Microsoft’s “Calendar.Help” With Cortana

If you are like me, my to-do lists get longer by the minute and there doesn’t seem to be enough time in a day to ever complete it. One of the biggest time sucks can be coordinating meetings. This can be especially true when you’re scheduling with attendees outside of your own company. It would be nice if we all had personal assistants who could schedule the meetings for us but, the reality of that is slim. What if you could have a digital assistant that understood real language and could take over the lengthy process of navigating the schedules of the attendees? What if this assistant could handle the back and forth emailing and could propose new times that would avoid conflicts and once decided upon, could send the invite to all attendees? Amazingly, this futuristic technology already exists through Microsoft’s Cortana with calendar.help and has been around for close to a year!

How does this service that combines artificial intelligence, conversational computing and calendar work and how do you get it working for you?

Microsoft 2007 has Officially Retired

On October 10^th, 2017 Mircrosoft 2007 officially retired. (Click here to watch the retirement party) The software did not move to Florida but instead has been placed on a high shelf of Microsoft’s hypothetical storage pod. What does this mean for anyone still running on this 10-year old software? (Other than you are running on 10-year old software!!) Basically, you are time bomb waiting to go off as this product has reached the end of its support lifecycle.

The Antithesis to, “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”

November’s look at what Pendello President, Mike Jackson, is currently reading or listening to:

Freakanomics

This award-winning weekly podcast is hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, the co-author of Freakonomics, and delves into a menagerie of incredibly interesting topics.

How do we stay safe when the regulators are getting Hacked?

One of the major roadblocks in today’s business world is security. We are constantly trying to stay ahead of the “bad guys” by staying up on the newest technologies to keeps us safe. We even have regulations which, in theory, should keep us safe. But, what happens when those in charge of the regulations themselves get hacked? And, what happens when regulators aren’t following their own protocols?

Is your smartphone listening to your conversations?

Our smartphones have inherently become an attached part of our beings. For good or bad, they go absolutely everywhere with us. Most cannot imagine being apart from them. (A topic recently discussed in The Wall Street Journal) They are never far away. In fact, we even sleep next to them! But, did you know, these personal little devices that we cannot stand to live without are technically tiny little data recorders recording a great deal of information when most of us have no idea.

Microsoft Teams updates, announced at the 2017 Ignite Conference

Ignite is Microsoft’s annual Technology education conference. It encompasses presentations, ask the expert sessions and hands on labs but one of the most anticipated portions of the conference is the announcement of new technology and updates to current products! This year’s announcements did not disappoint. One of these announcements deals with exciting updates and changes to Microsoft’s Teams application.