Microsoft Products Reaching End of Life

End of life is a key moment to transition to a cloud-first, mobile-first environment. Managed Solution can help you with this transition. Key dates for Office products approaching end of life support:

• April 11, 2017: Exchange Server 2007

• October 10, 2017: Office 2007, Project Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007

• October 31, 2017: Outlook 2007 connectivity to Office 365

• January 9, 2018: Communication Server 2007

Breakout on End of support for Exchange Server 2007

On April 11, 2017 extended support for Exchange Server 2007 will end. Updating to Office 365 will provide:

• Continued support

• Security updates

• Better hardware utilization

• Improved connectivity to Outlook and OWA

• Easier and more complete compliance

Microsoft recommends migrating to current product versions prior to the support end date to get the latest product innovations and ensure uninterrupted support. If assistance with migration is needed, contact Managed Solution for more information.

5 steps to a solid disaster recovery plan

If your business was about to be destroyed by fire, and you had one minute to save one file, what would it be?

I’d guess not your pictures of Fluffy the cat. But maybe your payroll data or customer order list. A Disaster Recovery strategy defines which data you will save first and what will be available during planned or unplanned downtimes. It also plans for the data you can live without. Poor Fluffy.

Complexity vs. Costs

When you create your Disaster Recovery plan, you’ll need to weigh the trade-offs between complexity vs. costs. What data can you afford to be without? For how long? If you lost some data, would that destroy your business forever?

Five parts of a disaster recovery plan:

1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO defines how much data you are willing to lose. You can give higher priority to your most critical data, but be willing to lose less important data, such as pictures of Fluffy. Customer records might be top of your list, while marketing data might rank lower.

2. Recovery Time Objection (RTO). RTO weighs how long you are willing to be without your data. Depending on your business, you might decide that you can lose up to two hours of business operation. A shorter time will create higher costs, so you’ll need to consider your options carefully.

3. Personnel. Who should get their data back sooner? Who will support the plan? Do you have a backup person as well as backup technology? Is your plan dependent on human intervention, which may not be possible in all cases?

4. Regulatory constraints. Is your business subject to regulatory compliance? How will you make sure you are covered?

5. Critical data. Which data is critical to your business? What are the dependencies between different areas of the business?

Test and train

Often companies will create a plan, and then leave it on the shelf. They don’t fully test the plan, or consider multiple scenarios. When a disaster hits, whether it’s cybercrime or a hurricane or a rogue sprinkler system, the plan fails. The New York Stock Exchange had a plan before Hurricane Sandy, but they didn’t follow it when disaster hit. Instead, they closed the stock exchange for two days.

Your resources and business needs will change over time. This includes your location, personnel, and data. Testing your plan two to three times a year is one way to make sure the plan is up-to-date and still supports your current business goals.

Once you have a plan in place you’ll need to train all personnel. For a higher chance of success, ensure that senior management endorses the plan and promotes training for all employees.

Get help to create a plan

A cloud solution can help you find a good balance between cost and complexity. With Azure Site Recovery, you can easily create disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure portal. The disaster recovery plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand.

We’re here to help you with all stages of strategy, planning and implementation.

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2016 Recap: The Past 365 Days of Office 365

By Kelly Cronin

As 2016 comes to an end, we look at how the year treated us, memories we had with friends and family, and all the ups and downs we faced.  This New Year, we're taking a look back at some of our favorite moments with Office 365.

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January: Smarter address book and flight confirmations come to Outlook on the web

You send and receive a lot of emails, and it’s natural to make mistakes along the way—you forget how to spell someone’s name, leave someone out of a group email or forget to add a flight to your calendar. Microsoft brings new people and calendar features to Outlook on the web to help you avoid these common mistakes and get things done faster.

Read the article here >>

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May: Collaborating with Planner in Office 365

Office 365 Planner offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.

Check out Planner's collaboration tools and more here>>

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June: Office 365 for Nonprofits is here to help organizations do more good with technology

Microsoft took a significant step forward in its mission to help nonprofits harness the power of technology with its announcement of the global availability of Office 365 for Nonprofits through the Technology for Good program.

Office 365 for Nonprofits is available today in 41 countries around the world, and will be available in up to 90 countries by July 2014. There’s no cap on the number of nonprofit employees who can use a donated instance of Office 365 for Nonprofits, whether the organization has 10 employees or thousands.

See more on Office 365 Nonprofits 

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November: Microsoft Flow is open for business around the world

Manage your organization’s flows with enterprise-grade control using environments.

• Use Environments to store your flows by geography or team.

• Establish data-loss prevention policies to control the flow of data and the use of services within your organization.

Microsoft Flow offers more connectivity than ever—to Microsoft and third-party services.

• Connect to 15 new services, including Basecamp 3, Bitly, Cognitive Services Text Analytics, Instapaper, and Pinterest.

• Use Premium services like Salesforce and the Microsoft Common Data Service, which are exclusive to paid Microsoft Flow plans.

Read the article here >>

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