As you might already know, we love our jobs and we always do our best to provide top quality services to our Customers. But we also believe that it’s really important for us as a team to spend quality time after hours, when we do not talk about tasks to do and meetings to schedule. These outings are all about having fun and taking care of our inner child. This year we chose an amazing venue, Accelerate Indoor Speedway (Racing & Axe Throwing), where it’s extremely easy to let loose and build lasting memories. Unfortunatelly, not all our team’s members were able to participate, but we’re hoping they join us next year. Take a look at some pics we took, though believe when we say, it was not easy to capture us in those speedy go-karts!

Personalized search across Office 365, a way to bring intelligent search and discovery experiences directly to users, was introduced by Microsoft at Ignite in 2017. And in September 2018, company announced that they were expanding that vision to encompass search both inside and outside of Microsoft 365. By applying artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Bing to the deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, the search in your organization can become even more effective.

With Microsoft Search, new organizational search experiences are being introduced into the apps you use every day, including Bing.com and Windows.

Microsoft believes that the meaning of “search” needs to be upgraded, as getting pages of results with hyperlinks to other information is simply not enough. Faced with ever decreasing attention spans, and an enormous explosion of data, they recognize that the challenge is to find and deliver answers to the questions you have, suggest insights, and enable you to take action on your tasks. This makes search a powerful capability that stretches across your work to make you more productive and take advantage of the collective knowledge from your organization.

In their own words their vision “is a cohesive and coherent search capability, prominent in every experience, providing the way to search across all your organization’s data—both inside and outside of Microsoft 3650.”

Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/ydf3kawe

We are a Team of professionals, dedicated to working hard to meet our Customers’ needs. We devote our working days to provide high quality services,  often operating under huge stress and that, as you can imagine, requires a solid dose of concentration. That’s why in order to stay motivated and ready to solve problems that might arise, we try to spend some time away from our desks and bond as a Team. Every once in a while we have a company outing, when we can just hang out and have some fun together. We strongly believe that the better team we are, the better service we provide. So, last week we decided to play some golf together at the Topgolf Naperville. This place offers great infrastructure and is suitable even for really unexperienced players. And we admit some of us are quite new to this sport, making this a funny experience.  Unfortunately, not all Team members were able to participate, but still it was an amazing opportunity to bond and to forget about software, databases and cybercrime. Take a look at some of the pictures taken to see us in action.

Network IT Easy (NIE), an IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) based in Lisle, Illinois, is proud to announce it has been awarded Silver Partner status in the Allworx APEX partner program.  Wildly successfully at fighting the trend toward hosted telephony, Allworx provides premise based VoIP (Voice over IP) telephone systems designed for Small-and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).

About Network IT Easy

Network IT Easy helps Chicago area small and medium sized companies (SMB) focus on their business and gain a competitive advantage by providing a cost-effective combination of IT technologies and outsourced technical support tailored to the SMB community.  Combining superior customer service with highly advanced and automated technology tools, NIE supports hundreds of SMB companies while providing products from industry leading manufacturers including Allworx.

For more information on our services, or to check out our recent blog post on a creative (i.e. no out of pocket expense) way to fund your new telephone system, visit our website at https://networkiteasy.com.

About Allworx

Allworx provides a complete portfolio of VoIP telephone systems, IP phones, network switches and advanced software options to help SMBs create solutions tailored to meet their unique needs. The company has deployed more than 40,000 VoIP systems and more than 600,000 IP phones across more than 25,000 business customers to date. These systems provide cost-effective, innovative voice communication features that enhance the user experience at their desks, on their mobile devices and on their PCs.

By Ray Miner, Technology Solutions Adviser

Update:  As a follow-up to our original post on a creative way to fund the replacement of your old phone system by upgrading your telephone service and internet access with less expensive and more capable service.  I am happy to report that we found $746 PER MONTH in savings at the first company that took us up on our offer of a free analysis.  More than enough to fund a new phone system…

Although it may sound too good to be true, companies with older Nortel phone systems can get a state of the art VoIP (Voice over IP) solution and pay for all or most of it using the savings realized from updating their telephone and internet access service.  During the course of our analysis, we also find that companies are paying significant sums of money for services they either no longer need or no longer use.

If you still have an old Nortel system, you haven’t been able to upgrade your phone service to a relatively new technology called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol).

Your old Nortel system couldn’t use SIP technology.

Instead of using separate, dedicated lines like you used to get from “The Phone Company”, SIP comes in over your existing internet access circuit. And it costs a fraction of what you are currently paying for your current phone service.

Even “new” phone service from companies like Comcast, uses old technology and costs significantly more.

Lease a new premise-based system or pay for a cloud hosted solution, on a monthly basis, and fund it out of the savings on your new SIP phone service.  Contact us for a complimentary analysis of your current phone service.

By Witold Stanislawski and Ray Miner, Technology Solutions Advisors. 

Continuous access to e-mail communications is at the core of every Small and Medium Sized Business (#SMB) today. There is an emerging vulnerability, which could allow a hacker to encrypt your email system data within seconds and make all your information inaccessible.

If successful, these hackers could:

• Demand a ransom to unlock the access to your email.  Companies are paying $100,000+ in many cases.
• Block users from accessing email for hours until the ransom is paid .
• Delete all email messages whether the ransom is paid or not.  They can’t be trusted….
• Bankrupt your company.

How do you avoid and/or mitigate the impact of this attack?  Network It Easy, Inc. recommends:

1. Disable a capability within O365 that allows “Integrated Apps”. “Integrated Apps” allows a third-party applications to read user profile details, edit or delete their files, read items contained in the collections and send email as that user.  In essence it gives those applications control of your email.
2. Enable Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) for all your mailboxes which requires the entry of an automatically generated, temporary and unique verification code that is sent to a separate device like a cell phone.  MFA is included with Office 365 but not enabled. It must be enabled and configured.
3. Sign up for a cloud mailbox backup (Office 365 does not provide a mailbox backup). This backup will allow you to restore the mailbox data and go back as far as your backup retention policy allows for, even if the e-mails get encrypted.  This will allow you to NOT pay ransom.
4. Engage with a Managed Services and Security Provider (MSSP) like Network It Easy, Inc. and get all the above plus pro-active security and vulnerability scanning and training as a monthly subscription.

For additional information, contact us at (630) 435-4000.

Network IT Easy is pleased to announce it is now a B2B Partner of the Illinois Manufacturer’s Association (IMA).

About Network IT Easy

Network IT Easy helps small and medium sized (SMB) manufacturers focus on their business and gain a competitive advantage by providing a cost effective combination of IT technologies and outsourced technical support tailored to their business.  We take complete responsibility for every facet of the IT infrastructure including 24X7 monitoring, security protection, proactive Microsoft patching, remote and on-site technical support, data back-up/disaster recovery and ongoing technology planning.

About the IMA

The IMA is the oldest and largest state manufacturing association in the United States. Founded in Chicago in 1893, the IMA represents nearly 4,000 companies and plants that operate in Illinois. IMA support includes lobbying, informative seminars and training, continuing education courses, and a number of affinity programs designed to help your company grow and prosper.