With recent headlines, has your company considered what might happen if your employees needed to work from home suddenly? Does your company have policies and procedures in place for working remotely? SpireTech can help you get ready. Things to consider...
Portland IT Support Articles & Business Tech News
Cybersecurity, M365, Managed IT Services, AI, & Technology Trends for Portland Businesses
How to report spam to Microsoft 365
Getting a lot of annoying spam in your email? Here's a quick guide on how to report spam in Microsoft 365. For customers using Office 365’s built-in junk mail filter, there is an outlook plugin you can install to report spam that gets past Microsoft’s filters and move...
3 million SSL certificates abruptly revoked
Let’s encrypt, an industry nonprofit that issues free SSL certificates, had to revoke 3M certificates Wednesday March 4, 2020 due to a bug. SSL is the technology that gives websites the https “padlock” and is often used to secure other things like mail servers....
Simultaneous editing of docs with Office365
“Co-authoring” is available in Office365, which is the ability for multiple people to edit a file at the same time. The file must be stored on Sharepoint or Onedrive for this feature to be available (not an internal file server). To see it in action, along...
Implement Multi-factor authentication now
We’ve been recommending for quite a while that our clients implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) on their email and Office365 accounts – really, anything that can have MFA enabled should. You may have heard of two-factor authentication (2FA) before,...
OneDrive/Sharepoint is now ready for prime time
Several years ago, we hated OneDrive and had massive problems with efforts to implement it with our clients. We’re happy to say now that it works, and works well. Microsoft has made great strides in improving the product and it is now a valid replacement for...
How to detect phishing and scam emails
At SpireTech, our managed services clients often contact the helpdesk to determine if an email is fake or not. We thought it’d be helpful to put together a short instructional video to help you identify some common signs that an email is a phish or fake email....
2020 Note from SpireTech’s President
2019 was a year of continued growth at SpireTech. We’d like to thank all our clients for your continued support and your referrals – we don’t advertise much, so we appreciate every referral! Review of 2019 Business Activity We spent a lot of the year focused...
SpireTech Webmail gets a new look!
Many of our @spiretech.com email customers have been using our SquirrelMail webmail interface for years. However, as time has gone by, SquirrelMail has received very few updates to remain current with the latest security standards. Therefore, we are making the transition to a new webmail interface called Roundcube.
At present, both interfaces are available, but we will be retiring the SquirrelMail interface at the end of March 2019. We recommend that you visit the new Roundcube interface by visiting https://www.spiretech.com.
Windows 7 End of Support Is Approaching
Windows 7 is reaching the end of its life and support on January 14, 2020. It’s now time to plan your upgrade to Windows 10. What’s happening to Windows 7? Windows 7 (as well as Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2) will no longer be supported by Microsoft...
Connecting and Presenting in Microsoft Teams
If you regularly use Skype for Business in your organization, you may now know that Microsoft has begun replacing Skype with Teams. Microsoft Teams is a new platform that acts as a hub within Office 365 and brings together chat, meetings, notes, and integrations...
5 reasons why general software updates and patches are important
used with permission from Norton by Symantec, by Steve Symanovich You’re probably no stranger to those little pop-up windows. They tell you software updates are available for your computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile device. You might be tempted to click on that...
Netflix phishing scam: Don’t take the bait
used with permission from FTC.gov., by Colleen Tressler Phishing is when someone uses fake emails or texts to get you to share valuable personal information – like account numbers, Social Security numbers, or your login IDs and passwords. Scammers use your information...
Check email header information for signs of spoofing
Think about this scenario: A friend tells you that they received a message from your email address that wasn’t really sent from you. They think you’ve been hacked and your account is sending malicious emails to friends. How do you know if your email address...
Improving business efficiency with AI
Small businesses can use AI to improve their bottom line Chatbots cut business costs by $20 million last year. By 2022, that savings is expected to jump to $8 billion.[1] That’s an increase of about 75% in five years. Artificial intelligence (AI) allows customers...
Windows 10 Tip: Schedule items by dragging a task to your calendar
If you need to allot time to take care of the items on your to-do list, wouldn’t it be great if you could drag and drop those tasks right into your calendar? Now, you can. The new Tasks experience in Outlook.com helps you manage tasks without breaking your flow or...
