Microsoft Forms has launched in initial preview to commercial customers – adding data gathering, surveys, opinion polls and quizzes to Office 365’s list of abilities.

Originally released to Microsoft Education customers for classroom use, the commercial release is likely to interest those gathering client or staff feedback, or doing market research.

The delay in launch has been worth it though: entirely cloud-based Microsoft Forms boasts some more advanced features than free alternatives, including branching surveys which alter question paths as the subject answers, and more extensive visual customisation – helping companies match each survey to their branding.

By swapping from the ‘Questions’ Tab to the ‘Reponses’ tab form-builders can view data collection in real-time and Forms integrates nicely with other popular business applications in Office 365, including Excel and even SharePoint. As with others, form-builders can also use a range of link-based permissions sharing to make surveys open to exact security groups.

It’s not yet been made clear which Office 365 packages will grow to include Forms as standard, although it looks intuitive, clear, responsive across a wide array of screen-sizes, and powerful enough to become a firm-favourite.

Lineal are a Microsoft Gold Partner and Authorised Education Gold Partner: for Office 365 support and advice – contact our team today.

Outlook Stops Spam Emails

At Lineal we’ve found the most commented upon feature of Microsoft’s Office 365 email has been the reduction of spam – but why does running your email from the cloud make Outlook 2016 so much better at blocking these annoying spam emails?

On your old in-house email server, Outlook stops spam emails being delivered based on whatever policies and protection you’ve put there and maintained (or not…,) whilst Office 365 is managed all year round as a remote service, with up-to-the-hour security updates in Microsoft data centres. Moving your business email to the cloud ensures your inboxes are not just company compliant, but physically and virtually safer.

Firstly, Office 365 checks your email for known suspicious attachments or malicious links. If neither are found, your email is screened through three independent Anti-virus engines, before being delivered safely to your inbox.

But what if something suspicious is found? Malicious links are re-written where possible, and suspicious attachments are removed to a sandboxed (isolated in software) ‘detonation chamber’, where they are opened safely to check for harmful code. Any attachments still deemed to be dangerous are removed from the email before being processed further.

Due to sheer volume of email processed through Office 365, Microsoft are also able to use information about all threats seen worldwide, and protect your inbox from even brand new ‘zero-day’ dangers seen elsewhere online.

Office 365 business packages (which can be trialled for free via Lineal) have been made increasingly secure over the past year – with Microsoft opening new UK based data centres and introducing new admin centre for power users to manage system usage in large organisations more effectively. 97% of people can’t identify a phishing email, so it’s important to know that Office 365 will remain vigilant.

Lineal are a Gold Microsoft Partner: for Cloud help and support contact our team today.

Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access is making a return to Microsoft Office, and will soon be offered as a free extra to many cloud customers.

In a recent announcement from Microsoft, the ‘Access Team’ confirmed that the popular business database tool would be making a return as a part of the standard package available to all Office 365 Business Premium customers.

Officially the move continues Microsoft’s commitment to keep expanding Office 365’s cloud service to make more features available (including the new Slack-style Microsoft ‘Teams’) giving Office 365 subscribers ever more for their money. 

Unofficially, we wonder whether omitting Microsoft Access from the well-known ‘suite’ of Microsoft Apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and others) has seen Microsoft lose it’s 1990s database dominance to other platforms or CRM systems. Reintroducing the app may be timely for modern businesses that are increasingly interested in studying their data, and help encourage a wider audience to take a second look at the powerful program.

Recent iterations of the popular database management system have expanded on the traditional database store and report tools, allowing power users to use Access to develop web apps and other software, or act as the practical visual ‘front-end’ for more complex ‘back end’ database systems like Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.

In addition, Access will be available with a set of enterprise data connector allowing Office 365 users to integrate their databases with Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and others.

Office 365 Business premium (which you can try through Lineal for free here) will include the latest version of Access to all new and existing customers from December 2016.

Lineal are a Microsoft Gold Partner – for help and expertise, contact us today.

UK data centres –

Microsoft’s Office 365 Team have announced the availability of multiple UK data centres for customer data.

The move follows increasingly strict rules on data compliance in the financial, security, health and public sectors – with more cloud IT users looking to ensure their data remains safely located in the UK.

Prospective customers considering the implications of Office 365 are able to view the locations of Microsoft’s uk data centres with this online ‘Where Is My Data?’ map, which now displays both the additional data centres and the Microsoft cloud services they support, in both London and Durham, with a third site anticipated for Cardiff.

Office365 and Azure Users will also have the ability to ‘re-locate’ their data from regional data centres (in most cases based within mainland Europe) to the new UK service.

In addition to the security and legal advantages for protecting sensitive data, cloud users of Office 365 are likely to benefit from lower costs, online backups and collaborative, remote access to files.

For now, the ability to re-locate Office365 or Azure data to the UK is likely to be restricted, with priority expected to be given to high-profile UK public sector customers including NHS Trusts and the Ministry of Defence – the latter mirroring many customers belated move to the cloud, upgrading legacy on-site systems in use since 2005.

The new infrastructure has been widely praised, with Microsoft clearly investing heavily in addressing the doubts many have about moving their IT to the cloud; reducing Office365 downtime to just 4 hours per year, and now re-locating data within country of origin for compliance with a high standard of data protection.

Contact Lineal for advice on moving to the cloud, or for a free trial of Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium, click here.

fake invoices

This week’s IT security alert from Lineal – fake invoices which ask users to run a dangerous piece of code.

The example above comes from a fake Word document emailed with a typical text line, such as ‘Please check this invoice’ or ‘Double check my numbers for me’, to an unsuspecting user.

Upon opening, the document appears to load a popup from Office 2016 prompting the user to ‘Enable Content’ for compatibility purposes, before they can view the detail of the ‘invoice.’

In fact, the display is just an image within the word file, and the ‘Enable Content’ content button instead runs a piece of Visual Basic code downloading unknown malware from the internet.

The scam relies on users’ curiosity at the unusual $1999.00 charge, and upon reaching a user still running an outdated version of Microsoft Office.

Several measures can be taken to prevent this kind of attack:

• Don’t click any popup that doesn’t visibly pop ‘open’ in Microsoft and don’t ‘Enable Content’ you can’t see in a document.

• Consider an email filtering service like Barracuda – in the above example, Barracuda had recognised this email as malicious and stripped the code from the document before placing it in the correct email inbox for the intended recipient.

• Invest in a high-quality antivirus and IT security software like ESET – using sophisticated heuristics and live scanning ESET can block this kind of threat, and advanced versions operate a comprehensive watchlist of fake ‘phishing’ scams which might try to imitate legitimate companies online.

• Move to Microsoft Office 365 – Microsoft’s cloud subscription model now ensures that you’ll always have the most up-to-date version of Microsoft Office, and therefore that if a document gives you this kind of message, it may be a scam.

For IT Security advice and guidance – speak to Lineal today.

Ever wish you could add handwritten notes to documents in Microsoft Office? Now you can – as Microsoft have unlocked the ‘Draw’ tab for Office 365.

The new tools come with a range of pen shapes and bright colours, and have been designed particularly with touchscreens and tablets in mind. Accessible across all Office 2016 documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notes, the ‘Draw’ tab follows the recent releases of Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and the iPad Pro. Those with clumsy fingers may prefer to use a stylus.

It’s undoubtedly a pretty and relevant addition to Microsoft’s historically bland Microsoft Office – the simple colour wheel can be used for highlighting text or adding freeform annotations in various ‘ink’ colours.

Behind the new sketchpad fun is some intelligent software, which includes shape recognition that allows users to ‘rough’ draw polygons for conversion to regular shapes for use in diagrams or flowcharts .

The possibilities for working collaboratively, marking homework, sketching designs, reviewing reports or simply saving paper are endless and enjoyable – and show just how practical Office 365 has already become.

Explore Office 365 with Lineal today: click here or call 01271 375999

Microsoft Office 2016 is here: the staple of word processing, spreadsheets and presentation work everywhere is now available for single purchase on Windows 10 and Mac OS X.

Office 2016’s apps will look very familiar to existing customers – but Office 2016 is undoubtedly ‘smarter’ than any previous version of Office, with its most impressive new features aimed at boosting productivity for both home and business customers.

Take Microsoft’s new ‘Smart Lookup’ function for example – click a single word in a document and Office will web search that term (via Bing) within the window, allowing instant research.

Cleverly, Office 2016 will even infer from the context of the surrounding paragraph the exact meaning of the word being searched for, preventing irrelevant homonyms clouding your search results. A neat trick certainly, but also an important one for certain sectors – for instance helping children do school work with protection against loading inappropriate search results based on words with double-meanings.

It is a similar case with 2016’s new ‘Tell me’ function. Gone are the clunky help menus or cartoon paperclips – ‘Tell’ Word for a tool like ‘mail merge’ or ‘footnotes’ and the Office 2016 apps will not load search results, but immediately take you to the exact menu and function needed.

The latest version allows for collaborative working (finally catching up with rival Google Drive) with multiple users able to edit documents in real time with a visible tracked changes function, from remote locations if needed. As an added bonus, Office is integrated with Skype, aimed at making the process of collaborative working more easily communicated.

Part of productivity is personal though, so Office 2016 also introduces ‘Office 365 Planner’, an app aimed at time and project management. Even Outlook will attempt to shave a few minutes off your day by linking attachments from cloud-based OneDrive and introducing ‘Clutter’, an automated email filtering service which avoids distractions by pushing less relevant emails into a separate folder, helping you to best utilise your time. Office 2016 knows that time is worth money, and for some may be a very smart investment indeed.

Need advice on software for your business, or help migrating to Microsoft Office 365 services? Lineal can help – contact us today: http://www.lineal.co.uk/contact/