Completely focused on a chat interface, meetings, and video calls, Microsoft Teams Essentials is designed especially for small businesses.
The difference between this new version and Microsoft 365 Business Basic is mainly centred around the functionalities of Teams and cloud storage. Teams Essentials offers extended limits like longer meetings and more storage. Among its special functions, specially designed for small businesses, the following functions stand out:
No time limit: you won’t have to worry about the time in your meetings anymore. This version has up to 30 hours, so time will no longer be a limit in both private and group meetings.
More capacity: Teams Essentials offers the ability to bring up to 300 people together in the same virtual room.
Calendar integration: you can use your existing calendar to control your meetings and times. This version will allow you to integrate your Outlook Calendar and soon also your Google Calendar.
Easy invitations: the function of inviting people to your meetings is much simpler in this version. You can simply invite them by adding their email address. They will receive a link to join your meeting. Also, if participants don’t have Teams, they can open the meeting in their browser. No more installations or user creations will be necessary.
More interactivity: virtual backgrounds, together mode, live closed captions, live reactions, and more. Everything you need to make your meetings much more interactive.
Ongoing chat: chat conversations will continue even if the meeting is over.
Small business group chats template: quickly start a group project and host meetings with anyone, assign tasks to teammates and create polls to receive feedback quickly all in one hub, taking productivity to the next level.
Mobile chat: you can have access to all the content of your meetings and organize them by locations, photos, files, etc. The main objective of all these improvements is to facilitate the us of applications and simplify them into a single app that meets all the needs that small businesses need in their day-to-day.
When it comes to pricing Microsoft Teams Essentials could look appealing at just $4 per user per month, against the Zoom Pro license is $14.99 per month. Microsoft Teams Essentials is now available.
Would you like to try it? What functionality would you add to this version of Teams for Small Business?
Microsoft Teams is fast becoming the perfect tool for the hybrid workforce. Modes of work are changing, and Microsoft knows it. Updates are constant, and these are just the latest. How will they help your business? Let’s find out.
Search experience
Search is essential to Teams. Conversations and group chats can get repurposed for new topics and become quite long. Years-long. Thankfully Teams has redesigned its search to be more intuitive. This allows you to find your messages, people, and your responses faster. This change is driven by artificial intelligence that is based on the content services you interact with the most.
Workgroups management
Organizing workgroups will be much easier with the new “Manage Users”. This tool will allow you to manage all the users you need in one place. It also includes settings for guests and external users.
Font: Microsoft teams website
Teams’ rooms for Surface Hub
Microsoft is quickly adapting to the new workplaces of the world. Functions from desktop Teams and Teams rooms (MTR) are being added to Meeting Space. The meeting controls have been improved, such as scenes in “Together mode”, large gallery, live reactions, PowerPoint Live, Whiteboard, and chat bubbles. The Whiteboard tool has also been improved. Now it is much cleaner and, more spacious and with a more modern look.
Photo: Microsoft teams website
Teams Admin Centre
Teams Admin Centre is a self-managed platform that Microsoft will launch at the end of the year. The platform will oversee remote monitoring and managing the Teams Rooms experience.
Big news for Teams Phone
To allow much more mobility, Teams has made several improvements to its mobile app. You can now transfer calls seamlessly between your devices, such as moving it from your desktop to your mobile and vice versa. The great thing about this is that the call will not suffer any interruption.
Teams have also incorporated a spam prevention feature. This uses some advanced techniques to identify spam calls.
Can you answer Teams calls in the car?
One piece of great news is that you can now answer your business calls while on the road. Apple CarPlay is compatible with Teams so you can join calls and meetings using vehicle controls or hands-free with Siri. You can also transcribe and record calls with Teams Phone. Handy!
Smart cameras
Soon you will be able to enjoy some more futuristic features from Teams. It’s being updated to support smart cameras. These cameras will be supplied by partners like Jabra, Neat, Poly, and Yealink. These cameras will monitor for active speakers, along with support for multiple video transmissions with facial recognition. This last feature includes tracking facial movements and gestures to detect who is speaking.
This under-the-hood advancement will make it that much easier to level up your business’s hybrid work model. The big goal is to have no difference between regular and online meetings.
It is proposed that in 2022 Teams will manage to control issues such as lighting. Using artificial intelligence, the goal is for the Platform to be able to make lighting corrections in real-time, while the meeting is taking place.
PowerPoint in Microsoft Teams
This great collaboration means you can present without opening PowerPoint. You only need to open PowerPoint Live, simplifying the experience of presenting remotely. It also you to progress through the slides while viewers share their reactions to a presentation, such as an applause and hearts.
How do I show a PowerPoint in Microsoft Teams?
To use this new option, connect PowerPoint Live with Teams. It is as simple as pressing the “Present in Teams” button (in the top right). You’ll automatically have access to your meeting from within Teams.
With all these updates, Microsoft Teams is looking to become the best tool to support your transition into hybrid work. What kind of needs do you think Teams should cover to improve your daily work? Do you think the future of work will be hybrid?
Did you know that if you use Teams, you can control its sounds and notifications? In this article, we are going to teach you 6 techniques for personalising teams.
1. Where are the notification settings?
Access your notification settings by selecting your profile photo in the upper right corner of Teams, then Settings> Notifications.
2. Enable or disable notifications
To choose whether to play a sound with each new notification, select the three dots next to your profile picture in the top right corner of Teams, then Settings> Notifications> toggle between off and on.
In this state, the notification sounds are on.
Note: Currently only Android mobile devices can choose what type of sound is played for notifications.
3. Default settings
By default, you’ll receive desktop notifications and activity feedback alerts for @mentions, direct messages (chat), and all-new conversations and @mentions on the channels and teams shown in your list.
All of these defaults can be changed.
4. Ways to be notified
The activity feed
You’ll find it in the upper left corner of Teams. This is where we’ll let you know what’s happening on your teams and channels.
Then there is chat
This is where group and one-on-one conversations happen. As you receive multiple messages, we will count them for you.
Desktop, also known as Banner, notifications
In Windows, they will be displayed in the lower right corner of the screen and then moved to the Action Center.
On Mac OS, they are displayed in the upper right corner of the screen and then moved to the Control Centre.
Note: If you use Teams on the web, some browsers will only display notifications in the browser tab where you are running Teams.
Windows
Mac
5. Email
If you want to use email to keep track of Team conversations as they happen, use the missed activity email. You can choose how often you get them.
For a summary of the day’s activity, please use the summary email. You will receive this email at the beginning of each day.
6. How notifications work in the mobile app.
One of the first things you’ll want to do is choose whether to send notifications to your phone always, or only when you’re not active on the desktop. (you are considered inactive after 3 minutes of desktop inactivity.)
The other thing you’ll want to set up is your quiet hours. To do this, go to More in the upper left corner of the mobile app, then Notifications > Quiet hours. Then, set a specific time of day when you want Teams to hold your notifications. You can also choose full days.
Need more help? More Info.
If you need to know how each of the notifications work step by step, we recommend you read this guide from the Microsoft support blog.
How to suppress noise in calls
A great feature of Teams is AI based noise suppression. This eliminates unwanted background noise from your surroundings. It works by using deep neural networks to analyse audio sources and separate human speech signals from unwanted noise.
How to turn on noise suppression
Click the three dots next to your profile picture in the upper right corner and then select the Settings option.
Choose Devices on the left and then under Noise Suppression, select one of the following options: Automatic (default), Low or High.
It is important to note that your processor must support Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to opt for the “high” setting. Users will be able to change this setting at any time, and once changed, the setting should be retained for the next meeting or call. Alex Eggers, Microsoft MVP, created a video that delves into its inner workings with the settings.
The advent of AI-based noise suppression is important step for Microsoft Teams. This should help limit distractions in a remote work setting. Although Microsoft says the feature will be generally available to desktop users in mid-December, there is no news on whether it will be rolled out on iOS and Android.
With the massive growth in video conferencing in 2020, Microsoft have added some useful features to Teams, with the promise of more to come. Let’s take a look at some of the new functionality.
Together Mode
Instead of seeing all the users in a square or rectangular grid separately, you can see all of them together in a virtual space. This feature is the new “Together Mode” which is designed to build a virtual live avatar of all members of the team and negate their backgrounds.
Raise Your Hand
During a Microsoft Teams meeting, a participant can use the Raise Your Hand option to get the speaker’s and moderator’s attention.
Thanks to this feature, participants can signal that they want to talk without disrupting the meeting, and the moderator or speaker can see if anyone in the meeting wants to talk.
Raise Your Hand makes meetings more inclusive by encouraging participation from participants, and provides a simple, quick way to take a poll of participants.
Third Party Meeting Join for Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR)
Microsoft Teams Rooms devices support a one-touch experience for joining third-party online meetings. When enabled, you can use a Teams Rooms device to join meetings hosted on Cisco WebEx and Zoom just as easily as you can join meetings hosted in Microsoft Teams.
Before you can join third-party meetings from a Teams Rooms device, you’ll need to do the following:
Configure the Teams Rooms device’s Exchange Online room mailbox to process invites for third-party meetings
Make sure your organization doesn’t have any policies that would prevent you from connecting to third-party meeting services
Configure your Teams Rooms devices to allow third-party meetings
Breakout rooms
Breakout rooms allow meeting organizers to split up meeting participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions. Presenters can choose to hop between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and/or close the breakout rooms that then bring everybody back into the main meeting.
Custom layouts (coming soon)
Coming later this year or early 2021, custom layouts allow for a more dynamic content viewing experience and enable presenters to customize how content shows up for participants during a meeting. For example, when a presenter is showing a PowerPoint slide, participants will be able to see the presenter’s video feed transposed onto the foreground of the slide they’re showing.
Teams is rapidly adding useful functionality to maintain its place as one of the leading videoconferencing solutions, while maintaining interoperability with other platforms. If your business is looking for such a solution, now might be a good time to hop on the Teams train.
Microsoft Teams Teams is the key tool we use to modernise and optimise. Ditch expensive old school infrastructure. Why move to Teams Do you need your server? For many businesses, the operating costs and liabilities can be eliminated with a switch to m365. Teams, a...
Picture this: Your business is thriving, operations are smooth, and everything seems perfect. But then, disasterstrikes – a cyber attack, a hardware failure, or even a simple human error wipes out your critical data in an instant. It’s a nightmare scenario, but it’s one that can be prevented with a simple yet powerful solution: regular backups. In this article, we’ll dive into the world of data protection and uncover why regular backups are the unsung heroes of business resilience.
Understanding Regular Backups
Regular backups serve as a critical key component of the Essential 8 framework, providing a foundational pillar for resilience in the face of cyberthreats and data loss. Regular Backups involve creating copies of your critical data and storing them in a separate location from your primary system. These backups serve as a safety net, allowing you to restore your data in the event of data loss or system failure. By maintaining up-to-date backups, you can minimise downtime, protect against data loss, and ensure business continuity.
Why Regular Backups Matter
1
Protection Against Data Loss
Data loss can occur due to various reasons, including hardware failures, cyber-attacks, and accidental deletion. Regular backups provide a reliable means of recovering lost data and minimising the impact of such incidents on your business operations.
2
Resilience Against Ransomware
Ransomwareattacks can encrypt your data and render it inaccessible until a ransom is paid. With regular backups, you can restore your data from a clean backup, avoiding the need to pay the ransom and mitigating the impact of the attack on your business.
3
Compliance Requirements
Many industries have regulatory requirements regarding data protection and retention. Regular backups help ensure compliancewith these regulations by providing a means of preserving data integrity and availability.
How to Implement Regular Backups
1
Identify Critical Data:
Start by identifyingthe data that is essential for your business operations. This may include customer records, financial data, intellectual property, and other sensitive information.
2
Choose Backup Solutions
Select backup solutions that meet your business needs and budget. Options include on-site backups, cloud-based backups, and hybrid solutions that combine both approaches. Consider factors such as data volume, recovery time objectives, and security features when choosing a backup solution.
3
Establish Backup Schedule
Determine how frequently you need to perform backups based on your data recovery objectives and the frequency of data changes. For critical data, daily or real-time backups may be necessary, while less critical data may require less frequent backups.
4
Test Backups Regularly
Regularly test your backups to ensure they are functioning correctly and that you can successfully restore data when needed. Conducting backup tests helps identify any issues or gaps in your backup strategy and allows you to address them proactively.
5
Automate Backup Processes
Whenever possible, automate backup processes to minimise manual intervention and ensure consistency. Use backup software or tools that offer scheduling, monitoring, and reporting features to streamline the backup process and ensure data integrity.
Regular backups are a fundamental component of a robust cybersecurity strategy, providing essential protection against data loss, ransomware attacks, and regulatory non-compliance. By implementing regular backups and following best practices, you can safeguard your business’s critical data and ensure its resilience in the face of unforeseen events. Don’t wait until it’s too late – start backing up your data regularly today to protect your business’s future. For expert guidance and support in implementing regular backups for your business, contact KeyTech. We specialise in cybersecurity solutions tailored to meet the unique needs of small businesses, helping you safeguard your data and ensure business continuity.
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In today’s swiftly evolving digital landscape, small businesses are constantly searching for tools to streamline their operations, foster productivity, and enhance collaboration among team members. Power Automate, a component of Microsoft’sPower Platform, is emerging as a revolutionary tool for automating workflows and facilitating seamless communication within teams. This article delves into how Power Automate can transform collaboration by automating notifications for project updates, assignments, approvals, and more, thereby driving efficiency and saving valuable time and resources.
Automating Project Updates
Keeping everyone on the same page can be challenging, especially in dynamic project environments. Power Automate simplifies this by automating the dissemination of project updates. For instance, when a project’s status changes in your project management tool, a cloud flow can automatically send a notification to a team’s communication platform, such as Microsoft Teamsor Slack. This ensures that every team member is promptly informed about project progress, reducing the need for manual follow-ups and meetings.
Streamlining Assignments
Assigning tasks is a fundamental aspect of teamwork that can often become cumbersome. Power Automate enables the automation of task assignments through integration with various project management tools. When a new task is created, it can automatically assign the task to the relevant team member based on predefined criteria, such as expertise or workload, and notify them via their preferred communication channel. This not only speeds up the distribution of work but also ensures a fair and efficient allocation of tasks.
Facilitating Approvals
Approval processes are critical in many business operations, from expense reimbursements to document signoffs. Power Automate streamlines this process with automated approval workflows. When a request is submitted, an approval flow is triggered, sending a notification to the approvers’ email or mobile app, where they can review and respond to the request with a simple click. This accelerates decision-making and keeps processes moving smoothly, eliminating bottlenecks that can arise from manual approval methods.
Empowering Teams with Timely Information
Access to timely information is vital for effective collaboration. Power Automate can be configured to send notifications for various triggers, such as when a deadline is approaching or when a critical document is updated. This ensures that team members are always aware of important milestones and changes, enabling them to take timely actions and make informed decisions.
Customising Communication Channels
Different teams have different communication preferences, and Power Automate accommodates this diversity by supporting various channels. Whether your team prefers email, instant messaging, or a dedicated project management tool, Power Automate can deliver notifications through these channels, ensuring that the information reaches everyone in their preferred format. This flexibility enhances the effectiveness of communication and collaboration within the team.
For small businesses looking to enhance collaboration and efficiency, Power Automate offers a powerful solution. By automating notifications for project updates, assignments, approvals, and more, teams can significantly reduce manual tasks, stay informed in real time, and focus on strategic work that drives business success. Power Automate not only saves time and money but also fosters a culture of transparency and responsiveness, which are crucial elements in today’s competitive business landscape. Embracing Power Automate is a step towards revolutionising teamwork and propelling your business forward in the digital age.
Are you ready to revolutionise your business processes and boost collaboration? Reach out to KeyTech today, and together let’s explore how Power Automate can transform your workflows. Together, we’ll tailor solutions to maximise efficiency and propel your business to new heights. Contact us now for a personalised consultation.
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In the dynamic realm of cybersecurity, closing the knowledge gap becomes crucial for staying one step ahead of potential threats and developing strong cyber practices. This series explores the ACSC Essential Eight component: patch applications. This article delves into the intricacies of this frequently underestimated strategy, which plays a pivotal role in the defence against cyber threats.
Unravelling Patch Applications:
While discussions about application patching may occasionally go unnoticed, its significance cannot be overstated. Given that 34% of infection vectors are linked to vulnerability exploitation, understanding the crucial role of implementing application patches becomes a cornerstone in cybersecurity defence.
The Challenge: Bridging the Gap:
Making internal teams and clients understand the importance of “patch applications” presents a challenge. As we delve into this strategy, it’s clear that awareness and education play crucial roles in ensuring it’s implemented effectively.
Patching Applications Explored:
Patching applications involves more than creating a software asset register. Utilising a vulnerability scanner becomes critical, ensuring applications are up-to-date and all potential vulnerabilities are addressed. This process is intricately linked with application control, providing clarity on which applications require patching.
Identifying and keeping track of installed applications in end-user computing pose a major challenge in the patching process. This is often because many organisations don’t have an asset register and their users have the freedom to independently install applications.
Organisational Impact and Solutions:
Patching applications can be expensive, involving upfront and ongoing costs like time, effort, staffing, and software resources. It’s essential for decision-makers to be educated on standardising applications and set up processes for automatic identification and maintenance tools.
Empowering Cyber Infrastructure Protection:
In hardening endpoints and reducing attack surfaces, a robust application patching mechanism proves essential. This strategy, integrated into the ACSC Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents framework, holds an “essential” effectiveness rating. Understanding the benefits empowers organisations to address customer concerns and unique challenges, bridging the gap between technical procedures and business processes. Education and improvement in cybersecurity practices contribute to collective protection against evolving threats. Stay tuned as we continue to unravel the Essential Eight, enhancing cybersecurity resilience one strategy at a time.
