New Year’s celebrations have come and gone and things are really starting to look up again. (After all, on the Lunar calendar it’s the Year of the Ox. And my Google Machine told me this means “success in business, prosperity, and wellness” for us all!) After the trials and tribulations of 2020, it feels good to say that CGNET didn’t just sit idly by, biding time until things got back to normal. In fact, you could say we took that time to really “grab the ox by the horns”. (Yes, that was corny. This is what lockdown does to a person.) Anyway, we focused our sights on the things we could do to help out our customers both during everyone’s mandated remote work status and once everyone is back in their offices. Read on to learn about some of the new tools and services from CGNET.

Microsoft Teams “user guide”

A long-time customer suggested we put together a compilation of links to our most helpful (and popular) how-to and “tips and tricks” Teams blog posts from the past couple of years. We took her up on it, and the result is All About Teams: A Collection of Useful Posts, a resource that should be super-handy for Microsoft Teams users. Set up as a pdf and housed on our website’s Publications page, users can find what they’re looking for quickly: Read a short summary of the post, and if it’s what you’re looking for, just click to open it.

We’ve included posts on several Teams-related topics, including:

• Teams phone basics: All about making, taking & transferring calls
• Polling in Teams channels and meetings
• How to open a Teams meeting in a new window
• The Wiki tab: What it is, why it’s useful and how to set one up
• How to pop out a chat window in Teams
• Tracking attendance in Teams meetings
• How to share your screen during a meeting or chat

…and more.

If your organization uses Teams, this is a great resource — particularly for your newer users. So check it out, download it, share it… You get the idea!

New Security Service offerings

CGNET has been around a long time. Well into our 4^th decade, one of our areas of expertise is cybersecurity. Always important, but now more than ever, (it’s a dangerous place out there on the interwebs!) you know that security services are critical to keeping your organization safe and functioning. That in mind, we’ve added to the (already lengthy) list of services and products in our security suite. Just a few of the newest options include:

• Conditional Access for Microsoft 365. Conditional Access policies at their simplest are if-then statements; if a user wants to access a resource, then they must complete an action. For example: A payroll manager wants to access the payroll application and is required to perform multi-factor authentication to access it. Read more about getting set up with Conditional Access.
• Azure Active Directory. The Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enterprise identity service provides single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to help protect your users from 99.9 percent of cybersecurity attacks. Read more here about migrating your AD to the cloud with Azure.
• Security Mini-Review. While a comprehensive review of your cyber security is recommended every 3 years, you should not neglect it in-between. It’s important to review aspects of your security every year to make sure it is up-to-date and relevant to today’s cyber threats. Click here for more information on CGNET’s mini-review service.

Those are just a small fraction of everything we have to offer on the cybersecurity front. If you want to see every security service and product we offer, check out the entire list on our website here.

So let’s think of 2021 as not only a year of recovery but — c’mon, everyone, more enthusiasm! — a year of positive transition and growth. In other words, let’s strive not just to get “back to normal” but to get back to even better than normal.  And I’m feeling pretty darn confident that the new tools and services from CGNET can help make that happen for your organization.