This week I read a great book titled The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. It’s a book meant for managers, IT guys, and everyone else in the business world to understand how IT connects to practically everything we do on our jobs, and how IT should be managed to be as useful as possible. The IT heroes in this novel implement a way how to deploy a new release of a program 10 times a day. And the company wins the market.

This DevOps method described in the book is a widely accepted way of deploying new software nowadays. Facebook uses it. Amazon, too. And, of course, Microsoft.

And now my Friday rant. Why I’m telling you this? Because in my humble opinion, the rate of change is too great and it’s the reason why people are getting pis*** off.

For the last few weeks, I’m helping Microsoft Partners to get their partnership with Microsoft in order. When I started 3 weeks ago I could find one specific piece of information in one menu in their Partner Center, a week later it was moved to another menu and now the same data resides somewhere else.

Tell me … Am I getting to old for this?

Have a nice day. Matic Z.

Sync Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders to OneDrive. Do it as soon as possible to gain a better night’s sleep knowing your files are safer.

Download free eBooks for Microsoft OneNote. In my humble opinion, OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps. Okay, there are a few drawbacks like the missing word and character counter and untamed auto-correct but still. My big thumbs up. A few ebooks to give you tips and tricks and use cases for OneNote.

5 things you may not know about the free version of Microsoft Teams. Yes, MS Teams also comes in free flavor. Those features listed in the article are also available in the paid version, of course.

Watch out Zoom: Microsoft Teams now has more than 115 million daily users. And that’s quite an impressive number. More than 40 million new users added from April 2020. Like I mentioned in the previous issue, MS Teams is catching up with Zoom. And it’s way cheaper.

4 ways to deliver better meetings with apps in Microsoft Teams. By now we all know that virtual meetings are quite a bit more exhausting than real ones. Let’s make Teams meeting better and more tolerable for all of the participants.

How to Use Forms to Poll Participants in a Teams Meeting. Did you know you can use polls during MS Teams calls?

Send a Teams meeting invitation from a group mailbox. Sometimes it’s better to not disclose who’s organizing a call. You can send an invitation from the group mailbox to hide.

Edit a video in the Microsoft Stream mobile app. I will do for some basic editing.

How to set up a self-service password reset in Office 365. A useful feature to enable if you want to reduce helpdesk calls for password resets.

Create a distribution list in Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online). Step-by-step tutorial.

How can users change their own passwords in Microsoft 365? Send this to the users and they won’t bother you anymore.

Microsoft Has a New Password Manager for Consumer and Enterprise Customers. And it’s built into the Authenticator app. You’ll need to load the extension to use it with the browser.

Hackers are Bypassing Transport Layers and Depositing Spam via IMAP. Vade Secure has detected a wave of spam emails that are being directly deposited into mailboxes without passing through transport layers. That’s why the world needs to stop using obsolete mail retrieval protocols. I’m pointing fingers at you, POP3, and IMAP protocols.

Microsoft Office 365 Credentials Under Attack By Fax ‘Alert’ Emails. Well, what to say about that? The mailing system is as secure as the weakest password or user is.

January 14, 2021. We’re moving to Microsoft 365, now what? Meetup.

Family Activities. Christmas is around the corner and this year a lot of us will be confined to our living quarters due to lockdowns and other anti pandemic measures. At least let’s have some fun!

Is ‘Inbox Zero’ achievable (or relevant) in a Microsoft Teams world? Do you know the Inbox zero method? I discovered it years ago and it helped me to stay out of the psychiatric ward ever after. An interesting debate developed in this podcast.

Considerations for optimized performance in Power Apps. Quite an extensive article on the inner workings of Power Apps and how to make them perform better. Well explained best practices for low-coders.

4 of the biggest Microsoft Influencers about failures 90% of the companies make with the modern workplace. I agree with Christian Buckley: Microsoft 365 is not “set it and forget it”. It’s a well-working machine with a lot of moving parts that need good maintenance.

Compliance. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. GDPR, CCPA, NIST, HIPAA, PIPEDA … A lot of complicated compliance laws to follow wherever on the planet you live. There’s no escape.

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☁️ Last but not least …

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