Interlink Cloud Blog

Everything has its time. For your Lotus Notes deployment, sadly, the glory days are long past.
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When it comes to migrations and understanding specific organizations environments needs and goals – we are the experts and have many best practices in place.

Technology is constantly evolving. Years ago, Lotus Notes met and exceed organizational needs, both as a groupware mail system and as an app platform. However, increased demands and innovations in the industry have made this software no longer enough to help organizations stay productive and work optimally.

As of April 21, 2020, Microsoft has renamed its Small and Medium Business (SMB) commercial offerings, commercial desktop client, and their consumer Office 365 offerings to align with the Microsoft 365 name.
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It is important to note, that subscription prices, product features, Offer IDs and SKUs, and Office 365 Enterprise SKU names are not changing. Again, this is only a change to the product name - no product features or pricing is different as a result of these updates. No action is required by end-users, and the names will automatically be updated for them.

Microsoft 365 combines intuitive best-in-class productivity apps with intelligent cloud services to empower your Firstline Workforce. 
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Firstline workers are the people who work in service or task-oriented roles across a variety of industries such as retail, hospitality, or manufacturing. They often drive the bottom line, define the customer experience, are the face of organizations, and are crucial to the success of products/services. Empowering workers with the right tools and technologies is vital to their potential to create success. Through Microsoft’s Firstline Worker plans, organizations can streamline business practices and protect your organization's assets at the same time! Read on to learn about recent changes and upgrades to these plans.

Learn how your organization can effectively develop and improve strategies for working remotely during the COVID-19 crisis. 

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Interlink's CTO and Vice President, Mike Wilson, participated in an online roundtable discussion with experts in medicine, finance, employment law, IT, and public relations regarding some important ways you can prepare your business to deal with the fallout of the coronavirus. (You can view the entire roundtable webinar here!) While most of us haven’t felt the direct impact of someone we know becoming infected, most are experiencing indirect impacts. Many employees have been sent to work from home, schools have closed, major community events have been postponed, and travel plans are canceled - just to name a few.

In this article, we summarize some of the key IT takeaways that can help you maintain business continuity while balancing business risk versus IT security. It is our goal at Interlink to offer aid and assistance to businesses and organizations struggling with transitioning, even temporarily, to a remote office setting. 

Make sure your organization is ready for changes to Conditional Access Baseline Protections!
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Recently, Microsoft announced an update to Conditional Access policies regarding security. Read to learn what will be replacing Security Defaults, and how to turn it on!

Baseline Protections Update  

Microsoft currently has Baseline Protection Policies in place with Conditional Access in order to protect organizational accounts. Baseline Protections will stop being enforced on February 29th, 2020 and be replaced with Security Defaults. Security Defaults are a set of basic identity security mechanisms recommended by Microsoft. New tenants will automatically have these enabled, but existing tenants will require action. When enabled, these recommendations will automatically be enforced in your organization. Administrators and users will be better protected from common identity-related attacks – but you must be sure to enable these features! View the Microsoft announcement Introducing Security Defaults, which explain this.

If you are currently using Conditional Access and want to set up the equivalent policies in place of baseline, contact us today!