Blue Ridge Technology

​ Is your team experimenting with AI tools at work? What about you? Maybe an even more important question: do you and your team members have confidence in how to use it well, and how to stay safe while doing so? No matter how you feel about generative AI tools, the reality is that people are using them at work. And the big software companies, including Microsoft, are pushing these tools hard. Open any productivity app, right-click on text, or even just open your Gmail and you’ll instantly be greeted with some kind of AI invitation: Google Docs is currently begging me to “save time creating beautiful documents,” and Word wants to “help me write”—and that’s just two examples. So if these tools are getting embedded into the software and services you use to get work done, it makes sense to grow your team’s AI literacy. Maybe you won’t go all-in on AI tools, but people need to know the do’s and don’ts—and how to avoid unnecessary risks. It’s A Weird Time This is a weird time for many busine...

​The dreaded disappearing document is finally almost truly a thing of the past for Microsoft Word users. And it’s about time! If you’re still saving your documents locally, then you know the drill: you work for hours on a document or presentation, and then suddenly you’re stuck. The words you’re typing aren’t showing up, the cursor isn’t moving right, or the window crashes out entirely. And instantly, panic ensues: how long has it been since I hit “save”? Is my entire report lost forever? Thankfully, this happens less than it used to. Microsoft has already made some decent progress in this area, and hopefully you already have some sort of autosave set up. But it still happens often enough to be the stuff of nightmares, and Microsoft’s finally doing something about it. The Status Quo Is a Mess Currently, Word users have all kinds of options on how and where to save their files. You can save them to your local hard drive, to the network, to external storage, to OneDrive, or to a third-pa...

You know that sick feeling when your computer freezes, Word closes, and hours of work vanish. Most people learn the hard way that “I thought it saved” is not a strategy. The good news: Microsoft has built multiple safety nets into Word that can dramatically reduce (and often eliminate) lost-work scenarios. The even better news: with the right setup, you can make “Save” almost irrelevant for day-to-day editing. The big change: Word can save for you, automatically Microsoft Word has an AutoSave feature that can save your document every few seconds while you work. ( support.microsoft.com ) There’s one key requirement that trips people up: AutoSave only works when the file is stored in OneDrive or SharePoint (Microsoft 365). ( support.microsoft.com ) In most cases, you’ll also need an active Microsoft 365 subscription . ( support.microsoft.com ) If your document is sitting in a local folder like Documents on your PC (or on an on-prem file server), Word may still protect you with AutoRe...

Hard to believe, but another new year is already upon us! From all of us at Blue Ridge Technology, we hope your 2025 was a great year, both in business and outside of it. As we look ahead to 2026, most of us are giving some thought to resolutions, goals, or commitments for the new year. This is certainly worth doing, but this isn’t the place to talk about fitness goals or healthy eating. Instead, let’s think about what kinds of New Year's resolutions your business should make, especially surrounding tech and IT. 1. Find One Process to Automate — and Do It Business automation tools have come a long way in the last couple of years, thanks in large part to artificial intelligence (AI). We know that at this point some readers’ hackles may go up: there’s a lot of hype around AI, and some worry about job displacement. Those are both real concerns, but there are great automations that don’t fall into either category. Here’s an example. Just recently at a routine doctor’s appointment, the ...

Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, is already a pretty useful tool for some people and some functions. What Is Copilot, Again? If you could use a quick refresher, here you go: Copilot is Microsoft’s generative AI assistant. It works a lot like other generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, but the difference is that Copilot is built into the Microsoft ecosystem. That means it understands many of your Microsoft apps, like OneDrive, Word, Outlook, and Excel, and it can actually do things inside those apps. ChatGPT and the rest are usually confined to a web browser tab, and they can’t reach out and interact with your files and systems directly. (And hey, you might not want them to: that level of access seems kind of intrusive.) But in a way, Microsoft already has that level of access: it’s the company you’re paying for cloud storage, hosting, office applications, and more. So giving the company’s AI assistant access to all that same stuff isn’t that big of a jump. So, li...

Real-Time Audio Translation Microsoft is previewing a new feature in its Edge browser, and this one is truly exciting: real-time audio translation on videos. Language has always created barriers in business. This is especially noticeable as our world has shrunk and become more globalized. A couple of decades ago, language barriers rarely mattered until a business reached a certain scale and went international. But today, we can all access nearly anything, nearly instantly — including a ton of content that isn’t in the language(s) we speak. This new feature could make that kind of video content instantly accessible to you. And it can make English-language content instantly accessible for others who don’t speak or don’t prefer English. How AI Audio Translation Works The name is long and not all that clear, so allow us to clear it up for you. This feature uses AI to do ## things in quick succession: AI analyzes the audio track of a video. Generative AI breaks down what that audio is about...

Fake Apps with Malware Fake apps loaded down with malware are on the rise…again. What’s worse, new techniques are getting those malicious apps more and more visible, so that unsuspecting team members could easily download them without noticing anything’s wrong. This time there are two distinct elements you need to understand so you can keep your company and data safe. We’ll discuss the apps themselves first, then we’ll dive into SEO poisoning (the technique the bad guys are using to get these apps found). Problem #1: The Apps Themselves So what exactly are these apps? They look like apps your team needs to get work done, like WhatsApp, Chrome, and so on. Even apps we look at as extra secure, like Signal or Telegram, are getting spoofed. Of course, these aren’t the real versions of those apps. They won’t work well or fully, so eventually it might become obvious that something nefarious is happening. But maybe not: it could be that an unsuspecting user tries to install and open the app, ...