Google sends a nudge toward the unencrypted web

Starting in July, Google Chrome marked all HTTP sites as “not secure,” according to a blog post published today by Chrome security product manager Emily Schechter. Chrome currently displays a neutral information icon, but starting with version 68, the browser is warning users with an extra notification in the address bar. Chrome currently marks HTTPS-encrypted sites with a green lock icon and “Secure” sign.

Google has been nudging users away from unencrypted sites for years, but this is the most forceful nudge yet. Google search began down-ranking unencrypted sites in 2015, and the following year, the Chrome team instituted a similar warning for unencrypted password fields.

The Chrome team said the announcement was mostly brought on by increased HTTPS adoption. Eighty-one of the top 100 sites on the web default to HTTPS, and a strong majority of Chrome traffic is already encrypted. “Based on the awesome rate that sites have been migrating to HTTPS and the strong trajectory through this year,” Schechter said, “we think that in July the balance was tipped enough so that we can mark all HTTP sites.”

HTTPS encryption protects the channel between your browser and the website you’re visiting, ensuring no one in the middle can tamper with the traffic or spy on what you’re doing. Without that encryption, someone with access to your router or ISP could intercept information sent to websites or inject malware into otherwise legitimate pages.

HTTPS has also become much easier to implement through automated services like Let’s Encrypt, giving sites even less of an excuse not to adopt it. As part of the same post, Google pointed to its own Lighthouse tool, which includes tools for migrating a website to HTTPS.

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SharePoint now serves up search results personalized to your previous activity and permissions.

In SharePoint Online and on office.com, search is personal, and the search results are even easier to explore. Another user will see different results than you, even when you both search for the same words.

You’ll only see results that you already have access to, and other users can’t find your private documents.

Even before you start typing, you’ll see results based on your previous activity in Office 365. The results update as you start typing.

If these results aren’t what you’re looking for, click the link to see more results or press Enter to open the search results page and see and explore all the results. Here’s an example of search results from SharePoint:

Explore the search results to see more details about the people and files you’ve found, or refine your search to get other results. Here’s an expert tip to quickly see more, or less, details of a result – you can actually click anywhere in the empty space of the result.

You can navigate to locations that you want to explore further and, if you’ve searched in SharePoint Online, you can change where the results come from. For example, if you searched from a site, but really meant to search all of SharePoint, then you’re just one click away. Or, if the site you searched from is associated with another site, but you want to search all the associated sites.

When you exit a search results page, you return to the page where you started your search.

Dictate with your voice in Office

This feature is available to Office 365 Subscribers only.

Dictate in Word or PowerPoint

1) Turn on your microphone and make sure it works. Troubleshoot microphone settings

2) In Word 2016 or PowerPoint 2016, select Home > Dictate.

3) Wait for the icon to turn red.

4) Start talking. As you talk, text appears in your document or slide.

5) Speak clearly and conversationally. Insert punctuation by saying the name of the punctuation mark you want to add.

6) If you make a mistake while dictating, move your cursor to the mistake and fix it with your keyboard. No need to turn off the microphone.

7) When finished, select Dictate again to stop typing.

Dictate in Outlook

1) Turn on your microphone and make sure it works. Troubleshoot microphone settings

2) Open a new email message and select Message > Dictate.

3) Wait for the icon to turn red.

4) Start talking. As you talk, text appears in your email message.

5) Speak clearly and conversationally. Insert punctuation, by saying the name of the punctuation mark you want to add.

6) If you make a mistake while dictating, move your cursor to the mistake and fix it with your keyboard. No need to turn off the microphone.

7) When finished, select Dictate again to stop typing.

Troubleshooting

I don’t see Dictate, or it’s not working

If Dictate isn’t working, make sure you’re connected to the Internet.

You can enable or disable Dictate by going to File > Options and look for Office intelligent services on the General tab.

Important information about Dictate

Dictate is one of the Office Intelligent Services, bringing the power of the cloud to Office apps to help save you time and produce better results.

Your speech utterances will be sent to Microsoft to provide you with this service, and may also be used to improve speech recognition services. For more information see, What are Intelligent Services?

Office Dictate is not HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant.

After performing an in-place upgrade on a Windows machine, you will find a WINDOWS.OLD folder in the root of C:. This folder will have a backup of your old program files, appdata and Windows folder… just in case you need to revert back or recover something that might have been lost during the upgrade. When you try to delete it though you are told you don’t have permissions. Just a small point here, it is generally not recommended to do in-place upgrades on servers. In fact there are some products (e.g. Exchange, ConfigMgr) that explicitly state they do not support upgrading the Operating System. There is of course a difference between “what works” and “what is supported”, but we do suggest where possible you do a clean Server install and migrate your application to the new server. Anyway, let’s assume you’ve understand all the risks and have done a successful in-place upgrade, you now find the old WINDOWS.OLD folder of several GB in size sitting there. If all is well, then you might as well just delete it.

SOLUTION

On Desktop OS version, you can just use the disk cleanup tool to remove it, but that is not available (by default) on Servers, so there are a couple of approaches.

Command line tools to take ownership and delete the folder. Make sure to “run as administrator”

How can I delete the windows.old from an upgraded Windows Server?

For a client OS that’s upgraded, the Disk Cleanup utility can be used to delete the very large windows.old folder containing the old OS. This isn’t available on a server OS without installing the Desktop Experience feature.

To delete, it is necessary to take ownership of the folder, give administrators full control, then delete. This can be done with the commands below:

•  takeown /F c:\Windows.old\* /R /A /D Y
•  cacls c:\Windows.old\*.* /T /grant administrators:F
•  rmdir /S /Q c:\Windows.old

Or you can add the “Desktop” features to provide the Disk Cleanup tool:

Step By Step Guide to Enabling “Disk Cleanup Utility”

1. Open The Roles and Features Wizard

To open the roes and feauture wizard. Lauch the “server manager” by pressing the Windows key

and clicking on the server manage please see Screenshot as shown.

Personally, the command line option is less messy and saves having to add features to your server that don’t really need to be there.

2. Click on Add role and Feature

Click on add role and feture to launch the add role and feature wizard.

3.  Choose installation Type

Choose rolebase or feature based installation to install to local machine.

4. Click Next all the way to features

Click “next” all the way to features. Locate “User Interface and Infrastructure”. Click on “Desktop Experience”

and install additional required feature.

5.  Proceed with the installation and Reboot

Make it sure that you reboot the system

6.  Verify that the Utility is indeed installed

Ready to run diskcleanup. See screen shot below.

Disk Cleanup in Action

Below is a sample snapshot of disk cleanup in action.

FBI warns against VPNFilter malware that targets over 500,000 routers

If you have a home or office Internet router, the FBI has issued an urgent request for consumers to reboot now to help disrupt a massive foreign-based malware attack.

Foreign cybercriminals have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and other networked devices worldwide, the FBI said in a May 25 announcement.

How to help defend yourself from VPNFilter malware:

Turn your router off, then back on. This may temporarily disrupt
the malware and potentially help identify already-infected devices.

Secure the device with a strong, unique, new password.

Upgrade firmware to the latest available version.

Consider getting the Norton™Core Secure Wi-Fi Router designed to
help defend against a variety of possible cyber threats,
including the VPNFilter attack, and is also designed to automatically
update its knowledge of known viruses and other threats.

Recent changes by Microsoft to the Windows 10 support schedule underline why Windows 10 Pro is an ill fit for most companies.

Windows 10 Pro is a dead end for enterprises, a prominent Gartner analyst has argued.

“[We] predict that Microsoft will continue positioning Windows [10] Pro as a release that is not appropriate for enterprises by reducing … support and limiting access to enterprise management features,” Stephen Kleynhans, a research vice president at Gartner and one of the research firm’s resident Windows experts, said in a report he co-authored.

Microsoft’s Windows 10 Pro occupies the middle ground between the consumer-grade Home and the corporate-level Enterprise in features, functionality and price. Because Enterprise versions of Windows have never been available to computer makers, Pro – sometimes, as in Windows 7, tagged Professional instead – has been the most popular pre-installed OS on new business PCs. (Corporations typically re-image new personal computers with Enterprise upon receipt of the devices.)

But although Pro or Professional has a long history in business settings, Microsoft has made numerous decisions in its Windows 10 migration campaign to separate Pro and Enterprise even more, pushing them apart. In Kleynhans’ view, the gap has become unbridgeable.

The last straw was Microsoft’s on-the-fly changes to Windows 10 support.

Last year, the Redmond, Wash. developer announced a six-month support extension for Windows 10 1511, the November 2015 feature upgrade, “to help some early enterprise adopters that are still finishing their transition to Windows as a service.” In February, Microsoft added versions 1609, 1703 and 1709 – released in mid-2016, and in April and October of 2017, respectively – to the extended support list, giving each 24 months of support, not the usual 18.

“Some customers have requested an extension to the standard 18 months of support for Windows 10 releases,” a Microsoft executive said at the time.

There was a catch: Only Windows 10 Enterprise (and Windows 10 Education, a similar version for public and private school districts and universities) qualified for the extra six months of support. Users running Windows 10 Pro were still required to upgrade to a successor SKU (stock-keeping unit) within 18 months to continue receiving security patches and other bug fixes.

Windows 10 Enterprise 1709, for example, and its free “supplemental servicing,” will exhaust support in October 2019. But Windows 10 Pro 1709 runs out of support on April 9, 2019.

“The one thing that really surprised me about the added support,” said Kleynhans in an interview, “was the fact that it didn’t apply to Pro. I think that this telegraphed the fact that, for businesses, Pro is being dead-ended.”

Even though the six-month support extension ended with the 1803 feature upgrade, the one that began reaching some users late last month, in the report Kleynhans co-wrote with Gartner colleague Michael Silver, the duo made clear that they believe Pro is viewed by Microsoft as a second-class citizen.

“Customers currently using Windows 10 Pro should continue to monitor Microsoft’s life cycle announcements because they will eventually need to budget for Windows [10] Enterprise as Windows [10] Pro becomes more ‘pro-sumer’ and small-business oriented,” they wrote in a six-item list of recommendations.

Another component of Microsoft’s current Windows 10 support strategy, something the company has labeled “paid supplemental servicing,” was also out of bounds for those running Windows 10 Pro. The extra support, which Microsoft will sell at an undisclosed price, is available only to Enterprise and Education customers.

Paid supplemental servicing adds 12 months to the 18 months provided free of charge.

“The extensions and paid support option only apply to the Enterprise and Education SKUs,” Kleynhans and Silver said in their report, “Plan and Budget for Short Windows and Office Support Cycles Based on Microsoft’s February 2018 Announcements,” which was published by Gartner last month. “Customers using Windows 10 Pro will still see support end after 18 months. In this way, Microsoft is further reinforcing that it expects enterprise customers to move to the Enterprise edition of Windows 10.”

New SharePoint hub sites make organizing and connecting your intranet easy. 

As business goals and team structures evolve, so too must your sites and the content that lives within them. Ideas must flourish and grow, not become rigid or stale. SharePoint hub sites bring flexible, dynamic building blocks to your company intranet – connecting collaboration and communication. Associating sites together in a hub site enhances discovery and engagement with content, while creating a complete and consistent representation of your project, department or region.

Microsoft first disclosed SharePoint hub sites during Ignite 2017. And recently they announced that they are now rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365. Microsoft encouraged by early adopter feedback, can’t wait for every customer to use and adopt them.

SharePoint hub sites bring the following new capabilities to you and your intranet:

• Cross-site navigation – increase visibility of and navigation among associated sites
• Content rollup – read aggregated news and discover related site activities
• Consistent look-and-feel – establish a common theme to improve visitor awareness of connected sites
• Scoped search – focus on finding content that resides within the hub site’s associated sites

Hub sites support good governance, giving admins a growth framework to maintain relationships between sites over time. They are easy for admins to establish and bring efficiencies for people who work inside and across the sites on a day-to-day basis. And when managing change within the business, it is easy to move a site from one hub site to another.

Getting started with SharePoint hub sites in Office 365

You can convert an existing communication site or modern team time into a hub site, or you can start with a brand-new modern site. We recommend selecting a communication site as the hub site. You can associate multiple team sites and communication sites to model and promote an intranet that reflects the way your people organize. It is easy for admins to create one or more hub sites. After a hub site is created, approved site owners can associate existing team sites and communication sites with the hub site.

Use the SharePoint Online Management Shell to establish your hub sites

Admins, you are the enablers. And the SharePoint Online Management Shell (aka, PowerShell for SharePoint in Office 365) is your enabling tool of choice.

The PowerShell cmdlet you’ll want to get most familiar with is: Register-SPOHubSite https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/HR (where HR URL is the full-path address of the existing site that you want to convert into a hub site). You then will assign a unique security group to designate approved site owners that can associate sites to this new hub. You simply create a mail-enabled security group and add the users. You then run an additional PowerShell command to give that group permissions to associate their sites to the hub site.

Note: You must be a SharePoint administrator or above in Office 365 to create SharePoint hub sites. Site owners, however, can associate a SharePoint site with a hub site that already exists.

Learn more how admins create and manage hub sites.

Associating a site under a hub site

Once a hub site is established, it’s then a two-click process to associate to the hub site.

As the site owner, go to the site you want to have associated to the hub site. Click Settings (gear icon) > Site information > hub site association and select the desired hub.  You’ll only see the hubs you have permission to associate to. And then click Save. You will see the hub navigation appear above. The site itself will inherit the hub theme, and news and activities will begin to flow up to the hub site home page – along with a search crawl of content for any site associated to the hub site. And at any time, per a reorg or change in business direction, you can easily move sites between hub sites. This is the power of a dynamic intranet, one that can change and adapt with the ebb and flow of your ever-changing business landscape. Note: individual sites can only be associated to one hub site at a time.

Note: Sites associated with a SharePoint hub site don’t inherit the permissions of the hub site or any other sites associated with it. Each site, including the hub site, will retain their current permission settings. And as easy as it is to associate a site to a hub site, you, too, can dissaciate from one.

Learn more how to associate and dissociate your sites to and from hub sites.

Design your layout and choose you theme

Once the hub site has been established, you’ll then want to further set it up and refine it for that organization — so the hub site carries the right name and logo, the preferred navigation elements, a preferred theme, and the desired layout for news, sites and highlighted content. And all will re-flow and present beautifully within the SharePoint mobile apps.

The SharePoint mobile apps will display hub sites, and their pages, news, and content, with smooth navigation between associated sites and the scoped search experience. Find what you need on the go and get going! Install or update the SharePoint mobile app today: aka.ms/getSPmobile.

To enable IT admins to better manage the various aspects of Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business services, Microsoft is announcing the new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center.

Now, there’s an admin center just for calling and messaging.

This new portal will offer a unified experience to manage both Teams and Skype for Business and will also include Call Analytics and the Call Quality Dashboard. Admins can also get end-to-end insights and the ability to manage Teams settings on a user level in this new portal.

Following features are available in this release:

Microsoft Teams messaging policy: Create custom policies for messaging scenarios for your users.

User management: Assign policies and configure your users.

Microsoft Teams guest messaging settings: Control the messaging capabilities for guest accounts in Microsoft Teams.

Federation settings: Manage federation between tenants for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. (Please note that federation for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business will roll out in stages and this setting might not be visible for you during the initial rollout.)

Audio conferencing: Configure dial-in numbers and settings for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business.