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As always, we try to keep you up to date on the latest trends and issues that face us please keep in mind, I don't want to waste your time. Articles will contain generally less than 250 words. Please have a look and give me your feedback. If you want to see the Newsletter archives, there are more than 5-years available on our Newsletter page. Have a look and by all means, forward to a friend. Thanks. Questions? Send me an email!

Office 365; A Book That Will Help

Last month, I introduced a new book by Michael Sampson, Re-Imagining Productive Work with Microsoft Office 365. (Buy your own copy of this book in PDF form here). We talked about thinking productively. This month I wanted to talk about Chapter 6, Co-authoring a document. A document in Office 365 can be a Word doc, Excel Spreadsheet, PowerPoint slide show or a OneNote digital notebook. Any of these document types can be stored and shared in a OneDrive for Business folder or a SharePoint document library.

Sampson states, "Co-authoring is a new work practice for people". The biggest part of document collaboration is “Unlearning the Email Habit”. Email makes it easy to attach a document for review and return, but just because it is easy doesn’t mean that it is efficient. As an example, Sampson cites Air Canada which moved its 27,000 employees to Office 365 and uses the Online Apps along with OneDrive for Business.  Multiple people are permitted to edit a Microsoft Excel Status and Progress Update spreadsheet. Using Excel Online, the changes made by others can be seen in near real-time.

Collaboration is tough. Just like in a face to face meeting, voice needs to be constructively intermixed with visual assets. In Office 365, that can be a shared document from OneDrive, an Office 365 Online App and Skype Instant Messaging. The best way to successfully implement online collaboration is insuring everyone on the team has the same purpose, tools and abilities.

Credit Card Security Passé in the U.S.

Within a few years, credit cards with static numbers may be a thing of the past.  We will soon see credit cards with numbers that change every hour. France is seeing them now. The 3-digit code on the back of the card changes every hour for up to 3-years. But until then, for us in the US, we have chips, and for convenience, a magnetic strip as well.

Your credit cards have chips to enhance security. They may also have RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) – most do not, less than 1%. The specifications governing these chips are contained in ISO/IEC 14443 and ISO/IEC 7816. These specs cover contact chips (looks like an integrated circuit) and contactless chips, identified by the symbol pictured here.

Contactless technology allows you to pay simply by tapping your card against a contactless enabled terminal. If there is not a contactless symbol, it is not a contactless enabled Card. Contact chips require a reader that touches the chip.

These standards describe the use of Chips for not only banking, but also mass transit, telephone, Internet, gaming, medical and identification. In credit card use, the chips generate a unique code for every transaction so if fraudsters steal data from a retailer, they won’t be able to use that information to make future purchases.

However, most cards in the United States also have a magnetic strip because not all retailers accept chip purchases. And in other countries, a PIN associated to the chip is required. For whatever reason, the United States is way behind everyone else in the world on chip-and-PIN: Europe did this in 2005; Africa did it in 2006. The answer to our slowness might be the 25 billion dollar price tag to replace all cards and readers.