We hear a lot about the Dark Web and although many of us shudder at the topic, few honestly know what the Dark Web actually is. The Dark Web is not a location but instead a way of searching the internet with anonymity. To fully understand what this means, we need to look at how the surface web works in comparison to the Dark Web.

One of the exciting announcements from last month’s Microsoft SharePoint conference is that Microsoft will soon be releasing Homesites. Homesites will be a fully customizable homepage where the existence of your SharePoint contents will reside. To fully understand the impact that this addition will have, we need to understand the current view of a SharePoint page. To begin, SharePoint is essentially your company’s internal communication site, which is referred to as an intranet. This is where you find all of your saved documents and files. Up until this point, your SharePoint site was fairly generic and not exactly pretty or easily navigable. It essentially is a simple page with a list of files. Understandably, we are beyond excited about this announcement. Now, anyone who currently uses the Microsoft SharePoint Intranet will be able to customize their Intranet “Homepage,” creating an aesthetically pleasing homepage with your company’s voice and branding.

Gone are the days of solely creating slides shows with timed transitions! Microsoft Sway, one of the lesser known applications from the 365 Stack, allows for the creation of interesting presentations with incredible options, fantastic flow and presenter-less presentations. Sway is where today’s presentations are headed, so let’s take a more in-depth look!

Microsoft is on the brain this month at Pendello Solutions as the Microsoft SharePoint conference is coming up later this month. As we dig deeper into our Microsoft 365 stack to prepare for the upcoming conference, we quickly realized that many are unaware of some of the lesser known applications within the comprehensive 365 stack. This month, at Pendello, we are moving our focus to a few of these lesser known applications within the 365 stack in hopes that it might help you utilize a few more applications that may bring a bit more efficiency to your workday. To start off the month right, we are going to look at Microsoft Forms.

April at Pendello has been all about the cloud. We have covered "What is the Cloud?," "Is The Cloud Secure?," "Can The Cloud Save you Money?" and now we need to determin if you are a candidate for the cloud. Most businesses can benefit from a cloud environment although there are a few barriers that must be crossed. Let's take a dive into whether or not the cloud will work for you...

There is a great deal of confusion about the cost of the cloud. Many believe that since iCloud storage runs us a measly $.99 per month that cloud storage is a “cheap” solution. It is accurate that the cloud, if customized adequately for your business, can save your business money. Although, the savings are not as black and white and cheap as the $.99 iCloud storage for the storage of our pictures. To decipher the real value of migrating to the cloud, we need to look at the different payment models when comparing cloud environments to on-premise environments.

When dealing with cloud computing, one of the top questions we receive at Pendello Solutions is, “Is the cloud safe?” What most people mean by this question is, “How is the cloud a better option than having my data and applications on-premise?” As with anything in today’s business world, security needs to be verified. There are definitely perceptions of the cloud and this week our focus is to take a look at these perceptions and decide truth or myth.