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Heads Up: AI Shopping Is Coming — Even to Copilot

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AI Shopping ​Microsoft keeps on iterating and innovating with AI, and this time you might not exactly love what they’re offering. But you need to know so you can keep your team on track. Here’s what you need to know about Copilot Checkout, coming soon to…well, everything Microsoft makes, it seems. What Is Copilot Checkout? Copilot Checkout is a new AI-driven feature coming to Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant that’s already built into Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365. It does what it sounds like it does: sells you stuff. We know, not exactly revolutionary. But the difference is that Copilot Checkout wants to sell you (and your team members) stuff directly within an AI chat window. No shopping cart, no procurement process, and — some fear — no accountability. Microsoft isn’t coming out of nowhere with this. ChatGPT already rolled out a similar feature, called Instant Checkout. Different from ChatGPT’s recent addition of ads, Instant Checkout can show product recommendations when users ask ...
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Years-Old Bad Security Decisions Still Haunt Businesses Today

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MFA ​Your business’s cybersecurity could be haunted by ghosts of the past that put you at risk in surprising ways. Even if you’re doing all the right things to keep your business digitally safe today, poor security hygiene from years back could still threaten your digital security if you haven’t made certain specific changes. The Threat: Old, Stale Passwords with Weak Authentication Let me paint you a picture: there’s a business about your size that seems to be doing everything right. New employees are required to create long, complex passwords managed by a business-grade password manager. All employees receive regular training on scam and phishing awareness. Every system is kept up to date with the latest security updates across software and operating systems. But they still fall victim to a cyberattack. How did the bad guys get in? Well, it wasn’t through a new employee with a weak password or poor training. It was through an account belonging to a long-time employee (or maybe even a...
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Spot the Signs: Both Cyber Threats and Scams Are Growing More Sophisticated

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Cybercriminals and scammers are getting better, faster, and more sophisticated. The magic of generative AI is helping them generate content and code at a scale and a quality level that wasn’t feasible before. Businesses of all sizes, including yours, are at greater risk today than five years ago. Here’s the lay of the land across both cyber threats and scams, plus how you and your team can spot the signs and stay safe. How Cyber Threats Are Changing For the last few years, ransomware attacks have been the big news: cyber criminals weasel their way into your system, find a way to lock you out, and then demand payment. It’s not good, especially because even if you pay up, you have no guarantee the bad guys will keep their word and restore your access. Well, ransomware hasn’t gone away, but something new is springing up alongside it: data theft and extortion. In this kind of attack, you don’t necessarily get locked out. Instead, the bad guys lurk around inside your system, find sensitive ...
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Long-Awaited Microsoft Teams Fixes Are on the Way

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Teams Issues Fixed ​If your team uses Microsoft Teams for communication, video meetings, or collaboration, you already know how powerful the application can be. But let’s be real: it’s far from perfect. It looks and acts like what it is, a smattering of capabilities from other products and competitors all smashed into one giant app that’s kind of hard to define or pin down. Several frustrations jump to the top of the list, and Microsoft is finally doing something about them. Here’s what’s changing. “Enter” Is Changing First up is a small change with a big impact on quality of life. The “Enter” key on your keyboard has a bit of an identity crisis. In some places, like documents or email applications, “Enter” is the cue for “start a new paragraph.” This is the O.G. use case for the key. Readers of a certain vintage will remember the key used to be called “Return”, because it represented a “carriage return” on olde-tymey typewriters. In other words, it sent the carriage down and back to t...
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Technical Debt: What It Is and Why It’s Slowing You Down

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Technical Debt Technical debt is a term that gets thrown around all the time in large enterprise businesses, but it’s not just for the big guys. It comes for all of us. If you have a sinking feeling that something about your IT is slowing you down, then you need to read this post. Let’s start things off with a definition…or two. What Is Technical Debt? So what is technical debt exactly? Good question. IBM defines it as “the future costs associated with relying on shortcuts or suboptimal decisions made during software development.” That works if you’re, you know, in software development, but it’s a little too specific if you ask us. Because technical debt affects everyone. Go a little broader and a little simpler, and you can think of technical debt as the cost of falling behind on tech. Everything works a little slower, a little worse, and there are nebulous but major costs just over the horizon. Windows Is the Biggest Example of Technical Debt for Most Small Businesses If this term i...
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AI Browsers: Time Savers or Security Dangers?

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AI Browsers Most people have grown accustomed to a certain concept of what an internet browser is: it’s a tool for accessing the internet, and that’s it. It isn’t all that smart or technical; it’s more like a window to the stuff I need to see and use. This definition was never quite right, though we can see how people got there. Most browsers offer a pretty similar experience, so it’s just not something most people give a lot of thought to. Enter AI: as with nearly every other corner of business technology, AI is showing up inside web browsers. It’s even spawning a new breed of browser built around generative AI from the ground up. So far, these AI browsers remain more of a niche option. But they’re growing quickly in popularity, so the chances are getting higher by the day that someone wants to use them within your business (or already is). Here’s what you need to know about AI browsers — what they are, what they’re capable of, and how they could put your business at risk. What Are AI...
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Goodbye, “Reuse Slides” in PowerPoint: Do This Instead

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If you’re a PowerPoint power user you’ve probably used a handy little feature called “Reuse Slides” from time to time. You might have already noticed after a software update that Reuse Slides is nowhere to be found! It’s sad news for many of us, but it’s true: Microsoft officially killed off this feature. So here’s what you need to know — what Reuse Slides did, why Microsoft retired it, and what you can do instead. What Was “Reuse Slides”? “Reuse Slides” was a feature that lived in a small panel within PowerPoint. It would allow you to look through slides in a different PowerPoint file (.pptx), and then pull in a slide from that file into the one you’re currently working on. If you make PowerPoints that need to enforce company fonts, logos, colors, and layout, you can already see the draw here. Instead of having to manually add and set those elements (and risk doing something slightly off-brand), you could just open up a known show using Reuse Slides and pull in a slide tha...
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