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In This Issue

To Cloud or Not to Cloud

Office 365 Gotchas!

PM Lingo

What is Office 365

Bob to speak at COSE's...

Multi-Factor Authentication

AR Tech or books?

Genghis Khan

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs...

Plain Funny

Issue: #89

September/2015

Ok. Our website is now live. Not done, by any stretch. But it's live.

So is our new blog. It's got the old stuff too (well, not all of it). It's http://Simplex-IT.com/Blog (we'll be redirecting our http://bizblog.simplex-it.com to it as well). More about that next month.

And you'll see some additional articles there. As always, all about informing, not selling.

Brandon's back. He spent another summer as an intern for Google.

And thanks to the 70-80 people who attended the picnic last month! Despite the rain towards the end, a good time was had by all. It was great seeing everybody, and thanks especially to Microsoft and Malted Meeple for adding some additional fun.

As we mentioned, July is the last of our monthly lunchinars. But we also mentioned that we'd still be doing things. Our first example is a webinar where we're going to talk simply about "To Cloud or Not to Cloud?" It'll be the same day as the lunchinars were (3rd Wednesday). But for lunch, you're on your own (sorry about that).

We've got a preliminary schedule of the next 5-6 months, but not quite ready to push that out just yet.

I've also got an announcement to make (made a preliminary announcement at the picnic) about a project that my lovely wife Julie and I are kicking off. The ink's dry, but holding off for a week.

More to come (always, it seems)!

Bob

Free Webinar from Simplex-IT: "To Cloud or Not to Cloud"

Bob's Short-Attention-Span Webinar

This free webinar will be on Wednesday, Sept 16th from 11:30-noon (eastern). click here to RSVP

As many of you know we held our last monthly Lunchinar back in July. But we told folks that we were going to be replacing the Lunchinar with several different types of events, with topics ranging far and wide.

Here's the first test to see whether we live up to that claim. We'll be putting together a webinar discussion about the Cloud. Not in terms of specific services, vendors or applications.

Read more here.

Office Webinar: "Office 365 Gotchas!"

We're all moving to the cloud. We're all going to love it. And life will be good.

Microsoft's Office 365 is offered as a great way for companies to cut costs, simplify their infrastructure, eliminate CapX expenses, and keep Justin Bieber from being cloned into a small army.

Free Webinar Thursday, September 10th from 11-1130am Eastern. Click here to RSVP.

It's a great product. As a Microsoft Tier 1 Cloud Champ Silver Cloud Funnel Cake Now with Lemon Partner, we've been involved with about 80-90 implementations of it (back when it was called BPOS). We've never had anybody migrate away (whether it be to Google or back to on premise). So Microsoft must be doing something right.

But is it perfect? Hardly. All IT services, whether cloud, on premise or hybrid (a combination of both) have limits. All have imperfections. Most don't matter, and the ones that do don't matter all of the time.

Project Management in general can be filled with new terminology you may not be familiar with. Once explained, it becomes a lot easier to understand.

Join us for our next free Project Management webinar on Thursday September 17th from 2-2:30pm. Click here to RSVP.

A few of the basics:

Projects - Will have a start and end date, and produce something unique. In other words, something that's not part of your day to day operations. Paying invoices is not a project (although it cam seem like one!) but upgrading your account payable system or revising the process of paying invoices could be a project.

Tasks - Projects are broken down into tasks, the things that need to be done to complete the project. Tasks can can be very detailed and granular, but they don't have to be. Tasks have start and end dates, resources, dependencies, and other attributes...

Read more here.

"What is Office 365" webinar now online

If you missed our "What is Office 365" webinar last month, you can watch it now online! There's a lot of info (good and bad) about Office 365, but sometimes it's too much info. This will give some needed simplification of the major features of Office 365.

Bob Coppedge to speak at COSE's Small Business Convention

Billed as the largest small business convention in the Midwest, COSE is putting on their Small Business Convention on Oct 21-22 of this year.

Thursday morning from 10:30-11:30 I'll be presenting "Business Software Trends - What Tools will Help my Business Grow?"

To say that IT resources for businesses change quickly is like saying LeBron James return to the Cavaliers was good for the team. Not only do they change quickly, but the number of options that companies can choose from is increasing seemingly daily. How can small to medium businesses choose which IT tools to take advantage of, but still focus on driving the business?

Some of the key topics covered:

Read more here.

Tip of the Week: How to Set Up Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365

Hackers are growing bolder by the day, taking on huge organizations like the IRS and Sony Entertainment, and forcing businesses to stay on the defensive at all times. In spite of this, what can the average small business do to keep themselves safe? For starters, you can integrate multi-factor authentication, a solution designed to make it extra difficult for hackers to access online accounts.

Better yet, it's super easy to setup multi-factor authentication of your Office 365 account, and all accounts associated with your company. Follow these steps and you'll be done before you know it.

First, you'll want to log into the Office 365 Portal with your administrator credentials. Then, click on the users and groups tab.

Read more here.

AR technology May Be an Adequate Substitute to "Fancy Book Learnin"

How smart are smartphones really making us? If we're honest with ourselves, most of us would admit that our mobile phones are more for entertainment and efficient communications, and less about actually being used to make ourselves smarter. Thanks to augmented reality technology becoming more accessible, perhaps smartphones will one day live up to their name.

If you've not yet heard of AR technology or experienced it, don't worry, you will. Wikipedia defines AR technology as:

A live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

One example of AR technology that you might be familiar with comes from sports broadcasts. When watching a football game on your television, you will notice lines and arrows on the field that are generated by a computer for the viewers at home.