For the first time ever, our whole office is working from home and it seems to be one of the busiest periods for us right now. All of the systems we have put in place, the extra staff we have employed, and the processes we follow have certainly made the transition a lot less daunting.
Working through Teams on Microsoft Office 365 is certainly something a lot of our customers know about, but we also practice what we preach too and use it every single day. It has become invaluable for streamlining communication between the teams at a challenging time like this.
Note: If you’d like more information on Teams and Microsoft Office 365 please get in touch.
The steady flow of tickets that are flowing through our newly polished ticket system are being picked off by our first line support before escalating to second line support. We hope the service we are providing is meeting our customers high standards at this challenging time for all businesses.
Its worth reminding everyone that tickets coming into servicedesk@bowe.co.uk or on the telephone at 0191 214 1750 will be collected by the first available engineer.
If there is anything we can advise on with regards to your IT systems please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
We look forward to helping all of our customers in any way we can.
Stay Safe.
It was great to be back with “bite”, our networking event for our clients and contacts. It was a fantastic event thanks to the promotional efforts of The Marketing Heaven, which was held again at the home of Newcastle Gin, Bealim House. We had lots of local businesses attending, quite a few were from our first event in November.
Our first event of 2020 was totally in Top Gear as we welcomed Paul Swift of Paul Swift Precision Driving as our guest speaker.
Paul showed an interest in driving at a very young age and was passionate to follow in his father’s footsteps. He started with a tractor at the family home and has since progressed to being in film, TV and live shows across the world.
Having been a Stig on Top Gear, Paul has been involved in many daring stunts ranging from driving cars whilst on fire to taking Chris Evans on an exhilarating ride in a London cab!
Paul gave an excellent presentation at our event and showed many video clips of the amazing work he has done over the years. Paul said himself that it is the theatre and performance element he loves most about driving. He has now set up corporate experience days in the North East for individuals or businesses wanting to offer their staff team building or entertain clients.
We couldn’t have wished for a better start to our events calendar of 2020. We are hoping to have our next event in May, watch this space for news of our other upcoming events.
Find out more about Paul’s stunt driving experiences & how you can get involved https://www.paulswift.com/
So, here is a question for you – where in the world do you find the world’s best London Gin?
If that has got you a little puzzled, well, we have the answer………….Newcastle!
How incredible and exciting is this, in the recent World Sprit Awards, the award for best London Gin went to the Newcastle Gin Company, part of the Vaulkhard Group.
Its signature Newcastle London Dry Gin is distilled at Bealim House in Gallowgate where gin fans can see the impressive copper still where it is created.
We are so pleased to hear this news and send all our congratulations to the team at Bealim House. Having been there recently at our networking event, bite, we continue to see the amazing work they do, and we are so proud to be able to say this award-winning company are on our doorstep.
Being passionate about North East business we are eager to share this excellent news and it just shows how our region yet again is making an impact on the global stage!
Not only that, they also provide us with our referral scheme Gin!
So, now, if you refer someone to us who then buys our services, you will receive an award-winning bottle of Newcastle Gin.
The reasons to get in touch with us just keep on coming! Talk to us today on 0191 214 1750
Bite is back and we are totally revved up for our next event as we welcome Paul Swift, ex Top Gear stunt man as our guest speaker.
Paul has travelled the world and been behind the wheel in a variety of TV and film productions. Now based on our doorstep and offering people the chance to experience being a stunt driver for themselves, Paul will share details of his experiences and how you can get involved!
Come along for a “bite” of something different and enjoy making connections with coffee and chat. Tickets are free and can booked by clicking here
Look forward to seeing back at The Newcastle Distillery Co. Bealim House, Newcastle, NE1 4SG on Thursday 27th February 3pm to 4.30pm
We are excited to announce a new strategic partnership. Working with other businesses who share our values and passion for excellence is a key part of our ethos and this latest partnership reinforces this.
Our service offering has expanded to now include IT asset disposal services through our north east-based partner Protech.
After a thorough consultation exercise, Protech’s expertise and experience in the industry stood out as the organisation we feel can offer the best service to our clients.
Protech are fully regulated and are the only IT asset disposal company in our region to hold both ISO 27,001 and ADISA accreditations. This demonstrates that they have extremely robust procedures in place to safeguard your data, during every stage of the collection and sanitisation process.
They offer a free collection service, provide certificates showing that your assets have been fully erased using the industry leading software. They can also donate refurbished IT equipment to local charities on your behalf.
If you have any old IT hardware which need properly disposing of, please get in touch to discuss your requirements.
Great news for our team as we welcome Conor Sizeland on-board as an Apprentice Technical Engineer.
Being able to respond quickly to clients is key for us here at Bowe and Conor fits well with that ethos. He has previously worked in a call centre environment and had experience with Sage where he was involved in accounts and payroll support. More recently he has worked for an IT support company, so he already brings with him relevant expertise.
Welcome to the team Conor, what excites you about working with us here?
Conor: “I love helping people and the satisfaction of solving a challenge. The role is very varied which keeps things interesting. The team I work with on a day-to-day basis are fantastic. Everyone has been very welcoming and supportive.”
Tell me about your day to day duties?
Conor: “I help out with anything and everything from basic troubleshooting to configuring and deploying new hardware for our customers. At the moment, I do a lot of the new machine setups for our customers, fixing machines with faulty hardware, Office 365 administration and both proactive and reactive server maintenance.”
What are your plans for the future?
Conor: “As far as the future goes, I’m really looking forward to finishing my infrastructure technician qualification and moving on to the next level. My long-term goal is to get qualified in cyber security as it is a very interesting field and there is currently a skills shortage in the industry.”
What do you get up to in your spare time?
Conor: “Outside of work I like going to the pub, spending time with my wife and daughter and going to beautiful places such as the Lake District and Lough Navar. I also enjoy gaming, keeping up with current affairs and meeting new people.”
It is an exciting time for us as we start 2020 with new faces on the team and great plans for the coming year. Look out for more news coming soon.
If you want to talk to us about how we can support you with your IT requirements, contact us, our friendly team are here to help.
Using Microsoft Excel is an excellent way to quickly generate calculations on your in-house data but things can get real frustrating real fast.
The first thing I learnt in Excel was to click on a cell, click the plus and click another cell and it totalled it up. Then I could drag it down the list, it was effortless, great I thought!
However, one thing I did initially struggle with on my first few days, was summing information down but then needing to calculate on something that always stayed in the same cell like a tax rate. This is where absolute cell references comes in!
F4 key / Using the dollar sign: $
This bit of information is key, if you are clicking on something which will always stay in the same cell, but everything else is in sequential cells moving down or across then press the F4 key. It will immediately insert dollars on to the cell in the formula which is a sign it has locked the reference with that cell.
For example: If you had a tax rate in cell A1 it would change it to $A$1 when you press F4.
Lets watch a video for a better understanding
First it will take you through relative cell references which we are all used to which is when excel fills the formula down for you. Then it will take you through absolute cell references from the 1m 45seconds in.
More Information
Using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet applications like Google Sheets can being great benefits to your day to day job allowing you to quickly organise information, sum up figures, and react to changing data patterns inside your business. Here at Bowe we are always just a phonecall away to help in situations where you might need some advice. Contact us here to see if we can help.
As a business, IT security should be your primary concern. Although passwords have been around since 1961, they can be one of the first steps in keeping your business safe but can often be the weakest link.
Password Policies and Procedures
Having a standard policy for passwords – e.g. Minimum character count, at least 1 capital letter, 1 number and 1 symbol – is a good start to improve this typically weak area.
All of this however will be inevitably in vain if you, as a company, do not have proper procedure in place to follow regarding passwords.
This could include for example:
- Not disclosing your password.
- Not leaving your password written on a document left lying around the office.
- Not left cached inside browser windows.
Having a set procedure in place for your staff to follow can be crucial in making sure your business stays safe and secure.
The impact of non-secure passwords
A weak or non-secure password can cause a plethora of issues for you as a business.
Your password is the key to accessing your accounts and your systems, especially on the cloud, which means a weak password is like leaving the key in a lock. Having the same password for multiple accounts across your business can be likened to that same key being able to open all the other doors.
Once those doors are open your business is vulnerable, this could be in the form of ransomware or data theft or a whole host of other issues that could plague your business.
These threats could cause business downtime leading to a loss of time and money whilst you try to fix the problem and recover from it, not to mention GDPR.
Password Managing Applications
A password manager is an application that both generates secure passwords and stores those passwords to be used later. All you need is to remember your 1 master password to access the application.
Advantages of these are:
- You only need to remember one secure password.
- You can then use large strong generated unmemorable passwords for every other service, as you don’t need to remember those.
- They can be auto filled to your website login boxes so you don’t even have to type them in making logins to websites almost immediate.
- Works across multiple devices. The phone APP and chrome browser extension work in tandem, so your passwords are all with you, wherever you go.
As an extra layer of security, you should turn on two factor authentication (2FA) which we will cover later. This would mean that to access your password management software you would need a code generated on your mobile phone app typically google authenticator or a variant of that to login.
What we recommend
Here at Bowe, we recommend our businesses follow a standard business procedure for passwords.
This standard procedure involves:
- Changing passwords at every agreed interval – 30 days recommended
- Having a minimum of 8 characters to a password, at least 2 numbers and including at least 1 special character within the password.
We encourage this to try and make sure all our partners are as secure as they can be and limit the risk of potential threats to their business.
If in doubt you can check your password on https://www.haveibeenpwned.com/passwords to see if your password is on a password breach list of approximately 555 million passwords. If it is, change it immediately. Password breach lists are used by hackers to attempt access to accounts. The is serviced by https and is ran by trusted security researcher Troy Hunt.
Two factor Authentication
Anytime two factor authentication is available we recommend you set it up. It is worth noting two factor authentication through SMS is not as secure as google authenticator 2FA due to the possibility of a sim swap attack. This involves someone persuading your mobile phone carrier to swap your mobile number to their new number with a story that they have got a new phone. If they can convince the mobile phone carrier to change it, or by answering the security questions correctly, then your two factor codes will go to the attacker allowing them to reset your password and gain access to your accounts.
For the highest security two factor authentication, we recommend using a Yubikey. These are USB devices which have a button on them for you to press when generating a code.
Biometric Authentication
You will have heard of Face ID and finger print scanning. These are a way of proving that you are you. These are a great way of adding additional layers of security if the option is available to the system.
Summary
There are many ways in this day and age to protect your online accounts from hackers and a multi layered approach is always best. If there are ways of adding extra security so you are not just relying on a password to gain access to systems, then those should be investigated.
Top Image Credit: Technology vector created by slidesgo – www.freepik.com
When IT comes to people, we are passionate about the contribution and value they bring to our business. In this bulletin, we are delighted to feature Jack Vaughan, our apprentice, who has achieved great success in his year with us.
We recently chatted to Jack to find out more about his experiences with Bowe and ideas for the future.
Good morning Jack, thank you for taking the time to chat with me, firstly congratulations on your year’s anniversary with Bowe, tell me how quickly has that year gone?
“Thank you, I can’t believe it has been a year, I have had such a good time in the past 12 months and learnt so much from the team around me”
Tell me more about your role in the business?
“I am the Junior Technical Engineer. I help with the initial calls into the business and help direct enquiries to the right person. I am also involved with both the professional support we offer clients as well as some of the longer-term project work, we are doing. I assist clients with issues relating to getting the right backup software and antivirus solutions”
What is so special about Bowe?
“The best thing for me is the people. We all get on so well and coming to work is like meeting up with friends. We work hard but also get on which is good. This is my first employment, so it has been a great start in my career”
What are your ideas about your future?
“I suppose I am not looking very long term right now. When it comes to ambition then I am very keen to continue developing within this industry and I feel I have had a good start, made connections and had the chance to focus on my skills”
So, you are only 19 but I want to ask, what did you want to be when you were younger, did you want to be a pirate?
“Perhaps not a pirate but oddly enough I did want to be a lorry! When I was 6 that was something, I thought I could be. When I was 14, I thought then about IT and felt that I was good at it and did have a real interest in that area. I like to think I have a natural talent and hopefully because I have adapted well to the work that Bowe gets involved in, that ability shows.
What do you enjoy doing when you are not supporting clients with IT?
“I am a movie fan and have just started at the gym, so life is pretty busy. I do enjoy reading a good book and the one I always go to is Lord of the Rings”
What is your favourite location in the North East?
“I enjoy visiting Alnwick, it is a lovely place to go with a really good range of interesting and historical sites”
Finally, if I was on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and I had a phone a friend lifeline, what subject would you be able to help me with?
“Definitely movies but only ones after 2000”
Thank you, Jack, watch out for chats with other members of the team in the future.
As a Microsoft Partner we offer Office 365 a cloud-based subscription service that brings together the best tools for the way people work today. By combining best-in-class apps like Excel and Outlook with powerful cloud services like OneDrive and Microsoft Teams, Office 365 lets anyone create and share anywhere on any device.
We are delighted to be hosting an event where you can learn more about the benefits this software can bring to you, your business and your team.
Whether you already have Office 365 and would like to explore its full potential or if you are considering this as an option for the future, this event is for you!
Agenda
9.00-9.30 Welcome & refreshments
9.30-11.00 Office 365 Presentation:
O365 Interface
Online vs local version of Office
Storing files in One Drive
Sharing Files using One Drive
Introduction to Teams
Hopefully we’ll see you there, book your tickets here…
