There’s no need to download a special software or hire someone to take care of your event invitations. The truth of the matter is, you are able to do it all in Word! Here are the videos you need to watch to craft the perfect event invitation.
Frame Your Invite with Something Special
First, make the invite. Crafting a creative invite with some savvy designs will catch the eye of your invitees and make them want to RSVP ASAP. When you’re working on a piece of art, it’s natural to want to frame it to help with the presentation. The same should go for your Word documents. Word is a great canvas for you to craft your documents and eventual PDFs, so why not put a frame on it?
Using layers in your Word document can take you a long way when it comes to designing an event invitation or professional looking document. Here’s a quick video on how to add text on top of your images in Word.
Create an Envelope to Sign, Seal, and Deliver Your Invite
Snail mail has its time and place. Whether you use snail mail for wedding invitations, holiday cards, or a sincere thank you card, sending and a receiving a physical piece of mail can be really meaningful. To keep a little technology involved in the process, here’s how you can print on envelopes and never forget how which corner the return address goes.
These 4 Keyboard Shortcuts in PowerPoint Will Make Presentations a Breeze
Beginning to build a presentation PowerPoint can be quite a journey and an undertaking. To make it easier along the way, use these four shortcuts to move swiftly while you create your masterpiece.
Decrease or Increase Font Size
To quickly increase or decrease your font in PowerPoint, select the font you want to adjust and hit CTRL + Shift + < or >.
Make it Simple
When you are playing around with the text formatting, this keyboard is great to clear your slate. Press CTRL and the spacebar to remove all formatting.
Create a New Slide Within Your Presentation
Use CTRL + M to create a new slide. Don’t get confused with CTRL + N, this will open up a new PowerPoint presentation.
Tab Around All Objects on Your Slide
Objects can add up in PowerPoint. To quickly move between them instead of carefully selecting the one you want and having to click over and over again, use Shift+Tab to move through them.
Business are starting to invest more in IT, and that means they're also investing in IT workers. A study from Brilliant found that Q4 hiring for IT has remained steady, as businesses search for qualified tech workers.
The IT skills gap and talent shortage remains an ongoing business challenge as technology becomes the cornerstone of nearly every industry. That shift means there is a bigger demand for tech pros with specific skill sets; and companies are hiring qualified individuals faster than schools can graduate candidates with the right skills.
A recent survey from Brilliant, a staffing firm that specializes in temporary staffing, permanent search, and management resources for accounting, finance and information technologies, in conjunction with Richard Curtin, director of Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan, found that companies are still hiring in the IT industry, and businesses are looking to fill open positions. The survey looked at data from human resources and hiring manager professionals across a number of industries to find out what their hiring goals are, and how they've changed over the previous quarters.
The study found that open and unfilled IT positions dropped compared to the Q2 2015 hiring forecast, from 58 percent of companies in Q2 to 33 percent in Q4. The largest growth in jobs occurred in technical services, at 15 percent, which includes jobs such as help desk personnel and desktop support. There was a decline in openings for software and database administration positions, including jobs in big data. And businesses are looking to fill these openings immediately with only 4 percent of respondents suggesting they want to wait until after Q4 to hire.
"The biggest challenge is that there continues to be a limited supply of talented IT professionals. Therefore, we anticipate an increased pressure on salaries and wages. As a result, the compensation for IT professionals will continue to increase, while companies will be forced to increase spend on IT. Further, this increase in demand for IT professionals will also lead to more companies willing to hire interim or contract professionals rather than hire on a permanent basis," according to Jim Wong, CEO of Brilliant.
A job seekers market
The upside to the skills gap is that those who do have the right skills are in a good position to find the best job offer. Essentially, it's a tech job-seekers market and companies are moving to attract people with competitive offers and perks.
The most recent study found that 37 percent of respondents said they were turning to temporary professionals to fill the skills gap. This is decline in temporary workers from the Q2 hiring study, which found that 63 percent of businesses were using temp hires. The study suggests that this decrease points to successful hiring in the past and the overall decline in projected openings for additional IT staff.
Not the lack of skills you might think
While there is certainly a lack of qualified candidates with skills ranging in big data to cloud to Internet of Things, those aren't necessarily the skills hiring managers are most looking for. The study found that the biggest skillset gap wasn't in any specific area or industry of tech, but rather hiring managers were looking for the right "soft skills." At the top of the list, 25 percent said they were looking for workers with expertise in certain areas, but did not specify which areas. Next on the list, 25 percent were concerned with finding a "cultural fit," which is a 10 percent increase from the last two quarters. Beyond that, 18 percent said they were looking for individuals with problem-solving skills as well as communication skills.
The best place to find tech job seekers
Landing the right candidates is one thing, but it's another to figure out the best place to find qualified candidates. The most popular source in recent years has typically been, and continues to be, the more traditional route of search and recruitment firms. And for IT workers, referrals and word of mouth are another highly popular way to land the right talent, with 20 percent saying they hired the bulk of workers through these channels in Q4.
In Q3, 17 percent of companies cited online job boards as their main source of hiring, but that increased to 19 percent in Q4. Interestingly, in Q3, 13 percent of companies said they hired the bulk of workers through social media, but that has since dropped down to 6 percent in Q4. Meanwhile, companies citing resumes submitted via the company website as the source for new hires increased from 7 percent in Q3 to 11 percent in Q4 for the IT sector.
Technology prompting more hires
Technology drives nearly every industry and, as a result, business leaders are starting to view IT in a different light. IT is no longer simply the department that handles networks, hardware and business software. It's become a cornerstone of innovation as more workers rely on technology day to day.
"Companies view technology as an investment as opposed to an expense. Technology can create efficiencies and allow businesses to scale without having to add fixed costs. Businesses know they can get an ROI through investing in technology," says Wong.
And part of that investment can be seen in an uptick in companies reporting that they don't plan to reduce their IT teams. The survey found that 64 percent of businesses report they do not have plans to change the size of their current IT teams, whether through firing or hiring employees. However, 12 percent of businesses still report that they plan to increase the size of their teams, while only 7 percent report a plan decrease; 17 percent are unsure.
Wong also says that the data suggests that companies are turning to technology to improve business practices, make departments more efficient and stay ahead of the curve. Leaders are starting to view technology as a way to save costs in the long run by increasing overall productivity and efficiency. "Essentially, companies want to be able to do more with less," Wong says. Overall, it's simply good news for IT workers, and even temporary or contract employees, as businesses begin a shift towards investing in their careers.
"In sum, the demands for IT professionals mean higher compensation and wages, increased investments by companies to pay more for qualified professionals, and more reasons to hire temporary or contract professionals to fill those IT roles," says Wong.
Demystifying Licensing: Pay As You Go Guide to Enterprise Agreement Changes
Sean Ferrel explains changes and benefits of using a Cloud Service Provider for Enterprise Agreement Changes in this hour long webinar:
Enterprise Agreement Changes
Options for Customers with 500 Seats or Less
Information for Customers with 500 Seats or More
Microsoft Jump Start Incentives that may help you transition
Price Comparisons for working with a Cloud Solution Provider
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_cta_button2 h2="Using a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) saves your IT department deployment time, offers 24/7 support for IT staff" title="Purchase Pay As You Go Licensing Through Your CSP Partner Today! " link="url:http%3A%2F%2Finfo.managedsolution.com%2Fpay-as-you-go||"]Managed Solution is in the top 1% of Microsoft Cloud Service Providers worldwide, is an award-winning Microsoft National Solutions Provider and premier partner aligned with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.[/vc_cta_button2][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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SQL Server 2016: The database for mission-critical intelligence
Joseph Sirosh - Corporate Vice President, Data Group, Microsoft as written on blogs.microsoft.com
The world around us, every business and nearly every industry, is being transformed by technology. This disruption is driven, in part, by the intersection of three trends: a massive explosion of data, intelligence from machine learning and advanced analytics, and the economics and agility of cloud computing.
While databases power nearly every aspect of business today, they were not originally designed with this disruption in mind. Traditional databases were about recording and retrieving transactions such as orders and payments very reliably, very securely and efficiently. They were designed to enable reliable, secure, mission-critical transactional applications at small to medium scale, in on-premises datacenters.
Databases built to get ahead of today’s disruptions do very fast analyses of live data in-memory as transactions are being recorded or queried. They support very low latency advanced analytics and machine learning, such as forecasting and predictive models, on the same data, so that applications can easily embed data-driven intelligence. They allow databases to be offered as a fully managed service in the cloud, in turn making it easy to build and deploy intelligent Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
They also provide innovative security features built for a world where a majority of data is accessible over the Internet. They support 24×7 high-availability, efficient management and database administration across platforms. They therefore enable mission critical intelligent applications to be built and managed both in the cloud and on-premises. They are exciting harbingers of a new world of ambient intelligence.
We built SQL Server 2016 for this new world, and to help businesses get ahead of today’s disruptions. It supports hybrid transactional/analytical processing, advanced analytics and machine learning, mobile BI, data integration, always encrypted query processing capabilities and in-memory transactions with persistence. It is also perhaps the world’s only relational database to be “born cloud-first,” with the majority of features first deployed and tested in Azure, across 22 global datacenters and billions of requests per day. It is customer tested and battle ready.
Let me share with you what industry analysts and our customers think.
Industry analysts recognize the breadth and depth of our capabilities in data, intelligence and the cloud. Microsoft is the only company recognized as a leader across data platforms and cloud by Gartner in both vision and execution, in database, business intelligence, advanced analytics, data warehouse, cloud infrastructure and cloud application platforms.
The customers we’ve been working with in preview share our excitement and are already benefiting from new innovations, such as built-in analytics.
PROS Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: PRO) is a revenue and profit realization company that helps B2B and B2C customers achieve their business goals through data science. Royce Kallesen, senior director of Science and Research at PROS says: “Microsoft R’s parallelization and enhanced memory management on the server integrated with SQL Server provides much faster results on a common platform with built-in security.” They have realized over 100x faster advanced analytics using SQL Server and built-in Microsoft R Server.
In addition to faster analytics, the real-time in-memory processing capabilities of SQL Server are industry leading. This technology allows up to 100x faster analytics with updatable in-memory columnstores. In addition, as the only commercial database that leads simultaneously in both transaction processing (per the TPC-E benchmark) and data warehousing (per the TPC-H benchmark), SQL Server allows customers to realize incredible performance against massive data sets and gain real-time insights – across all workloads, new and existing applications.
“KPMG observed approximately 60 percent reduction in execution time and 10x table-compression gains for one of the main analytical procedures by leveraging Columnstore Indexes and Parallel Insert functions in SQL Server 2016,” says Michael S. Sellman, executive director, Global IT Services, KPMG LLP.
According to Chris Stolte, co-founder and chief development offficer of Tableau, Inc., “an average 190%+ interactive query performance improvement enables our customers to visually explore large datasets in real-time, even against transactional databases.”
With unique hybrid capabilities, any SQL Server deployment or app can span private clouds, hosted clouds and our public cloud, Microsoft Azure. New Stretch Database technology allows customers to dynamically, transparently and securely stretch their transactional data to Azure, creating a massive database with great price performance. Customers can also use new AlwaysOn Availability Groups to enable disaster recovery at low cost.
Security has never been more important, and we’re humbled to be the industry’s least vulnerable database, six years running, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) public security board. Several capabilities in SQL Server 2016 help protect data at rest and in memory (Always Encrypted), encrypt all user data with low performance overhead (Transparent Data Encryption), mitigate attacks with support for Transport Layer Security version 1.2, and allow developers to build applications that restrict access and protect data from specific users with Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) and Row Level Security (RLS).
DocuSign helps organizations build entire approval workflows without a single sheet of paper or filing cabinet in sight, so security and reliability are critical, as they are with every business today. Docusign partnered with Microsoft to help secure their customers’ data, realize insights with SQL Server analytics and BI capabilities and receive world-class support. Hear directly from their Chief Architect and Vice President of Platforms, Eric Fleischman:
With all of these capabilities built-in, SQL Server 2016 delivers not just a relational database, but an entire data platform for your business with incredible TCO. Today customers can save up to $10 million over three years versus Oracle, running transactional, data warehouse, data integration, business intelligence and advanced analytics workloads.* Judson Althoff, president of Microsoft North America, announced a new program to help more customers adopt SQL Server 2016 and save. Specifically, customers currently running applications or workloads on non-Microsoft paid commercial RDBMS platform will be able to migrate their existing applications with free SQL Server licenses.**
Microsoft is delivering on a vision that no other company can match across data, intelligence and cloud. To learn more, watch the webcast as well as various on-demand videos that showcase the new capabilities of this database built for mission-critical intelligence.
Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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SQL Server 2016 is much more than a database – it is the data management and business analytics platform for intelligent applications that can tackle any data project for any application.
SQL Server 2016 is the only database that is born in the cloud. It is the summation of capabilities we released first in Microsoft Azure, where they are already being used in millions of production databases.
We celebrate our customers' success in business as demonstrated by powerful customers stories such as Docusign, MasterCard, Johnson Controls, and Renault Formula 1 Racing.
Microsoft is the new industry leader based on the Gartner in the Operational Database Management Systems MQ, the just released Data Warehouse MQ and the new Business Intelligence MQ.
Watch Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group in Microsoft, explain the benefits of using data in businesses. He also talks to executives at Docusign, Johnson Controls and Renault Sport F1 Team about how they are using data to transform their businesses.
Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296
Skype Meeting Broadcast is a new component of Skype for Business. As part of Office 365 and Skype for Business Online, Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you produce, host, and broadcast meetings to large online audiences.
How Skype Meeting Broadcast works
You can schedule a Skype Meeting Broadcast for up to 10,000 attendees. You use the Skype Meeting Broadcast scheduling and management portal to schedule a meeting.
You use the familiar meeting experience within Skype for Business to produce a professional, engaging event for their audience. And, attendees can join from anywhere on any device, and engage in the meeting.
Skype Meeting Broadcast roles
There are several roles required for producing a Skype Meeting Broadcast. These include:
Organizer. Creates the meeting request and invites attendees. Reviews meeting reports.
Producer. Manages the meeting sources (live presentations, dial-in presentations, audio, video, and PowerPoint decks), records the event, and posts the recording to Office 365 Video.
Note: Using an embedded video in a PowerPoint presentation is currently not supported in Skype Meeting Broadcast.
Event team member. Participates in the meeting by presenting live or dialing in from a remote location.
Attendee. Watches the event online.
System requirements
System requirements for a Skype Meeting Broadcast
Browser (attendees) - Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Firefox, OSX Safari, iOS 8 or later, Android (KitKat)
Client - Skype for Business client for Windows (producer, presenter)
For Skype for Business 2015 clients, you must have the September Update, build 15.0.4747 or later
For Skype for Business 2016 clients, you must be using Click-to-Run, build 16.0.4227 or later. (MSI installations only support the presenter role. Producers can join through a different client, as explained in this knowledge base article.
Lync for Mac 2011 (presenter only). See this knowledge base article for more information.
Find your client version information in Skype for Business by clicking Help > About Skype for Business.
Users - On-premises and online
License - You will need one of the following licenses:
Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 (or 3).
Office 365 Business Premium
Enterprise E1, E3, E4 or E5 - which contains the Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 license.
Authentication - On-premises customers must have established an online tenant. You should configure directory sync to make user accounts and DL memberships available to the Skype for Business Azure Active Directory in order to enable user authentication and meeting authorization using group membership.
Skype Meeting Broadcast producers cannot be enabled for modern authentication.
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New Office 365 profiles help people get to know their coworkers
Microsoft has unveiled a new profile page for Office 365 users aimed at making it easier to collaborate at work.
The profile pages, most accessible through Microsoft's Delve product, show a large photo of the worker, along with the files shared between that person and whoever is viewing their profile. The new feature, announced Tuesday, is a way for people to get a sense of their coworkers' responsibilities, even if they don't work in the same office.
An Office 365 user's profile also shows who they work with inside an organization, allowing the viewer to get a sense for how someone else fits into the business.
The new experience replaces a somewhat unwieldy two-page profile that Microsoft currently uses in Delve. Right now, users can see the files that someone else shares with them when they open up that person's profile, but have to switch to a different tab to get contact information.
With the new profile Microsoft is rolling out, the information will be on the same page, along with a button that lets users Skype their coworkers.
When people look at their own profile, they'll see the documents they've worked on recently.
Companies that have opted to get Microsoft's First Release updates for Office 365 will get the new profiles first over the next several weeks, and everyone else can expect to see the pages by the second quarter of this year.
It's all part of Microsoft's continued emphasis on helping people collaborate at work. Office 365 is focused on not only providing standby tools like Word and Excel, but also on new collaboration services that tie them together through features like real-time co-authoring.
As Microsoft faces increased competition with Google, Facebook, Slack and other companies for the workplace productivity business, these sorts of features are increasingly important.
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SQL Server 2016: The database for mission-critical intelligence
