Email Security

In addition to the other IT upgrades in progress, we have been focusing on email security.  We have made a few changes in the last few days, and are planning a few more to come.

Quarantine Mail

Some of you may have notice an email in your inbox this morning from quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com.  The email contains a list of emails that were blocked from your inbox, and gives you the opportunity to download any emails you wish to receive.

Until very recently, we did not block any email that was addressed to you.  This email is a result of recent changes.  We implemented this feature to reduce the amount of spam and other unwanted email that arrives in your inbox each day.  The quarantine email is a daily summary of the email that we are blocking.  You only receive one email each day rather than receiving perhaps dozens of spam emails over the course of the day.

This will not block all spam, but hopefully reduces the amount that you receive.  Note that some mail is delivered to your mailbox and is diverted to your junk mail folder.  You may want to check that folder from time to time as well.

Encrypted Mail

Another feature recently added is the ability to send secure encrypted messages.  All internal mail is already encrypted.  But when you send to an outside party, email must necessarily be unencrypted in order for the recipient to be able to access it.

The firm now offers an option to send emails and attachments in a more secure way.  If you type  "securemail" or "#securemail" into the subject or text of an email, the recipient will receive a notices that says:

"You've received an encrypted message from [sender] To view your message Save and open the attachment (message.html), and follow the instructions. Sign in using the following email address [recipent's address]."

The email contains an attachment called "message.html" which the recipient must download and open.  It contains a message:

"Encrypted message
From [sender]
To [recipient]
To view the message, sign in with a Microsoft account, your work or school account, or use a one-time passcode."

If the recipient is already a Microsoft user, he/she can log in and access the text of your email and any attachments.  If not, the recipient can request a temporary pass code which is sent as a second email from Microsoft.  The recipient can use that code to access the content of your email.

If this sounds like a number of extra steps for the recipient, it is.  You may also get calls from recipients saying that this email looks suspicious to them.  Many hackers send similar emails to get users to download suspicious html files and open them on their computers.

Despite these concerns, you should use the secure mail option for any emails that contain private information.  This can include personally identifiable information (PII) such as birth dates or Social Security Numbers.  It would also include any medical records protected under HIPAA.

Box Links

If you want to get confidential information to someone outside the office, and do not want to go through the securemail option, there is another option available to you, at least for the offices that have already converted to Box.  Instead of attaching a file containing private information to an email, you can upload the document to Box.  Then, send an email to the recipient with a link to the document on Box.  The recipient can click on that link and download the information over an encrypted connection.

Multi-factor Authentication

Another feature that is coming soon is multi-factor authentication (MFA) also sometimes called Two-factor authentication (2FA).  We are implementing this because of the ever increasing number of hacker attacks on our email accounts.   With this implemented, a hacker cannot access your email, even if he/she knows your password.  Once you enter your email and password, you will be asked to enter a separate code, that is texted to your smart phone.

Once you have authenticated your computer or other device, you will not need to go through the process again, at least for a period of time, after which we may reauthenticate your device.

Again, it is an extra step, but one that is needed to provide the firm with better security.  We have not implemented MFA yet.  We are still working out a few details.  I wanted to let everyone know that it is coming soon.

Handling Suspicous Mail

In our ongoing efforts to protect our network and our client data, we have created a special email where you can send any suspicious emails  that you receive.  If you get anything that looks suspicious, please forward it to spam@margolisedelstein.com.  Do not open any attachments or reply to the sender.  Just forward the email for our evaluation and testing.  It is important that you do not attempt to act on the message yourself.  Hacking attempts via email are becoming more sophisticated every day.  If you have the slightest doubt, suspicion, question or hunch about an email, please forward it to the spam@margolisedelstein.com address for evaluation.

Junk Mail

The move to Microsoft Exchange for Email means that we are now using Microsoft's anti-spam filter instead of Google's filter.  You may find that spam sorting is different from the one to which you grew accustomed.

Junk Mail Folder

First, Google had a folder called "spam."  Outlook calls the folder "junk mail." In each case, our provider attempts to discern what mail is unwanted and what mail you want to see.  At the post office level, we have the ability to set how aggressive we want Microsoft to be in filtering out spam.  We have the setting default to "low" meaning you are likely to see some spam in your inbox, but less likely to get a valid email incorrectly sent to your junk mail folder.  Even so, you may want to check your junk email folder from time to time to make sure you do not miss anything important.

Just like Google did with its spam folder, Microsoft holds junk mail in that folder for 30 days, then deletes it.  So you do not need to worry about manually deleting the messages there.  You should, however, check it regularly to make sure something important does not disappear.

Junk in Inbox

Inevitably, some mail that arrives in your inbox is going to be junk.  When you get such a message, rather than simply deleting it, mark it as "junk".  This helps Microsoft determine what is junk and what is not.  You have the option in Outlook to block a sender or an entire domain.  You can also opt never to block a certain sender, assuring such messages will always arrive in your inbox.

Focused Mail

Beyond messages sent to junk mail, Outlook attempts to discern between important and unimportant mail that goes to your inbox.  It calls important mail "focused" and less important mail "other".   You should see a tab for each category at the top of your inbox.  "Other" mail does not quite meet the classifications for "junk" status, but that Microsoft's AI considers less important or uninteresting for you.

Depending on how you are viewing your mail (via Outlook, Outlook Online, or the Outlook App on your phone or tablet), you may find these two groups mixed together.  On each of your devices you have the ability to turn on or off focused view.  If off, everything simply shows up in your inbox.  If on, less important mail fails in the "other" tab and you are not given an alert when it arrives.  You can make different choices on different devices.

Changing Your Outlook

We are still on schedule to move to a new email service over Labor Day Weekend.  We will be bidding goodbye to Google's G Suite and moving to Microsoft's Exchange Online.

For the past few weeks, we have been  migrating your mail, contacts, and calendars to the new system.  This process is still ongoing.

Outlook Users

If you already use Microsoft Outlook for your work email, you are currently connecting to Google Mail to receive and send messages.  We will need to point Outlook to Microsoft's system at the appropriate time.  To facilitate this, we have a program called Outlook Assistant.  You can download and install this program now, and it will point your Outlook program to the new system at the appropriate time.

This week, you will receive an email with a link to download Outlook Assistant.  When you do so, you may be asked to create a password.

IMPORTANT: This will change your password for the Office 365 Portal.  If you already know your Office 365 password and want to keep it, simply enter that password.  If you don't know your password or want to change it, this will give you the opportunity to reset it.  This password must have at least 8 characters, both upper and lower case letters, and numbers.  Please remember what your password is.  If we have to change it before the migration is complete, your Outlook conversion will not work properly.

Once you enter a password, simply download and run the executable.  Once this is installed, you will not see any changes.  The program will wait until we tell it to make the switch to Exchange, then it will simply point your program to the new mailbox at the appropriate time.

If you do not install Outlook Assistant, you will no longer receive new emails once we cut over to the new system.

Non-Outlook Users

If you have not yet started using Outlook, and still rely on a web browser to get your mail, you will need to start going to a new web site for your mail.  Rather than going to gmail.com, your mail will start coming to outlook.office365.com.

This will be a new interface that looks a little different, but it will continue to provide browser based access to send and receive mail.

If you go to that web site now, you can see that most of your mail is already there.  Do not be concerned if some mail is missing.  We are still migrating mail, and your mailbox may not be complete.

IMPORTANT: Do not start sending mail from the Office 365 portal before the migration is complete, and do not make any changes to the mail in the new portal.  If you do, you will mess up the migration.  Do not delete messages.  Do not move them into folders. Do not try to send messages from there.  Do not make any changes at all.  You cannot start using the portal until the migration is complete.

If you want to begin using Outlook for your mail, but have not done so already, at this point I would recommend waiting until we make the final conversion.  At that point, you can simply run your initial setup of Outlook and begin using it with Microsoft Exchange Online.

Everyone

There will be some work to do once the migration is complete.  We are migrating your mail, contacts, and calendar.  You may lose some settings.  If you have filters set up to deal with messages, you will need to recreate those in Exchange.  If you have shared calendars with others, you will need to re-share them.  If you are using third party tools like Cloud HQ to share mail folders, those tools will no longer work.

Your labels/folders will move over, but going forward, you can only assign a message to one folder. If you have messages with more than one label during migration, they will be duplicated with a copy in each folder.

The exact timing of the final conversion to the new system is dependent on when the migration is complete.  Once we are confident of when that will happen, we will let everyone know the exact date and time of the cut-over.

Once cut-over is complete, there may be a short time when you still have access to your Gmail account, even though it will no longer be receiving any new messages.  This will give you a chance to confirm for yourself that everything moved properly.  However, once the migration is complete, you should not attempt to send messages from Gmail, nor make any other changes in the old system.

We plan to bring over the contents of your Google Drive to your personal Box folder.  Anything else you may use in Google that is tied to your work account (e.g. photos, chats, blogs, sites, etc.) will be gone once we shut down our Google account.

OneDrive for MS Office

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that it was possible to open and save documents from MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) directly to Google Drive.  This allows you to access those documents from anywhere simply by being logged in to your Google account.

You can also do the same thing using Microsoft's OneDrive.  If you have not used it before, OneDrive is very similar to Google Drive.  It allows you to save documents in the cloud, accessible from anywhere you have Internet access as long as you log into your Office 365 account.  You can even edit the documents using Microsoft's online version of Office if you don't have the full version of Office installed on the device you are using.  Keep in mind though that the online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint do not offer all of the advanced features available to you on your downloaded version of MS Office.

When you open or save a document in Word, you should see a OneDrive option.  If you select that, you may be asked to log into your OneDrive Account.  Your account name is your email address.  We sent you an Office 365 password in recent months, though you may have changed it.  If you don't know your password, the Help Desk can reset it for you.

Whether you use Google Drive, OneDrive, or neither is strictly up to you.  Personally, I like Google Drive better since I am already signed into that one always for may email.  If you use MS Word on an iPad, there is no way to connect from there to Google Drive, though you can access OneDrive.

Google also puts no limit on storage space, although OneDrive's 1 TB limit is pretty generous.  Both use encryption to protect your documents when uploading or downloading, and both remain password protected from the view of others unless you share a file or folder with others.

While these online storage options may be convenient if you work outside the office, keep in mind that copies of all client related documents must also be saved to the Matter Directory (M Drive) pursuant to firm policy.

MS Office

As of today, everyone in the firm should have an Office 365 Account.  You should have received an email from Office 365 allowing you to download a setup program, which will install MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and a few other Office programs on your computer.

Hopefully by this time, it is not a surprise to anyone that we are doing away with WordPerfect and moving to MS Word as the firm's supported word processor.  I announced this change in a Blog post last August.  In March, I published this post and this one announcing the move to Office 365, which includes the most current version of MS Word (2016).

If you did not get an email allowing you to install Office 365, or lost the one we sent you, please email me or the help desk and we will send you another one.

Cain Elliot will be offering training classes beginning soon.  You should have MS Office on your computer before you take that class.  I strongly recommend playing around with the program ahead of time so that if something you do is a problem, you can ask about it during the class.

There are also online training videos available here: http://www.gcflearnfree.org/topics/office2016

I am addressing this issue again, because I want to make very clear to everyone that I will not be making an Obama-like promise that if you like your word processor you can keep your word processor.  You cannot.   The firm is moving to MS Word and you need to make sure you are up to speed on its use.

We expect to be using MS Word exclusively for all new documents by the end of this summer.  That deadline will come sooner than you think.  Please act now.

Thanks.

Office 365

The firm is planning to start a pilot group of users for Office 365.  The Pilot will likely last for about a month.  We are only looking at the component that uses MS Office, not the component that works with MS email.

For the pilot, we are looking for people who

1. are already experts in use of MS Office (at least MS Word and Excel, possibly Powerpoint)
2.  have a need to use MS Office for work when outside the office. 
3. tend to use their phones or tablets for a great deal of their work
4. are willing to experiment with the MS Office cloud platform, and
5. are willing to take the time to provide me with feedback about your experience.

Space is limited in the pilot trial, so I cannot guarantee everyone who wishes can participate.  If you don't make the pilot, you certainly can get access once we go live, assuming the pilot is successful.

If you are interested in participating in the firm's pilot project, please send me an email.  If you want to help your chances, you can feel free to explain why your input would be particularly valuable based on how you plan to use the system.

If you want to learn more about Office 365 for Business, check out Microsoft's web site.

Thanks,

Mike Troy

Editing MS Documents Online

Microsoft remains the de facto standard for editable documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Working with MS formats, however, can be problematic if you do not have MS Office.  Fortunately, there are several solutions:

Chrome Extension for Google Docs

Google will allow you to view any MS documents, such as Word or Excel.  You can also download them, but cannot allow you to edit them directly in Google Drive.  There is, however, a fix for that.  There is a Google Chrome Extension that will allow you to edit Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents in Google Drive.  If you would like to get this extension, click here.  Make sure you are doing this using your Chrome Browser. These extensions will not work if you are accessing Google Drive from Internet Explorer or some other browser.

Creating MS Documents in Drive

If you are creating a new document you can do in Google Drive using the native Google format.  When done, you can download the document to your computer.  One of the options is to download the document as a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document.   Once downloaded you can send the document to others who need that format.

Office Online

In an earlier post, I discussed how to open up a free personal account with MS Office 365.  This can also be helpful, especially if you are already comfortable operating with the MS Office interface.  Still, it involves downloading an email attachment to your computer, then uploading it again to MS Office online.  So the process takes longer than simply using Google Docs.

LibreOffice and WordPerfect

In the offline world, there are also options that don't involve having MS Office installed on your computer.  Both LibreOffice and WordPerfect are capable of reading MS Office documents and saving in that format.  However, they do not do a perfect job.  Changing document formats sometimes messes up how the document appears.  There are also instances of document corruption.  LibreOffice seems to do a much better job with MS documents than WordPerfect, but there can be problems with both.  Also, because LibreOffice is open source, you are free to download and install it on as many computers as you like without working about licensing restrictions.

Microsoft Office Online

The IT Department has been evaluating a move from WordPerfect to MS Word.  In case you missed it, you can read my log from last month on Word vs. WordPerfect.

As we continue with our evaluation, you may want to consider trying MS Office Online.  Recently, Microsoft made Office Online free for personal use.  If you have a Microsoft account, (or create a free one) you can access Office Online and use it.

MS Office online comes with online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and several other applications. It also offers a free terabyte (~1000 GB) of online storage space with OneDrive.

I tried a few features of Office Online but have not used it extensively yet.  It can perform most of the basic functions of the standard version of Office, but it definitely is a light version.  Don't expect  to have all the same features you have on your disk based version of Office.  For example, I tried to create a dual column document, as I know I cannot do that in Google Docs.  I was unable to do so using MS Office Online either. There are probably many other similar shortcomings if you are working on more complex documents.

Still, the program had the same basic look and feel of MS Office, with a limited version of the ribbon toolbar.  You also have the ability to open and edit MS Office documents and download documents you have created in MS Office format.

If you want to give this a try, I have a few warnings:

1. Only the home version of Office Online is free.  By its terms of service, you are not permitted to use it for commercial use.  Using this service for work documents would seem to violate its terms of service.
2. If you have to create a new Microsoft Online account, I strongly recommend using a personal email address rather than your work email.  We have used some of your work emails to create accounts in order to install MS Office 2013 on your computers.  Also, we may use your work emails in the future if the firm decides to purchase Office 365 in the future.  If you have a personal account using this same email address, it will only lead to complications and conflicts.
3. Microsoft seems to limit an IP address to the creation of three online accounts per day.  So if you try to create an account from work and are told you have reached the daily limit, there is nothing we can do about that.  You will have to wait for another day, or set up your account from home.
4. Do not store work documents in this online account.  If your account is closed for any reason (such as violating terms of service for commercial use) we would have no way to recover this information.
5. Keep in mind that the Help Desk does not support MS Office and has no experience with the online version, so if you have problems, you are on your own.

If the firm does eventually decide to move to an Office 365 subscription and phase out WordPerfect, we would get the full subscription which includes a traditional version of MS Office, not just the online version.  But this free version is a great opportunity for you to give it a try and decide if it is something that could be useful.

MS Office also now offers versions of its Office suite for use on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.  Just go to the App Store or Google Play and download the App to your device.