iOS 9.3 offers several features that might appeal to business-oriented Apple users.

Apple introduced a new version of iOS on Monday. The update includes several new features, including updates to CarPlay and HealthKit, as well as a feature to make it easier for iPads to be used in schools for educational purposes. There are several other new features which are particularly appealing to the business-oriented user.

Here are 3 new features business users should check out.

Night Shift

The proliferation of devices like tablets and smartphones means that some sort of screen is never far away. For many, looking at a screen is the first and last thing they do in the morning and evening.

The problem with that is screens emit blue light, which reduces the amount of melatonin produced in the body. Melatonin is a chemical that helps people fall asleep. The light emitted from smartphones can also cause eye strain, which carries symptoms like headaches and blurred vision.

With this latest version of iOS 9, Apple introduced Night Shift, a feature that automatically adjusts the colors of your display at night. You can schedule times for it to go into effect, manually turn it on and off, and adjust colors on a scale of less warm to more warm.

You can access Night Shift through Settings | Display & Brightness, or through the menu that swipes up from the bottom of the device’s screen.

Password-protected Notes

Notes is iOS’ app for taking, well, notes. iOS 9.3 updates it by allowing users a layer of security. Now, users can lock their notes using either a password or the Touch ID, which makes the app that much more useful.

In order to lock a note, tap the button in the top right corner (the one you might use if you were going to email the note) and then tap Lock Note. When prompted, enter a password, confirm it, and decide if you want to enable the Touch ID. A lock button will appear at the top of the note and in the future if you want to open it, enter the password or use the Touch ID.

More personalized News

The News app now offers more personalization for users, and on a range of topics and publications. So for example, you can select a topic like mobile apps or internet privacy. You can access news by opening the News app, or by swiping right from your main screen.

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Get the inside story on how your PC is managing power:

One of the most powerful diagnostic tools in Windows doesn’t have a graphical interface.

The Powercfg command, which is available only from a command line, allows you to manage, save, and export power settings. But its best trick is the ability to produce a detailed report of energy usage on your PC, including clues about devices or services that are preventing your system from going to sleep when it should.

To produce the energy report, open an administrative Command Prompt window. (From Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, right-click Start and then click Command Prompt (Admin).)

At the command prompt, type cd %temp% and then press Enter to switch to the Temp folder, where your report will be saved.

Enter the command powercfg /energy to begin generating the report. The process monitors your system for 60 seconds and then analyzes the results, saving the report as a document called energy-report.html in the current folder.

To open that report in your default browser, just enter the command start energy-report.html.

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The hackers used “ransomware” to lock the hospital out of its own medical records.

Not all kidnappers grab your loved ones.

A growing online threat – ransomware – essentially abducts your computer system, putting data and services off-limits to users and demanding a payment to restore access.

“We are seeing more cases of this – sometimes almost on a daily basis,” said New Jersey State Police Capt. Steve Jones. “And we’re not seeing all of it, because people may be too embarrassed or don’t believe it can be helped.”

Ransomware viruses are a plague. Once infected — installed to your computer by a website you’ve visited, a rogue email attachment or link, or instant message — your computer will lock up. With names like CryptoWall, these types of viruses may create a popup window or Web page warning you that you’ve broken some law and have to pay a fine, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, according to the FBI.

These scams threaten to encrypt your files forever or destroy them unless a ransom is paid, according to the FBI.

Once paid, your computer is unlocked or a code is sent to unlock the machine, authorities said.

Between April 2014 and June 2015, the FBI received 992 CryptoWall-related complaints with victims reporting a loss of more than $18 million.

The state’s top cybersecurity unit recently launched an online effort to help people guard against ransomware.

“For many organizations, preventing ransomware entirely is nearly impossible,” says the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell (NJCCIC), which introduced a Ransomware Threat Profile page at its website in February.

But it notes individuals and companies can take measures to prevent infections and to limit their impact.

Although ransomware can lock up laptops and desktop computers, the risk is particularly great for data-dependent organizations like hospitals and accounting firms, said Jones, the State Police spokesman.

So far, at least three hospitals have been hit nationwide – in California, Kentucky and the Washington, D.C., area. South Jersey hospitals are well aware of the menace.

“It’s a big concern. It’s something that has really spiked,” said Tom Handlon, chief information security officer for Kennedy Health, which operates three acute-care hospitals in South Jersey.

Handlon gave no details, but said Kennedy seeks to protect itself through protective measures inside its computer system and by promoting safe conduct by employees.
“We’re monitoring it constantly and updating as we go along,” he said. “We are really educating the staff and our entire organization that we are a target.”

A similar view came from Tom Rubino, spokesman for Cooper University Healthcare System in Camden.

“We have tracked the recent wave of ransomware attacks that have targeted hospitals across the nation,” Rubino said. He said Cooper’s IT security team “is proactively taking measures to prevent ransomware infection of our computer systems.”

“Additionally, as a critical component for preventing all computer viruses, we are increasing our employee education efforts.”

A key precaution is to back up your computer’s contents on a frequent basis, Jones said. “But you’ve got to keep the backup drives disconnected,” he warned. “Otherwise, the ransomware can migrate to the backups.”

The State Police in March 2015 investigated a hacking incident that disabled much of the computer system for the Swedesboro-Woolwich school system. In that case, a hacker demanded more than $125,000 in the form of a digital currency called bitcoins.

The district, which did not pay the ransom, had to wipe clean its email servers and cafeteria lunch-ordering system to rid itself of ransomware. Only a handful of classroom computers were infected.

Hackers exploited a gap in the district’s computer security system and a vendor’s “weak” passport to take over the computer system, Michael Procopio, Educational Information and Resource Center’s director of technology, said at the time. EIRC experts helped the district restore its system.

The district’s hacker was believed to have struck from abroad – a familiar pattern, according to the State Police.

“Many of these messages and attacks are coming through foreign servers,” Jones said. “The countries that house these servers are not often countries that have a real open relationship with law enforcement.”

Tools have been available to help decrypt older versions of ransomware, said Dave Weinstein, New Jersey’s director of cybersecurity.

“At this point, the strain has morphed to the point where there is no releasing your files,” said Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s office. “The lock these cybercriminals put on your files is foolproof at this point.”

Unless you’ve backed up your computer prior to the infection, Della Fave said, “The only way you would get your files back is to pay.”

“Ransomware is working” for cyberthieves, said Ben Johnson, chief security strategist at Carbon Black Inc., a  computer security firm in Waltham, Massachusetts. “People are paying.”

In the last few weeks, cybercriminals have come up with some new twists, he said. For instance, one version encrypts files more quickly after someone opens up a malware-filled Microsoft Word document or some other attachment.

Other versions encrypt the computer at its most basic level so it can’t even power on, or use the computer’s own system administration tools to infect itself, he said.

The best course of action is to make sure you don’t get the virus. “You must be super careful what you click on,” Della Fave said.

Here’s what you should do, according to Johnson and the Ocean County prosecutor’s office:

Office 365 provides the productivity tools required by a modern enterprise workforce. This guide covers key details, including available applications, system requirements, and subscription options.

For just about any enterprise of any size, the productivity of its modern workforce revolves around the basic office suite of email, calendar, word processor, and spreadsheet. But as the enterprise workforce has become more mobile, the basic productivity toolset has had to adapt and change to match new requirements. This is why Microsoft updated Office 365 to be a mobile collaborative platform ready to get work done wherever and whenever it happens.

Microsoft Office 365 is the de facto productivity suite for many enterprises and it is the suite all the other competitors are measured against. So as a leader in information technology for your enterprise, it’s in your best interest to know everything there is to know about Office 365. To help you achieve that goal, TechRepublic compiled the most important details and related resources on Microsoft Office 365 into this “living” guide, which we’ll periodically update as new information becomes available.

Executive summary

What is it? Microsoft Office 365 provides users with the basic productivity applications necessary to get work done in the modern enterprise. It includes applications like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive, just to name a few.

Why does it matter? As the standard for productivity suites, competing products are generally measured against applications from the Office 365 suite.

Who does it affect? In the modern mobile-centric enterprise, Office 365 provides the tools used to get work done. This makes Office 365 important to just about every working individual.

When is it available? The latest version of Microsoft Office 365 is available right now. The current subscription includes Office 2016 applications.

How do you get it? Enterprises can purchase a subscription to Office 365 via the Microsoft website. Subscriptions range from $8/user/month to $35/user/month.

What is it?

Microsoft Office 365 is a subscription service that provides users with the basic productivity applications necessary to get work done in the modern enterprise. Productivity applications include, but are not limited to, a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, a calendar, and a presentation application.

As an example, a Business Premium subscription to Office 365 ($12.50 per person per month) includes these applications:

Word: This app sets the standard for word processors and is available with Office 365 for both Business and Premium. If users in your enterprise need to create documents, this is the tool they will use.

Excel: The spreadsheet has been the workhorse for basic data analysis since its invention back in the previous century. Excel is the current standard-bearer and comes with Office 365 for Business and Premium.

Outlook: Office 365’s solution for managing email and an appointment calendar is called Outlook. The app has been around for many years and its busy interface tends to be either loved or hated by users. It’s available with both the Business and Premium subscriptions.

PowerPoint: Communicating information to a group of individuals at a meeting often involves a presentation. Office 365’s PowerPoint allows users to create, display, and disseminate information in formats ranging from the basic slide to animation to video.

Publisher: Sometimes communicating information to a broader audience requires something more permanent and more formal than a presentation at a meeting. The Publisher app in Office 365 provides users with the tools they need to publish professional-looking newsletters, brochures, and booklets.

OneNote: As the workforce has become more mobile, the need to capture information on the go has become increasingly important. Applications like OneNote allow users to take notes on any device and then retrieve those notes from any other device. It’s your basic productivity cloud app.

OneDrive: The other basic and fundamental cloud-based application is storage. With each Office 365 Business subscription, Microsoft provides users with up to 1TB of cloud storage in the form of an application called OneDrive for Business.

SharePoint: A subscription to Office 365 Business Premium also provides an enterprise with a few applications for backend infrastructure management. SharePoint, for example, can be used to host intranet websites for the enterprise. It also can be used to host smaller sites designed for smaller teams or divisions. The permissions for these sites can be designated by the users themselves or by appointed administrators.

Exchange: Each Office 365 for Business subscription includes an Exchange Server, which handles all the email management duties. By default, each user is granted 50GB of storage for email. Maintenance of the Exchange Server is generally handled at the administrator level.

Collaboration tools: Along with the typical productivity applications, Office 365 includes many collaboration tools—like Delve, Skype, Yammer, and Sway. These tools allow users to communicate, brainstorm ideas, share documents, and have video meetings while on the go.

Power BI: One of the most powerful tools any enterprise can have, regardless of size, is reliable business intelligence gathering applications. Office 365 for Business, through its Power BI application, provides enterprises with a set of tools for collecting, sorting, and presenting business intelligence data.

Infrastructure: All Office 365 subscriptions include a reliability guarantee of 99.9% uptime. In addition, permissions for internal access control are handled by administrators designated by the enterprise using tools supplied by Active Directory. Each Office 365 subscription includes five layers of security and proactive monitoring to help safeguard your data.

System requirements

• CPU: 1GHz or faster
• Memory: 2GB RAM
• Hard drive: 3GB of available space (6GB for Mac)
• Display: 1280 X 800 screen resolution
• Operating system: PC-Windows 7, 8, or 10. Mac-Mac OS X 10.10
• Connectivity: Internet connection

Why does it matter?

Collaboration and communication are the key components of productivity in the modern enterprise, and productivity is the lifeblood of the enterprise. Microsoft Office 365 provides the tools necessary to bring collaboration and communication—and by extension, productivity—to each individual in an enterprise.

For many companies, Office 365 is the de facto standard for productivity software. The performance of all competing products is generally measured against applications from the Office 365 suite.

Who does it affect?

Just about every knowledge worker in every enterprise is required to have an email account and a calendar application. Beyond that, most individuals in an enterprise will need to use, at least once in a while, a word processor. And a significant number of individuals in an enterprise will also find themselves needing to use presentation software or a spreadsheet at some point in their career.

These are the productivity tools of any enterprise. These are the tools used to get work done. That means Office 365 is important to just about every working individual.

When is it available?

Microsoft Office 365 is available right now. The current subscription includes applications updated to the Office 2016 versions. Of course, the key to the subscription model is that each user will always be using the most current and most secure version of each application because each application is continuously updated.

How do you get it?

Enterprises with fewer than 300 users can purchase a subscription to Office 365 and download the appropriate applications via the Microsoft website. The Premium version costs $12.50 per user per month ($150/year). There are also versions of Office 365 available for individuals ($69.99/year) and households ($99.99/year).

For large enterprises, unlimited user versions of Office 365 are available, ranging from $12 per person per month to $35 per person per month. Each subscription caters to a particular type of enterprise. More expensive enterprise versions of Office 365 add features like voicemail, compliance auditing, rights management, encryption, and Advanced Threat Protection.

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Software Licensing secrets:

Every version of Windows dating back to Windows Vista has included the Windows Software Licensing Management Tool, a script file found in the Windows System 32 folder as Slmgr.vbs. The script is designed for a local administrator to run in an elevated Command Prompt window.

Most people never need to use this tool, but it can come in handy when you’re trying to resolve activation problems or upgrade a Windows PC. The secret is knowing which switches to add to the end of the command to achieve the desired result.

If you just type the command, with no switches, you get a series of five dialog boxes that list all those switches. Network administrators who manage a Key Management server for Volume Licensing will find a goldmine here. For the rest of us, the three most commonly used switches are the following:

Slmgr.vbs /dli Displays basic license information, including the last five characters of the product key

Slmgr.vbs /dlv Displays much more detailed license information

Slmgr.vbs /cpky Removes the product key from the registry so that it can’t be copied and reused

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Google fiber is coming to your town. But not without a fight. After Louisville, Kentucky approved legislation that would allow Google Fiber to piggyback on pre-existing telecommunication infrastructure, AT&T sued the city.

“The ordinance in question, known as “One Touch Make Ready,” essentially allows Google (or any other ISP) to install its equipment on existing utility poles, including those owned and maintained by AT&T. Despite strong opposition from AT&T and Time Warner Cable, the ordinance passed with a 23-0 vote.”

AT&T claimed a need to defend past infrastructure investment, and that the ordinance violates current telecommunication rules. The city of Louisville countered claiming, “gigabit fiber is too important to our city’s future.” Google pledged to support the city.

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How to set up a Cloud Files library:

You probably have two, three, or maybe even more folders that sync files from cloud to your PC right now: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and so on. How do you keep track of all that cloud content? Set up a Cloud Files library in File Explorer. Here’s how:

In Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, right-click any empty space in the navigation pane on the left and make sure Show Libraries is selected. (Libraries are visible by default in Windows 7’s Explorer.)

Right-click the Libraries heading and then click New | Library. Change the default name to something descriptive, like Cloud Files.

Right-click the first locally synced cloud folder and select Include In Library, choosing the name of your newly created library.

Repeat that step for each additional local folder.

That’s it. You can now get a unified view of all your cloud files by selecting that library in File Explorer. Use the search box to quickly find any file, regardless of where it’s stored.

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Microsoft made several new updates to Office 365 in February, including the addition of six useful functions for Excel.

When it comes to general updates to Microsoft Office 365, February 2016 was a fairly significant month. Microsoft rolled out numerous improvements to Office 365, like better pen annotation integration, the ability to pin documents to the Start menu, a new feature that allows images to be inserted into documents directly from the camera, and the best—adding more functions to Excel.

Six new functions

Using, combining, and creating formulas in Microsoft Excel is where true Excel gurus separate themselves from the pretenders and wannabes. For an Excel aficionado, the satisfaction of creating the perfect nested formula is second to none when it comes to Excel coding. So when Microsoft adds six new functions to Excel in one month it is a very big deal.

Of course, while there is great satisfaction when you figure out the perfect formula, a certain amount of despair also goes with it—because now you have to apply that complicated nested formula over and over again. This is where the six new functions are supposed to help.

The first updated functions are TEXTJOIN and CONCAT, and they are replacements for the old concatenate function, which gave the user the power to join strings of separate text into one cell. This comes up with addresses all the time—a common task for spreadsheets since they were invented.

In the past, the formula would look something like this:

=CONCATENATE(A3, “, “, B3, “, “, C3,”, “, D3, “, “, E3)

With the new TEXTJOIN formula, the same process would look something like this:

=TEXTJOIN(“, “, TRUE, A3:E3)

This is just one example of how these new functions are designed to simplify users’ lives when it comes to advanced Excel tasks.

The next two new functions are IFS and SWITCH, which provide an alternative to using the infamous series of nested IF functions. The old IF function was the mainstay for Excel coders looking to apply logic to sets of data. You know what I mean: If this is larger than this, than this; but if it is larger than this but less than that, then this, etc. The more nested IF functions the more complicated the formula and the more likely you are to make a mistake.

The last two new functions are MAXIFS and MINIFS. They are designed to supplement the MAX and MIN functions by allowing users to apply conditions to the maximum and minimum calculations and thereby filter results. In the past you may have had to use the IF function to create your filtered conditions. These new functions eliminate the need and make your life just that much simpler.

Bottom line

When Microsoft began trying to convince us that subscribing to Office 365 was a better idea than repurchasing new versions every few years, the ability to update the productivity suite regularly at no extra cost was one of the main selling points. As the new six functions illustrate, that was not a false promise.

These functions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Office 365 improvements. However, the problem with continuous updates to the software is that users have to try to keep up.

Even though there are some users out there who will keep using nested IF functions no matter what improvements come along, for example. But for the rest of us, it would seem to be worthwhile to pay attention to whatever improvements Microsoft rolls out each month. Because for better or worse, changes to Office 365 are going to keep coming.

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Save time and keystrokes with environment variables:

When asked to open your user profile in File Explorer, you’ll probably type its full path: C, colon, backslash, Users, backslash, followed by your user name. But there’s a much faster way:

Type %userprofile% and press Enter.

Congratulations, you just saved a half-dozen keystrokes or so by using one of many useful environment variables in Windows. These are reserved names, enclosed between percent signs, that represent the current location of a specific system folder.

Here are a few other useful ones to know:

%localappdata% The hidden folder in your user profile where Windows apps store your data

%windir% The folder containing Windows system files; usually C:Windows

%public% A special user profile that contains folders for Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos, intended for sharing on a home network

%temp% or %tmp% The normally hidden folder where Windows and apps can store files necessary for one-time tasks

Some people write these variables using mixed case (%ProgramFiles%, for example) to make them easier to read. But they’re not case sensitive, so skip the Shift key if you want.

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