BEI Blog
We are very excited to welcome Ashley Adair to BEI as our new Service Desk Director. Ashley has over 12 years of Help Desk management experience with a diverse background in IT operations, client and service delivery management within the financial, high tech and government sectors. She was most recently at SRA International where she implemented and managed Help Desk Operations for a number of their clients. At BEI Ashley will be responsible for all non-project service activities, managing BEI staff and working with our clients to make sure that we deliver outstanding service.
We hear that Ashley and her family are HUGE Virginia Tech fans and have season football tickets. We are bracing ourselves for the deluge of maroon and orange that Fridays in the fall may bring! Ashley will be visiting clients as she settles into her responsibilities – in the meantime please feel free to contact her at ashley.adair@beinetworks.com or 703-528-8300
x101.
We have had a number of questions about recovering deleted email in Office 365 and wanted to clarify how it works.
Recovering Deleted Items
Summary – when using Office 365 you have 14 days to recover any items that are deleted from your deleted items in Outlook.
Details – when you delete an email in Outlook it is placed in your Deleted Items Folder. It stays there until you manually delete it or until it is deleted by rules or archiving. In Office 365 items that are then deleted from the Deleted Items Folder are placed in the Recoverable Items folder for an additional 14 days before being permanently removed. Users can recover these items using the Recover Deleted Items feature in Outlook Web App or Outlook. If a user has manually purged an item from the Recoverable Items folder, an administrator can recover the item within the same 14 day window, through a feature called Single Item Recovery.
Recovering Deleted Mailboxes
Summary – you can recover deleted mailboxes within 30 days of the date the mailbox was deleted, after that they are deleted permanently..
Details – When an Exchange Online mailbox is deleted, its contents are recoverable for 30 days. A recovered mailbox contains all of the data stored in it at the time it was deleted. After 30 days, the mailbox is not recoverable. Administrators can recover a deleted mailbox using the Exchange Control Panel.
May, 2012
We participate in the Business Bank’s Annual Golf Tournament each year and this year were ably represented by Ryan McDonnell and Nick Zahra. They had a great time and enjoyed the day!
May, 2012
FISMA Certification
FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) is the latest security certification for Office 365. FISMA is important to our customers because it creates a process for federal agencies to certify and accredit the security of their information management systems. Many BEI clients are government contractors who are required to meet specific standards for their internal networking and applications.
Office 365 Trust Center
You can learn about FISMA Certification and more at the Office 365 Trust Center.
Office 365 Data Center Tour
This video tour takes you through a tour of Microsoft Data Centers that support their online, cloud-based services.
Big Easy Rebate
The Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.
Office 365 Trust Center
You can learn about FISMA Certification and more at the Office 365 Trust Center.
Office 365 Data Center Tour
This video tour takes you through a tour of Microsoft Data Centers that support their online, cloud-based services.
Big Easy Rebate
The Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.
April 2012: BEI is very active with the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce and one event we especially love is the Taste of Reston – an annual festival that celebrates good food, community and entertainment. There is something for everyone – food from wonderful restaurants, live entertainment, a carnival with rides, and a family fun zone with lots of kid-friendly entertainment.
BEI will be staffing the beer booth on Friday night, so please come by and we’d love to serve you!
April 2012: We use a number of online tools in our marketing and administrative efforts and thought we would share our favorites. All of these integrate with various other third party companies to add capabilities.
Wufoo – an application for building forms. We use it for seminar registration and collecting information from clients and prospects. The basic plan is free, but you are limited to 100 entries per month. But – the free version is certainly enough to get you started and help figure out if it will do what you want it to do! We’ve found the email support to be great – you get answers back within a couple of hours. We have a plan that is priced at $29.95/month. (Note from Ellen Jennings – I also use Wufoo for some non-profit organizations that I volunteer with and have found that the payment integration works great. Non-profits get a 50% discount.)
MailChimp – a newsletter design and mailing application. We use MailChimp to send out this newsletter, our Healthcare IT Newsletter and various seminar invitations. Using a third party to send out any emails that are going to a large group of subscribers is highly recommended. MailChimp takes care of maintaining the list and tracking results.
Survey Monkey & Survey Gizmo – internet applications for surveys. We’ve used both of these to for surveys, quizzes and to gather information as part of the RFP process. Both work well and are easy to use. Survey Gizmo had more capabilities to score results at the time, but that may have changed in the last few months.
As a note, there are also free versions for most of these applications but most of the free versions are supported by ads.
April 2012: On February 23 CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) released the proposed rules for Meaningful Use Stage 2. These rules will govern how the federal government dispenses the $23 billion that was appropriated by the HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act in 2009. The proposed Stage 2 rules will have a 60 day comment period, CMS will consider the comments and come up with the final rule. For more details please read the entire Meaningful Use Stage 2 article.
March, 2012:
Price Decrease
Microsoft has announced a price decrease of approximately 20% on most Office 365 services – making these great offerings even more attractive. The most significant – and in our opinion overdue – price decrease is on the SharePoint additional storage. Adding additional storage to SharePoint Online was $2.50/GB and is now $0.20/GB, making online file storage with SharePoint Online much more practical.
Pricing for the most popular Office 365 options is below:
- Exchange Online – $4/user/month
- E1 Suite (Exchange, Lync, SharePoint) – $8/user/month
- E3 Suite (Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Office Pro Plus) – $20/user/month
The following links have pricing for all Office 365 Services and Office 365 Suites.
Big Easy Rebate
In addition, the Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.
Kiosk Suites
Lastly, the Kiosk suites have been upgraded to include:
- Active Sync support for mobile devices
- 1 GB Email storage (was 500 MB)
- Support for Exchange Online Archiving (optional)
New Exchange Online users in March should have this support for their kiosk users. Existing users will start seeing these updates late-March/early-April.
March, 2012 – A recent publication by hackers on a Chinese language forum highlights the need to keep server patching up to date. You can read the story here, but the summary is that hackers published a way to exploit a dangerous RDP (remote desktop protocol) vulnerability that was patched by Microsoft earlier in the week. All BEI clients who are on a managed service plan are patched on a monthly schedule.
February, 2012: With Office 365 we’re seeing first hand that cloud-based services evolve in a much different way than server-based software. When server-based products come out with new features there is a RELEASE, we need to download new software, install it, wait to see what it impacts – maybe even pay for it. With Office 365 new features pop up, sometimes without even an announcement. So far, this is mostly good news:
- You can now record Lync calls – click here for details. It is interesting to note that the reason this wasn’t here when Office 365 was first released was that recording calls is not legal in some countries, and Microsoft was not able to remove that feature on a country-by-country basis. Now, apparently, they are! This is nice as we know some users have missed this capability.
- Healthcare practices can now get a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for HIPAA that covers Office 365. From your Admin Console: Subscriptions – Manage – Optional Office 365 privacy and security contractual supplements, then select Office 365 HIPAA/HITECH Business Associate Agreement.
- RIM has launched BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 – still free, and now out of Beta testing.
- Charity Licensing is available for Office 365 – up to 60% off most of the services. You must be a 501(c) 3 to qualify – contact Ellen Jennings if you are interested.
- New “big name” clients on Office 365 include JetBlue, Patagonia, and the American Heart Association. You can read details about how these companies are using the service here.
Attend BEI’s Seminar on Moving your business to the cloud with Office 365 and learn more!
Wednesday, March 14 noon – 2 pm
Seasons 52 Tysons Corner Center
REGISTER NOW
