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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.
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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.
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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.
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Use Environments to store your flows by geography or team.
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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.
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Connect to 15 new services, including Basecamp 3, Bitly, Cognitive Services Text Analytics, Instapaper, and Pinterest.
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Use Premium services like Salesforce and the Microsoft Common Data Service, which are exclusive to paid Microsoft Flow plans.
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Is your IT department crying out for help with managing different systems and elements? Systems Integration could be the answer. Without having to work on multiple systems, engineers can focus their energy on other tasks.
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Reduced Costs
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Integrated systems lead to streamlined operations. With this, companies end up reducing their labor costs! Not only does Systems Integration save you a headache, but it can also save you a few dollars, too.
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Improved Performance
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Systems Integration is generally easy to use, so anyone can learn how to use the system and operate accordingly. Real-time alerts let engineers handle tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible. Many devices can even be managed through mobile devices, making performance on-the-go a breeze. A single work station makes systems management just a few clicks away!
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Energy Savings
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With streamlined operations, systems integration can significantly reduce energy consumption. This not only reduces overhead costs, but it also is better on the environment and can help your business be a bit more eco-friendly.
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Healthcare infrastructure will help cure healthcare
By Emmi Kendall as written on techcrunch.com
Donald Trump’s election has left many wary of how he’ll respond to a campaign promise to dismantle Obamacare. It seems that select aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, will remain intact. Likely to remain are provisions that make it illegal for insurers to deny a patient’s pre-existing medical conditions and enable children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans through age 26.
While not part of the ACA, structural innovations designed to control cost, such as the shift to value-based care (VBC), a new way of paying doctors and hospitals, will likely continue (more on this later). The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) may cancel their timeline for this shift, slowing momentum. However, private insurance plans and doctors have already changed the way they contract together, making very unlikely a retreat to the old payment model.
Even without a crystal ball of the exact specs of a post-Trump healthcare world, the fundamentals of the healthcare market and the massive forces acting upon it continue to render it an excellent investment opportunity. Specifically, the most near-term and pervasive value-creation area is in infrastructure software, the “glue” that serves as middleware for healthcare.
The persistent truths are that the healthcare market represents $3 trillion, almost 20 percent, of the U.S. economy. This market also is plagued by a level of gross inefficiency and under-performance largely unseen in any other industries in our post-internet world.
Why has healthcare lagged behind so much?
Largely, it’s because despite complaints about skyrocketing costs, there was no needto change. The lack of technology progress wasn’t because of a lack of available solutions, but rather because of a lack of economic incentive. Incumbents maximized profit by continuing along proprietary business processes and technology paths, because doctors and hospitals got paid by insurance companies for every single transaction of care. Nobody stood to gain by re-engineering for common workflows or common infrastructure. Siloed operations were sufficient under a payment model based on transaction volume.
The paradigm, however, is shifting dramatically.
Consumers and new payment rules are inverting healthcare
The new role of “patient as consumer” is key in making healthcare behave like a more normal market. High-deductible health plans are the driving engine. In 2006, only 6.2 million members in the U.S. were on high-deductible plans. By 2015, this number grew to 58 million, a growth rate of 28 percent per year. Because almost 90 percent don’t exceed $2,000 per year in healthcare spending, 50 million people are effectively paying 100 percent of their healthcare out-of-pocket!
Unsurprisingly, this will start to change consumer behavior. Previously, patients had a significantly higher threshold for bad experiences because they largely weren’t paying. Increasingly, payments are made by patients themselves and/or insurance companies based on outcome and experience. Healthcare providers that had optimized only around transaction volume are finding themselves in sore need of new CRM-like tools for a consumer-centric business: to segment/acquire/retain the right patients, control costs, message/coordinate care effectively and streamline processes.
There is an emerging crop of healthtech entrepreneurs who see the more stage-appropriate opportunity actually lies within the infrastructural layers.
The second catalyst for change is CMS. This department spends almost $1.1 trillion on healthcare each year, making it the largest payer in the country. They’re also changing how they pay. With the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), Medicare has said it will pay for healthcare in a value-based way. Value-based payments invert the traditional healthcare business model: Instead of paying for healthcare transactions, doctors and institutions are to be paid for healthcare outcomes. Previously, the volume maximization recipe was “more patients, more revenues.” Now, the goal is to try to keep patients from needing the healthcare system at all.
The impact is amplified as private insurance companies are quickly following suit. Importantly, because these changes are being driven by Medicare, they are not impacted by the potential repeal of the ACA. As noted above, the repeal of the ACA may temporarily slow incorporation of new programs, but the industry transition to value-based care will continue. Under this model, standardization and integration are imperative, because value-based payments cover an entire “episode of care” (typically 90 days). Now needed are technical capabilities that enable longitudinally tracking of patients’ care histories and outcomes, auditing activity-based cost of services provided and determining return on investment for each episode of care.
Infrastructure as the missing glue
The new world order has spurred a deluge of healthtech applications. Startup Health notes that the first half of 2016 was the strongest ever start to the year, with $3.9 billion of venture capital invested. However, most entrepreneurs reflexively focus on the seemingly lower-hanging fruit of consumer apps (lose weight, track steps, send photos straight to your dermatologist) or enterprise point-solutions, such as appointment scheduling, patient intake, patient risk stratification, etc. All legitimate problem areas.
However, without any horizontal infrastructure, each of these solutions takes forever to develop and subsequently function only in specific walled-data silos. So, following an unduly protracted dev cycle, a product further leads to duplication of work every time it extends outside the original data pool — which happens a lot. Instead of these abundant headline-grabbing consumer apps or siloed enterprise point-solutions, the best investment opportunities actually are found elsewhere: in infrastructural software providing best-in-class functional solutions pervasively needed across the broader universe of healthtech apps.
What do the best healthtech investments look like? Best-in-class infrastructure. What exactly does this mean? It means horizontal infrastructure that allows application-layer CTOs to outsource discrete functionalities and compress their own dev cycles.
It’s taking a page from the playbook of current-day pure-play tech CTOs who now can choose from a plethora of application program interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) partners. This enables them to focus solely upon their core product and outsource much of their tech stack (e.g. AWS for hosting, Twilio for messaging, Mixpanel for analytics, Salesforce for CRM). This is in stark contrast to the dev protocol in the late 1990s, when startups were capital-intensive and vertically integrated because they lacked a robust infrastructural ecosystem of developer tools and third-party cloud solutions.
Today, the pure-play tech app CTO has evolved to “borrow instead of build whenever possible,” in the words of Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, in order to “focus on actually building out your product.” In healthtech, however, we still see too many app developers try to build everything natively, thus delaying focus on their core product. Invariably they burn through much of their early-stage financing runway before working on their core product enough to secure the proof points necessary for follow-on investment rounds.
6 signs your company has outgrown its free email solution
A free email solution is great when your organization is first starting out. But how do you know when you have grown beyond the capabilities of your free email service and you need a more sophisticated solution? The business emailrequirements of a growing company are much different than those of a small startup. Whether you’re using Outlook.com or another provider, there are signs that indicate your business has outgrown free email.
The following list identifies six important capabilities you need now (or in the future) to ensure your email solution doesn’t hold you back. Needing any one of these capabilities is an indication that it’s time to consider moving from a free to a paid email solution:
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Security—If you’ve experienced a security breach—or are even worried about it happening—you need a more sophisticated solution that offers increased, enterprise-class security capabilities.
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Storage—You’ve reached your storage max: a very simple reason to upgrade. Storage space should never cause you to delete or change how you use your email, especially when paid solutions offer large stores of data.
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Tools—Free email tools don’t typically provide robust inbox- and user-management tools. Paid email solutions offer a range of features for managing users as well as extensive rules for managing your inbox—enabling you to spend less time managing your inbox and more time managing your business.
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Domain names—Using a custom domain for your business email is a vital way to ensure your business appears professional. For example, “yourname@yourcompany.com” has a lot more credibility than “yourcompany@domain.com.” While free custom email addresses are available, they often leave you open to security threats, because the company you host through will likely have access to your data and other information.
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Data—If you’ve ever felt the need to own and manage your email data, it’s time to move to a paid solution. Often, when you agree to free email terms, you’re granting the email provider permission to mine your data and send you ads—which is how their companies remain profitable while offering free services. Not only can this distract from your work, it also puts your company’s data at risk.
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File sharing—Need to share files and collaborate securely with your team? Paid email solutions enable team-based collaboration and sharing without putting confidential company information at risk.
Graduate to an email solution that offers your growing business increased security, enhanced customization and a variety of features and capabilities to improve collaboration. Not only will this keep your company running smoothly and increase teamwork—your IT team will no longer spend time on common free email service-level issues.
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For More Information on Microsoft and other Cloud Solutions, Contact Us at 800-208-4037
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5 Reasons Managed Services is Crucial to your IT Strategy
Development and implementation of a global IT strategy is crucial to further advancement of your organization’s ever-growing performance goals. However, this task is hindered by a stagnant or diminishing budget. It can be overwhelming for IT managers to maintain a feasible budget for their business in conjunction with ensuring the performance, security, and operational goals are met. Budgeting experts advocate a predictable cost model such as Managed Services.
Below are five reasons you can consider Managed Services as an integral component of your IT strategy.
1. Predictable Cost Structure
Costs for an IT department include—but are not limited to—equipment, personnel, and training to keep up with industry standards. Managed Services incorporates these costs into one predictable monthly charge. With the expansion and evolution of your business this single monthly cost can be scaled to meet business demands and address out-of-scope work.
2. Advanced Risk Management
The insurance industry calculates risk and promotes that insurance provides you with peace of mind. Managed Services reflects that very same assurance. Coverage can include:
- Any combination of coverage for the LAN, WAN, proprietary systems, user management, or monitoring and alarms.
- Extended Support Models provide various levels of support (24X7, 8X5, on-incident, custom) that cater to a variety of business needs
- MSP's provide proper documentation, which can help mitigate sudden loss of critical IT personnel.
- Transferring incident response and other certification requirements, such as HIPAA for Healthcare, and PCI-DSS for Financial institutions.
3. A Shift in Focus to Your Core Business:
Building and progressing a business has enough challenges as it is. Building and maintaining fundamental IT infrastructure can be just as daunting. Large IT companies choose to outsource their IT to a third-party to then concentrate on revenue-generating initiatives.
4. Future-Proof Strategy:
The future holds an abundance of technical challenges for the security and operation of your business. Delegating the task of maintaining infrastructure parallel to current industry developments gives you the opportunity to focus on other aspects of your organization.
Managed Services is staffed with specialists that handle both basic routers and firewalls so that the transition from one to the other can be a seamless and stress-free process for your network security. Let experts focus on your company’s adaptation to market demands, while you dedicate your time to growth and achievement.
5. Better Value:
Value of your business operations is crucial to success and customer satisfaction. Value is the outcome that weighs your investments.
Managed Services models have evolved over time through the hard work and commitment of many integrators and providers. Dedication to the perfection of its delivery resulted in benefits and features that greatly contribute to the equilibrium and profit of your company. Lower monthly costs, constructive operations, expert skill sets, more stringent service level agreements (SLAs), and attractive service level objectives (SLOs), are just a few notable examples from an abundant list.
IT is at the core of most businesses; it is the underlying business engine. Your company could be investing substantial capital on building in-house operations for hardware, software, and the skills required to maintain them.
However, the onsite IT staff may be limited to certain operations that are less modern, and a lot rarer, than the wide-array of operations needed for Managed Services.
If you’re interested in easing the burden of cost management predictions in the midst of unpredictable requirements, consider Managed Services as your solution.
Interested in how Managed Services could work for you? Learn more here.
CONIN: Finding, reaching and helping at-risk children through the cloud
Mendoza, Argentina-based CONIN works to not only eradicate child malnutrition in Argentina but also to serve disadvantaged families at risk of falling through gaps in social services. With Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft cloud services, the nonprofit helps more children and families receive the resources they need to thrive.
Its previous, analog-based systems helped the nonprofit impact the lives of thousands of youth. But with an Azure—powered IT system, CONIN is now poised to improve family health across Argentina-and beyond, as they begin to expand their services in Latin America.
Smarter Data
As nonprofit leaders know, effectively tackling a problem begins with understanding it. So when CONIN set out to map malnutrition in Salta, a northern and remote province of Argentina, the family-focused organization turned to the flexible and comprehensive solutions of Azure.
By identifying the most pressing needs of different pockets of Salta—from lack of clean water to insufficient healthy food—CONIN input data into an application developed and hosted in Azure, which they then displayed and shared in Power BI. The result: an accurate and up-to-date visualization of on-the-ground realities. They could then partner with the regional government to pinpoint priorities and direct limited resources at the most urgent issues first. What’s more, this detailed map provided the data to develop a long-term solution: CONIN and the Salta government drafted public policy to prevent malnutrition in the future—and ensure the area’s children have a healthy start to life.
The impact of the Azure mapping solution does not end in Salta. CONIN is rolling out the system in other communities in Argentina as well as in parts of Latin America and Africa. And other nonprofits will save time and resources by transferring an already developed solution to their own Azure environment.
Connecting Communities
Like many nonprofits, CONIN relies on a combination of staff, volunteers and partners to carry out its mission. And although CONIN's dedicated team has already served 20,000 youth over several decades, leaders within the organization knew they could reach even more people in need by leveraging cloud-based tools.
CONIN, then, developed an app in Azure that triggers an alert whenever the nonprofit-and government-run community census identifies a child in need. Take, for example, an alarm CONIN staff received about Bryan, a cheerful and playful boy who was born with Down syndrome and severe kidney problems. His mother, who didn’t even know she was eligible for services, was invited to the nonprofit to begin the process for getting care for Bryan. CONIN paid for Bryan’s surgeries, arranged for transportation to and from medical visits and now enrolls Bryan in a special CONIN school. The system also allows CONIN staff to track the boy’s health with digital updates on his progress.
Without this alert app that automatically analyzes data to identify families in need, Bryan may never have gotten a fair shot at a happy, healthy future.
Field-to-office solutions
Proactive nonprofits not only help the at-risk families that seek them out but also bring in others who may never have known about their services. CONIN teams used to do this community outreach and information-gathering with inefficient paper surveys. Since receiving an Azure grant, they canvas Argentina's poorest neighborhoods with a digital, cloud-based polling solution.
“Today, the technology makes it much faster: It enables us to have every child in the system,” says Teresa Cornejo, president of a CONIN network member that addresses nutrition in Salta. By inputting information designed to identify families in danger of malnutrition, lack of education or unmet medical needs, the data is automatically synched to folders accessible anywhere—from CONIN's offices to employees traveling the dirt roads of Salta.
Canvassers go door-to-door with mobile phones or tablets, making the highly detailed data they collect immediately available on an Azure cloud platform. CONIN, other partner nonprofits and the government of Salta province use this up-to-the-minute information to work toward their goal: making malnutrition a problem of the past.
A deeper look at Skype for Business integration with iOS CallKit
We recently announced deeper integration of Skype for Business with iOS devices using Apple’s CallKit framework, which enables a better experience for Skype for Business calls on the iPhone. The CallKit API with iOS 10 enables Skype for Business calls to work the same way as the native calling experience on iOS, allowing you to seamlessly extend your personal device as a business phone.
Answer Skype for Business calls from lock screen
Now, iPhone users can accept an incoming Skype for Business call right from the lock screen. There is no need to unlock the phone or launch the Skype for Business app to receive the call. Skype for Business calls will appear and behave just as regular cellular calls do—including being able to see the caller’s name on the lock screen. When you need to, you can also get to the app from the calling interface with just one touch.
Handle Skype for Business calls like any other call
This integration also allows you to switch between calls across Skype for Business, your personal cellular line and other VoIP applications supporting CallKit. If you are in an important Skype for Business conversation and receive an incoming cellular call, you can send the second call to voicemail or put the Skype for Business call on hold to accept the incoming cellular call. You’ll also see Skype for Business calls in your phone’s call history.
Built-in IT and user controls
These new features are enabled by default for all iOS app users. In scenarios where you may not want the Skype for Business calls to appear in the native iOS call log, the built-in IT and end-user controls allow you to disable the CallKit integration altogether. IT admins can disable this integration for their users through a policy, and app users can also control it in the settings.
Try the new calling experience
To try the new calling experience, update your iOS app today. If you haven’t yet checked out the Skype for Business mobile app for iOS, you can download it at Skype for Business Apps & Downloads.
Kroton does its homework and chooses Office 365 over Google Apps for Work
When Kroton merged with another company to become the largest private educator in Brazil, it embraced the enormous responsibility of providing the best possible education to more than a million students across a large and vastly diverse country.
With the merger, Kroton found itself divided between two cloud environments, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Work. It had to choose just one, to help unify the company, reduce costs, and provide students with the very best experience.
So, Kroton did its homework. Its IT team spent three months evaluating the Microsoft and Google cloud offerings, resulting in a 50-page report of findings. In the end, Office 365 made the grade. “We performed a very deep analysis,” says Mauricio Oliveira, the IT Infrastructure and Technology Manager at Kroton. “It was clear that Office 365 met all our requirements and in many cases delivered far beyond them.”
With the start of the 2015–2016 school year, 1.4 million Kroton students, teachers, and staff throughout Brazil are using Office 365, and the company has ambitious plans for things like an innovative job placement service, virtual team assignments and projects, and new operational efficiencies—all to make Kroton the best it can be for its students.
