Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Two-step authentication/verification has seen considerable popularity as a means of securing an account. To help you boost the protections surrounding your Microsoft account, we’re offering a few tips on how to use two-step verification, as Microsoft refers to it.

If you have used Microsoft Word, there’s a very good chance that you’ve become irritated at the occasional insistence that when you type, sometimes Word will make seemingly random adjustments to the formatting of dates, hyphenated content, and other elements. Here, we’re offering some tips to help you put a lid on these irritating changes.

It wasn’t too terribly long ago that Windows 10 was offered for free to users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. While this offer was constrained to a limited time, the response was surprisingly stagnant. Why didn’t more people jump at the chance to snag the latest version of the operating system - especially when it would come at no cost to them?

Microsoft is saying goodbye to OneNote 2016. Although the handy note-taking app will still be supported until October 2020, with extended support for a few more years after, Microsoft has decided to no longer add features to it, and instead, they are focusing on the new version of OneNote that comes bundled with Windows 10.

Microsoft’s handy little note-taking app, OneNote, is gearing up to hit the old dusty trail and retire. At least, that’s the plan for OneNote 2016, whose end of life coincides with the rest of the Office 2016 suite in October, 2020. Fortunately, most of us already have OneNote 2016’s successor installed. Wait, what?

A decade-old version of Microsoft’s popular database software SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 is losing support on July 9,2019. If your business hasn’t moved away from the software, you are looking at a few real pressing problems. Let’s take a look at the software and what options businesses that haven’t moved on from SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server R2 have going forward.

On the surface, Microsoft OneNote seems to be a pretty basic program - it’s just a quick place to jot notes, right? In actuality, OneNote offers functions far beyond that of a digital scratchpad. For this week’s tip, we’ll review some of these functions.

Microsoft Word is one of the most popular software titles in the world. It wasn’t always so. Despite competing with a myriad of separate word processors over literal decades, Word has sustained and is now more powerful than ever. Today, we’ll take you through the history of the world’s most recognizable word processor.

Despite its name, Microsoft OneNote can serve as far more than a basic note-taking application. One of these uses is as a rudimentary, but effective, wiki system. This week, our tip will go over how you can set up an internal wiki in OneNote.

With Microsoft betting on Windows 10 to be their #1 OS for the foreseeable future, it is important for them to be able to sufficiently protect their users from the growing threats looking to make life difficult for businesses from all over the world. Today, we will take a look at Windows 10 Enterprise Security, and how it works to protect businesses from harm.

For the business owner that likes to keep his/her pulse on how his/her staff communicates, email has traditionally been the best solution. Most enterprise email setups these days will provide you with email, file storage, and an integration for a messaging application--all of which have their uses--but, today’s business owner has to understand that their employees are living more mobile lives and can be productive when they’re on the move. Typically, the email application, no matter how strong their integrations are, doesn’t support real-time text messaging, but today there have been a couple solutions developed to speed up and streamline business communications, they are Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Spreadsheets are great for organizing information, but they aren’t particularly interesting to look at--especially if you aren’t using Microsoft Excel to the best of your ability. Today’s tip is dedicated to going over some of the more obscure Microsoft Excel tips and tricks that will help you stylize your spreadsheets and make them more dynamic.

You may have heard of .NET framework before, or if you routinely use a Microsoft Windows operating system you’ve probably been prompted to install it at some point. Pronounced “dot net”, it is the predominant software framework of Windows, the most used non-mobile operating system in the world. Today we will introduce some software terms, go into what a software framework is, and how .NET framework is unique.

It’s not really news that Microsoft Word is one of the best pieces of software for productivity, but it will still surprise you from time-to-time. Since it can cost an arm and a leg to purchase the professional version of Adobe Acrobat for a singular purpose, people had to find a way to edit the .pdf files they received. Not surprisingly, Microsoft Word is a great solution to this problem. Today, we will show you how to edit a PDF in the newest version of Microsoft Word.

Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday issued resolutions to 48 vulnerabilities in August, including 15 that affected Windows, 25 critical flaws, 21 important flaws, and 27 that allowed for remote execution. This is a lot to consider, but the main jist of this is that lots of threats were fixed, and that your organization shouldn’t risk not implementing them as soon as possible.

Microsoft Word is a great tool that your business may use for word processing, but it can do so much more. With the right tools, you’ll be able to take advantage of many different tricks that could change the way you see Microsoft Word. Here are four neat tips that you may not have thought of.

Voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google Now have become omnipresent on smartphones and other devices, and Microsoft’s Cortana is hoping to capitalize on their popularity. However, Windows 10’s anniversary update has not been kind to the voice assistant, and actually makes it somewhat of a security issue to use on your Windows 10 devices.

Is your business accustomed to paying for Windows operating systems up front? Microsoft’s latest “as a service” offering, Windows as a Service, might throw a wrench in your business model, but it could welcome shifts in your IT policy that ultimately allow for more flexibility on your part. Regardless, Windows as a Service provides businesses with the opportunity to reassess their approach to software solutions.

Microsoft’s latest round of security patches includes 27 software vulnerabilities, many of which are critical in nature. Affected are widely-used titles such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and the new Edge browser. It’s important for users to take action and install the Microsoft-provided patches, and soon.

As a business owner, there are naturally a few things you would prefer your employees not to be able to do on your workstations - least of all cost you a pretty penny in charges as well as in memory space. Taking this into consideration, it is no wonder that an employer would prefer to have access to the Windows Store removed from employee workstations.