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Google Docs and Sheets
Google has recently released two new apps for Android and iOS devices. The new apps are Google Docs and Google Sheets. A presentation app, equivalent of Microsoft’s PowerPoint is also on the way, called Slides. The two apps work great on both devices, they offer offline capability, in case you want to jot down an idea where you cannot get an internet connection on your mobile device. Both applications are very easy to use and offer a simplistic, not overcrowded design.
However, Microsoft has released its Office Mobile apps for Android and iOS not too long ago. Both companies offer their apps for free, a huge plus. However, now it’s up to the user to see which companies app suits their needs. Respectfully, Microsoft Office Mobile wants to open and save files to their OneDrive service, whereas Google Docs and Sheets give the ability to save content locally on the phone or to upload to Google Drive.
It’s good to see two big companies release some essential apps such as these. Word processing and spreadsheet apps are very useful and a lot of people have trouble finding the perfect one for their needs. With the release of Google Docs, and Sheets, perhaps some people will find exactly what they are looking for.
If you are interested in learning more about Google Docs and Google Sheets, feel free to contact Group 4 Networks.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Managed IT Services vs. Break Fix
When choosing between managed and break fix IT models, you should consider how much your business’ survival depends on your IT system and how much an IT problem will cost your business in downtime.
Can you afford to put off maintenance of your system and risk a full fledge IT fiasco? Or are you willing to pay a monthly fee to possibly keep the problem from occurring in the first place? Only you know what your budget can handle, but keep in mind that paying a monthly fee for a professional to handle your IT headaches not only minimizes productivity disruptions, it can free you to focus on doing what you do best: growing your business.
For more info or to get FREE Network assessment call us at 416 623-9677 or visits our web site at www.g4ns.com
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Office for iPhone and Android
We’ve talked about Office for iPad in a previous post. Office for iPad based on a
subscription model from Office 365. However, Microsoft has been nice enough to charge $0 for the iPhone and Android versions of Office. This means you can have a free, fully functional document editing application on your smart phone.
This is an example of some of changes the new CEO of Microsoft is making towards the company.
It is quite interesting as why the iPad version needs a subscription, when phones do not.
If you’d like more info on Office for mobile devices, and info how it could benefit your company, feel free to contact Group 4 Networks.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Heartbleed bug
Heartbleed was the popular word of the internet last week, and it still is. What exactly is heartbleed though?
Heartbleed is a major bug within the authentication system for website which use OpenSSL to authenticate website logins. The problem is, a great majority of the internet uses OpenSSL as their authentication system.
The fix against this bug is to update the OpenSSL software on webservers. Major websites like Yahoo, Facebook, Google and plenty of others were affected, however they quickly patched the bug. After the fix is applied, users should change their passwords and make it complex.
Upon the discovery of this bug, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) temporarily suspended their online portion of the website. However, today it is reported that on average 900 Canadian social insurance numbers were stolen using the heartbleed bug.
How does heartbleed work though? Take a look at the image below. 
To get more information on the heartbleed bug, visit http://heartbleed.com/
To test some websites, to see if they are currently affected with the heartbleed bug, visit https://filippo.io and enter the website address you wish to test.
In an upcoming article we will talk about password managers and how to choose a strong password and why you should do so.
If you would like more info on passwords, heartbleed, or internet security in general, feel free to contact Group 4 Networks.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Managing Passwords 101
A good, strong, complex password is what is needed on the internet these days to prevent your account from being compromised. Most, if not all websites encrypt the passwords for user accounts when it’s stored in their database. An encrypted password cannot just be read as a normal word or sentence. The password appear as gibberish. Even if a hacker would get their hand on your encrypted password, it takes considerable amount of computer power to decipher the password. This is where password complexity comes in. If a password included the use of special characters such as $, @, &, %, numbers, letters with capitals, it’d be way harder to decipher.
For example: “blogpost” as a password is weak, it has no complexity, it could be cracked, and guessed within minutes. However, “Bl0gp0$t” is harder to decipher as there are a lot more variations of the password which the cracker would have to guess.
Password managers such as Keepass are great tools. A password managers sole purpose is to remember your usernames, passwords for specific sites. They also have builtin tools such as random password generators, which create complex, meaningless passwords which get stored in the database.
From the manager you search for which website you’d like to login to, and you could copy and paste the credentials into your browser.
Password managers are secure, and you’d only need to remember one password, the manager will remember the rest. Some other managers besides Keepass are LastPass, 1Password, and DashLane
If you’d like more info on password complexity, feel free to contact Group 4 Networks.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Internet Explorer 0day vulnerability
Microsoft is warning people about Internet Explorer, which has a serious 0day vulnerability, which attackers can exploit and gain control of your computer. A 0day vulnerability is a bug or hole in the product which has never been documented before, is an unknown bug or hole to the developer, and something that has not been fixed yet.
This 0day vulnerability within Internet Explorer affects versions 6 to 11. The vulnerability is triggered when the user goes to an infected website and if the client computer has Adobe Flash installed. This 0day vulnerability news comes at somewhat of a bad time, since Microsoft has just ended their support for Windows XP. Windows XP users will not receive any patches to fix this major vulnerability within Internet Explorer.
At this time there is no fix from Microsoft, however it is expected for a patch to be released with the upcoming Windows updates. In the meantime, we recommend users to temporarily use a different browser, either FireFox or Google Chrome, as these browsers are not exposed to the latest IE vulnerability.
If you are a client of Group 4 Networks and if you are on our managed service plan, these updates will be applied automatically as soon as the fix from Microsoft is released.
If you would like more info on this latest Internet Explorer vulnerability, feel free to contact Group 4 Networks.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Windows XP end support
As you may already know, Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows XP. If you have machines that are still running Windows XP, you may wonder how this will impact your protection and system security. To help address your questions, we’ve crafted a blog post that addresses a few important things we think you should know.
You can find the post here:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/what-endpoint-protection-customers-need-know-about-windows-xp-end-support
Should you find that you have other questions or if you need technical help, please contact the Customer Support Team: [email protected]
Sincerely,
The Group 4 Networks Customer Communications Team
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
Microsoft Updates Windows XP Users for IE Zero-Day
Microsoft releases an emergency update for the Internet Explorer vulnerability.
Microsoft isn’t quite yet ready to abandon its Windows XP users to security threats. Today Microsoft is releasing an emergency out-of-band update for a zero-day vulnerability, identified as CVE-2014-1776, that was first publicly disclosed on April 26. 
The Internet Explorer flaw impacts versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of the Web browser with a remote code execution vulnerability. CVE-2014-1776 is particularly noteworthy in that it is the first publicly reported flaw that impacts the Windows XP operating system since that operating system officially hit its end of life with Microsoft’s April 8 Patch Tuesday update.
“The security of our products is something we take incredibly seriously,” Adrienne Hall, general manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, said in a statement. “When we saw the first reports about this vulnerability we decided to fix it, fix it fast, and fix it for all our customers.”
Although Microsoft is providing an update for Window XP users, that doesn’t imply that Microsoft is now changing direction and extending support for Windows XP overall.
“We have made the decision to issue a security update for Windows XP users,” Dustin Childs, group manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, wrote in a blog post. “Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, and we continue to encourage customers to migrate to a modern operating system, such as Windows 7 or 8.1.”
There are a few things that make this update really interesting.
For one, this is the first out-of-band security update for IE so far in 2014. Microsoft usually only issues security updates on the first Tuesday of every month, and to go out-of-band is not all that common, even for zero-day flaws. On Feb. 13, FireEye reported the CVE-2014-0322 IE zero-day security vulnerability, which Microsoft did not patch until Tuesday, March 11, in a Patch Tuesday update.
The fact that Microsoft has also included Windows XP users is also interesting. Many had assumed that Window XP users would now be at risk from all new flaws that pop up, but this incident proves that’s not necessarily the case.
Microsoft is taking security seriously, even for those that it claims it no longer wants to support.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.
The Cloud Explained
The cloud is best explained as a remote server, that’s it.
Instead of storing your content, such as your work, music, pictures on your local hard drive or your external hard drive, you’d store them on a remote server.
Another method of the cloud would be the all time popular applications like DropBox, Google Drive and SugarSync. Uploading your documents, and pictures to these services provide a safe haven, should your hard drive crash and not have any backups. The cloud is not just for backups, but it also gives the ability to work remotely.
In summary, the cloud are really just servers that are not local to your computer. Not a flash drive, not an external hard drive. Some companies run their own cloud, within their organization, to provide remote access to work files and data, from wherever it may be needed.
Group 4 Networks offer cloud services for all sizes of business. Should you be interested in our cloud services or want more information about the cloud, feel free to contact us.
About Group 4 Networks
We provide Toronto and GTA businesses with IT Support, IT Consulting and Managed IT Services at a fraction of the cost that they would pay a low-level full time IT Manager. Our team eliminates the hassle of dealing with the single knowledge and abilities of a lone “computer guy.” What makes us unique is that we proactively manage our customer’s computer networks to eliminate many of the headaches and hassles of using computers to run a business.
We guarantee our customers a response within 60 minutes or less and are the only IT service provider in the region that offers a 60-Day 100% no hassle money back guarantee on our flat rate all inclusive service plans.