Microsoft’s Office 2016 suite for Windows 7, 8 and 10 PCs and tablets is available since September 22, 2015. Here’s what’s new and what’s still to come for Office users.

 

Microsoft made a first public preview of the suite — which runs on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 PCs and laptops — back in March of 2015. Testers had been working with private previews of the suite since 2014.

The full Office for Windows 2016 suite includes new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Project, Visio and Access.

There are not a lot of major new features in this release. Microsoft’s main focus with the new version of Office for Windows has been on adding team-collaboration functionality. Among some of the new features in the suite are coauthoring for Word, PowerPoint and OneNote; real-time typing in Word; new integrated Power BI publishing functionality in Excel; and updated search and navigational capabilities in Outlook.

Users who subscribe via Office 365 consumer and/or business plans which include rights to the Office apps also get will get additional, supplemental services and features, including Microsoft’s Sway digital-storytelling app/service; new Office 365 Groups functionality; and more.

As is the case with Windows 10, Microsoft is planning to fill out some of the partially baked Office 2016 features in the suite with regular updates in the coming months. Microsoft is still working on improving and syncing its OneDrive online-storage service. The promised new sync clients for Windows and Mac are due later this year. Built-in coauthoring for the other Office 2016 apps beyond Word is also still in the works. And Enterprise Data Protection, a security feature that Microsoft has promised for Windows 10, also will be coming for Office 2016 for Windows in early 2016, and the Office Mobile apps later this year, company officials said.

Starting with the Office 2016 for Windows release, Microsoft is moving to a new servicing model for Office 365 which is similar to the one it has put in place for Windows 10, with different servicing “branches” providing users with new Office features and fixes on a regular basis.

While on the subject of dates, here’s what Microsoft officials are saying in terms of availability for Office 2016 for Windows (and other related Office apps and services).

The Office 2016 apps are available in 40 languages starting today. Office 365 subscribers can choose to download manually the new Office 2016 apps as part of their subscription starting today. Automatic updates of the Office 2016 apps will begin rolling out to consumer and small business subscribers in October 2015, and to commercial customers early next year. Office 2016 is also available today as a one-time purchase for both PCs and Macs.

Update:

A Microsoft spokesperson said MSDN subscribers will have access to both Office 2016 for Mac and Windows today, starting at about 9 am PT/noon ET. Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) availability for Office 2016 for Windows will be October 1. (VLSC customers got Office 2016 for Mac in August.)

Office 365 Planner, the lightweight project-management service (formerly codenamed “Highlander”), which Microsoft is building into its Office 365 business subscriptions, will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers starting next quarter. And GigJam — a new task-completion service which Microsoft demonstrated earlier this summer — is in private preview as of today, and will be available to Office 365 business subscribers in 2016.

Office 2016 for Windows and Office 2016 for Mac are Microsoft’s two fully-featured Office desktop suites. The company also offers a variety of universal’ and/or mobile Office mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phones and Windows PCs and tablets.

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One in 10 web-facing computers is still running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, according to a report – despite the OS no longer being patched by Microsoft.

Hundreds of thousands of computers are still using the Windows Server 2003 operating system – despite it no longer being patched against hacks.

Internet services found more than 600,000 web-facing computers, together hosting millions of websites, still running the OS that Microsoft ceased supporting in July this year.

The end of support means the OS no longer receives patches against viruses, spyware and other malware that might seek to exploit the system. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team warns that those running Windows Server 2003 risk “loss of confidentiality, integrity, and or availability of data, system resources and business assets”.

Despite these risks, 175 million websites – what it terms “one-fifth of the internet” – are hosted on machines running Windows Server 2003. The OS also appears to be in use on computers sitting behind web servers for a further 1.7 million sites.

Together accounting for 55 percent, the US and China are home to the bulk of the machines running Windows Server 2003, with 166,000 in the US and 169,000 in China.

The unsupported nature of Windows Server 2003 makes it a tempting target for attackers – which is why it is important for firms to switch away from the OS as soon as possible.

“As time goes by, there will be some vulnerabilities that affect Windows Server 2003 and if those allow things like remote code execution and so on, we’re likely to see a massive number of web-facing computers and a much larger number of websites getting hacked. These could then go on to distribute malware and even be made into botnets to enable other attacks.

“Of course, because Windows Server 2003 is now unsupported, those people who try to find vulnerabilities might even now be particularly focusing on this platform because they know it won’t be fixed.”

Windows Server 2012 R2 is the most recent version of Microsoft’s server-targeted operating system – with a variety of options for licensing. In part, the cost of moving to a more recent Microsoft OS for the proportion of machines still running Windows Server 2003.

“[That proportion] is over 10 percent of all web-facing computers, and shows the true potential cost of migration,” the report states.

Moving a server to a Linux-based OS can be difficult for organisations that have traditionally used Windows Server, Mutton said, particularly if they rely heavily on scripts written for ASP.NET, Microsoft’s server-side web application framework.

The report lists several major firms and banks still running Windows Server 2003 machines, including UK bank NatWest, part of the larger publicly-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

However, while Microsoft is no longer supporting the OS for most users, it will offer fixes for the OS to organisations willing to pay for a custom-support deal.

Such a deal was recently struck by the US Navy, which agreed to pay at least $9m to Microsoft to provide ongoing support for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and Server 2003. A spokesman for RBS said NatWest is also covered by a custom support deal with Microsoft that began in March this year.

Firms without such a custom support deal in place that use Windows Server 2003 to serve sites that handle financial information could be in breach of data security standards, which carries out security testing and assessments for companies.

The requirement under Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) 6.2 that “all system components and software to be protected from known vulnerabilities by installing vendor-supplied

“Many merchants still using Windows Server 2003 are likely to be noncompliant and could face fines, increased transaction fees, reputational damage, or other potentially disastrous penalties such as cancelled accounts.”

Microsoft advises several options for machines still running Windows Server 2003 – including switching to Windows Server 2012 R2 or its cloud platform Microsoft Azure. It provides an interactive Windows Server 2003 Migration Planning Assistant.

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Tips and advice for making the best use of this medium.

E-mail is a great tool that has become both a blessing and a curse. Designed to enhance productivity in the workplace, it slowly had the reverse effect. Today, e-mail is ubiquitous, much easier to use, and often abused. It’s time to focus on how to turn e-mail back into an effective management tool for 21st century executives.

Don’t use it to do your thinking for you. Writing e-mails at work is not like doing calculus at school. At school you needed to show that your logic flow was part of the answer. With e-mail, assume no one is interested in how you came to your conclusion. They are only interested in what impacts them and their work and anything on which they need to take action.

Make your request clear. When publishers lay out a newspaper, they place the most important news “above the fold.” You should think the same way about your e-mails, especially when you are making requests. If you ask for something, always put that request, including names and dates related to it, in the first two or three sentences of your e-mail. Do not assume that the reader will read far enough to see the request buried in all of the detail.

Limit emotion of all types. Humor can cut through a lot of noise when you communicate, and it can help a team rally around a common thought or issue, but it rarely belongs in e-mail. This is especially true of sarcasm, which is very easy to misinterpret. The reader almost never understands what you are trying to communicate.

Use the save button before the send button. When we were young and got angry, people told us to count to 10 before saying anything. When you need to be cool and show that you have a levelheaded approach to problems, the last thing you want to do is send an e-mail. If you are writing an e-mail about an emotional or difficult topic, such as a performance review or a follow up to a contentious meeting, save the e-mail. Then, come back to it in 30 minutes or even the next day and decide whether you want to send at all.

Use the phone. These days, an e-mail lasts forever and there is no such thing as privacy in the workplace. In many cases, the laws and regulations governing publicly held companies require strict adherence to document retention rules. If you don’t want someone else to read what you wrote, don’t send it via e-mail. Also, if the subject matter you want to discuss is important and sensitive or personal, a phone call or face-to-face discussion is always the better option.

The bottom line. E-mail is a great tool for communicating, although we are never as effective as we think we are going to be. Remember to stop and think before hitting “send.”

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This month our website team launched a website for Narberth Ambulance. Narberth Ambulance is an organization built on the countless hour of work over 70 years and now responds to over 6100 calls a year and provides most qualified EMT’s and Paramedics. Like the majority of websites we develop, Narberth Ambulance is fully responsive and is helping thousands of people.

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Windows 10 is now available as a free update. Here is what you can expect when you say “yes” to the update.

Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of the upgrade process while upgrading Windows 8 machine to Windows 10.

Launch Windows 10 upgrade through Windows Update

Look for the Update screen in Windows 8 and click the Check for Updates link. When the check is over, you will see the screen shown in Figure A.

As you can see, it is a 2699.0 MB download. Click the Get Started button and then the screen shown in Figure B will appear.

You may be able to get Windows 10 via a free update, but it still requires that you agree to a license/user agreement.

The next screen (Figure C) is very important. Updating takes about 2 hours depending upon the machine. If you cannot afford to be off your computer for that long, it may be a good idea to schedule a time when you can.

Installation process

After you start the update process, your PC will immediately restart. From that point on you will just have to wait for the update to finish. During update the screen gets blank for over an hour, so please don’t panic and turn your PC during this seeming lack of activity.

Your PC may also restart several times during the update, but eventually you will reach a screen that asks if you want to do an Express Configuration or a Custom Configuration. Express configuration will be the best choice for most people.

Note that the update does take a bit of bandwidth, so it might be more efficient to update one PC at a time.

When the entire update procedure is complete, you will be presented with the Windows 10 desktop or tablet interface depending on your device as you can see in Figure D.

There are new versions of OneDrive and the Snipping Tool in Windows 10. Of course, there is also the new web browser, Microsoft Edge, too.

Get Windows 10 without using Windows Update

If you would like to get Windows 10 without going through the update process, for a clean install for example, then you will have to download the Windows 10 ISO file.

If you have a Windows Vista or Windows XP PC you would like to update, you have to purchase Windows 10. Windows 10 Home will cost you $119, while Windows 10 Pro will cost $199.

As of July 29, 2015, most new devices will be available with either Windows 10 or Windows 8.1, which can be upgraded to Windows 10 for free. If your PC is more than a few years old, it might make more sense to spend money on a new device rather than to update an old one.

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PPTP VPN Blocks Internet Connection on Windows 10

After setting up a PPTP VPN from new Windows 10 computer our team couldn’t get internet access.

So we tested to make sure it wasn’t just DNS playing up and pinged 8.8.8.8 but no good.

So we tested pinging my default gateway and that worked, so then we tested pinging the default gateway of the remote network that we were connected to via the VPN and that also worked.

So we figured it must have something to do with Windows 10 not allowing split tunnels by default.

Configure Split Tunnel In Windows 10 PPTP VPN

You must be connected to the PPTP VPN for the network settings below to be available, if you are not connected to the VPN from Windows 10 then the network settings will not work.

Go to network and sharing center, you can get here by right clicking the network icon on the taskbar and selecting “Open Network and Sharing center”

Select “Change adapter settings”

Right click on the PPTP VPN connection and select properties

Select “Networking” on the top menu

Select “Internet Protocol Version 4(IPv4)” and click the “Properties” button

Another window will open, in this windows select “Advanced”

Tick the box that says “Use default gateway on remote network” and hit “OK”

Now you will be able to browse the internet through the VPN on Windows 10.

Found a solution using Powershell (Run as administrator):

Get-VpnConnection
That will get you the name, and other info, of the vpn

then run

Set-VpnConnection -Name MY_VPN_NAME -SplitTunneling $true

replace MY_VPN_NAME with the name of your vpn connection.

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TECHIES is a full Managed IT Services Company headquartered in Marlton, New Jersey for over 20 years with a new location opening soon in Wilson, North Carolina. TECHIES provides Managed IT Services, Cybersecurity Solutions, Website Design Services, Dedicated Server Solutions, IT Consulting, VoIP Phone Solutions, Cloud Solutions, Network Cabling and much more.

IT leaders considering a Windows 10 migration as a cornerstone initiative risk having a focus that is a decade behind.

Microsoft and I have been “partners” in computing since my father brought home a strange beige box with MS-DOS 2.11 installed. I remember a few years later shuffling through a half-dozen 3.5-inch floppy disks and watching in amazement as my C:\> prompt was replaced with the seemingly magical Windows 3.0 user interface, kicking off years of computing bliss (and occasional frustration) with the famed Wintel alliance at my side.

Much as my early days of computing were defined by Microsoft, CIOs, and even average computer-using “civilians,” hung on the company’s every announcement. A Service Pack release, let alone a new version of Windows, was a cornerstone item in most IT project portfolios. In the past few years, a confluence of developments brought us to today, where Windows 10 — Microsoft’s soon to be latest and greatest OS update — barely registers on most CIOs’ radars.

The end of desktop dominance

Sales of traditional desktops and laptops, and now even tablet computers, have been fading for several years. Perhaps the greatest contributor to this trend is the rise of hosted applications, whether they’re public web apps like Gmail, heavy-duty enterprise applications accessed through a browser, or cloud offerings. Increasingly, Windows is merely a portal to get to the web-based tools we need to get our jobs done.

Even the web browser, once the subject of complex anti-trust lawsuits and one of the greatest “battles” in technology history, has become largely irrelevant. Whether Chrome, Firefox, IE, or Safari is the “weapon of choice,” they’re now about as relevant to how we consume computing services as a Samsung TV vs. a Sony TV is to experiencing the latest episode of Game of Thrones.

The failed “Windows Everywhere” gambit

Microsoft did something bold with Windows 8 by attempting to create an OS that transparently adapted to the user’s device. Dock your tablet, and the OS would theoretically adapt to a keyboard and mouse-centric computing experience. For developers, write a single “Modern” app and easily run it on a variety of Microsoft products from Xboxes to phones.

Unfortunately, the gamble failed. Windows 8 was panned by enterprise customers, most of whom migrated from XP to Windows 7 as support for XP ended, even though Windows 8 was an available option. Consumers were confused by the new user interface, and developers opted to follow the money to the Android and iOS platforms.

Windows 10 promises to rectify many of the failures of Windows 8, much as Windows 7 helped the company regain its footing after stumbling with Vista. However, we’re in a very different place than the summer of 2009, when the iPhone was still largely scoffed at as a “serious” enterprise device, and most corporate software still ran on fat clients that necessitated a capable desktop. The world was clamoring for a better Windows; now, most of that excitement is reserved for the latest Android device or iPhone.

Freeing Windows

Microsoft seems to have recognized this trend, and has made upgrades to its desktop OS free for consumers and made its crown jewel, Microsoft Office, available on platforms ranging from Android phones, to Mac desktops, to web browsers. Rather than a destination in itself, the desktop is now a gateway to a company’s cloud offerings like iTunes, Azure, Siri, and Cortana. Even Google is in on this game, offering its own platform with just enough muscle to get a user online and connected to Google’s portfolio of services.

The bottom line for IT leaders

Even though Windows 10 may be relevant to your organization, it doesn’t mean you should let Microsoft define your enterprise computing strategy. It seems even the vaunted company realizes that Windows is little more than a gateway to higher value services. As IT leaders, we need to make sure we’ve acknowledged the same trend.

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There is a possibility that microsoft will be selling Windows 10 on USB flash drives.

As you may know, installing an operating system from a USB flash drive is easier and faster than installing it from an optical disc. A USB flash drive is not as bulky as an optical disc and doesn’t require an external case. You just take it out of your pocket, pull off the cap, and insert it into your computer’s USB port. USB flash drives are faster than optical drives too. USB flash drives have read and write speeds that measure in 10x megabytes per second (MB/s), while optical disc read and write speeds measure in 1x MB/s.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that there are a multitude of articles on the web that describe how to create a Windows installation package on a USB flash drive. Microsoft even provides a tool that facilitates the procedure.

With Windows 10 on the horizon, there have been rumors floating around the web that in addition to making the upgrade available as a download, Microsoft will also be selling the retail copies of the new operating system on both DVD and USB flash drive.

As a regular follower of the German website WinFuture, I recently encountered an article that indicates that Microsoft will indeed be selling the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 10 Home and Pro on USB flash drives in addition to the DVD option. Having a USB flash drive option makes sense, because tablets don’t come with optical disc drives.

The WinFuture article contained a screen shot (Figure A) showing catalog details of the USB offerings. As you can see, it appears that the USB flash drive will contain both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Presumably, the USB flash drives will sell for the same price as the DVDs.

Figure A

Windows 10 Home and Pro will be sold on USB flash drives.

You can find a number of software reseller sites (mostly Canadian) with advertisements for the USB flash drive offerings of Windows 10 by Googling the part numbers shown in the screenshot: FQC-08788 for the Pro edition and KW9-00016 for the Home edition. However, keep in mind that we’ll have a clearer vision of the USB flash drive offerings once we get closer to the Windows 10 launch date of July 29th.

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