Blue Ridge Technology

Last week, we showed you three powerful Microsoft 365 apps that many businesses haven’t discovered yet. Bookings, Whiteboard, and Planner are already a part of your Microsoft 365 license, and they can drive incredible improvements to your workflow and processes. If you appreciated that post, we have good news: this week, we’re back with more. Check out three MORE lesser-known apps you already have access to in Microsoft 365! Power Automate Are you an efficiency freak who’s always looking for ways to speed up your work? Or have you ever noticed that your job requires you to repeat a series of tasks many times a day? If so, Power Automate (previously called Microsoft Flow) could save you some serious time and effort. Power Automate is an automation tool that you can use to create sequences of tasks or steps. It’s a take on macros, but it’s more powerful because it can integrate with multiple Microsoft 365 apps. Here’s an example: do you frequently make updates to a document, save the do...

Many businesses subscribe to Microsoft’s cloud-based office suite, Microsoft 365, because it’s the best way to keep up to date with some core Microsoft apps, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Chances are, your company does, too. But what you may not know is that Microsoft has been steadily adding new apps to Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365, and just Office Professional before that) for going on a decade now. In fact, it’s added so many new tools so quickly, that many businesses don’t use more than half of them. To be fair, not every app is as essential or robust as Word or Outlook. Still, quite a few of the lesser-known Microsoft 365 apps are worth a closer look. Many of them can improve efficiency, collaboration, and quality of life for a wide range of businesses. Over the next three weeks, we’ll be covering 10 of these lesser-known yet still incredibly powerful apps tucked away in Microsoft 365. We’ll start today with just three: Bookings, Whiteboard, and Planner. Booking...

Have you heard about the global chip shortage? It’s a serious problem, affecting everything from cars to iPhones to the equipment you need to keep your business running smoothly. But unless you follow tech news on your own time, you may not have heard about this problem or know what the ramifications might be at work. Here’s what you need to know about the global chip shortage, how we got here, and what your business needs to do to stay equipped. The Chip Shortage: What Is It? The global chip shortage is a supply chain problem caused by a lack of sufficient supply of the silicon microchips that power today’s electronics. These chips go by a variety of names: semiconductors, semiconductor chips, computer chips, and so on. And right now, manufacturers need more of these chips than the chipmakers can make. These chips are in nearly everything with a computing component, from household appliances to cars to consumer electronics. As a rule of thumb, if it has a screen, it has one or more ch...

Microsoft 365 continues to innovate throughout its suite of products, and one of its newest tools is a big win for inclusivity. The little-known tool is called Immersive Reader, and it’s already baked into some of the most popular Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Outlook, and Teams. It’s a powerful tool in all three applications, but its uses in Teams are what takes the tool to an entirely new level. We shared a little about Immersive Reader in a recent tech tip to our email subscribers, but we wanted to take a closer look in today’s blog post. Here’s what this tool can do, plus how to enable it. Immersive Reader: What It Is Immersive Reader is a free tool built by Microsoft Education that’s designed to make content more accessible to all kinds of people. The tool was designed with students in mind, but many of its functions translate into business use cases as well. Immersive reader is already built into many Microsoft apps, including at least these: Word OneNote Outlook Teams Form...

Microsoft Teams is an impressive collaboration and workflow tool that has the potential to completely transform the way you interact with team members. It’s especially useful when you’re working with a distributed workforce, where some (or even all) members of your team aren’t in the same physical location. If you’re already using Teams, you know how powerful it can be. But did you know about these lesser-known tools from Microsoft that can further improve your productivity and workflow? Each of the tools we review below is already available to you if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription or license. And each tool integrates seamlessly with Teams, so you can keep everything running in the same ecosystem. Editor Your organization’s top-tier, public-facing content probably routes through an editor or proofreader (or someone with a better than average eye, at least). That’s because we all understand the importance of brand image: your company needs to look polished and professional at all...

So you’ve tapped a bad link on your phone. You’re not the only one. Truth be told, this happens all the time. Once you realized your mistake, it all seems so obvious. But in the moment, that link seemed too good to pass up (or too urgent to ignore). These scam links are getting better and more sophisticated. We’re not seeing so much “hot singles in your area” these days — most people know by now that the sketchy links are no good. These days scammers target business users with legit-sounding offers or urgent-sounding messages that act like they’re from work. In other words, it’s quite possible that the scam was so well disguised that you’d never have known if it weren’t for that strange outcome. Whatever the case, the important question to ask is this: What now? What’s done is done, but you still need to take steps to make sure your smartphone isn’t compromised. Here’s what you need to know. Understand the Threat Vectors First, understand the potential threat vectors in play with bad l...

The Biggest Security Threat to your business might be on your payroll Your biggest security threat may well be on your payroll right now. Without proper training, your own well-intentioned employees can unknowingly open you up to attack. Rarer (but much worse), someone on your payroll could be intentionally working against you as a malicious insider. Here are five strategies to mitigate internal threats and increase your overall cybersecurity health. 1. Commit to Ongoing Cybersecurity Education Investing in ongoing cybersecurity education for your team is the most important thing you can do to reduce the risk of accidental exposure. In today’s connected environment, there are more bad actors out there than ever before. Scammers are getting more sophisticated, too. One 10-minute training session once a year isn’t going to cut it. Cybersecurity training must be thorough, and it must be carried out frequently. Most importantly, though: everyone — and we mean everyone — in your organizatio...