How-Tos

IOS 11 – Ready for it?

So what’s the hype…

Control Center for one!  Beyond just a new look, the Control Center centralizes everything you need at your fingertips.  Calculator, brightness, wifi, flashlight, camera ALL in one place!

DND While Driving! People on the go will love the new Do Not Disturb While Driving!  If you turn this on, when people text you, they get an auto response letting them know you cannot reply at this time, but will do so when you reach your destination!  Look for the car in the bottom right.

App Dock – Drag and drop is now here.  Your iPad it becoming more of a laptop now! Finally, you have a dock on the iPad.  You can drag apps side by side much easier than before!  It’s great to be able to work in messenger and type up an email.  You can even drag pictures into an email.

When can you upgrade? Anytime on September 19th. Visit Apple!

Ready to Synchronize SharePoint to Your Mac

If you are ready to work with SharePoint files on your Mac, its’ available!!

First remove the existing OneDrive application on your Mac.

To remove the OneDrive Mac Store app

1. Open Finder and Search for “OneDrive.app” or “OneDriveDF.app” from “This Mac.”
2. Move all returned items to the trash.

Once you’ve removed the Mac Store app, you can install the preview build of the new OneDrive sync client.

Now install the preview build

1. Download the preview build of the new OneDrive sync client for Mac.
2. Open the package and drag and drop the OneDrive app into your Applications folder.
3. Launch OneDrive by typing cmd+space and searching for “OneDrive”
4. Sign in with your Office 365 account.

The next step is to enable team site sync.  If you are not familiar with terminal commands, please contact a representative at Tappan Solutions.  We are here to help!

To enable team site sync

1. Exit the new OneDrive sync client by clicking on the OneDrive cloud icon in the Menu bar and selecting Quit OneDrive.
2. Open a terminal window by using cmd+space and searching for “Terminal.”
3. Run the following commands:Defaults write com.microsoft.OneDrive TeamSiteSyncPreview -bool True
   Defaults write com.microsoft.OneDriveUpdate Tier Team
   Killall cfprefsd
4. Restart your Mac
5. Restart the sync client and log in again if prompted.

Locky Virus – The Real Threat

 What is Locky?

Locky is one of the newest biggest threats to a computer that your average person is going to encounter. This virus attacks the files on your computer that have a file type that can be anything ranging from Documents to Videos to Photos. What it does is locks the file and makes them unusable without a decryption key that you have to pay for of course.

This is known as “Ransomware” in the tech industry and it can be very difficult to recover from if you are not properly prepared with backups and proper anti-virus software.

This particular attack tends to almost always come in the form of an email that looks like it could be safe with a attachment that has the ending .zip. You will be prompted to open the .zip and see a document that when opened looks like a bunch of gobbled up letters/numbers and it will ask you to enable macros on your word program to be legible.

What you don’t see is it using that “macro” ability to install in the back ground and lock out all your files and giving it unrestricted access to your computer as well as any external drives or network locations you have the ability to save or write to. Once it has infected your machine you really only have 2 options. Pay them and pray that they give you the program to remove the encryptions or recover from a backup solution.

Virus prevention is a constant fight and will always be something that we as both users and technicians have to be vigilant for and work on learning about and how to prevent the new threat.

Tips

• Always check the sender of an email.  Remember if the email is coming from a bank, shipping company, online shopping site, or other normal vendors confirm they are the real sender prior to following any link or opening attachments.  Visit the vendor’s website for clarification and/or to report any fraudulent emails.
• Review the content of email.  If it contains links, hover over the link to determine if it goes to the same website the email is from; if it’s from someone you know, but you were not expecting an attachment, contact that person; if it only contains a link and no other content, delete it.  Do not open Zip files if you were not expecting them.  For example, faxes come in the form of a PDF, not zipped.
• Keep your computer up to date with patches
• Keep your antivirus software updated
• Always backup your data!!  Invest in Carbonite or some other online backup solution.  If you are running Windows 7 or 10, setup a schedule backup routine.
• Consider another layer of protection with Malwarebytes.  It’s effective and reasonable.

Helpful Links:

• Carbonite: Get Carbonite Now!
• Malwarebytes:  www.malwarebytes.org