflows thoroughly so that those who maintain the system and work team members understand the workflow logic.
  • You must test it comprehensively and thoroughly to ensure that your workflows function as intended and handle errors gracefully.

We can help you set up and optimize Power Automate routines focusing on adopting consistent naming conventions, implementing robust error handling, and avoiding unnecessary loops. We can also help with configuration management and flow performance monitoring for continued efficiency. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your needs and design a system for them.

New Outlook has Mixed Benefits

Classic Outlook has aged like a good wine, but Microsoft is pushing more users to the New Outlook for managing emails, contacts and calendars. Some features are gone from the New Outlook, and some are hidden.

Deciding whether to hang in with the Classic Outlook or go to the New version depends on how you use the app. However, keep in mind that Microsoft is like Lola. What Microsoft wants, Microsoft eventually gets – and at some point, they’ll stop supporting Classic Outlook to force everyone into New Outlook.

Microsoft touts a more minimalist interface for New Outlook that it says is more in line with Windows 11 and AI and handles email, calendars and contacts better. One of the specific benefits is they claim is the use of AI to help you write better emails, but you can turn off the autofill. They also claim New Outlook can let you access your emails – including Gmail, Yahoo, and even your “shopping account” – from one spot on every Windows device. And you can organize your appointments, share availability and events with a click, and ensure time for important people and events.

However, Microsoft took away a number of key functions that they may or may not restore. These include features involving multiple mailbox accounts and ways in which accounts can be shared from SharePoint. Some “take-aways” are scheduled to be restored, and some are still under investigation. The company says it’s looking for user feedback in deciding what to restore and when that might happen.

Quite honestly, we think this hurts Microsoft’s credibility, but it also shows where all major software companies are headed. They will make changes seemingly on a whim without regard to how those changes affect our ability to maximize our production. Features might come back – or they might not.

Together, we need to be flexible in how we use software such as Outlook, but on the other hand, we can force the issue somewhat. We can look specifically at how you use Outlook and determine what Classic features we may be able to recapture some things that were lost or help you find ways to make better use of New Outlook.

As much as we might yearn for the “good old days” of apps like Classic Outlook, it’s likely we’ll all be using New Outlook sooner rather than later. So, let’s get a head start on adapting to it. Call us – 973-433-66765 – or email us to see how you can bridge the Classic and the New to make Outlook work better for you.

The New Outlook for 2024

Windows Mail is going away. Let us all say “hallelujah” and give thanks. And let us all start moving to the New Outlook, which is web-based and adds speed, more functionality and additional security features to the old Classic Outlook.

Beginning in 2024, new Windows 11 devices will be shipped with the new Outlook for Windows as the default mailbox application, free for all to use. The Mail and Calendar applications will remain available via download in the Microsoft Store through the end of 2024. Users can switch to the new Outlook for Windows from a toggle in the Mail and Calendar applications on existing devices. If you still want to use Classic Outlook, simply toggle it back. New Windows is part of Microsoft 365 and takes advantage of OneDrive and SharePoint.

While many of us are reluctant to leave our comfort zones, where the old Outlook or Outlook Email might reside, there are several reasons why you should make the switch.

The new Outlook will have a much longer shelf life than the old version. That’s because it’s part of the transition from desktop- or computer-based to web-based apps. Once you get used to it as an individual user or have your employees trained, everyone can settle into a more productive routine.

You’ll first notice how quickly it loads and updates email messages. We found it faster than the classic Outlook, and it streamlines how you can handle email messages and coordinate email and your calendar. You can pin emails to the top of your inbox so they are easy to find later, snooze emails to temporarily hide them, and then have them reappear when you’re ready to respond and get reminders to follow up on important conversations. You can time the schedule for sending emails so they are delivered at the best time for the recipient or undo a sent email within 10 seconds, and you can use the sweep function to clean up your inbox quickly by setting advanced inbox rules for incoming mail. With My Day view, you can see your upcoming calendar events and tasks anywhere in Outlook. Package delivery and upcoming travel dates are also automatically added to your calendar from your email confirmations, and you can view the weather forecast in your calendar at any time.

Aesthetically, you have hundreds of customization options and several key functional options. You can save attachments to OneDrive while in Outlook and open them without leaving Outlook to open your Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

For security, the New Outlook has beefed up its spam and malware filters, and those with a Microsoft 365 subscription can also access other security features, such as encryption.

Finally, the New Outlook has much more robust search capabilities, which we’ll explain in more detail next month.

In the meantime, we invite everyone to try the New Outlook. We believe you’ll find it a more productive tool once you learn its basics. We’re available if you have any questions about its new features. Just give us a call – 973-433-6676 – or email us if you have any questions.

The Night the ‘Office’ Went Dark

Two weeks ago, Microsoft’s Office 365/Microsoft 365 cloud-based services, which include the online Office apps, went down for as long as five hours in some parts of the United States, Western Europe and India. As of this writing last week, users were still reporting sporadic outages of some services. So far, our clients have not been affected, but It’s a fluid situation.

No matter what happened and what might happen, you can protect your data by backing up your files in more than one place. The outage hit Azure, a Microsoft platform, that we use for our backup for Microsoft 365, which was known as Office or Office 365. Microsoft 365 is built on Azure. It wasn’t the first time it was hit by an outage, and it won’t be the last. In its most recent outage, Azure and Microsoft 365 were affected by what was reported as a major Azure Active Directory authentication issue. In practical terms, users got kicked out of cloud-based applications, such as Office, Outlook, Exchange, Teams and SharePoint. It lasted from roughly 5 to 10 p.m. on Sept. 28.

Microsoft said very little but referred to an update in their network structure – and then said they rolled back the changes to an older version. It was all automated, but because of the authentication issues, some administrators couldn’t see the changes. Over the course of two weeks, problems cascaded worldwide – and randomly. Despite what Microsoft reports, we haven’t seen any satisfactory explanations of what happened and how it was fixed.

In this case, we don’t know of any data losses, but if you can’t access your files, they’re as good as lost until the service comes back. That’s where multiple backups are valuable. As a small business or home user, you may still have a computer with a version of Office installed. If you can pull a file from another storage site, such as Mozy (one of our partners) or Dropbox, or from an external hard drive, you may be able to work with your file. You also can store files on your computer’s hard drive.

One of the problems with an outage such as the one that hit Azure, you never know when it will hit. We reported on an outage two years ago, and we did have at least one client who was affected.

At the time we were affected, we were doing a setup at a client and needed to get a big file from Azure. When I logged in to get it, I got no access; I just got a message they would send a text. I had an external hard drive with an old version of the file, and that was not suitable. Transferring the file remotely from my office computer would have taken too long. We solved the immediate problem by transferring the file from my computer to my Dropbox account and then downloading it from there. We and our client were fortunate that I had the capability – files stored on a computer I could access and Dropbox – to initiate a solution.

Azure solves recovery issues for us because it works seamlessly in the background with Office 365, including Outlook and its PST files for your email. For some, backing up email may be more important than backing up files.

As an IT professional, I like Azure’s ability to generate reports – with more capabilities coming online all the time. Microsoft constantly uses customer feedback to add more power to the platform. That gives us the ability to go back into our clients’ backup records to trace incidents and to restore files after a catastrophic event. That’s critical because it can be 90 days – sometimes longer – before a hack or data loss is discovered by a client. When that happens, we can go back in time through the power of Azure to find data files that help us help you recover.

We can help you with continuity during various service outages, but it all starts with accessing your data.  Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your backup and file storage options. The cost of a workable redundancy system may pale in comparison to the loss you could suffer from the loss of data or the loss of access to your data.