Microsoft 365
Summary: Microsoft 365 is a great product for businesses to ease their hardware needs. Dave Hodgdon and Steve Ripper from Portsmouth Computer Group discuss why cloud-based software is essential for businesses. Listen or read more to find out about the benefits of Microsoft 365.
Mike: Hey, it’s Tech Tuesday with the folks from the Portsmouth Computer Group here on WTSN. Yay! Dave and Steve are with us. Dave, good to see you. Welcome, my friend. Steve, good to see you. How are you?
Dave Hodgdon: Always our pleasure, Mike. What a great week. July 4th, we’re all fired up to talk about this hot new product today.
Steve Ripper: Thanks, Mike.
Mike: Hot new product. How are you, Steve? Good to see you.
Steve I’m good. I’m good, thank you. Thanks, Mike.
Mike: We haven’t seen you in a few weeks. Things are good at the old company there?
Steve: Oh, of course. Always.
Mike: All right. We talk a lot . . . I want to direct people to the website as well, pcgit.com. You can call them. They’ve got offices in Portsmouth and Dover. (603) 431-4121. That’s the Portsmouth office. The Dover office, (603) 750-0101. Easy numbers to remember.
Dave, just for people who are just joining us for the first time on this Tech Tuesday, Portsmouth Computer Group. What is your focus? The products that you offer, basically for businesses, correct?
Dave: That’s correct. It doesn’t really matter. We’re not a specific vertical. We’re very horizontal. Whether you’re legal, you’re financial, you’re medical, you’re manufacturing, all businesses need security. They all need email communications. They all need to collaborate. They all need remote access. So, our job is to provide them a solution that gives them everything they want at a predictable price, and offering our phenomenal service both on-site and remotely.
Microsoft 365
Mike: Let’s talk about some of these new products. Let’s talk about, Steve, this thing called Microsoft 365. What is Microsoft 365? What is that program all about?
Steve: The idea is, is to have the email systems that companies have been using for the last 10, 15, 20 years, they’ve moved it to the cloud, so Microsoft went and gave it a name called Microsoft 365. Think of it as corporate webmail. The same ideas that they’ve been doing in servers in their facility for the last 10, 15 years, they’re doing it in the cloud now with a subscription-based model. It just makes it easier on companies.
Mike: Now, why has everything moved to the cloud? Just because of space confinement?
Steve: Once we’ve gotten bandwidth that’s fast enough now, now that everyone has it . . . not just home people, but companies have internet that’s so fast now, the real question is, why have the hardware in your building? Why manage the heat? Why manage the performance? Why manage the hardware and the maintenance and everything else when you can just have big companies like Microsoft do it and just pay them a fee?
Mike: Yeah. That’s how it works, pretty much?
Steve: Sure.
Mike: And it’s more convenient, more economical down the road?
Steve: Yeah, and it takes the worries out of, “What’s going on in my server closet? Is it overheating? Did my server start last night? Are they running today?” You let them worry about it. Companies like Microsoft . . . all the large companies, but particularly like we’re talking about, Microsoft, they can do what we call scaling up. Because they can put the money into having thousands of servers in a big facility, smaller companies gain the leverage and the cost savings of letting them handle it instead of them handling it and such.
Mike: Yeah. Dave?
Dave: The name, 365, comes from it’s always on. A lot of businesses, you could have a server, you could have a power outage, you could have an internet outage. It doesn’t really matter with 365, as Steve said. It’s on at multiple locations. So, your phone . . . you could be anywhere and your email is on.
Mike: So, taking the name from the amount of days in the year, it’s always there.
Dave: Correct.
What is Cloud-based Email?
Mike: Always there. What are some of the ways that email in the cloud has changed email for companies, pretty much?
Steve: As I mentioned, the biggest one is not having to deal with the hardware. You’re really just taking that off of the mindset of the managers, of the office managers, of the IT directors of the companies. They don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s really just the biggest change.
They’re starting to add a lot of features that you wouldn’t normally get if you had servers in your building, like web versions of Word and Excel and Office. More intranet-type things, like Facebook clones that you would have maybe in your company, where you can post pictures and web stuff and things like that.
Mike: Is it all secure, though? Pretty secure?
Steve: Oh, sure. Microsoft has what they would call, and I would call, best-of-breed security. They’re having spam protection in their email, they’re having virus protection. Security and managing the metrics of your email that’s going through. You can look at reports, see the different mail flows that are going through really easily.
Mike: Microsoft 365. Dave, is this relatively new on the market?
Dave: No, it’s been around seven, eight years. But as far as the big push recently, Mike, it’s probably been the last four to five years. We’ve probably changed over around 3,000 email boxes to 365. No one’s keeping it on-premise anymore, which was called exchange. I think Microsoft has done a smart thing. You’re really paying for what you use. It’s really no different to the end user. Outlook is Outlook. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s sitting on their server or out in the cloud. It’s still Outlook. Part of what we do is make that transition simple for them. Steve’s our man. He’s the 365 expert.
Advantages of Microsoft 365 for Businesses
Mike: What’s the advantage of a company choosing Office 365 over another cloud email? What’s the real advantage?
Steve: The biggest advantage is, is that it’s going to leverage all of the stuff they’ve been doing for the last 10 years. So, if they’ve been using Outlook, Word, Excel, which was basically the most prevalent app in companies, Office 365 is going to do all of the things that their users in their company have been doing forever. They don’t have to learn new things, a new way of doing how Gmail does it, or how another email system does it. It’s basically the exact same concepts. When we move them from a server that’s in their closet, an email server that they have . . . when we move it to the cloud, everything looks exactly the same.
Mike: Really? And they don’t lose any information when they switch over, right?
Steve: Every time I do one of these transitions, Mike, people go, “Steve, I don’t care about any of that. Am I going to have all my stuff? Is all my email going to be there? Am I going to have my contacts?” Yes. Yes, so we’ll bring everything over to look exactly the way it did before.
Mike: It is like getting a new phone. When you switch over to a new phone, you want to make sure the . . . “Will I get my contacts? Will my music be there?”
Steve: Exactly.
Dave: [crosstalk] all my shortcuts. Yeah.
Mike: “All my messages?” Stuff like that.
Steve: Yes. Yes, it’ll all be there.
Mike: Yeah. We’re speaking to Dave Hodgdon and Steve Ripper from Portsmouth Computer Group. They’re out of Portsmouth and Dover. It’s part of Tech Tuesday here on News Talk 98.1, WTSN. If you’re on the roads, it’s 7:50. 10 before 8:00 on WTSN.
What are some of the ways that spammers try to trick people as far as this goes?
Spamming Scams and How to Avoid Them
Steve: The biggest thing that we’ve been seeing lately is, is that we call it the virtual ATM trick, where they will send you an email that says, “Click this link and come change your password.” Then what they do is they build a whole website that looks like the website that you would log into, but what they really want is your username and password. So it’s kind of like a… You know how they used to, back in the day, they’d put a fake ATM in front of the real ATM and get your credit card info? They’re trying to do that with your username and password. You really got to watch for an email that comes from any of the companies, like a bank website, Bank of America —
Dave: — Amazon.
Steve: — Amazon, Dropbox, Instagram. What they’re really doing is trying to get you to put your username and password in so they can record it. So, you have to be really careful. It’s hard, but we can help you-
Mike: But how do you know? If it’s a fake email from Amazon, how would you know it’s fake?
Steve: We would help, Mike, right? We would help with that. You can ask us. But the other thing you would do is you got to really look at the email, and maybe hover your mouse over the links. That’s really a skill that I try and teach users when I meet with them, is try to say, before you click on it, if you hover that mouse over it, it will show you where it’s going. If where it’s going doesn’t look like it’s anything to do with, say, Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, Instagram, don’t click on it.
Of course, the other piece of advice, of course, is if you’re at all suspicious, don’t, right? Find out from your bank or whoever, is that really true?
Mike: Do you find a lot of people fall for this?
Steve: All the time.
Dave: All the time.
Steve: All the time.
Mike: Really?
Steve: Yeah.
Dave: One of our next topics we’ll talk about —
Mike: It’s hard.
Dave: — is called PhishMe. We’ll get in more detail, Mike, one of our sessions and how to help. That’s really about security awareness and just being . . . they’re trying so many ways to get us, and it’s easy.
Mike: Once again, I want to make sure that I should not respond to that Nigerian prince that gets in touch with me?
Steve: You should not.
Dave: Make that deposit of $50,000.
Mike: Well, it’s something like $10 million, but I don’t even have it. Seems like a good way to make money. But no, don’t do that. Don’t do that.
We’re talking about Microsoft 365 with Steve and Dave from Portsmouth Computer Group. They’re out of Portsmouth and Dover. You can check out their website, pcgit.com. That’s pcgit.com, if you’re in a business and looking to change over your system as well.
We talked about kind of a way to tell if an email is a legitimate message by using that mouse to kind of hover over it. That will really show you, pretty much, how to do that?
How to Know if an Email is Legitimate
Steve: It can work. Again, you should try and look at the address that it came from, like, “Is that something I’ve ever seen? Is this something . . .” Always hold it up to the test of, “is it true? Do I think my password’s about to expire, or do I think that my bank balance is that way?” There’s plenty of ways other than the hovering method of verifying that what they’re doing . . .
I guess the always advice is to be suspicious. I think that most people driving around would know that already. But we always try to say, “It’s okay to ask one more question.” People say to me all the time, “Steve, I’m sorry I keep asking you, ‘Is this okay?'” I’m like, “I would rather you ask me than call me up and go, ‘I got infected.'” Let’s get it ahead of time.
Mike: You know, Steve, I think the problem, both on a personal level and on a business level, that we get so many emails a day that . . . I mean, I get emails at work, I get emails at home, we get emails on your phone. I mean, there’s too much email stuff out there, and that you can get kind of lazy and not be kind of disciplined and figure out, “Well, I can click on that. That’s probably a real one.”
Steve: That’s a good point.
Mike: You get lazy and you just get into that automatic pilot mode, you know, where you’re looking at emails, opening things up. “Oh, yeah, they need my password and username. Oh, great, I’ll give it to them,” and not thinking about what you’re doing. You’re opening up a can of worms, right, Dave, pretty much?
Dave: You got it right there.
Features of Microsoft 365 Email
Mike: Yeah. Real quick now . . . we’re winding down our segment here, but talk about… The email’s always on, so that’s kind of cool. Microsoft 365. Give our listeners some of the benefits to 365 email, pretty much.
Dave: Sure. I feel that your emails, as we talked . . . if the server’s down, you don’t have to worry about it in the cloud. Each user gets up to five devices. They can have it on their tablet, their home computer, their work computer, and their phone. That’s a big one right there.
I feel one of the good things from a business standpoint, it’s the known cost. Each mailbox is around $4. If you got 10 users, that’s $40 a month. Times your 12 months, it’s $480 a year. That’s kind of short money. You know what you’re getting, and you pay for what you use. If you add employees, you add another $4 a month. If you delete an employee, you subtract $4 a month. So, you’re not overbuying all this hardware and it just comes out that way.
You can add encryption if you need it. You can add the latest versions of Office. What else you got, Steve, on that?
Steve: The other thing I always try to emphasize when I talk with corporate managers is, is the reporting that they can do. The reporting is really easy to see. You can just log into the website. Who’s getting the most mail? Who’s not sending any mail at all? How much of different kinds of mail is coming out?
Mike: So, it all can be pretty well tracked.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. Whereas before, it would be maybe you’d have to ask more questions or the reporting was very just obtuse to get to, the web pages now will just show you all kinds of metrics, graphs, tables, forms for what’s going on with your company and the email that’s going out.
Mike: Does the whole system take a long time to install into the system, or no?
Steve: No, the migration, depending on how much email you have, can take a little while. But the move isn’t hard. We track all of that stuff out for you. We will do a plan, what it’s going to look like. We really spend a lot of time with what the expectation will be. What’s going to happen with your users and your email while this is happening?
Mike: All right. Any final words, Dave?
Dave: Just give us a ring here at Portsmouth Computer Group. Love to hear from you on how we can help out with your email system.
Mike: All right, sounds good. Microsoft 365, interesting stuff. Thanks to Steve and Dave from Portsmouth Computer Group.
