It's here. This week, Microsoft is launching the latest version of Windows, Windows 11. This is certainly no secret, especially if you've been watching Sunday night football and the flood of Microsoft ads during the game.

As a business leader, you don’t care what Microsoft calls its services as long as your programs work and fees don’t go up. The name change from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 doesn’t create any changes in your services or bill (as of this article’s date). But the name change does signal a great time to really understand what you’re paying Microsoft for and make sure you have the right subscriptions to match your needs. Before we move on, you should know that this article focuses on Microsoft 365 for business licenses and the enterprise license affected by the Microsoft 365 name change. These are some of the most common Microsoft/Office 365 plans for businesses with less than 300 users.

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is Microsoft’s suite of cloud services. Depending on the license tier you choose, it can include the Microsoft Office suite of products, hosted email, cloud based active directory, mobile device management, and many other great cloud services to keep your business secure. As a managed service provider and Microsoft Partner, we are huge fans of Microsoft 365 at Innovative, and we love sharing our favorite features with our clients. Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how users can recover deleted data from Microsoft 365, or how they can undo changes that another user may have made to their documents. Want Exclusive Content Like This? Sign up for our monthly email. In this video, I answer those questions by showing you how to use the two Recycle Bins in Microsoft 365, and how to access previous versions of your Microsoft Office documents. I also touch on some of the limitations of Microsoft 365 data retention and recovery features, and why we recommend third-party SaaS backup solutions to protect your cloud data from a thing called ransomcloud, or rasomware in the cloud.

You've just finished a long report in Word or a presentation that needs to be put together by tomorrow in PowerPoint, hit save, and… your computer freezes on you. Unsure as to why you restart your computer only to see nothing happen. No logon screen, no report, no presentation, nothing. Whether it be due to the operating system or faulty hardware, you're without a computer. What do you do?

Do you have computers in your business operating on Windows 7? Do you feel like you just upgraded away from Windows XP? If that’s the case, you were most likely utilizing Windows XP beyond its April 8, 2014 end of life date and managed just fine without upgrading immediately. So, it makes sense that you are probably not too concerned about upgrading away from Windows 7 any time soon. You survived the last end of life date just fine, and you’ll get through this one too, right? Wrong.

The short answer, it depends. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is about more than just the tools you use, but how you use them. While some applications may never be HIPAA compliant, others that offer compliant features can still get you in trouble if your equipment is not physically secure, or if your employees are not trained to use the tools in a compliant way (i.e. walking away from a workstation without signing off or sharing passwords). At a minimum, HIPAA compliance requires you use the Pro version of windows, as Home versions do not offer the functionality required for HIPAA compliance. Additionally, your operating system must be currently supported by the software vendor. Any version of Windows prior to Windows 7 is not compliant, and Windows 7 will not be compliant after the Windows 7 end-of-life date on January 14, 2020. This article focuses on Windows 10 because other versions have reached or will soon reach end-of-life.

As technology advances so do the software needed to make it run efficiently. At the beginning of the year, Microsoft published a reminder that Windows 7 will lose support on January 14, 2020. If you're wondering how this affects you and your business, here are some things to consider.