Five years after rolling out Office 2011 for Mac, Microsoft has made a first public preview of its successor, Office 2016 for Mac, available to testers for download.
Microsoft already has updated OneNote and Outlook (available in limited preview form) available for the Mac. On Thursday, the company is delivering refreshed public previews of those two apps in addition to the first public previews of the 2016 versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and is making all five apps available to anyone running Yosemite (Mac OS 10.10).
The Office for Mac 2016 preview is available for download from Microsoft’s Office.com preview site, and can be run alongside Office for Mac 2011.
Microsoft plans to deliver regular updates to the preview, and will let testers know via a notification from the Office for Mac Auto-Update tool. Every new preview build will expire roughly 60 days after it’s posted. The final preview build will continue to function for roughly a month after Office 2016 for Mac becomes generally available, sometime this summer, officials said. That’s likely to be several months ahead of the Office 2016 for Windows release in the second half of 2015. Officials said they’d have more news to share soon about opening up the Office 2016 for Windows suite publicly. (The Windows version has been in private testing for several months.)
Microsoft’s goal with Office 2016 for Mac is to make it look and feel more like Office for Windows (and other Office suite flavors), while not losing the styling that makes the suite feel like it’s built for Mac OS X, said Eric Wilfrid, director of Office product marketing.
The updated Mac suite includes a newly designed Ribbon that’s similar in formatting and organization to the Office for Windows Ribbon. The suite includes full support for retina displays and is built to be “cloud connected,” so it’s tightly integrated with OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and Office 365.
Office 2016 for Mac allows users to access files across all their devices running Office by signing in with their Office sign-in credentials. This way, a user could start writing a document on Office for Android, access it later on Office 2016 for Mac and then finish it on Office for iPad, while always having access to the most up-to-date version.
In the new version of Word 2016 for Mac, Microsoft has added threaded comments to improve coauthoring. In Excel, there’s now support for the same keyboard shortcuts as Office for Windows users have. The PowerPoint 2016 for Mac update adds the same presenter view as is available in PowerPoint for iOS.
So far, as is the case with the Office 2016 for Windows private preview, new features and functionality seem rather limited for the next version of Office for Mac. So what took Microsoft so long to bring the coming version to market?
Wilfrid said that Microsoft shifted gears after rolling out Office 365 and decided to focus on Office 365 and prioritize some of the new Office mobile releases, such as Office for iOS.
Office’s focus is now on cloud connectivity, he said, noting that anyone who has a current Office 365 subscription with support for downloadable versions of the Office suite apps will get Office 2016 for Mac as soon as it is released for no additional cost. Microsoft is not yet releasing Office 2016 for Mac pricing for those who don’t have an Office 365 subscription.
This story originally posted as “Microsoft delivers first public preview of Office 2016 for Mac” at ZDNet.
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Your email is a nexus point for user interaction and for potential vulnerability from scammers. It is the door to your data home and the place where many users are most likely to compromise their information.
As you know the internet is rife with scammers who are always looking for the next way to take advantage of the public. They use ever improving techniques and changing tool-sets to come up with the next way to get your information and create vulnerabilities in your network.
In most cases this is as easy as convince users to click on links and attachments that they should not.
Recently we have seen a growing malware/phishing/virus threat being spread through legitimate looking voicemail attachments in user emails.
In almost all cases email scammers convince users to click on or open attachments by including just enough information that could be perceived as correct and accurate that it may be appropriate to be receiving the attached information. In the case of the Voicemail attachment – Users may see an “Email ID” that appears to be coming from an internal email address at the recipient’s organization, as well as a “Download Message” link that appears to host the fake audio file on the recipient’s organization’s domain. All these work together to throw off recipients better judgment and convince them to trust the email enough to click on the download link.
This phishing attempt fools users by appearing to be a legitimate, automated email from Outlook. The scam targets Outlook users, who are sent official looking emails with the subject line “You have received a voice mail.” The body of the email contains the Microsoft Office Outlook logo, fake data about the voicemail and caller, and a link to download the voice message. Although the download link appears to be a .wav audio file, it’s actually an HTML link to a website that tries to install a Trojan virus. If you are current with your Antivirus Protection and Ant-malware Protection the software should stop the Trojan from installing, however we have had users who have manually overridden these protections and allowed the blocked content to install.
Another version users are seeing with more frequency is the appearance of a “voice message” which appears to come from the “admin” of your organization. This email includes a zipped attachment which when downloaded will install malware on your computer.
Deleting the email should be enough to avoid downloading any malware. but accessing, or downloading, or even opening and allowing the email to load any embedded images may be enough to confirm the validity of your email address and open your system up to potential vulnerability.
If you do click on the download link or believe that your system has been compromised as a result, You should take steps to quickly mitigate the damage.
The best strategy is to exercise additional diligence when opening email. If you cannot confirm the authenticity of an email or sender, it is always best to avoid opening it.
Yes, it’s all going to the cloud, which is better than “to the dogs.” And yes, you have to make sure your cloud environment is secure.
You need to confront some hard realities about cloud security because the cyber landscape continues to be unforgiving. It doesn’t matter whether you’re protecting traditional computer systems, your mobile platform or the cloud itself. Simply put, organized cyber crime and cyber espionage continue to grow in sophistication. Any new hackable platform is red meat for them. Opening massive breaches that harvest critical data is their day and night job. News headlines make that clear that the aggregate total of global cyber crime damage now rivals that of many nations’ annual gross domestic product (GDP).
First reality: Organizations spend considerable time and money securing their on-premises infrastructure. That’s good. The problem is maintaining that same high level of security when outsourcing to the cloud. Security delivery requires a cloud provider’s undivided attention. Yes, there are built-in security tools, but you will not get the key to any strong security posture—24/7/365 threat monitoring, analysis and response—or “managed security service.” These are humans watching out for you. You must know what’s happening on the cloud in real time and be able to respond very quickly. You need people to manage this, even if you have automated capabilities as part of your cloud security. The “cloud” doesn’t do it on its own.
(Related: An interview with Brendan Hannigan, IBM GM Security Systems Division)
Second reality: Repeat after me: “My cloud will be breached.” Take a deep breath. Say it one more time.
Remember, just because you’ve been breached doesn’t mean an attacker knows where to go once they get in your system. If you identify the attack quickly you can prevent him or her from getting to your critical data.
So, review your incident response plan for cloud security. What, you don’t have one? Okay, review the plan you have for your premises infrastructure.
If you still have a blank look, gather your team and start putting a response plan together—fast. How you handle it is crucial, particularly the speed of your response. Sophisticated attacks often show no upfront “symptoms” but can quietly devastate your business over time. The longer it takes to resolve an attack, the more costly it becomes.
Prevention starts with an incident-response plan and mock exercises to test the plan. Get an experienced provider to try and hack your cloud. Find out your vulnerabilities. Most important, make sure you have a team ready to move quickly and decisively if you suspect your cloud has been attacked.
Third reality: Last but maybe most importantly, get smart about “security intelligence.” Your cloud systems, along with your other IT platforms, generate billions of security events each day from firewalls, emails, servers and the like. It’s simply not possible to manually sift through this data and find evidence of suspicious behavior. Beyond the costs involved, it’s confined to figuring out “what happened” rather than “what will occur.”
When applied to security data, big-data analytics tools can be transformative—the tip of the spear in security intelligence and response. Analytics can provide automated, real-time intelligence and situational awareness about your infrastructure’s state of security to help disrupt the attack chain.
Say that two similar security incidents take place, one in Brazil, the other in Pittsburgh. They may be related. But without the intelligence needed to link them, an important pattern—one that could indicate a potential incident—may go unnoticed.
You need this capability, and providers like IBM are stepping up to make it the ultimate reality.
Stay safe.
Hurricane Sandy, Black Forrest fire, 6.0 earthquake hits Napa Valley – major catastrophes strike large population centers, business are damaged and even destroyed. Even after these major events, many of which make international news, numerous companies have all of their corporate data in the same building, and, in many cases, the same room.
No matter what the business goal or high level requirements, organizations must take action, intelligent action, to protect critical data. While this may seem like common sense, it’s amazing how often companies fail to perform even the most basic protection.
Nearly every business has a policy in place to cover disaster recovery, a catch all phrase to cover the need to restore data should trouble occur. In reality, disaster recovery is piece of a larger concept that includes high availability and business continuity. All of these concepts revolve around two basic ideas: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
There’s a tradeoff between potential for data loss, duration to recover, and cost. Certain businesses require high availability, the idea of near zero data loss and near zero downtime. Examples include financial industries, healthcare, and most organizations that utilize transactional actions in data processing. In other words, anytime one has a need to trace an action from start to finish there needs to be a way to have near zero data loss and more times than not, no downtime.
Business continuity is a step down on both RPO and RTO from high availability. The idea here is not about instantaneous recovery, it’s about making sure the business can continue to function after catastrophe hits. VMware and similar technologies using redundant infrastructure do a great job of providing business continuity; the key, how this environment is set up and over what distance, if any at all.
Disaster recovery covers both high availability and business continuity. Disaster recovery can also simply include a copy of data that sits on tape or a storage area network. The key here, where does that data reside. Having a copy of the information in the same location as the source data won’t offer protection against nearly every major catastrophe. This “old school mindset” really only protects a business from power outage, data corruption, or system related outages. Does your business implement this simplistic disaster recovery method?
Hurricane Sandy devastated the east coast in 2013 and a number of hospitals were directly impacted. One facility, a client at the time, shut their doors after the storm due to massive damage. I recall their data center was in the basement and water rose to the 5th floor; everything in the data center was destroyed. Without offsite data storage, not only would this hospital be out of business, they would have no way to run down their accounts receivable to obtain payment for services rendered.
While working with a global storage provider that was within a couple miles of the most devastating fire in Colorado history, I found out they have zero data protection outside of their server room. If the building burned down, as did so many others during this catastrophe, this company would’ve gone out of business. Data is key, protecting it is fundamental.
The recent 6.0 earthquake in Napa Valley shows the need for not only private industry to understand and implement realistic and attainable disaster recovery, Government must do the same. When certain disasters strike they can impact our infrastructure including gas, electricity, and transportation. Computer systems run large amounts of critical systems including transportation signals, lighting, and gas and electric power to the populace. Without proper disaster recovery with the necessary RPO and RTO in place, a community can suffer major impact. Government cannot only consider physical infrastructure when preparing for disaster, they have to understand the information technology impact as well.
A major impetus in creating this article revolves around the discrepancy between what a business believes they have in place versus what truly exists. So many organizations, often up to and including board of director requirements, create extensive disaster recovery plans. Unfortunately, oftentimes significant variance exists between what the business says they want, and what’s actually in place. Third party audits are critical to help close this gap. Before that audit can occur though, leadership has to know about and acknowledge the gap. Education is key; know there’s a problem and act!
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