News

Exchange Online dropping support for Office 2007 from Oct 31 2017

Computer Culture Admin - Thursday, October 19, 2017

RPC over HTTP, also known as Outlook Anywhere, will no longer be a supported protocol for accessing mail data from Exchange Online as of Oct 31, 2017. Microsoft will no longer provide support or updates for Outlook clients that connect through RPC over HTTP, and the quality of the mail experience will decrease over time.

This is being replaced by MAPI over HTTP, a modern protocol that was launched in May 2014. This change affects you if you're running Outlook 2007 because Outlook 2007 won't work with MAPI over HTTP. To avoid being in an unsupported state, Outlook 2007 customers need to update to a newer version of Outlook or use Outlook on the web.

This change may also affect you if you're running Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, or Outlook 2010 because you must regularly check that the latest cumulative update for the version of Office that you have is installed.

What is RPC over HTTP? What happens on October 31, 2017?

RPC over HTTP, also known as Outlook Anywhere, is a legacy method of connectivity and transport between Outlook for Windows and Exchange. In May 2014, Microsoft introduced MAPI over HTTP as a replacement for RPC over HTTP.

Starting on October 31, 2017, RPC over HTTP will no longer be a supported protocol for accessing mail data from Exchange Online. Starting on this date, the following conditions will apply:
1. Microsoft will not provide support for RPC over HTTP issues (regular or custom).
2. No code fixes or updates to resolve problems that are unrelated to security will be released.

Additionally, for Office versions that support MAPI over HTTP, Microsoft may elect to override existing registry keys that customers are using in order to force RPC over HTTP use.

Why is RPC over HTTP being replaced by MAPI over HTTP?

MAPI over HTTP offers the following benefits:
• Improves the connection resiliency when the network drops packets in transit.
• Enables more secure sign-in scenarios, such as multi-factor authentication for Office 365.
• Provides the extensibility foundation for third-party identity providers.
• Removes the complexity of RPC over HTTP dependency on legacy RPC technology.

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Microsoft SharePoint Explained

Computer Culture Admin - Thursday, October 19, 2017

Microsoft SharePoint is a private intranet site, a data repository, a smart website, a built-in content management system, a development platform, an extranet site, a collection of websites, best-in-class portal software, a document management system, a project management system, a workflow designer, and more. You can collaborate, communicate, gather decision-making reports and data from multiple resources and publish those online, make visually presentable reports, create and view intuitive and real-time dashboards, do customizations, import theme templates, and do more with your SharePoint site.

Organisations use SharePoint to create websites. You can use it as a secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from any device.

SharePoint Online
A cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint Server on-premises, any business can subscribe to an Office 365 plan or to the standalone SharePoint Online service. Your employees can create sites to share documents and information with colleagues, partners, and customers.

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Identifying Phishing Emails

Computer Culture Admin - Thursday, September 28, 2017

With the increasing use of phishing emails, we’d like to draw your attention to how to identify whether the email links you are being asked to click are legitimate. This is done by hovering your cursor / pointer over the link and revealing the domain or destination to where you will be sent. If you look at the final part of the domain before the forward slash (/) you can determine whether you think this link is from the organization referred to in the email. In the example below .cenotehopping makes little sense and indicates the link is not authentic.

If there is a string of cryptic numbers or an .exe file do not click on the link. Ring the organisation who has sent you the email and verify that the email is legitimate. As always it is better to be cautious than caught out.

Microsoft offers this information on recognising phishing email messages, links, or phone calls.

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Microsoft Office 2016

Computer Culture Admin - Thursday, July 13, 2017

Please note: Businesses should not be running any version of Office older than 2010

With Microsoft Office 2007’s support due to expire on 10 October 2017, now is a good time to upgrade to a newer suite such as Office 2016. From October Microsoft will no longer supply patches for security vulnerabilities or fixes for other bugs, nor will it provide company-assisted technical support, whether free or paid, such as by-phone or trouble shooting.

That gives businesses that are using Office 2007 just over three months to drop Office 2007’s applications and switch to a new suite.

Here are the top 6 reasons to upgrade your Microsoft Office Suite to 2016.

1. Built for teamwork

In Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, there's easy sharing right from within the app. You can also see who has access to a given file and who is currently working in it.

2. New Chart Types in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

Visualize financial or hierarchical data, and highlight statistical properties of your data with new chart types: Treemap, Waterfall, Pareto, Histogram, Box and Whisker, and Sunburst.

3. Faster, easier ways to get data into Excel

Excel includes a powerful new set of features called Get & Transform, which provides fast, easy data gathering and shaping capabilities. Get & Transform enables you to connect, combine, and refine data sources to meet your analysis needs.

4. Modern Attachments in Outlook

Attach a document from your recent items and share them from OneDrive or SharePoint with email recipients. Also configure sharing permissions so that all the recipients have access to the attached file without having to leave the app.

5. Smart Lookup in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook

Fact-check or explore terms in your documents with Bing-powered Smart Lookup. Simply highlight terms in your document and use this feature to bring in search results from the web right into your reading or authoring environment.

6. Tell Me in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Project, Visio, and Access

Simply type what you want to do in the app using your own words, and then Tell Me will guide through the process as well as offer additional resources.

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Microsoft Surface Pro

Computer Culture Admin - Thursday, July 13, 2017

Computer Culture have joined a small select group of companies to become an official Microsoft Surface Product Reseller.

We are now able to source directly:

The New Surface Pro
Surface Pro 4
Surface Laptop
Surface Book
Surface Studio

The new Surface Pro is 8.5mm thick and weighs only 786 grams. Processors options includes m3, i5 and i7, hard drive sizes ranging from 128Gb up to 1TB and memory 4Gb up to 16GB. Battery life is claimed to be 13.5 hours.

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Microsoft Windows 10 Support

Steve Hirst - Tuesday, February 21, 2017

If you have steadfastly refused to update your Windows 10 PC to a new build since launch, Microsoft has given you another 2 months reprieve to still get patches and bug fixes.

Build 1507 of the OS was to exit support on the 26th March, but Microsoft has now announced on Technet that version 1507 will continue to be serviced until May 2017.

Currently Microsoft plans to only support the two latest versions of Windows 10, and expect most users to remain current with the latest version of the OS via automatic updates, a practice which has been criticised but which means that more than 75% of Windows 10 users are on the latest public version of the OS.

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Google PhotoScan

Steve Hirst - Tuesday, February 21, 2017

PhotoScan is a new scanner app from Google Photos that lets you scan and save your favourite printed photos using your phone's camera. Picture perfect and glare free....

Create enhanced digital scans, wherever your photos are.

This is a great app if you are out somewhere and there is, say a old black and white photo of one of your ancestors. The app guides you through a process of photographing the picture in segments then seamlessly joining it up to reproduce the original photo.

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The Microsoft Surface Studio

Steve Hirst - Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Arriving early 2017.

The Surface Studio is designed for the creative process. The 28” PixelSense™ Display gives you a huge canvas for all kinds of work. Use it upright, or draw on it like a drafting table.

Surface Studio, with its strikingly large and incredibly thin 28” PixelSense™ touch screen Display with a 4500 x 3000 resolution, lets you visualise ideas as you paint, edit, and design. Then watch those ideas leap off the screen with 13.5 million pixels of true-to-life colour and clarity.

This stunning desktop computer is available in either i5 or i7 CPU options, 1 or 2TB hard drive versions and can take up to 32GB of memory.

Check out the video of it in action here.

See the friendly sales team for more info.

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Office 365 Changes

Steve Hirst - Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Until now, Microsoft Access was only included in the Office 365 ProPlus, E3 and E5 plans. Microsoft today announced that they are including Microsoft Access in the Office 365 Business and Business Premium plans so that small and mid-size businesses can get access to this great database management solution.

Microsoft Access will be automatically installed for Office 365 Business and Business Premium customers as part of their next regular Office client update, rolling out between December 1, 2016 and January 30, 2017. Customers who have updates set to the Deferred Channel will receive this update in June 2017.

Follow this link to see all the improvements in Office 365.

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End of mainstream support

Steve Hirst - Friday, October 28, 2016

For those of you using a Windows 7 machine, Microsoft has ended mainstream support for this operating system.

There is no need to panic as your system will still work and receive security updates. Mainstream support mainly refers to free phone and online support, as well as non-security updates, which are offered for five years after the release of an OS or two years after its successor hits the market.

Microsoft won't end security updates for your Windows 7 PC until January 2020. By that time, Microsoft hopes you will have upgraded to the latest version of its operating system.

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