Today’s post was written by Tony Qualls, director of enterprise technical services at Adventist Health System in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

Over the years, healthcare has changed from hospital-based care to preventive and continuous care that happens throughout an individual’s life—outside of hospital walls and inside patient homes and neighborhood clinics. Consequently, Adventist Health System is in the midst of a big transformation to a more consumer-centric organization to meet the needs of patients and families at every stage of health.

Our more than 80,000 employees are embracing this new care delivery model, and as many of them are frequently on the go, they need secure, quick access to information from anywhere.

With Microsoft 365, we’re able to give them access to the information they need in a secure, compliant environment. We’ve been a longtime user of Microsoft Office 365 to deliver the latest productivity innovations to our clinical and non-clinical employees. We migrated to Microsoft 365 to gain more flexibility with our licensing for Office 365 and for the Windows 10 operating system and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS).

We have 28,000 Microsoft 365 E3 licenses for our office staff and 41,000 Office 365 F1 licenses for our Firstline team members—nurses, doctors, and other employees. These individuals carry laptops and tablets with them throughout the day or access shared devices using badge-tapping technology. With Microsoft 365, we can cost-effectively license the specific applications that employees need to accomplish various tasks throughout their workdays.

For example, our clinical staff uses Skype for Business Online to improve patient flow and connect physicians with remote patients. Now, we’re taking it to the next level with Microsoft Teams—probably the fastest-growing Office 365 application we have deployed. Everything’s in one place—SharePoint Online sites, files, chat, meetings, and Microsoft Planner. It’s so easy to use, and we find that after people get invited to one Teams channel, they turn around and create channels of their own to support other projects. With Teams, we have persistent conversations, documents, and other resources about a topic in one place, which helps groups focus and move faster. In addition, it’s a highly secure environment that we trust, and we can remain completely compliant with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations.

At Adventist Health System, we strive for excellence in all that we do. Our IT employees strive to be recognized as an industry leader. Utilizing Teams is just one way we are supporting our organization’s vision to be wholistic, exceptional, connected, affordable, and viable.

Communication is crucial to the success of any organization, and Adventist Health System is no different. The quicker we can share information, updates, and plans, the faster we gain buy-in from our team members. The clinical workspace thrives on rapid communication and collaboration around patient care. This, in turn, helps foster better outcomes and patient satisfaction.

It’s exciting to see the Teams roadmap incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities by offering speech-to-text and meeting transcription services. As we gather takeaways and valuable information from meetings, I am happy that Teams allows me to focus on listening to my staff and peers while it captures and transcribes meeting notes for later review.

There’s an abundance of innovation coming from Microsoft, and we’ve taken the approach of releasing new Office 365 applications directly to employees and letting user communities provide guidance, tips, and support on Yammer channels. This has been a great adoption model that has empowered employees to put these tools to work in ways that make sense for them.

Because Microsoft matches productivity innovation with security innovation, we can confidently utilize new technologies on tens of thousands of mobile devices. We’ve standardized on Windows 10 Enterprise, chiefly for security features such as default encryption. But EMS also includes a great bundle of security tools and licensing options that have significantly decreased our licensing costs while giving us enhanced security capabilities.

From a support perspective, Microsoft Intune and mobile email with Exchange Online have been tremendous timesavers. Employees had to unenroll and re-enroll devices in a previous email security program, and our infrastructure support team was inundated with support tickets around the need to resync mobile email accounts. But with Intune, employees download the Microsoft Outlook mobile app, we apply the correct policies, and they’re off and running.

With Microsoft 365, our clinical, support, and IT staffs are all better equipped to help Adventist Health System transform its business in a secure, compliant manner to meet the needs of today’s changing healthcare landscape.

—Tony Qualls

In “Small Fry,” set for publication in September, the eldest daughter of Steve Jobs tells stories about the late Apple cofounder, and her life.

In the mythology of Apple history, Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ name is well-known. She’s the oldest child of Steve Jobs and his first serious girlfriend Chrisann Brennan. At the same time he was publicly denying paternity of her, Jobs made the decision to name an early Apple computer the Lisa. Later, the two reconciled, and Lisa went on to a career as a journalist.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ past has been detailed in various biographies of her father over the years, but the now 40-year-old Brennan-Jobs is stepping into the spotlight to tell her side of the story in a new memoir called “Small Fry.” The book, which was announced in March, is set for release in September, and Vanity Fair published an excerpt Wednesday. The excerpt implies that the question of whether or not the Lisa computer was named for Brennan-Jobs will loom large over the book.

In the excerpt, Brennan-Jobs shares that after she was born, Jobs denied his paternity from the start, even though he had agreed to visit her and her mother at the farm in Oregon where she had been born. But she didn’t see Jobs again until she was three years old.

She goes on to tell her side of the court battle over Jobs’ paternity, sharing that Apple went public — bringing Jobs’ net worth to over $200 million — just days after that legal case was finalized.

Even after Jobs admitted paternity and the two started to spend more time together, Jobs was distant with her. “By that time I knew he was not generous with money, or food, or words,” she said of a time he visited her in San Francisco.

As she got older, Lisa would tell her friends “a secret,” that her father was Steve Jobs, even though most elementary school students in the mid-1980s likely didn’t know Jobs by name. She would even brag that her father had named a computer after her, although later in life, it started to bother her that the failed computer had had her name.

“By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing,” Brennan-Jobs writes. “I didn’t care about computers—they were made of fixed metal parts and chips with glinting lines inside plastic cases—but I liked the idea that I was connected to him in this way. It would mean I’d been chosen and had a place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent.”

Then, as a high school student, she finally asked Jobs if the computer had been named after her. His answer? “Nope. Sorry, kid.”

However, years later, on a yacht trip with her father, Lisa found herself spending time with the long Apple-adjacent rock star Bono. As Jobs and Bono talked about their respective experience, Bono asked Jobs if the Lisa computer had, in fact, been named for his daughter. “Yeah, it was,” Jobs replied.

The excerpt also includes a personal retelling of Jobs’ final days before his death in 2011. Jobs died at the age of 56 after a long battle with cancer.

Teeny Titans – Teen Titans GO! is a mouthful of a title, a great game, and one of the most successful premium games on the App Store. Grumpyface Games and the Cartoon Network are back two years after its release to bring us the next installment in the collect-and-battle franchise. A sequel always invites comparison to its predecessor. Is there enough new hotness to make it feel like a different game but not so much that it loses what fans loved about the original?

Teen Titans GO! Figure walks down the middle of that line like a tight-rope specialist. In the game we’re back in Jump City, but the figure-battling craze has cooled off and the game looks to be in trouble. Powerful forces are looking to shut the game down for good and the culprit seems to be…the Justice League? As a last gasp, new figures were just released which jump-starts interest in Jump City and puts the teen heroes on a path to save their favorite game.

The main quest line follows the fate of this game within a game and features a couple major DC heroes, Batman and Superman, along with a lot of other familiar faces. Naturally, there is also a whole host of new side missions to accept and new neighborhoods to explore. The city looks familiar but is rearranged and while many of the assets from the first game are reused, most of the content is new and is packed with the same tongue-in-cheek approach to collect-them-all games and the hero genre.

Now quests are great, but the figure battles remain the highlight of the game. Grumpyface Games didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken here, and thankfully so. You can battle pretty much any character in the game and take part in figure-battling tournaments as well. Battles are still fast-paced, a lot of fun, and full of enough tactical bite to satisfy strategy gamers. You pick a trio of figures to go into battle against one to three opponents in a real-time showdown. Your goal is to defeat the other team by reducing each figure’s health to zero before they can do the same to you. Each side has a battle bar that builds up charge over time and each figure has three powers that fall somewhere on that bar. Powers deal damage, heal your team, and provide a variety of other support effects and the longer you must wait the more powerful they tend to be. This sets up some nice tension and key decisions: Do you pew-pew-pew with fast lower-damage attacks or do you save up your charge for one massive-damage hit?

Balancing your team of figures remains a strategic challenge. The game has six classes, and each has an advantage, and disadvantage, against one other class. When you have advantage your attacks do more damage, so making sure you go in with an advantageous crew is key. Figuring out an assortment of figures that work well in different trios and leveling them up remains a central part of the game and is definitely my favorite part of Teen Titans GO Figure.

So, what’s new in battle? Quite a bit. First, there’s a slate of new figures available, including fast-hitter Black Lightning, who quickly became one of my primary damage dealers. I had been worried I’d end up running with the same crew as in the first game, but this was not the case. Between all the new figures and getting some really good guys much earlier, hello Killer Moth, I ended up with a considerably different team of regulars to power through the game.

Teen Titans GO Figure not only has new figures, but also new powers, such as a blast of super-cold air that freezes your opponent’s battle bar and causes it to crack and fall to pieces, losing all progress made. It’s effective and adds a great tactical element to the game as you look to time it perfectly to maximize your opponent’s woe. There are also new tofu effects that are a lot of fun. Tofu are blocks that drop during combat and when you click on them you gain a bonus power that you can activate at will. Existing tofu did things like provide a damage bonus, regain health, and remove enemy effects. New tofu let you speed up your battle bar progress, create a shield, and freeze and break your opponent’s battle bar among other things.

Yet another big change to the figure-battling portion of the game is the introduction of accessories. Accessories are items you can add to a battle that provide a bonus. You must charge them by attacking and grabbing batteries that randomly drop like tofu and once ready, you can activate them and unleash more pain on your foe. Just a couple examples are a Lil’ Penguin that continually freezes your opponent’s battle bar, a Titan Coin that increases your team’s hit points, and Cyborg’s Waffle Shooter that fires waffles that temporarily block one of your opponent’s powers. Both sides get access to accessories and figuring out how best to use and play around them introduces yet another aspect to the game’s already compelling combat system.

Figure customization has also gotten some intriguing new features. The original game featured mod chips, which provided a nice bonus to a specific figure, as well as the ability to enhance each of the figure’s three powers to make them more effective. Teen Titans GO Figure includes both of these but has also introduced figure painting and power-order customization. Each figure has several different color-scheme outfits you can unlock with repaint tokens. At level 10 you can also customize the order of a figure’s three powers as well.

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Teen Titans GO Figure remains a premium game, but unlike its predecessor includes in-app purchases that include the ability to buy rare figures, extra repaint tokens, and eggs filled with a random assortment of figures, accessories, and repaint tokens. I’ve played through most of the game and I can attest that you don’t need to buy any IAPs and there’s no pay wall of any kind. All of what you can buy is relatively easily obtainable in the game. The IAPs might be really tempting for collectors and completionists who are impatient to collect them all but are easily ignorable for anybody else.

If you played Teeny Titans and are ready for more great figure-battling action, or enjoy the genre in general, Teen Titans GO Figure is an easy recommendation to make. The game is a great blend of old awesomeness and new hotness and does feel like a new experience, one that I am enjoying just as much the second time around.

A game that was, until very recently, up for sale on Steam has been accused by numerous parties of secretly using its players’ computers to mine for cryptocurrency.

Eurogamer reports that the platformer Abstractism has come under fire for installing viruses and malware disguised as unassuming files like “steam.exe” and “abstractism launcher.” Though the game itself has now vanished from Steam, it has seemingly been live on the digital storefront since at least late March.

This all comes during a time where Valve has been embracing a more hands-off approach to moderating games that appear on its massive digital storefront Steam, and instead focusing on creating tools for users to filter what appears in their feeds. In a previous blog post, the company said it would endeavor to remove games that are “illegal or straight up trolling” but that it largely won’t police the content hosted on its platform. 

Abstractism itself has been on Steam since at least March 2018, though the earliest mention in its Steam Reviews of overly intensive resource demands only showed up on July 20. 

The YouTuber SidAlpha dug into the scam in a video posted July 29, noting that the game was also using assets from Valve’s Team Fortress 2 to create at least one fake Steam Marketplace item that could then be used to dupe unsuspecting Team Fortress 2 players into trading valuable in-game items for an Abstractism fake. 

A comment on SidAlpha’s original video from the user Matheus Muller neatly sums up many of the concerns, noting that “the game resource consumption is significant and inconsistent with its graphical quality or complexity, [and] the proportion of CPU/GPU/RAM/IO usage is consistent with what you would expect from a crypto miner.”

The developer previously addressed accusations on its Steam Community page by saying that the high resource usage was due to the demands of graphical rendering when the game was being played on high settings but, as Muller points out, “the resources used are not only graphical in nature, but include a sizeable amount of disk space which again is not expected from a game of this complexity, but is expected of a crypto miner.”

No Man’s Sky hit a peak concurrent playercount of around 97,000 users this past weekend, following the release of Next, an update which added online multiplayer to the game. 

Hello Games’ procedural space simulator showed over 40,000 concurrent players on Steam last week following the release the Next update, which also included features like expansive base building and overhauled graphics.

According to numbers pulled by PC Gamer, Next didn’t draw in as many players on Steam since No Man’s Sky’s launch, which was just over 212,000 concurrent users, but it’s not terrible for a game that’s seen significant changes since its original (and somewhat controversial) launch.

In addition to the co-op multiplayer and other new features of Next, the 50 percent drop in price of No Man’s Sky is probably contributing to the higher playercount as well, since the game has been sitting at Steam’s global top sellers list since the update launched.