Welcome to this week's Newsletter!
Harness Group Blog
Harness Group has been serving the Lawrenceville area since 212, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.
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In an effort to streamline the process of getting these helpful tips to people as quickly as possible, I would like to ask all users who would like to continue receiving our helpful tips emails to please go to our website and subscribe to our newsletter. You can even have your friends and family sign up if you like. Everyone who signs up will then receive it directly whenever I send it out without anyone having to forward! Here is the link to do that on our site:
https://www.harness.group/news-a-events
I'll continue to send this way for a little while longer as I see the newsletter list grow. For now. Here is a link to the new and improved newsletter format, I hope it helps you all:
I've made the switch over to Microsoft Edge. I avoided the switch for a long time, but I've been using Edge for about a month solid now, and I'm all in.
- Edge can be signed into and easily syncs to your work Microsoft 365 account to help with separation between work and personal items in Google Chrome.
- Edge uses fewer resources (processor and memory) as it's optimized for Windows computers and is integrated with many Microsoft services as well.
- Here is a video of a few other fantastic features that I find myself using often now (like split screen in browser and a built-in calculator!):
We've gotten a lot of tickets over the past few months about the New Outlook. Some people have accidentally updated to it, and other did it on purpose and rolled back. Microsoft has now decided not to force rollout to the New Outlook until 2029 so everyone should be able to switch back and forth until then. In the meantime, if you'd like to try out the New Outlook or you already are, here are a few helpful features included in the new version.
As a final bonus tip. Whenever you get an email with a link, even if you know and trust the sender's name, be wary and confirm outside of the email (phone call text message to known number or business organization). It is very unusual to need to sign into your Microsoft or Google account to access a document from a sender outside of your organization. There is a new line of attacks where bad actors will send links that look very similar to real Microsoft or Google links in order to harvest credentials and even steal MFA tokens in order to take over protected accounts. This could look like the difference in these 2 links:
login . microsoftonline . com
vs
login . microsoftonllne . com
(spaces added so that these aren't live links) As always, when in doubt, reach out!
Spring is just around the corner and in the spirit of fresh starts for our first helpful tips email of 2024, I’d like to introduce those of you who aren’t familiar with it to the Harness Support portal.
It is the best way for you to create, track and manage your Harness support tickets. You can view closed tickets and their resolutions without having to search or sort through your emails.
Quite a few of you have already been set up in and use the portal. The portal will help us deliver faster service to you and even has a searchable knowledge base of past tickets and resolutions to potentially help you get to an answer faster. Here are some of the benefits of the portal:
- One place to see all of your support requests
- Real-time status on open tickets and projects
- Consolidated conversations around open tickets
- One place for company administrators to see ticket history and status for the entire company
- Searchable knowledge base for past tickets
- Eliminates duplicate tickets for the same issue
In the portal, you can see:
- Who’s assigned to your ticket
- The current status of your ticket
- Any communications about your ticket
- All your closed tickets
- Templates for creating new tickets if you’re not sure what to put in or what’s needed
- You will soon see projects and their parts and status as well
Here is a picture of the portal with me logged in:
You can see here on the Create Ticket screen that we have preset ticket types that walk you through what’s needed to complete your request. Using the preset ticket types will provide a faster resolution by eliminating some of the back and forth communications to collect the required information. We’ll update and add to these presets over time to continually give our customers a better service experience.
Next time you need to open a support case with Harness Group, please consider using the portal. Your username is always the primary email address that we have on file for you. You can access it via:
- the Account Login link at the bottom of our website landing page (https://harness.group)
- by going directly to the portal at https://na.myconnectwise.net/harnessgroup/
- by clicking the “View Ticket” link at the bottom of any ticket email that you receive
- The HG logo communicator in the taskbar area of your main screen:
If you need a portal login account or need to reset your password, please contact our office at (678) 609-8150, Opt. 1 and one of our support team members will be glad to assist you.
- As your trusted IT partner, we are continually assessing and evaluating best practices to be implemented in your environment for security and digital well-being of your employees and business data. Currently, we are working too make sure that MFA (multi factor authentication) is turned on for every user and that every client is protected by our XDR security platform. We are now working to make sure that all external emails are tagged as such. When bad actors spoof an email address, they can fake the name, but they cannot fake whether it came from within your email system or from an external source. Because of this, over the next few weeks we’ll be adding the [External] tag in all of your environments to help you easily identify internal vs. external emails. We get a LOT of tickets asking, “is this legit,” and this can help each person answer that question much more quickly in many situations.
- This past week it was reported that a major security company was breached because an employee accessed their personal email account on a company computer and that personal account had been compromised. This is why it is of utmost importance to secure all of your accounts no matter what. It’s almost impossible in the modern world to keep our work and personal data completely separate. From personal email on company owned devices to company email on personal devices and then the hub of modern life, cell phones, personal account security cannot be overlooked.
https://www.securityweek.com/okta-hack-blamed-on-employee-using-personal-google-account-on-company-laptop/ - We all know that Windows has lots of features and most of us only use about 10% of them regularly. In this short video, Microsoft Expert, Kevin Stratvert, shows us 4 great built in features that many of us can use to make our computers look a little nicer and potentially make us a little more efficient:
https://youtube.com/shorts/LVOjE6VQwg0?si=PHXp2xOhUzC7H2DB
Mobile? Grab this Article!
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