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This month's newsletter is intentionally coming your way a couple days early, as we wanted to get it out on GivingTuesday. Our company’s core purpose is “to better the lives of others.” One of the ways we do so is we dedicate some of what we earn to charities we support. So far this year, thanks to folks like you, we’ve given monetary donations to charities that do great things in the community (not counting time, money, and parts members of our team have donated as well). In the spirit of Thanksgiving and given that Tuesday, November 29, is #GivingTuesday, we’d like to take a quick moment to list some of the organizations we’ve contributed to over the last 12 months. We wouldn’t be able to do this without the support of our awesome clients. Thanks so much for working with Weston, and the following charities thank you as well:
Speaking of the holidays, our offices will be closed the following days this upcoming season (emergency service is available for CompleteCare clients for network down emergencies):
- December 9 for End-of-Year Company Meetings
- December 23 – December 26 for Christmas Holiday
- January 2, 2023, for New Years
All of us at Weston wish you a safe and enjoyable holiday season!
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 In 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014, we published shopping ideas for folks who are shopping for geeks on their holiday list. Those lists are still very valid for folks trying to buy for that hard-to-shop-for nerd on their list. However, these last few years have been different. Realistically, we have a hard time justifying writing up a gift guide when the world is all topsy-turvy. So what do we recommend? Today is #GivingTuesday. To quote the site:
GivingTuesday is a global generosity movement that unleashes the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and their world. GivingTuesday was created in 2012 as a simple idea: a day that encourages people to do good. Over the past seven years, this idea has grown into a global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.
So today would be a great day to give the gift of a charitable contribution to your favorite organization (we give to several local and international organizations if you’re looking for ideas). Our entire team – all us hard-to-shop-for folks – would always love a charitable gift given on our behalf. Gifts to those organizations will go a long way right now as the pandemic and subsequent economic instability have hit a lot of these organizations pretty hard. |
 For many years, Google Chrome was the de-facto browser of choice on Windows PCs, far and away the most popular browser. We would usually install it when we setup new computers because it was a far better browser than Internet Explorer and early versions of Microsoft Edge.
However, a few years back, Microsoft wanted to make Edge relevant again. They basically told folks to quit using Internet Explorer and they decided to rebuild Edge to use the same back-end rendering engine as Chrome. In 2020, the new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium was released, and it’s been getting better since. Many of our techs are using it as their primary browser, and it has some great features that might make it worth switch. While some of these features are available via extensions to Chrome, it’s nice to have the features built-in. Here are some pretty cool and unique features to look at in Edge. |
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 Isn’t that always how it works? Literally a few days after we published our article last month about all the cool utilities that Microsoft has packed into its PowerToys, they released a couple more toys in the package. So we updated the article to include the two new toys:
- The HOSTS file editor (which you really shouldn’t mess with unless you know what you’re doing).
- File Locksmith, which is a super simple way to find the process has a lock on the file which has made it so you can’t delete, rename, or monkey with things. This allows you to unlock the file and get back to work.
Check out the updated article here. |
We usually save something like this for our Bottom of the Newsletter feature, but this is too good. Honestly, this is good and bad at the same time (as many things from the 90s are), and it features some Hollywood stars.
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While we check in with our clients all year long, this time of year, we meet with all our CompleteCare clients to have longer planning meetings to review the last year and plan for next year’s IT changes, projects, etc… . It’s part of our service. We are your IT Department and your virtual CIO, so we want to be less of a subcontractor and more a part of your business. These meetings are one of the ways we do that.
During these meetings, we also send a survey to the staff to get their opinion on what’s working, what’s not, how we could do better, what we do well at, etc… . One thing that came up during our meetings was the somebody didn’t like our telephone hold music. While we do our best to make it so folks are rarely on hold for very long, we want that experience to be pleasant. And frankly, we were just using the default hold music that came with our phone system and never really gave it a second thought.
We take client feedback seriously, so we wanted to change the experience. Our CEO and former lead janitor tasked his kids with creating a royalty free song to put on as our hold music. Since we don’t want you to sit on hold forever to listen to it (and we don’t know if it’ll be fully implemented on our phone system by the time you read this), you can play the file here.
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 Just a reminder in case you’ve missed our multiple mentions about this: Office 365 pricing has increased as part of Microsoft’s NCE adjustments (on average, around 20%). We’re in the process of migrating the last of our clients to the new NCE licenses before Microsoft shuts them off themselves, but wanted to just remind everybody on the timeline of all this:
- In 2021, Microsoft announced some pricing changes to some of their licenses that were going to kick in early 2022.
- In Early 2022, Microsoft announced that they’d be further increasing their 365 licensing costs across the board for new monthly licenses after June 2022 and then for all legacy licenses before the end of year as part of their “New Commerce Experience” (NCE) program. Since we didn’t know when Microsoft was going to flip the switch to the new licenses (as they didn’t give a firm date, other than “Before end of year”) we held off as long as we could to save our clients’ money. Since this change to the NCE program required a back-end Microsoft licensing change (and we don’t trust automated conversions), we manually converted your licenses to the new NCE program last month before Microsoft did it and potentially broke something.
- In August, we starting manually converting our clients’ legacy licenses to the new NCE licenses, doing a staged approach and only swapping over a few clients at a time.
By the time this email is published, we’ll be through the conversions. As a reminder, we charge for Office 365 what Microsoft would charge for Office 365 if you were to purchase it from them. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out to your Weston account manager.
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