Beware of malware Office 365 statements

It’s taken a little while but the bad guys have taken to impersonating Office 365 billing statements like the one shown above. Unless you check REALLY closely you’d click on the links provided and get your machine infected with something evil like Cryptolocker.

As always, the best defence is to be careful when clicking links and downloading attachments inside emails, even if they look legit.

The average user really doesn’t stand a chance as I have highlighted many times:

Why the bad giys always win

Paranoia is therefore your best defense, so be paranoid, REALLY paranoid when it comes you emails wanting you to click something, even those that appear to come from Office 365!

CIAOPS SharePoint Level 1 course now available

Following on from my Getting Started With SharePoint course I am happy to announce that the follow-on course, SharePoint Level 1, is now available at the CIAOPS Academy.

SharePoint skills is the biggest thing I find that is holding most Office 365 users back. This is because SharePoint is all about collaboration rather than simple storage. That means it has far more features and functionality than people appreciate. Understanding what SharePoint is actually capable of helps people to utilise SharePoint better to solve their business challenges.

My courses are designed to show you what SharePoint can do via focused on-demand video tutorials, reinforced with download PDF lesson notes.

The new course is available on demand and contains 25 lessons:

1. SharePoint structure overview

2. Introduction to Email Alerts in SharePoint

3. Introduction to Document Approvals in SharePoint

4. Changing the Site Title, Logo and URL

5. Document Check In/Out

6. Connecting SharePoint to Access

7. Content types

8. Creating sub sites

9. Introduction to Lookup Columns

10. Advanced List Editing

11. Working with Document Library Versioning

12. Introduction to Views

13. Using Promoted Links

14. Create a SharePoint Document Library Template

15. Using a template to migrate a SharePoint Library

16. Creating and using Site Columns

17. Creating and Editing Site pages

18. Adding a Yammer feed to SharePoint

19. Displaying Linked Lists

20. Getting Started with InfoPath

21. Saving a SharePoint Online Site as a Template

22. Creating a new Site Collection

23. Using a Site Template with a new Site Collection

24. Deleting a SharePoint Online Site Collection

25. Getting Started with SharePoint Designer

It is designed follow on from the Getting Started course and add to your SharePoint knowledge and help you make better use of SharePoint in your business. This course will help you become more of a SharePoint Power User.

The course is available stand alone or now combined into a SharePoint Quickstart package that also includes the original Getting Started course.

I have already commenced work on next SharePoint course which will take up where this Level 1 course finishes, so stay tuned.

You can find all my online courses at www.ciaopsacademy.com.

A new CIAOPS SharePoint online course is coming

My Getting Started With SharePoint Online course is available via two methods:

Delivered via email

On demand

I am just putting the final touches to my follow up 25 part SharePoint Level 1 online course that picks up from the Getting Started course and I’ll be posting it to the CIAOPS Academy before Christmas 2015.

ANYONE who has already signed up to one of my online courses at www.ciaopsacademy.com will receive a 50% discount on this new SharePoint Level 1 course when it becomes available.

So, if you have already taken one of my online courses then you’ll just need to keep an eye on your inbox for your discount code on or around Christmas. If you haven’t already taken one of my online courses then you might want to sign up to an existing course before December 25, 2015 to ensure you get the special 50% discount on the new course when it becomes available.

You’ll find all my online courses at www.ciaopsacademy.com.

A story with a happy ending

Open Live Writer

By now you should appreciate that I spend a lot of time blogging, not only here but in many other places on the web. When I first started out my blog was running on proprietary software I hosted on my own server. From there I moved to a public SharePoint blog that I also maintained on my own infrastructure. Eventually, I ended up on Blogger for various reasons and the offline tool that I used to craft posts was Windows Live Writer which Microsoft made available for free.

Over the years Microsoft has moved away from maintaining and updating Windows Live Writer which I can totally understand, especially being a free product. Problem was the Internet continued to evolve and was slowly but surely creeping towards being more secure. This meant that Blogger (a Google property) also became more secure in the way it handled authentication.

Doing so back in June 2015 this new autehntication broke the ability for Windows Live Write to post successfully to Blogger. The summary of my experiences are here:

Back with Blogger

As I expressed in that post, I was concerned about the way forward with Windows Live Writer because the writing was on the wall for it no longer being maintained. Kudos to both Microsoft and Google for working together on solving this and for Google to extending the older autentication for another 6 months.

Fast forward to a few days ago and BAMB, unable to post again (the 6 month lifeline was over). The support forums again lit up with people crying, screaming, begging for the problem to be rectified.

Scott Hanselman from Microsoft announced on December 9 that Windows Live Writer was being forked to an open source product called Open Live Writer. You read about it here:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingOpenLiveWriterAnOpenSourceForkOfWindowsLiveWriter.aspx

Only problem was the new Open Live Writer still didn’t support the ability to post to Blogger. However, the encouraging news was that some smart people were working on solving the problem.

Martin Woodward from Microsoft who is an author and contributor on the project left a comment on my post:

Windows Live Writer not working with Blogger again

to let me know the issue was being worked on as a priority. Cool, just needed to be patient.

I then received a reply to a tweet from Scott Hanselman that there was now a version of Open Live Write that supported posting to Blogger.

So I popped back over to:

http://openlivewriter.org/

downloaded the latest version and installed it.

One of things I was worried about was the fact that I have two factor authentication enabled on my Google account. Would Open Live Writer handle this? Yes it did! In a better way than before when I had to use one time applications passwords with Windows Live Writer.

So after publishing a test post to confirm all was in order I am now back on the blogging train and normal service will continue.

Firstly, thank you to EVERYONE who worked to resolve this issue. You have no idea I suspect of how many souls you have pleased. It demonstrates the greatness of people when they work together (remembering that both Windows Live Writer and Open Live Writer are free products).

I look forward to continued improvements with Open Live Writer going forward (some stuff still needs doing but that is minor) and again thank everyone who made this piossible. You are legends!

I love Open Live Writer

Hopefully this means we’re back!

Windows Live Writer not working with Blogger again

Windows Live Writer has once again stopped working with Blogger. This means I can’t post until things get fixed. Live Writer has recently been open sourced by Microsoft but that project also doesn’t work with Blogger. Hopefully it gets sorted soon and I can back to posting.

Very frustrating and may have to consider alternatives if the situation continues.

Hang in there, back soon.

Power BI adds Cortana integration

One of the regular Power BI demos that i do involves using the natural language query engine at the top of the dashboard. The above example is from a spreadsheet I uploaded to my Power BI environment that contains information about all the Olympic medal winners.

So if I now type total medals by country into the query Power BI automatically provides me with the visualisation as you see above.

But if I wake Cortana up by saying “hey cortana” and then asking “total gold medals australia by sport” you’ll see from above that it comes back with some Power BI suggestions.

If I now select one of these you’ll see that it pulls the information from that same spreadsheet I was just using in Power BI.

That now means Cortana is integrated with Power BI! Pretty cool eh? So how do you configure that?

The first step in the process is to integrate Office 365 and Cortana. I have detailed that previously at:

Connecting Cortana to Office 365

Next, you’ll need to go into the Power BI Dashboard for the data set you wish to integrate with Cortana.

Select the COG in the top right corner of the dashboard for the dataset and then the Settings option from the menu that appears.

Ensure you have the desired dataset selected on the left. Then on the right ensure option Enable Cortana to access this dataset is checked.

Now users who have access to that Power BI dataset and have Cortana enabled and linked to their Office 365 account can query data by voice or simply by typing into the search box.

Another REALLY impressive new features is Quick Insights. Here I’ll use the Chicago Crime Statistics spreadsheet that I’ve also uploaded into my Power BI environment.

Select the ellipse (three dots) to the right of the data source under the Datasets heading in the lower left of the Power BI screen.

From the menu that appears (shown above) select View Insights.

You’ll now see a list of discovered “insights” displayed as shown above. But how are these “insights’ generated?

Power BI’s new Quick Insights feature allows you to run a variety of analytical algorithms on your data to search for potential insights with the click of a mouse. Through a partnership with Microsoft Research, we’re honing a growing list of algorithms to discover and visualize correlations, outliers, trends, seasonality, change points in trends, and major factors within your data, automatically, within seconds.

It gets even more impressive than that as detailed here:

Announcing Power BI integration with Cortana and new ways to quickly find insights in your data

Aside from all the new cool Power BI stuff the integration with Cortana illustrates another benefit of the Microsoft platform and how services like Cortana are being integrated across everything!

This stuff just keeps getting better!