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.