Category Archives: News

Adobe have released their new Creative Cloud Express service, as a competitor to other web-based design editors such as Canva and Figma.

Adobe is known for its suite of professional creative software including Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign, Premiere, and XD. This new offering is a re-working of their previous service, Adobe Spark (which was geared more towards social media content creation), and seems to be focused on consumer users. Those who plan to use such software on occasion without wanting to learn complex interfaces – or paying the higher cost for the full software suite (Creative Cloud starts from circa £50 per month).

Canva and Figma are online design services which include various tools and collaboration options. For all three, basic features are included with a free tier, with more advanced options available on paid plans. Adobe is offering ‘Free’ and ‘Premium’ at £10.10 per month / £101.15 per year (inc VAT).

The paid plan includes more images and templates to use, alongside the ability to export a project and other useful features such as access to stock images as part of Adobe Stock and over 20,000 fonts via Adobe Fonts.

Creative Cloud Express is Adobe’s new freemium product – designed for students, small business owners, and those using for a hobby or learning purposes. Instead of a collection of applications, users can access the service online via a web browser, via mobile companion apps (iOS and Android), and there is a Windows application available. Design features include editing photos, trim videos, creating GIFs, and creating social media content.

Check out Creative Cloud Express for free or benefit from a 3-month free trial of the paid plan for a limited time.

Apple shocked everyone by in November by announcing Self Service Repair – making parts, tools, and manuals available to individual customers.

From early 2022, individual customers will be able to carry out their own repairs on their Apple devices. This will initially be limited to iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 devices, but will soon be followed by Mac computers (with M1 chips). This program will start in the US and expand to other countries throughout 2022; we don’t yet have a timeline for the UK.

Commonly needs repairs such as replacing cracked displays, worn out batteries, and broken cameras will be possible. Further and more complex repairs will eventually follow.

Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer: “Creating greater access to Apple genuine parts gives our customers even more choice if a repair is needed…now we’re providing an option for those who wish to complete their own repairs.”

At the moment it’s not clear how Self Service Repair will work with or impact Apple’s warranties. It may be that by undertaking a repair yourself, you will invalidate the device’s warranty, which could mean that most users with a relatively new device will still approach Apple for repairs.

Although this was a surprising announcement – as Apple like to keep a tight control on the eco-system – it is undoubtedly due to pressure from the Right To Repair movement, which has been gathering a lot of pace and support over the last few years. This movement advocates that as the owners of devices and things, we have the right to repairs these goods, and not be constrained by the manufacturer. Manufacturer restrictions have also hindered independent repair services and shops, which often don’t compete with manufacturers’ own repair services, as the independents often cater for devices outside of warranty.

Adobe is offering 39% off Creative Cloud for a whole year.

Visit the link below to get 39% off the entire Creative Cloud suit for a whole year. The price is now £30.34 per month, reduced from £49.94 per month. This includes 20+ creative applications and services for design, video, web and more. Also includes from 100GB of cloud storage. Offer ends 3 December 2021.

Adobe Cyber Monday »

Cloud Office Security provides advanced protection for Microsoft 365. This service is now enhanced with Dynamic Threat Defense at no extra cost.

Dynamic Threat Defense gives zero-day threat defence by picking up potential threats which haven’t been seen before and don’t yet match any known malware signatures. These are then analysed in an isolated sandbox in the cloud, running a whole battery of tests to determine if a file is suspicious or not. This is carried out using powerful cloud computing, and an analysis should be complete within under five minutes.

Such emergent threats are usually extremely hard to detect by traditional signature-matching solutions. This is perfect for defending against ransomware, targeted attacks, data breaches, and questionable email attachments. This advanced layer of protection will soon be available at no additional cost.

We will activate this for all our existing Cloud Office Security customers in early December, so you don’t have to do anything to benefit from the next-level security!

If you don’t yet have Cloud Office Security to protect your Microsoft 365 infrastructure, contact us now.

EDIT: Dynamic Threat Defense was renamed to LiveGuard Advanced in March 2022.

Salesforce’s deadline for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is the start of February.

We previously announced that Salesforce will require Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to increase the security and protection for users. We’d like to remind you that the deadline to have MFA enabled is 1 February 2022.

MFA is one of the most effective tools for enhancing login security and safeguarding your data and business. A 2019 report from Microsoft concluded that MFA blocks 99.9% of all automated attacks. As Salesforce is a tool often used to store consumer information and personal data, this enforced requirement makes perfect sense from a security perspective.

Salesforce recommend using their MFA Assistant under Setup for step-by-step guidance.

GoDaddy announced yesterday that the data of up to 1.2 million of its customers was exposed, due to hackers gaining access to its Managed WordPress hosting service.

GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest domain registrars and a web hosting company providing services to more than 20 million customers worldwide. The breach was discovered by GoDaddy on 17 November, but the hackers had access since at least 6 September.

Demetrius Comes, GoDaddy’s Chief Information Security Officer, said: “Using a compromised password, an unauthorized third party accessed the provisioning system in our legacy code base for Managed WordPress. Our investigation is ongoing and we are contacting all impacted customers directly with specific details.”

We use GoDaddy for domain registration only, and have never recommended their hosting services due to multiple security and performance issues. If you are a GoDaddy customer using WordPress hosting services with them, we recommend you change all passwords and conduct a security audit immediately.

Microsoft is ending support for the OneDrive desktop sync app on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on 1 January 2022.

Updates for OneDrive for these versions of Windows will no longer be provided, and, starting 1 March, users on these versions of Windows will no longer be able to sync their content to the cloud using the OneDrive sync app.

Microsoft announced its plans to retire the OneDrive sync app on older versions of macOS back in August, and now the time has come for older versions of Windows as well.

Microsoft recommend users upgrade to a newer version of Windows before next year. For users on machines unable to run Windows 10 or 11, and who have to stay on older versions of Windows, can still access files on their local machines (but files will not automatically sync) and use OneDrive on the web to upload/download.

To discuss upgrading your Windows version, please contact us. For some, upgrades to Windows 10 may be free, and we also have one-off Windows 10 upgrade licenses available for £49.99+VAT.