Delivering New Webinar Experiences with Microsoft Teams

a person holding a tablet in front of a laptop

In these challenging economic times, many businesses seek to optimize and consolidate for cost savings and efficiencies. Simultaneously accelerating growth. Hybrid workforces continue to pose unique challenges to keep people connected. Therefore, organizations everywhere ask, “How can we do more with less?”. Virtual events, such as a Webinar, have become an increasingly popular option for businesses of all sizes. Still, with so many different platforms available, it can be tough to know where to start.

At WheelHouse IT, we’re excited to share how Microsoft Teams is evolving the webinar experience for existing webinars within Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The new advanced webinars within Teams Premium are generally available now. Microsoft Teams delivers engaging and richer digital-first event experiences that can help businesses generate leads and drive results.

Seamless setup and preparation before your event ensures every webinar is unique. Microsoft has revamped the setup and management of registration to offer more options to customize registration details and event settings. You can now designate co-organizers and add the relevant event details. Additionally, enhance presenter bios to showcase their expertise and social credentials and manage registration capacity limits for up to 1,000 attendees. You can also specify custom questions to gather pertinent information about prospective attendees. As well as enable consent for event terms and conditions upon registration.

seamless setup and preparation before event 1

To build excitement and drive attendance as the webinar draws near, you can leverage timely, automated reminder emails to ensure the event remains top of mind. On the day of the webinar, presenters can join one another and the host in the virtual green room. Ensuring seamless preparation. With the virtual green room, presenters have a separate, dedicated space from attendees to connect and chat in real-time. Additionally they can stage content, do a quick briefing, and test run without disturbing attendees.

green room

Maintain focus and drive engagement during your event. During the webinar, you can easily manage the production of your webinar to showcase a more dynamic, curated presentation by managing what attendees see. You can keep your attendees focused and more deeply engaged by managing their view so they only see shared content and participants brought on-screen. Thus, they are no longer distracted by the multiple profiles of other attendees or an accidental attendee video popping up.

focus

Improve live event experiences with Microsoft eCDN in Teams Premium. To improve live event experiences within your organization, the Microsoft Enterprise Content Deliver Network (eCDN) is now included in Teams Premium. With Microsoft eCDN, organizations can seamlessly and securely live stream global meetings, all-hands gatherings, and town halls. As well as distribute company-wide trainings using Teams Live Events.

Enhancing existing webinar experiences, Microsoft continuously improves the existing webinar experience in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that users have relied on daily to deliver events worldwide. Microsoft has revamped the setup and management of registration with a new structure and expanded options to customize registration details and event settings.

enhancing webinar experiences

Live stream Teams Meetings and Webinars to Meta Workplace Live. As webinars are intended to reach a broader audience, typically outside of your organization. Microsoft is making it easier to connect with your extended network right within Meta Workplace Live. Now organizers can live stream a Teams meeting or webinar to Meta Workplace Live. Thus, increasing your reach and enabling attendees to engage wherever works best.

At WheelHouse IT, we’re excited to extend our knowledge to bring these new webinar experiences to our customers, partners, and community around the world. Whether you’re a seasoned Teams user or recently new to the application.

How to Create a Shared Network by Mapping Network Drives

several people using laptops and tablet computers in a circle

Shared networks are extremely common among businesses, as they allow your employees to access important company documents much more efficiently. Your IT department may have set up a shared network for your organization, without you even realizing it. 

Knowing the workings of shared networks and how to map a network drive on your device is a very useful skill to have in the workplace. So, we’ve created this short guide on how to create a shared network by mapping network drives. 

What are Shared Networks?

As the name suggests, a shared network allows resources, like documents or media, to be shared with users and devices connected to the same network. With a shared network, information can be accessed by more than one device at the same time. This makes accessing and exchanging information much more efficient in an office setting.

What Does it Mean to “Map a Network Drive”

When you map a network drive, you’re making a specific drive available to other users on your network. This makes it easy for those other users to quickly access the files you’re sharing as if they’re locating files on their device’s hard drive. When a drive is mapped, it will show up under “This PC” in file explorer for other users on that network.

How to Map a Network Drive 

  1. Turn on Network Discovery

Turning on network discovery allows you to locate the network you want to map. To do this, go to your Control Panel and select the View Network Status and Tasks option. From here, select the Change Advanced Sharing Settings on the left-hand side. Be sure that the Turn on Network Discovery option is checked, then save your changes.

  1. Select a Drive to Map

First, click on This PC in your File Explorer. From here, select Map Network Drive from the options located at the top of the window. You’ll then see a window open with options to select a drive to map, along with a folder path for your drive. You can browse the files here or if you’d rather select a proper location for your drive, do that now. 

  1. You’re All Done!

Once you’ve made your selections, click Finish. If you’d like a more simplified process moving forward, you can check the Reconnect at Sign-In box. That’s all there is to it!

It’s important to keep in mind that the domain policies on your network might prevent mapping a network drive. This is intentional and meant to protect your information. 

A lot of this process depends on the configuration of your network and the level of access you’d like other network users to have, so we recommend contacting a professional if you’d like to make adjustments. Wheelhouse IT is more than happy to help you out with any tasks related to business technology!

We hope you learned something new from this blog! Stay tuned for more great articles on technology tips, tricks, and news.

How To Send HIPAA Compliant Email

an iphone with several different app icons on the screen

How To Send HIPAA Compliant Email

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) set the standard for healthcare providers in protecting sensitive patient data. Any organization that handles protected health information (PHI) must adhere to all applicable physical, network, and process security measures. HIPAA-compliant email solutions and all aspects of email security fall under this category. But HIPAA compliance for email communications (email accounts and email services) is often viewed as a baffling subject matter.

Organizations subject to HIPAA include covered entities (any company that provides treatment, medical practices, payment, or healthcare operations) and business associates (any company with access to PHI that provides support for covered entities). Even subcontractors (i.e. business associates of business associates) must comply with HIPAA secure communications rule. These organizations and entities have to overcome all compliance challenges that may come their way, in order not to breach HIPAA rules.

What is HIPAA compliant email?

In 2000 the HIPAA Privacy Rule created for the first time a set of national standards for safeguarding certain health information. It allows covered entities to disclose PHI to a business associate if it receives assurances that the business associate will use the information only within the scope in which it was engaged by the covered entity.

The HIPAA Security Rule was added in 2003 to set out what safeguards must be in place to protect electronic PHI (ePHI), which is health information that is held or transferred in electronic form.

In regards to email, covered entities are required to take reasonable steps to protect ePHI as it’s transmitted electronically to the recipient’s inbox.

Once the email reaches the recipient, the obligation of the sender ends, and it becomes the recipient’s job to secure any PHI they have in their inbox.

If you are using a third party to transmit or host ePHI, the company is required by law to sign a business associate agreement (BAA) with you. A BAA establishes that certain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards are in place to protect patient data.

While no certification makes an email provider HIPAA compliant, meeting the requirements set by the HIPAA Privacy & Security Rules is the best place to start, along with ensuring strong technical security measures to make sure ePHI is protected inbox to inbox.

 Does HIPAA require email encryption?

The terms “required” and “addressable” are used to describe HIPAA encryption requirements. Encryption protocols labeled as mandatory must be implemented if you want to remain in compliance with HIPAA. If a risk assessment determines that encryption is necessary to protect ePHI, addressable encryption protocols must be implemented.

This decision should be documented and an equivalent solution implemented to protect ePHI if your organization decides encryption is not necessary. Because there is no suitable alternative to encryption for protecting ePHI in an email, it is effectively necessary. Your patients’ information and your organization could be at risk if you don’t encrypt your emails.

 

There are a few things to keep in mind to ensure that your email is HIPAA-compliant:

Ensure you have email encryption (end-to-end encryption) for email

Email is a quick and easy way to communicate electronically for healthcare organizations, but it does not necessarily ensure security nor usually have extra security and compliant technology solutions. Even services that encrypt messages in transit may not have the required level of security to make them HIPAA compliant. To make your email is HIPAA compliant and ensure cloud-based email security, you should ensure you have end-to-end encryption, which encrypts both messages in transit and stored messages. Access controls are used to ensure only the intended recipient and the sender can access the messages.

Some email service providers require individual emails to be encrypted by clicking a button or using a portal. Since it is easy to forget to turn on encryption and accidentally send an unencrypted email, it is a better choice to encrypt all emails, not only those that contain ePHI. This will reduce the potential for human error.

The type of encryption used is also important. While previously Data Encryption Standard (DES) was considered secure, that is no longer the case. You should consult NIST for advice on suitable encryption standards. Currently, AES 128, 192, or AES 256-bit encryption is recommended.

For many HIPAA-covered entities, especially smaller healthcare providers that do not have in-house IT staff to ensure their email is HIPAA-compliant, the use of a third-party HIPAA-compliant email service provider is strongly recommended.

Research potential HIPAA-compliant email service providers to ensure that they provide a service that is suitable for your requirements. A search on Google will produce several potential service providers.

Enter into a HIPAA-compliant business associate agreement with your email provider

In your compliance effort, before using a third-party email service to send ePHI, you should obtain a business associate agreement. As outlined in the business associate agreement, the service provider is responsible for ensuring ePHI’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability through the use of administrative, physical, and technical safeguards.

You should look for an alternative option if an email service provider or compliant email vendor refuses to sign a business associate agreement as one of the business requirements. To work with HIPAA-covered entities and their business associates, an email service provider should be willing to sign a BAA.

Ensure your email is configured correctly

It is possible to violate HIPAA rules even if a BAA is obtained because of the risks of email. It is not enough to use a BAA-protected email service to ensure that your email is HIPAA compliant, you must ensure that your email is configured correctly and take appropriate compliance security measures.

Develop policies on the use of email and train your staff

Training your staff on the proper use of email concerning ePHI and compliance with regulations is essential after you have implemented your HIPAA-compliant email service. Health care workers, in the busy healthcare environment, have been responsible for several data breaches, including the unintentional transmission of ePHI via email without encryption and the transmission of ePHI to individuals who were not authorized to see the data. Employees must be aware of their HIPAA obligations and trained on how to use the email service to comply with the law.

Ensure all emails are retained

Because email retention is not specifically mentioned in HIPAA legislation, HIPAA’s rules on email retention are a little unclear. Covered entities should maintain an email archive, or at least ensure that emails are backed up and stored because individuals can request information on disclosures of protected health information and email communications may be required when legal action is taken against a healthcare organization. Emails may also be required to be kept for a set period of time under state law. Because of this, you should check the laws governing email in the states where you do business. Consult a lawyer if you’re unsure about anything.

HIPAA requires covered entities to keep documentation related to their compliance efforts for six years, and the retention period for security-related emails and emails relating to privacy policy changes should be six years.

Storage space is required even for small and medium-sized healthcare organizations to store 6 years of emails, including attachments. When it comes time to back up your emails, consider using a secure, encrypted email archive instead. Additionally, since an email archive is indexed, searching for emails in an archive is a quick and easy process. Emails can be quickly and easily retrieved if they are needed for legal discovery or a compliance audit.

To be classified as a business associate under HIPAA, any email archiving service provider will be subject to the same regulations as email service providers. It would be necessary to sign a BAA with that service provider and obtain reasonable assurances that they will abide by HIPAA rules.

Obtain consent from patients before communicating with them via email

HIPAA-covered entities need to remember that even if a HIPAA-compliant email provider is used, the patient’s written consent must be obtained before any ePHI is sent via email, no matter how convenient it may be. Patients should be made aware of the potential dangers of sending confidential information via email. Emails containing electronic health information (ePHI) can be sent if the sender is willing to accept the risks.

Partner with Wheelhouse IT 

You may believe that you can meet the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) on your own, and you may be right. A HIPAA-verified Managed Service Provider (MSP) makes it much easier to achieve HIPAA compliance than if you were to do it on your own.

To keep your organization and in-house IT department HIPAA compliant, you can rely on Wheelhouse IT. Some of the benefits of working with us include:

  • Conducting HIPAA security risk assessments
  • Encrypting all PHI and stored data
  • Implementing backup and disaster recovery plans to keep data secure
  • Identifying system vulnerabilities and providing high-quality solutions
  • Providing the necessary technology to ensure data security
  • Providing services such as Remote Monitoring Management (RMM), cloud-to-cloud backup, and authentication and access management 

If you are looking for the assistance of an MSP for your HIPAA compliance needs, call the team at Wheelhouse IT today!

How to Select a Phone Solution (and How to Properly Use It)

How to Select a Phone Solution (and How to Properly Use It)

Considering how long we’ve had access to the basic technology, telephones (and proper telephone etiquette while using them) haven’t changed all that much on the surface. What has changed is how the technology fundamentally works, and the options that are available for businesses.

Here, we’ll go over some of the options today’s businesses have.

Selecting the Type of Phone to Use

While many may be tempted to eschew the incorporation of telephony in their business, this temptation should be resisted. After all, most businesses still rely on a phone for communication purposes, so any business that doesn’t have one is cutting off a valuable source of client communications. This also makes the decision of what kind of phone to utilize an extremely important one.

There are a variety of options that a business has when selecting a phone to use, each with its own pros and cons. Admittedly, some of these options have slowly had their benefits phased out by current trends and through the introduction (and improvement) of these benefits by other approaches.

Landline

This is the phone system that, until relatively recently, was the option for anyone who wished to use the telephone. Utilizing the connections provided by the telephone company, a company would need to host PBX (or private branch exchange) hardware on their premises. A PBX system would allow for the creation of the company’s needed extensions as well as the incorporation of many of the business’ necessary telephone functions, including directories and call transferring.

While there is a high comfort level with these solutions, many service providers are gradually abandoning landlines, and the Internet access speeds that many companies require have allowed them to explore other options more easily.

Virtual Phone

Virtual phone systems can often be the middle ground between traditional telephony and a VoIP solution. With incoming calls potentially processed through traditional telephony and forwarded to employees through VoIP solutions, the features of this kind of system can give a business that relies heavily on its remote employees a means of unifying their communications, as well as some advanced features bundled in.

VoIP

A VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system is one that eliminates the need for traditional telephony entirely. Instead, VoIP utilizes the Internet connection that your business already needs for the rest of its tasks, or can be leveraged as an app on a smartphone. In addition, most VoIP solutions include the same enhanced features that a business would need, for a much more affordable cost. These can be leveraged in two ways, though an on-premise system, or through a cloud-based service. Each approach has its own pros and cons.

An in-house system will initially cost your business a tidy expense, as the equipment needed to host the system itself is not cheap. Furthermore, you will need to pay a monthly fee for the necessary components that allow you to make calls. Any maintenance or upgrades will fall to your staff, and will require some skill.

However, this also means that you are in complete and total control of your business telephony.

Utilizing a cloud-hosted system will mean that everything is handled for you – you may not need to buy hardware, and you don’t have any maintenance to worry about. This also means that if your phone system goes down, your provider is the only one who can do anything about it. You’re also susceptible to Internet outages, as that is what allows the system to function.

Despite all this, VoIP is a very reliable solution (especially with a good service level agreement), with little that you have to worry about besides the monthly bill.

At WheelHouse IT, we have the expertise to recommend and implement the right phone system for you. Call (877) 771-2384 for more information.

4 Microsoft Word Tips That Could Save Your Job

4 Microsoft Word Tips That Could Save Your Job. Data Culture

The term “Johnny-on-the-spot” is one that most people are familiar with. It means when a person is ready to impulsively act on the opportunities presented for them.

Sometimes in business, things tend to move too fast for even the most experienced and thoughtful managers to be out in front of. One situation that is routinely experienced by organizations is that their content and deliverables need to be updated frequently to properly represent the products or service delivery the company offers.

Microsoft Word, the predominant word processing application, is one of the most utilized software titles in the world; and, there are constantly opportunities for people to show off their mastery of Word. These tips may not actually save your job (if your job is even on the line), but if there was a situation where there was a choice to be made whether to retain someone that isn’t proficient with productivity software and you, it would be more difficult for the person in charge of making that personnel decision to remove you from the equation.

Recovery of Lost Word Files

Here’s the scenario: someone is working on an important document when his/her computer crashes before he/she had time to save it. Luckily you’re there. While they are in a panic, all you have to do is open word and navigate to the Open menu. At the bottom of the page there will be a button that will allow you to recover any unsaved documents. He/she will get their files back, and you’ll be a hero.

Compare Two Documents Side-by-Side

Collaboration is more important today than it has been ever before in business. Today, you are beginning to see the workforce more dispersed than ever, so it becomes important for the productivity software organizations deploy to have these integrated collaborative options. If you are working on a document with another person, you can compare two versions of it or merge changes made by multiple authors by navigating to the Review tab at the top of the document screen. This will give you and your team options in which to collaborate more effectively.

Add a Functional Table of Contents

Occasionally, you’ll be tasked with building a report for someone that would be hard to follow without a table of contents. With your Word expertise, you can build a functional and easy-to-use table of contents on any paper or report.

When you are writing your paper the headings and subheadings will become line-items in your table of contents, so it is important to lay the paper out in the way you are determined for it to be read. Look for the References tab and click on Table of Contents. You will be given quite a few options. Just select the style you like the best and click on it and Word will create the table of contents. You then just have to edit to your specifications and you’ll have a way to easily navigate around lengthy documents.

Add Custom Words to the Spell Check Dictionary

It may seem pretty unreasonable when you type a word (or phrase) into Word that you write often and know how to spell (such as business names and other unique names), yet it continually marks it as wrong. One way to mitigate this distraction is to add custom words into Word’s spell check dictionary.

To do this navigate to the File menu and then click on Options. When the options window opens click on Proofing.

Once the dictionary list pops up, select CUSTOM.DIC and click on Edit Word List. This will allow you to make changes to your custom dictionary.

In any office, the more helpful and versatile you can be, the more valuable you are. If you would like to see more Word tips, consider subscribing to our blog. We write about productivity, collaboration, and the technology it takes for businesses to get things done. Do you know any Word tips that can save people time? Feel free to leave them in the comments.