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There are many benefits to "moving to the Cloud," or adopting "Cloud Courage" as we at Systems Engineering (SE), like to put it. In addition to keeping up with the way in which technology is moving, it's also important to look at benefits such as CSP billing. Throughout this article, I will discuss what CSP billing is, how it works, and the various benefits involved. 

I am sure you have heard the term "Digital Transformation." In short,  it means elevating your processes, applications, and data to reduce the time and effort needed to meet business and customer needs while driving value for both.  Uber and Facebook are common examples. Clearly, users value the ease and experience while the businesses can scale at very marginal costs.

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear the former Kodak Product Manager speak - he was there when the downfall occurred.  He said all the criticism he received from the management team about the technology was spot-on. The problem was, they could not see beyond the traditional benchmarks, like picture quality, to understand that the ease by which digital images could be shared would change their business forever.  The takeaway is, when you look at the cloud and mobility, look at all it can do, especially those things you could never do before. Don't get caught up on the fact that it doesn’t do things the way you've done them before. 

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of future jobs have not been invented yet. What does that say about the work we are doing today and how we are doing it? What does that mean for the future? 

Effective April 11, 2017, Windows Vista customers are no longer receiving the following from Microsoft:

Our recent SE Lunch & Learn series titled Windows 10: Enabling Your Move to the Cloud featured Microsoft's Steve Deming and Systems Engineering's (SE's) Adrian Wells.  This event gave both speakers a chance to mention the new Windows 10 upgrade benefits for Windows Cloud Subscriptions which had previously been announced by Microsoft on January 19 of this year.

A growing number of businesses are moving to Microsoft’s Office 365 for the benefits of mobility, availability, collaboration, and an ever-expanding set of capabilities built around Exchange, SharePoint and Office.  One of the challenges is how to stay on top of Office 365 service issues that can occur from time to time.  Which ones affect you? Is the problem you're having in Microsoft Word or Excel related to a service issue? Let's walk through the possibilities.

Microsoft has announced that at the end of the month (March 2016), users who have downloaded and installed the Office Suite from their Office 365 subscription will receive a notification to upgrade to Office 2016 (only Office 2013 installations that meet certain criteria will receive the notice). The notification will appear just below the ribbon in Office Suite applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook. 

In July 2015, Microsoft released the Windows 10 operating system (OS). Since then, Microsoft has been offering a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8.1 users through July 29, 2016.  

A typical office in 1995, with PC's and email, might have looked very sophisticated to your mother who was used to working with typewriters and physical mailboxes in 1975. In the same cyclical pattern, the office we see in 2015 is not like that of 1995. We now have to consider working from several devices no matter where we are, and access to everything is of utter importance.