Panasonic KX-TGP600 Series IP DECT Phone

We just got in our first Panasonic KX-TGP600 series IP DECT phone that is compatible with our Sangoma IP Phone networks. Our biggest excitement is how tightly integrated with the Phone Switch it is and quickly we were able to bring it online.

This phone is able to be expanded up to eight standard cordless phones using the KX-TPA60, KX-TPA65, KX-UDT121 or KX-UDT131.

The benefits of SIP communications are especially compelling today: the reduced hardware costs and simplicity of routing your company’s calls over the Internet can mean huge savings on your monthly telephone bill. For small and medium-sized businesses, Panasonic’s new KX-TGP600 SIP cordless phone system is the ideal solution. In addition to the KX-TPA60, which is included with the KX-TGP600, it is expandable with any combination of up to a total of eight Panasonic cordless or desktop DECT phones*, significantly reducing the costs of wiring.

The KX-UDT121 and KX-UDT131 are also fully featured  cordless phones that are compact and rugged and have full duplex hands free mode and headset support which gives the user plenty of options for multi-tasking during a conversation. The KX-UDT121 has Bluetooth® support, allowing a wireless headset to be used if needed. The KX-UDT131 provides IP65-level dust and water resistance for more demanding environments.

The KX-TPA65 desktop DECT phone offers a significant advantage over traditional desk phones. While it features the same range of desktop functionality as its wired competitors, the phone's DECT capabilities mean no wired LAN is required for installation, making the process quick, convenient and straightforward anywhere there's an electrical outlet nearby.

For businesses that need even greater wireless coverage the KX-A406 Wireless Repeater expands the indoor communication area from the standard 164 feet to over 650 feet depending on the environment.

Conventional cordless phones may experience signal fading when the user moves around in locations surrounded by metallic ceilings and walls, thereby making it difficult to hear the other party’s voice and have a conversation. With Panasonic’s reliable Digital Enhanced Wireless Telecommunications (DECT) technology, the KX-TGP600 system greatly reduces signal fading and errors so your calls aren’t interrupted and the conversations remain comfortable, clear and professional. And with the optional KX-A406 wireless repeater, you can extend digital cordless coverage

Google boosts verification after wave of Maps fake listings fraud

Apparently Google has been having some issues with illegitimate companies populating their maps, some even with ratings. They are getting there through the free to list Google My Business program.

In the Naked  Security Article, John E. Dunn goes into depth about how Google is admitting that it has been working on this problem for awhile.

This is not just a problem with Google’s search engine but other like Bing. So be aware that this is going on and gird yourself against these fraudsters!

Read the entire article here.

Are you using Forms Function in Acrobat?

You will want to look at this article. This is a quick discussion about the origin of forms in Acrobat/PDF files. Things are changing here with one of the two formats that have been adopted being put to bed by Adobe. So if you are using fillable PDF forms take a look at what Foxit has to say about them.

Here is info about this from the Adobe Forums.

Great Lightroom Tip from Scott Kelby

I keep thinking about purchasing a memory card with a built in GPS chip to be able to automatically geotag my photos when taking them since my camera doesn’t have a built in GPS so the suggestion is made to pull out your phone that has built in GPS and quickly take a photo from the same location that you are shooting. Then you can come back at a later time and apply that map location to your other images. See this link for more information.

What are my options for getting MS Office for myself?

If you are not needing to be part of team/organization that is shares information and documents, then you will want to consider one of the many personal options. The first is to purchase a perpetual license that can only be put on one machine, period. Your options here are Home & Student $150 or Home & Business $230. The primary difference is that Outlook comes with the Home & Business version. When purchasing one of these two packages you are purchasing the current version of the software that does not have an upgrade path to new version and can only be installed on one machine. The positive point is that you are acquiring at a fixed cost. If you do not upgrade your MS Office with each new version and if you have multiple machines that you want to put it on then you may find that the subscription service of Office 365 is a better option.

On the personal side you have two choices, either a Personal Subscription $70/year or a Home Subscription $100/year.

Office 365 Personal includes	Office 365 Home includes
1-year auto-renewal subscription For 1 PC or Mac, 1 tablet including iPad, Android, or Windows, plus 1 phone Fully installed versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and more Also includes Publisher and Access for PC (not available for Mac). 1TB cloud storage Ongoing access to updates	1-year auto-renewal subscription For 5 PCs or Macs, 5 tablets including iPad, Android, or Windows, plus 5 phones Fully installed versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and more Also includes Publisher and Access for PC (not available for Mac). 1TB cloud storage per user for up to 5 users Ongoing access to updates
$69.99/Year	$99.99/Year

This should give you some idea of where you want to go with this.

Office 365: Enterprise K1 vs. Business Essentials vs. Enterprise E1

Which Service plan is right for you? See the chart below that outlines each of the different Plans.

Online Service	Business Essentials	Enterprise K1	Enterprise E1
Price (annual commitment)	$5/user/month	$4/user/month	$8/user/month
Number of User Max	300	Unlimited	Unlimited
Email and Calendars	Email with a 50GB limit	Email with a 2GB limit	Email with a 50GB limit
Host Meetings	Host Online Meetings	Can Attend Online Meetings	Can Host up to 10k user meetings
Instant Messaging, Presence and Meetings	Instant Msg, voice calls, video calls with Business Skype and regular Skype	Connect to CoWorkers only using Web based Skype for Business and attend Skype for Business Broadcast Meetings	Same as Business Essentials
Meeting Broadcast	No	No	Up to 10000 attendees
File Storage and Sharing	1TB Storage Personal	2GB Storage Personal	1TB Storage Personal
Chat-Based Workspace	Connect your team with Microsoft Teams in Office 365 and bring together chat, content, people and tools in one place so your teams have instant access to everything they need.
Team Sites (SharePoint)	1TB of baseline storage for use for shared document libraries, data lists and other functions. Intranet functionality.	Can access with browser or on mobile device only	1TB of baseline storage for use for shared document libraries, data lists and other functions. Intranet functionality.
Yammer	Discuss ideas, share updates and crowdsource answers from coworkers across your organization. Yammer gives you a faster, smarter way to connect and collaborate across your company.
Office Online	Create and edit Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Excel documents in the browser versions of the Office applications.
Microsoft StaffHub	N/A	Helps workers manage their work days w/schedule management, information sharing, and the ability to connect to other work-related apps and resources from a mobile device or browser.
Work Management	Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress	N/A	Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress
Sway	With Sway, you can easily create engaging, interactive web-based reports, presentations, newsletters, trainings and more—right from your phone, tablet, or browser. Sways are easy to share and look great on any screen.
Office Delve	Statistics based insights on behavioral use of many of the Office 365 features	N/A	Statistics based insights on behavioral use of many of the Office 365 features
Corporate Video Portal	Easily manage videos within your organization. Office 365 Video is a company-wide destination for video upload, sharing and discovery, and smooth playback across devices.
Apps for Office and SharePoint	New third-party and customer-developed apps work with Office and SharePoint to bring web services right into your documents and sites.

New Value in Office 365 Enterprise K1 Users

Microsoft announced on April 3rd that they have added new updates to the Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan. The K1 Plan is meant for frontline workers are those that need to be able to work with tools for scheduling and task management, communications, training, and identity/access management.

This is what has been added:

• Microsoft StaffHub
• OneDrive for Business with 2GB of cloud storage
• Skype for Business presence and instant messaging
• Microsoft Teams
• Office 365 Video
• Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow

These new capabilities will begin rolling out in the next several weeks. Office 365 Enterprise K1 is priced at $4/user/month with an annual commitment.

Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan page

Naked Security: AKBuilder, Microsoft Word Intruder exploiting Office RTF vulnerability

A Microsoft bulletin for patching Office released last October patches a vulnerability attackers could exploit on your computers. Read here what this exploit is all about and what you need to do to protect yourself before you become infected.

SophosLabs researchers have discovered fresh cases of AKBuilder and Microsoft Word Intruder (MWI) exploiting the flaw.

This vulnerability is already under fire by two major exploit builders. It all happened within a couple of weeks, with the help of an underground forum.

Privacy Concerns Again are at the forefront of the News

Everyone is up in arms about the reversal of the previous rules passed last year that would have provided strong protections against internet providers from gathering and selling your browsing history.

TechCrunch Article: Everything you need to know about Congress’ decision to expose your data to internet providers

One thing to remember, these rules had not gone into effect as of yet so you are not going to experience anything different than what is already going on. However, as of now we are all open season on reporting on our web search history for all the good or bad things that this will bring forward.

Need more storage for your NVR unit?

Western Digital is introducing their brand new Purple^TM 10TB drive. Built for 24/7, always-on, high definition systems rated to support and annual workload of up to 180TB/writes/yr and support up to 64 cameras. The WD Purple drives are optimized for surveillance systems.

The Purple Series is currently available in distribution from 1TB- 8TB sizes the 10TB drives are SKU’d and should be available shortly. They should be priced in the $450-$500 range. Spindle speed is 5400RPM, SATA interface and has a 256MB buffer to help with the data stream. It does have a 5 year limited Manufacturer's Warranty.

WD’s Marketing Blub:

The right drive for the right job.
WD Purple™ drives have been engineered specifically for surveillance, so they're able to withstand the elevated heat fluctuations and equipment vibrations within a NVR environments. An average desktop drive is built to run for only short intervals, not the harsh 24/7 always-on environment of a high-definition surveillance system. A disruption to a drive could result in a failure that impacts multiple users, your security archive, or even the entire system. With WD Purple™, you get reliable, surveillance-class storage that's tested for compatibility in a wide-range of security systems.
Industry-leading storage. Surveillance you can trust.
WD is a worldwide leader in the hard drive industry. With WD Purple™ surveillance storage, you have a drive engineered for high temperature, always-on surveillance systems so you can rely on quality video playback when you need it most. Whether you're protecting loved ones or monitoring your business, WD Purple™ offers performance you can trust.
Wide compatibility. Seamless integration.
WD Purple™ hard drives are built with compatibility in mind, so you can quickly and seamlessly add capacity to your surveillance system. With a wide range of industry-leading enclosures and chipsets supported, you're sure to find the DVR or NVR configuration that's right for you.
Not sure what drive is best for your system? Use our compatibility tool to find the perfect storage for your DVR or NVR.
Expand your view to 64
Each WD Purple™ drive is optimized to support up to 64 cameras. With so many options, you have the flexibility to upgrade or expand your security system in the future.

Microsoft Teams versus Slack

I ran across an interesting article posted "by Cale Hunt, windowscentral.com" in Windows Central.com. it had recently come off in my conversations with some of my Sophos partner friends that we were going to make a move towards using Slack to help better the conversations between the members of our group. However, it was mentioned that internally they were using the Microsoft Teams application internally in that older people really enjoy it. We also had instituted several channels in our Teams system and we are finding it very interesting as well. However just like anything new it is hard for that new thing to gain any type of traction.

One of the things to understand about Teams is that it is built on top of SharePoint and for all intents and purposes is just an automated site creation and management tool for SharePoint sites that you can access both using this tool and SharePoint site interface. It allows you to pull in different pieces of your SharePoint sites to help integrate and overall continuity of conversation and project planning.

I will be talking more about this product in future post as we are using it so stay tuned for that. As for the title of the article here is a link to the post that I mentioned above

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-does-microsoft-teams-compare-slack

Just as a side note comma I wrote this entire article using my new Lenovo Android tablet totally would voice to text recognition. I was impressed with how well the Android engine performed.

It was a busy month

😥 Sorry that I was gone so long but it was a crazy month and it was hard to get back into the groove of writing even though I had more than enough information at my fingertips to share. So I promise to do better this month and will try to get as much information out there to all of you. Some of the things I will be pointing to our a month old comma but I will try to keep only the relevant items in my posts.

Sophos Conference Part 1 (Firewall Technology)

There are quite a few exciting items coming up in the next few months. When Version 17 of the XG firewall software is released we will be gaining closer parity with the current SG v9.x software products. The one disappointing piece of news was that we won’t be seeing a migration program to convert SG to XG. However, we may get a package to do part of the migration of just the objects, but not the policies. This would be a start but it wasn’t the full migration package we had hoped for.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 13

I was very hesitant to spend the money to update my Dragon NaturallySpeaking application from version 12 version 13. I know I was just being hesitant because I didn't want to spend the money but when I read that the new application would work on my laptops built in microphone I thought that would be a great benefit for when I'm on the road need to make quick notes and update a lot of the documentation for customer visits and service situations.

So, I went ahead and bit the bullet and shelled out the cash to acquire the new version of the software. I am really impressed with how well that it is working off the microphone that is built into my Microsoft SurfaceBook 4. I have written this entire article utilizing this configuration with minimal issues. The old version 12 not work in my Windows Live Writer application directly. I had to open a dictation box and then transfer whatever I wrote from the dictation box to the program using the transfer. While that was not too inconvenient, it is much easier to be able to have it type directly into my application instead.

Another application that I was hoping you work better with was our ConnectWise application. It still doesn't work in the application but it does bring up the dictation box automatically and allow for quick transfer of the text you want to put into the application where the cursor position. Quick and easy especially since I don't have to start the dictation box myself.

For some reason the old version 12 application stop working with Microsoft Office 2016 and I had to use the dictation box as well. I'm sure this was part of the reason why figured I needed to upgrade to the version of the software. Now both work within the Office 2016 applications so I'm very happy with that result as well.

I will have to report back on other things that I find that are different in the new application but I do feel was a well spent $79 to get these capabilities. I feel that it will be a great timesaver for me in the long run. Isn't that what it's all about?

.

Naked Security: Fallen for a fake Twitter Account? Here’s how to spot them

By Lisa Vaas, nakedsecurity.sophos.com       February 14th, 2017

On Tuesday, a fake Twitter account purportedly belonging to the retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who had resigned from his position as US national security adviser the night before, hoodwinked not only the New York Times and other media outlets, but also House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Elijah Cummings.

See the rest of the article here…

How to spot a fake Twitter account

Is it verified?

In a FAQ on its verified accounts, Twitter says that, typically, verified accounts belong to users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business and more, be they brands or individuals.

How much does Facebook really know about you – and is it right?

This is a very interesting point of view on how Facebook and other social networks use your interactions with their applications to their financial benefit. These “Free” services aren’t really free. They may be costing you in ways other than monetarily. Take a quick peak.

It is always a good thing to be more fully aware of what you are getting into when you access an online service. Be careful of the information you share and equipment you use to to access it.

Watch out LinkedIn Facebook now lest companies post job listings

While I am not really a candidate for looking for a jobs right now, I have been here at PAconnect for over 35 year at present, but if you are you will have a new place to dig into for your next potential employer. Facebook has initiated support for job listings on company pages in the US and Canada over the next few weeks. With Facebook being the world’s largest social network, it may be a perfect method of getting more eyeballs to your company’s job opportunities.

This is a good addition to most of the nonsense that appears in Facebook today. Hopefully these listing won’t get lost in the online clutter. If it works out for Facebook it could eventually harm Microsoft’s LinkedIn and other services that provide this already.

Amazon files patent for drone deliveries

Amazon is planning on using drones and parachutes for their future deliveries.

CNN reports that the US Patent and Trademark office provided Amazon with a patent that sees the everything giant delivering packages with drones and parachutes. The patent shows Amazon would use drones to delivery packages "at altitude" and "monitor and adjust package trajectory during descent". CNN reports that Amazon's drones could "radio a message to an off-course package, instructing it to deploy a parachute, compressed air canister or landing flap".

So, for now, drones still need a human at the flight stick but Amazon hopes to be in the lead with automating delivery in the very near future.

Sophos iView Overview

Sophos iView from Sophos on Vimeo.

Amazon offering kindle versions of “100 Books You Must Read Before You Die”

I am big into “reading” and I do so mainly digitally. Whether I use my Kindle, Tablet, or switch to audio, I hardly ever touch a real, physical book anymore. So if you haven’t read what are considered as the books you must read for your bucket list, Amazon is giving them away free for your Kindle device.

This looks like a good collection of public domain novels, in Kindle format.  It's volume 1 of a 2 volume set. Here's volume 2.

This is a great way to get started, but don’t forget the Kindleunlimited option that you can purchase which costs $9.99/month for basically unlimited reading. You can borrow up to 10 titles at a time and you can consume most of these either in text or audible formats. This is a really nice option especially for me consuming 8-10 books a month.

If you have Prime, there is also Prime Reading option that comes with that subscription. There are quite a few books and magazines available through this service as well.