Tag: video

From Good to Great: Making the Most of Your M365

Posted on by Vivienne Fouche

Empowering you and your family across multiple devices

 

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

This sentence definitely goes down in history as one of those things people deeply regret saying later. And while it’s easy to predict things in retrospect – ‘Hindsight is 20/20 vision’, as the saying goes – it seems incredible to think that people once lived in a world without access to personal laptops and smartphones in their lives, which have now become such an integral part of our home functioning for work, homework, financial planning and operating, entertainment and simply staying in touch.

The installation of Microsoft 365 (‘M365’) onto your devices will upgrade this even further – this brilliant software can maximise your devices and create truly next-level experiences.

Let’s look at how you can go from good to great with Microsoft 365.

 

Always Better with M365

monique carrati ONn4OfAnxZY unsplash | Vox | From Good to Great: Making the Most of Your M365

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” —Forrest Gump

But the great thing about Microsoft 365 is that you know exactly what you’re going to get (and it’s always a sweet deal). With Vox and Microsoft 365 for personal use, you can communicate, write, edit, do complex maths-based planning, share ideas, create presentations, and generally stay productive from anywhere, at any time.

Microsoft 365 Personal (for one individual) or Family (up to six people) will empower you and the rest of your family to stay productive from anywhere, at any time, across multiple devices. The subscription comes with 1TB of secure cloud storage space, advanced security features and innovative apps, all in one plan.

 

Features and Benefits

Some of the features and benefits include the following:

  • Microsoft 365 works on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets.
  • Applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote come with offline access and features that make your life easier.
  • Microsoft Defender provides advanced security for your personal data and devices.
  • Outlook gives you advert-free secure email.
  • Microsoft Editor provides advanced spelling, grammar and writing assistance.
  • Clipchamp video editor’s robust tools, including premium filters and effects, lets you create and edit videos easily, while AI-powered tools give you next-level productivity options.
  • Stay in touch with 60 minutes of Skype calling per month.
  • Create and manage databases for big or small projects with Access (PC only).
  • When you’re stuck, Microsoft 365 Family and Personal Subscribers have access to ongoing 24/7 technical support, via chat or email, with Microsoft-trained experts.

 

Making Your M365 Experience Better

Enable your life with M365’s multiple tools. Here are some tips to make your M365 experience even better.

brooke cagle g1Kr4Ozfoac unsplash | Vox | From Good to Great: Making the Most of Your M365

  • Organise Notes with OneNote: Microsoft’s OneNote is an app used for storing information and taking notes. OneNote notebooks allow you to store links, save photos and drawings and write with a stylus, keeping research notes in one convenient spot.
  • Recall Sent Messages: The next time you mistakenly click ‘send’ on an Outlook email, it’s possible that you can still recall an unread sent message. (Please note: Message recall is only available if both you and the recipient have a Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Exchange email account within the same organisation. You cannot cancel an email sent through Outlook on the web, and you are not able to recall a message that’s already been read.)
  • Use Keyboard Shortcuts: Microsoft offers dozen of keyboard shortcuts in Windowsto make your life easier. It’s useful to remember a few that work for you the best.  For a fun example, hold down Shift + [colon] plus [closing bracket on the zero key] and you get a smiley face. 😊
  • Don’t Recreate, Restore: Who hasn’t had the awful experience of working for hours on a document, only to accidentally delete it? Microsoft Office 365 enables you to restore your last saved copy (and a number of previous copies). View and restore files in SharePoint or OneDrive by clicking File > Infoand selecting View. You can see previous versions and restore prior content, and  while it might not take you back to exactly where you left off, you can still get back a lot of your hard work and then carry on.

 

With Microsoft 365, you get smart assistance features that help you create amazing content fast on any device. Imagine living in a world without access to Microsoft 365… No thanks!

Click here to find out more about how Vox can help you with Microsoft 365 for home use.

“Greatness is a lot of small things done well.” – Eric Thomas (American motivational speaker and author)

 

 

 

 

From Watchman to Business Intelligence: the Evolution of Remote Monitoring

Posted on by Duo Marketing

By Kobus van Deventer, Guardian Eye Manager

A growing number of South African companies are taking advantage of advances in remote video surveillance and monitoring technology by using cloud-based analytics to gain new insight into improving safety and security, identify retail trends, understand customer behaviour and more.

According to research firm Markets and Markets, the video surveillance market was valued at US$30.3-billion in 2016, and is projected to grow at an annual rate of 15.4% to reach $75.6-billion by 2022.

Key vertical industries driving adoption of the technology globally include commercial, retail, and infrastructure, with hospitality also providing increasing opportunities for growth. In South Africa, the focus is on industrial, commercial and residential precincts, and the mining and transport sectors.

Improvements in local internet connectivity have also resulted in higher uptake: while video surveillance in itself is not new, the growth in coverage by high-speed fibre or wireless networks together with declining data costs means that organisations can now connect all their cameras to a central network for monitoring and video archival.

Increased Safety and Control

With event monitoring, virtual guarding and fully managed monitoring services, companies can progress from getting ‘blind’ event-based alerts, toward visual confirmation of suspicious activity on premises or within particular perimeter.

Apart from removing the requirement for multiple onsite control rooms, which helps companies with many sites to save on infrastructure, staffing and training costs, remote monitoring further tightens security by ensuring that there can be no coercion of or collusion with onsite security in order to gain improper access to a secured area.

Using the cloud further means that companies no longer need to worry about data storage, backups and disaster recovery, cyber security, or the threat of damage or theft of recording infrastructure.

Advanced Software-Based Services

The real value in this technology for companies goes beyond just security infrastructure, and toward the analytical tools and capabilities that are made possible through the switch to cloud computing.

With self-learning video analytics, operators are not bombarded with endless streams of footage from multiple sources; rather, technology is used to analyse all video recorded, to sift out what is not required, and provide a short synopsis of suspicious or predetermined events.

The security operators can define alerts by actions (people or vehicles traveling in a particular direction or crossing set boundaries), frequency (the number of times a person or vehicle enters a specific area), and even link to relevant databases to flag stolen or suspicious vehicles in real time.

The benefits for companies here are twofold: it allows for one operator to handle up to 100 cameras – as opposed to one operator to 16 cameras for a traditional CCTV system – and archiving only the video reports results in lower data storage costs.

Smart Retail: Going Beyond Security with Analytics

Not only does advanced video analytics further enable companies to effectively monitor areas with high volumes of traffic, such as public spaces and transportation nodes, but is also capable of providing them with business insight.

By analysing in-store behaviour, retailers can learn more about who their customers are, how long they spend inside stores, and which parts of the store they visit the most (heat mapping). Stores can also improve the customer experience by monitoring and actively managing how long it takes before shoppers are attended to, or have to wait at till lines. They can also use video analytics to improve efficiency in warehouse management.

Property owners or managers – at shopping centres and other high footfall areas such as airports – can use this data to design better retail spaces by taking human behaviour into account, and even to justify higher rentals for properties or stands in areas with proven higher footfall.

While video surveillance has been around for many years, combining it with high bandwidth connectivity and cloud computing means the potential applications are myriad, and businesses now have a powerful tool that helps them convert hours of video into actionable intelligence.

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