Tell A Better Story With Microsoft Sway

Tell A Better Story With Microsoft Sway

Telling a story is a very unique and special part of running a business. When done right, a story can move an audience, whether it’s sharing a vision for a better world to launching a new product.

For many years, businesses have told their story using Microsoft PowerPoint. As business people, we’ve gotten used to the transitions, clip art, and hundreds of slides that some presenters choose to get their point across.

If you’re one of those who has had to sit through a boring PowerPoint presentation, fear no more. Microsoft’s launch of Sway changes the paradigm and adds a deeper layer of design, intuition, and creativity never seen before. In today’s blog post, we’ll look at 3 reasons why the technologically savvy business owner should consider using Sway to take their presentations to the next level.

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5 Stories You Need To Know – July 20-24

5 Stories You Need To Know – July 20-24

Four Key Cloud Management Considerations
By Bill Kleyman

“Today, we take a pause and look at the overall cloud landscape. We see a giant mess of interconnected data centers and resources all working hard to deliver rich content, user workloads, and vast amounts of information. Cloud adoption has allowed many to create new solutions and go-to-market strategies. Through a variety of services and deployment models – cloud computing has become a standard for agility, and supporting an ever-evolving user.

Still, for many organizations out there, controlling the cloud is somewhat of a challenge. It’s not even just the management side of things; there are just so many cloud services out there that it becomes confusing to understand the right use-case for a certain kind of offering. With that in mind, below are four insights into cloud management considerations which will help you see the bigger, cloud, picture.”

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How MDM Can Ease IT Pain

How MDM Can Ease IT Pain

It’s the summertime and half of your office is out on vacation or taking advantage of the beautiful weather to work outside. The other half has brought their personal smartphones or tablets to work on too. Though it’s quieter at the office, you want everyone to continue hitting business goals while still being able to use their own devices.

Whether your business is ready or not, a transformation in the workforce is coming. IT research firm IDC predicts the number of mobile workers in the United States will rise to105.4 million individuals by 2020. As a result, companies will adopt mobile device management (MDM) policies to let employees work whenever, wherever.

If you’re on the fence about how MDM can help your company weather the challenges of tomorrow, today’s blog post is for you. We’ll cover a few ways where MDM can make your transition much easier.
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5 Stories You Need To Know – July 13-17

5 Stories You Need To Know – July 13-17

Microsoft and Rackspace Form Cloud Alliance
Shira Ovide

“Microsoft Corp. and data center services company Rackspace Hosting Inc. are teaming up to ease customers over barriers to using Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service.

Under an alliance set to be announced Monday, Rackspace will help companies start using Azure and guide them on how to squeeze the most for their money from Azure’s processing, data storage, databases and other services. Rackspace will help solve service or security problems and help companies combine Azure with their own computing facilities.”

Windows Server 2003 reaches end of life while Microsoft makes upgrading unattractive
Chris Merriman

“4,464 DAYS AGO Microsoft released Windows Server 2003 to manufacturers. Today marks its end of life, the point at which Microsoft will stop supporting it, patching its security breaches, making it warm milk and kissing its oweeys.

In many ways, this is an even more relevant end of an era than Windows XP which expired in April 2014, because each instance of Windows Server powers entire networks and virtual machines and is the backbone of entire businesses’ IT infrastructure.”

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Half-Year Resolutions For The Technology-Oriented Organization

Half-Year Resolutions For The Technology-Oriented Organization

2015 has been a fast year so far, and if you hadn’t noticed the calendar, we just passed by the halfway point. For many small businesses, now is the time for assessment, reflection, celebration, and adjustments. Are you on track? What have you been doing well? What can you do better? Where is your industry headed and where do you fit in?

If your organization is technology-focused, there is still much to do before the calendar switches to 2016. In today’s blog post, we’ll take a look at some considerations that will help take your business to the next level.

1. Adapt to Cloud

Recent surveys show that cloud adoption is growing faster than usual. Numbers show that 62% of organizations will run 100% of their IT in the cloud by 2020. Small businesses are also adopting cloud at a faster rate than the enterprise. No matter the size of your business, transitioning to the cloud is a good call. Among the benefits of cloud are a remote workforce, lower costs, off-premise managed services, and better security.

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Office 2016 for Mac Now Available For Office 365 Customers

Office 2016 for Mac Now Available For Office 365 Customers

Did you hear the big news? Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Mac. Yep, Mac users are going to finally get a new version of Office. The last release was way back in 2011.

The all-new design is perfect for people who switch between Macs and PCs regularly. If your small business fits in this category, you have plenty of company. According to Microsoft, roughly 75 percent of the Office for Mac customer base is made up of cross-platform users. These are typically people with a Windows PC at work and a Mac at home. Sounds familiar right?

There is only one catch to this life-changing news. Office 2016 for Mac is not fully available until September.

But, if you are an Office 365 subscriber, you can get Office 2016 now!


The latest version of Office for Mac includes support for Retina displays, the signature ribbon interface, task panes, cloud integration, multi-touch gestures and a full screen view mode.

To start right now, all you need is an Office 365 subscription (Office 365 Home, Personal, Business, Business Premium, E3 or ProPlus), which includes the rights and access to use Office applications on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android devices, along with additional value in OneDrive and Skype.

Don’t have Office 365?

Well, that is not a problem because myhosting makes it easy to add the productivity suite to your business thanks to our new cloud marketplace.

By purchasing Office 365 from the marketplace, you not only get a powerful software solution, but you get the full support of myhosting’s cloud experts behind you. That includes setup, data migration, security patches and software updates. It’s worth mentioning that this applies to all products in the marketplace, not just Office 365.

Get Office 2016 for Mac today by becoming an Office 365 subscriber via the myhosting marketplace.

Otherwise, Office 2016 for Mac will become available as a one-time purchase option this September. (more…)