Welcome to this week's Newsletter!
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.
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:
In the portal, you can see:
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:
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.
In our modern lives, work and personal often crossover and bleed into on another. This makes it of utmost importance to protect all of our accounts in every location. Bad actors will use AI and social engineering to build profiles of individuals and target them for compromise across any platform that they can. Just keeping your work email off of your phone is not enough to prevent this. I spoke to a user on site at a client office yesterday who was actively dealing with the fallout of their social security number being compromised and used. Here is an article from Forbes about best practices for protecting yourself and your family across your entire life, all accounts and attack targets:
7 Simple Ways To Shield Yourself From Cybersecurity Threats
2 extremely useful features in Windows 10 and 11 are the Snipping tool (instead of old and clunky print screen keyboard button) and Clipboard history. I've shared these tools with quite a few of you, but these are shortcuts that can help everyone who ever needs to grab things that are on their screen, and/or if you've ever copied something then gone to paste it and realized that you've copied over it! One of the best use cases for these two tools together is if you're creating a set of instructions to walk through a process that includes a lot of screens, you can quickly walk through the process, grabbing screen snips and marking them up with the built in markup tools. All of the items will stay on your clipboard for you to access and paste into your instruction document all at once instead of having to do them one at a time. These tools will absolutely make your life easier:
There is a new round of bad guy trickery going on. Bad Actors are using fake websites to request users to "update" their browsers. This is not real! When your browser needs to be updated, it will come from a notification in the browser itself, not on the screen from a website. Here is an article explaining this, and how to check if your browser is up to date if you ever encounter this request (section at the bottom of the article titled, 'How to Update Chrome Safely"). I also mentioned this in my tips from a few weeks about about Chrome and Edge browsers needing to be updated, so this is just a refresher:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2023/10/19/google-chrome-users-warned-dont-click-to-update-browser-on-websites/?sh=6bac5733558e
Two of my favorite Microsoft tools are 'To Do' and 'Sticky Notes'. Both of these tools allow you to take quick notes, and access them in multiple place
To do is fantastic app that allows to to track tasks directly from your email, calendar, other Microsoft apps and on the fly. You can set due dates and reminders, and even share tasks with others on your team and within your organization. My team and I use this constantly, and it keeps all of us on track without have to find a separate app or platform to manage tasks on. It's already built into outlook for everyone!
Here's a good video introduction from Kevin Stratvert to get you started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQuRomdiJ58
Lot's of folks already use sticky notes. I see them pinned on desktops all the time, but, did you know that if you sign into your sticky notes, then they sync to your email, One Note, and directly into the notes section of the Microsoft 365 app? This allows you to save, backup and access anywhere all those notes that you've been creating and looking at on your desktop for all these years!
Here is a good video as an introduction. It's from a year ago, so it doesn't mention the Microsoft 365 app, so there's a quick 2nd video explaining this app:
Sticky Notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utDryRmD0-E
Microsoft 365 App: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbLMS2Fhcsk
Here are links to a couple of helpful articles that I've found super useful.
Thank you for allowing us to serve you!
Harness Group is proud to announce the launch of our new website at http://www.harness.group/. The goal of the new website is to make it easier for our existing clients to submit and manage support requests, and provide more information about our services for prospective clients.
How much does your business rely on technology to keep your organization running forward? As business technology becomes more complex, it’s becoming increasingly popular for organizations to have their own internal IT departments to manage and maintain it. Yet, small businesses don’t often have the necessary funds for such a feat. How can your company afford quality IT service? You can start by pursuing managed IT solutions from a managed service provider.
The password isn’t nearly as secure as it used to be. Hackers have begun to take advantage of extremely powerful solutions designed to brute force their way into accounts by using software to rapidly guessing thousands of passwords per second, making it extraordinarily difficult to prepare yourself for them.
What’s the best way to guarantee that passwords aren’t going to be the downfall of your company? A great start is by taking a close look at password best practices and two-factor authentication.
Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues - enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.
The cloud has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the modern business. Not only does it provide anywhere-anytime access to applications, processing, storage, et al; it also delivers those products as a service, allowing you to budget for recurring costs rather than major upfront ones. This provides your organization with functional, supported, and secure computing environments that eliminate a lot of the support costs that traditional computing environments require. It sounds like a perfect scenario for small and large businesses alike, but things aren’t always what they seem, as a lot of cloud users have found that they have incurred several hidden costs by using cloud platforms. Today, we take a look at these hidden costs.
There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want - building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.
In this blog, we’ll examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.