Microsoft wants to convince the world that it is serious about making a successful entry into the already-crowded smartphone arena -- so serious that CEO Steve Ballmer is apparently planning to spend $400 million of Microsoft's budget just on marketing the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 devices at launch.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice on mobile solutions for your business.

1: Uptime commitments

Of all the promises ISPs make, none is worth anything if the ISP doesn’t fulfill its uptime commitments. The circuits simply have to work. If they don’t, organizations become dependent upon redundant or backup service. Look for service level agreements that provide real and measurable targets for uptime, not just 99.9% operational guarantees. Insist on specific wording that governs what happens when service fails. Does your organization receive credit off its bill? Will the ISP scramble a technician 24×7? Both? Ensure these details are in writing.

2: Downstream speed

Many, including most customers, tend to rate an ISP solely on advertised downstream speeds. While many ISPs promote 20Mbps or faster service to businesses, these claims need to be tested. Too often, IT pros hear “2Mbps is the best service we can get in that building” or “Circuits in that part of the city aren’t as fast as other locations.” Marketing claims are occasionally excessive; excuses are plentiful. Test all new circuits’ downstream speeds the day they’re installed, a month later, and quarterly after that.

Better yet, before ordering, inquire what other clients, using the same service, are experiencing nearby. That’ll give you a better barometer as to how potent an ISP’s downstream speeds actually are.

3: Upstream capacity

As with downstream speeds, upstream speed claims must be tested, too. The increasing popularity of VPNs, remote access, and automated offsite backups place great premiums on an ISP’s upstream capacities. As organizations need to push more and more data to mobile users in the field, upstream bandwidth capacity will only grow in importance.

4: Port freedom

Don’t assume that once a telecommunications circuit is in place, an organization is ready to get to work. Many ISPs, in an effort to optimize network performance, selectively block ports. I’ve been unable to use Telnet and other ports, depending upon the ISP’s policies. Worse, the policies aren’t always uniform across an entire ISP’s network. ISP A may block Telnet on networks on the east side of town, but not the west. ISP B, meanwhile, may not block Telnet at all.

5: SMTP flexibility

Many ISPs, and I see this with former Ma Bell companies in particular, block SMTP port 25 traffic to any mail servers but their own. Obviously, the goal is to reduce the distribution of unsolicited email, but the solution places an undue burden on customers. Typically, the ISP recommends setting its servers as the outbound SMTP servers within email clients or switching to alternative ports, but that poses trouble for users who also travel with laptops or who are less technical. Be sure to check with the ISP to learn whether it supports open SMTP port 25 traffic.

6: Accessible technical support

When things go wrong, and they will go wrong, how accessible is technical support? I’ve called for assistance recovering a downed business circuit only to hear a recorded message stating support hours are between 9am and 5pm Monday through Friday. That’s unacceptable for an ISP. Be sure the ISP you select provides technical support that meets your organization’s requirements. If you close up shop everyday at 5pm, this won’t be an issue. But if you run critical third shifts 24×7x365, better support is a necessity.

7: Responsive field service

If a failure occurs (the most common issue I see is failed modems due to lightning strikes, but I’ve also repeatedly seen wiring go bad in the ISP-supported network interface device, or NID), how quickly does the ISP commit to resolving the outage? In many cases, ISPs think nothing of mailing a replacement modem or rolling a truck a full business day later. That could mean the organization is dead in the water, unable to process credit cards, send or receive e-mail, access the Internet, or process orders for days. Be sure you know the ISP’s field response policies, and be sure they match your organization’s requirements, before signing a contract.

8: Equipment quality

IT professionals know which modems fail and how often. They also know which modems with built-in firewalls should really be set to bridge mode and mated to better business-class routers. Not wanting to disparage any manufacturers, I’ll just say that when my office has an opportunity to work with Westell or Motorola modems, we feel better. ISPs often don’t provide a choice of modem; they just deploy the model they support. When comparing two ISPs’ bids, consider the quality of each firm’s equipment. The less time an IT pro must spend on site administering, reconfiguring, or restarting network equipment, the better.

9: Equipment flexibility

Some ISPs enable customers to supply their own modems. Take advantage of these opportunities, as supplying your own network equipment not only allows you to select the quality you want but potentially lowers costs, too. Occasionally, ISPs lease modems to customers. I believe it makes more sense to purchase network equipment, where possible, to achieve lower total costs of ownership.

10: Pricing

Price is the last factor that should be considered when selecting an ISP. Uptime, capacity, service accessibility, and field response are much more critical, especially considering the importance of Internet circuits to businesses today. But price matters, too. When all else is equal — from uptime to performance, support, and equipment — price becomes the differentiating factor. When factoring price, however, be sure to compare apples to apples. Some ISPs require customers to purchase a modem or CSU/DSU, while others lease this equipment. And some ISPs require multi-year contracts. Such lease and long-term arrangements may end up costing more in the long run, so compare costs carefully.

Source: ZDNet

Converge IT only partner with quality ISP's to provide our clients with a complete solution. Contact Converge IT at either our Manchester IT Support Centre or our Daresbury IT Support Centre for advice on the best Internet Service provider for your business. 

Do you need any more confirmation that cloud computing is the way forward? Well, just in case we did, the Yankee Group has chipped in with a survey to show how firmly that the technology is entering into companies' consciousness.

According to the research company, 57 percent of US enterprises do see cloud as a technology that drives business transformation and innovation, while only eight percent see it as hype or as a technology that has no place in their business.

Rather interestingly, enterprises place more trust in traditional vendors such as VMware, HP and Cisco and traditional integrators such as Accenture, rather than the new generation of Web 2.0 suppliers. More than half of the respondents opted for the traditional approach, as opposed to just 17 percent who thought that the likes of Google and Amazon would provide the way forward. Hosting and telecoms companies are similarly not seen as the people to lead the way to cloud computing.

The survey found that production-ready applications were most likely to feature in enterprise cloud deployments, although application testing and storage weren't far behind.

Source: Tech World

Contact Converge IT at the world class technology hub, the Daresbury Innovation Centre, to find out more about how cloud computing can benefit your business. 

The transition from Office 2003 to Office 2007 was a teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling event of epic proportions! Most longtime Office users hated the new interface and its infamous Ribbon. But if users have already made the switch, they’ll find the transition to Office 2010 easy in comparison — almost seamless. Microsoft has made improvements to the Ribbon interface and enhanced existing features — things your users will want to put to good use.

1: File tab replaces Office button

The biggest visible change is the demise of 2007’s Office button. It’s gone and in its place, users will find a new tab — the File tab. Most everything that was available via the Office button is on the new File tab. It’s a combo of old File menu items and option settings from the Tools menu.

After you click the File tab, users will see what Microsoft refers to as the Backstage view, shown in Figure A. This is where users will manage files and metadata and set options. It might help users to think of it this way: If you can do it to the file, rather than in the file, you’ll probably find the option on the File tab somewhere.

Figure A

The Print section of Word’s Backstage view offers options for selecting a printer, viewing the document in Print Preview, and even making changes.

2: Customizable Ribbon

Without specialized expertise that users just don’t have, Office 2007’s Ribbon wasn’t customizable. Now, anyone can add or remove commands from the Office 2010 Ribbon:

• Users can add custom groups and tabs.
• Users can rename default groups and tabs.
• Users can change the order of default groups and tabs.

They’ll be quick to catch on to using the Customize The Ribbon section, shown in Figure B.

Figure B

Choose options from the Customize The Ribbon section to add new groups and tabs and change existing ones.

You can access this feature as follows:

1. Click the File tab.
2. Click Options under Help.
3. Click Customize The Ribbon.

Alternatively, right-click any tab and choose Customize The Ribbon from the resulting submenu. Users will appreciate the easy access.

Once you name a customized Ribbon, you can export it to share with others. This is a helpful and efficient addition for users and administrators alike. Users will master the customization routine quickly and administrators can easily distribute customized Ribbons tailored to specific groups of users.

Tip: Use the small up arrow to the left of the Help icon to quickly minimize (and maximize) the Ribbon.

3: Office Ribbon guides for users skipping Office 2007

Users will find what they need quickly enough if they’re transitioning from Office 2007. Those moving from Office 2003 (or earlier) might need more help. Microsoft offers a set of Ribbon guides that list the Office 2003 menu commands and shows where to find them in the Office 2010 ribbon. These guides will take the sting out of the upgrade.

A similar interactive guide is also available. Suggest that your users bookmark this page in their browsers. After a quick download, they can point to a command in the Office 2003 structure and learn its location in Office 2010. It doesn’t hurt that the tool is kind of fun.

4: Built-in graphic tools

Office 2010 applications share an enhanced set of graphic tools for inserting images, videos, and other graphical elements. Before, editing took place in a third-party tool and users inserted the edited version of the file into a document, presentation, or spreadsheet. Now, your users can do a lot of editing right inside Office 2010.

They can crop, resize, correct colors, correct brightness and contrast, add artistic effects, and more, from within Office 2010. Perhaps the most useful tool is that one that removes the background from pictures and icons. These tools work with videos too; they’re not just for pictures.

5: Enhanced security

Security issues have long been a concern of administrators. Office 2010 makes it easier for you and your users to protect their systems. The most important new security feature is Protected View, which allows users to open a file from an Internet source without executing macros or embedded scripts. Your users can benefit from the data in the file without being vulnerable. When they’re sure the document contains no risk, they can unprotect it.

This is an important feature to introduce to your users. If they don’t know why the feature’s in place, they’ll ignore it and automatically remove it when they see the prompt shown in Figure C. Explain what the feature is and why it’s important to use it, and keep your fingers crossed that they pay attention. Files received via email or a Web site, saved to the local system and then opened, won’t trigger this security feature. But you can specify the file types Office 2010 should open in Protected View from the Trust Center (click the File tab).

Figure C

Train users to protect their systems by using Protected View.

6: Web apps

Office 2010 offers Web-based applications, probably a response to Google Docs. The online applications aren’t as robust as their full-blown desktop counterparts are, but they’ll work in a pinch. Let users know they’re available when they’re on the road or want to work from home.

While in the office, users can upload documents to a Windows Live (SkyDrive) account. To save a document to SkyDrive, click the File tab, choose Share in the left pane, and then select Save to SkyDrive. Users can access these files from just about anywhere. All they need is Internet access and a browser. For more details, see 10 things you can do with Office 2010 Web Apps.

Supposedly, you can use your iPhone browser with Office Web apps, but I haven’t tested that feature.

7: Paste Preview

Paste Preview is an enhancement that lets you preview a paste task before you actually commit to it. First, copy the text as you normally would and position the insertion point marker where you want to paste the text. Then, choose one of the Paste options from the Paste drop-down in the Clipboard group. As you can see in Figure D, hovering over a paste option previews the possibilities. You can see how the text will look if you paste it. This should save your users a lot of experimentation.

Figure D

Pasting is more efficient with Paste Preview.

8: Screenshots

You no longer need third-party software to create screenshots into Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Excel. On the Insert tab, use the Screenshot options in the Illustrations group instead. Because Screenshot works with open windows and not just the current Office application, you can capture information from lots of sources, so it’s not just for writers creating Office manuals.

Figure E shows Screenshot’s drop-down displaying three thumbnails of open windows. Simply click the shot you want to include in your document. Alternatively, choose Screen Clipping to copy just a portion. (Screenshots doesn’t work with a minimized window.)

Figure E

Insert a picture of any open window into the current document.

9: PDF support

Saving a file to PDF format has never been easier. Click the File menu, choose Save & Send, and select the Create PDF/XLS Document option in the File Types section, as shown in Figure F. Then, click Create PDF/XLS, specify a folder for the document, and click Publish. Any user who generates lots of PDF documents from Office content will appreciate the upgrade, just for this one feature.

Figure F

Saving a document in pdf format is now built-in.

Technically, this feature showed up with Office 2007 SP2, but is touted as a new in Office 2010 — perhaps because it’s now part of the 2010 Backstage view configuration.

10: Clunky icons

Users might be confused by the new 2010 application icons, shown in Figure G. Each icon sports a single letter that supposedly represents its corresponding application. Well, there are two Ps — for PowerPoint and Publisher — and OneNote’s icon sports an N. It certainly isn’t a terrible problem, but users will need to pay attention until they’re use to what icon launches which application.

Figure G

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice on how Office 2010 can benefit your business.

Microsoft has begun showing off what's to come in the new edition of its Windows Live Essentials suite, and while Live Essentials may be primarily geared toward consumers, it's got a good deal to offer small businesses and teams and remote workers as well.

Microsoft quietly began offering the latest beta of its Windows Live Essentials 2011 -- a key consumer part of the company's cloud computing initiative -- for download on Tuesday. Of note to business and professional users, the beta now includes tighter integration to Microsoft's Office suite.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at either our Daresbury IT Support Centre or our Manchester IT Support Centre for Cloud Computing advice and solutions.

Over the years, Microsoft has given us a staggering number of tools to help with server administration. Since there are so many tools available, I decided to talk about some of my favorites.

1: System Center Capacity Planner

It might seem strange to start out by talking about a tool that Microsoft has discontinued. But I’ve found System Center Capacity Planner (Figure A) to be so helpful, I wanted to mention it anyway. In case you are not familiar with this tool, it’s designed to help make sure your proposed server deployment will be able to handle the anticipated workload.

According to Microsoft, the System Center Capacity Planner is being replaced by the System Center Configuration Manager Designer (which I have not yet had a chance to use). The end of life announcement for System Center Capacity Planner indicates that it is no longer available, but at the time of this writing, you can still download it from TechNet, as well as from other third-party sites.

Figure A

System Center Capacity Planner

2: PowerShell

Microsoft’s Server products have evolved to the point that you can perform almost any administrative action from the command line by using PowerShell (Figure B). Most of the newer Microsoft Server products include management tools that are actually built on top of PowerShell. This means that any management tasks that can be performed through the GUI can also be performed from the command line or performed through a PowerShell Script. You can download PowerShell 2.0 from Microsoft.

Figure B

PowerShell

3: Best Practices Analyzer

The Best Practices Analyzer(Figure C) isn’t really a single tool, but rather a series of tools designed to analyze your server deployments and ensure that they adhere to Microsoft’s recommended best practices. Microsoft provides versions of the Best Practices analyzer for Exchange, SQL, Small Business Server, and other Microsoft server products.

Figure C

Best Practices Analyzer

4: Security Configuration Wizard

The Security Configuration Wizard (Figure D) is designed to help you to reduce the attack surface of your servers. It analyzes the way in which your servers are configured and then recommends how you can change various aspects of the configuration to make them more secure. The Security Configuration Wizard is included with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but you can also download a Windows Server 2003 version.

Figure D

Security Configuration Wizard

5: ADSI Edit

Another of my favorite tools is ADSI Edit (Figure E). ADSI Edit allows you to manually edit the Active Directory database. Whenever someone asks me about ADSI Edit, I usually compare it to the registry editor. The registry editor allows you to manually change various configuration parameters within a system, but if you use it incorrectly, you can destroy Windows. ADSI Edit is similar: It gives you free rein over Active Directory, but if you make a mistake, you can destroy it.

I have found ADSI Edit most useful for working with Exchange Server deployments. It is sometimes impossible to remove Exchange public folders through conventional means. When this happens, you can use ADSI Edit to get rid of the folders that the Exchange Server management tools leave behind.

Figure E

ADSI Edit

6: DCDIAG

Although domain controllers are usually fairly reliable, problems do occasionally occur — particularly with regard to Active Directory replication. The DCDIAG utility (Figure F), which is included with Windows Server, lets you run a full series of diagnostic tests against malfunctioning domain controllers.

Figure F

DCDIAG

7: Microsoft File Server Migration Wizard

As time goes on, server hardware continues to improve. Some organizations are finding that they can decrease management costs by consolidating their aging file servers. The Microsoft File Server Migration Wizard (Figure G), which is included in the File Server Migration Toolkit, helps organizations merge the contents of aging file servers into DFS root.

Figure G

Microsoft File Server Migration Wizard

8: LDIF Directory Exchange

The LDIF Directory Exchange utility (Figure H) isn’t exactly a tool I use every day. But it has gotten me out of a couple of jams, so I wanted to include it on my list of favorite tools. LDIF Directory Exchange is a command-line tool for importing and exporting Active Directory objects. As with ADSI Edit, you have to be careful when using this tool because you can really mess up your Active Directory if you use it incorrectly. Even so, it’s worth its weight in gold because it allows you to do some amazing things. For example, you can export all the user accounts from a domain and then use the resulting text file to create those same user accounts in a different domain.

The LDIF Directory Exchange utility is built into Windows Server. You can access it by entering LDIFDE in a command prompt window. Windows will display the command’s full syntax along with the various command-line switches you can use.

Figure H

LDIF Directory Exchange utility

9: Server Core Configurator

So far, all the tools I’ve talked about are provided by Microsoft. However, there is one third-party tool I want to mention. Server Core Configurator (Figure I) is an open source tool written by Guy Teverovsky.

Any time you perform a server core installation of Windows Server 2008, you must perform certain post installation tasks before the server is ready to use. Microsoft offers some PowerShell scripts, but performing the initial configuration process from a command line can be tedious. The Server Core Configurator simplifies the provisioning process by providing a simple GUI you can use for the initial configuration.

Figure I

Server Core Configurator

10: Microsoft Application Compatibility Manager

The Microsoft Application Compatibility Manager (Figure J) is part of the Application Compatibility Toolkit. It’s designed to ease the transition from one version of Windows to the next by compiling an inventory of the applications running on your desktops and determining whether each one is compatible with the new version of Windows.

Figure J

Application Compatibility Manager

Source: Tech Republic

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The Office 2010 Web Apps help create a seamless experience for you whether you are working at your desk, using your Windows-mobile smartphone at a coffeeshop, or toting your laptop from place to place. By saving your Office 2010 files to the Web, you can access and edit them using familiar tools. Here’s an introductory look at some things you can do with Office 2010 Web Apps.

1: Add files to Office 2010 Web Apps

The process of adding files to your Office 2010 Web Apps is pretty simple. First, you need a (free) Windows Live account, and you need to be a registered user of one of the Office 2010 versions. You can then log in. When the first window appears, click Add Files to choose the files you want to upload to the Web space.

2: Work on Office files from anywhere

Once a file is in your Windows Live SkyDrive account, you can open it, edit it, enhance it, and share it easily. The tools are almost identical to those you use in your desktop version of Office 2010 (some applications have fewer tools than the full program offers), and the program features work in the same way. Hover the mouse over the file you want and click Edit In Browser to begin working with the file online.

3: Create a new file

Not only can you add and edit files you’ve created on a desktop system, but you can also create new files in the Web Apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. After you log in to your Windows Live SkyDrive account, click the icon of the file you want to create on the right side of the browser window. You will be prompted to name and save the file. The program opens, displaying a new document, and you can choose a template, add content, and save and share the file as you ordinarily would (Figure A).

Figure A

You can add, edit, and enhance content in the Office 2010 Web Apps.

4: Use the Windows Live Sign-In Assistant

Windows Live offers a utility that signs you in automatically so that you don’t have to stop and log in each time you want to work with your Office 2010 Web App files. You will be prompted to install the Sign-In Assistant the first time you open a file in the Office 2010 Web Apps. Just click the link provided to start a wizard that walks you through the process of downloading and installing the tool.

5: Give users permission to share your files

The user permissions features in Windows Live SkyDrive lets you share your files with others. Create a folder to store the file by clicking New and choosing Folder. Add a name for the folder and click the Change link in the Share With selection (Figure B). Add the email addresses of those you want to share the file with or click Select From Your Contact List to display all your Windows Live contacts so that you can click the users you want to add. For each user, choose whether you want to assign the permissions that enable that person to add, edit, and delete files or simply view the files in the folder. Click Next to save your changes. The users you specified will be able to access the files you add to the folder you just created.

Figure B

You can share your folder and files with others in Windows Live SkyDrive.

6: Work collaboratively online

The Office 2010 Web Apps, including Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Excel, enable you to work online with others in real time. When you have given a user the necessary permissions for the file, the Office Web App lets you know when others are working with you in the file. You can click the lower-right corner of the status bar to display the list of others working in the file (Figure C).

Figure C

You can collaborative in real time in the Office 2010 Web Apps.

7: Download a file

You can move files from the online environment to your desktop and back. Hover the mouse over a file in the list in SkyDrive, click More, and then choose Download. You will be prompted to choose the folder where you want to store the file. While you’re working in a file in one of the Office Web Apps, you can click the File tab and choose the first option (which in Excel, for example, is Open In Excel) to open the file in your desktop application. When you save and close the file, any changes are synchronized with the online version.

8: Grab a snapshot of a workbook

If you want to download only a portion of the file you’re working on, you can click the File tab (in the Excel Web App) and choose Download A Snapshot. This downloads a copy of the workbook to your computer that includes only the values and the formatting so you can review the workbook as needed.

9: Get more room onscreen

Similar to the Ribbon controls in your desktop version of Office 2010, you can hide the Ribbon in the Office Web Apps by clicking the Minimize The Ribbon button on the far right side of the Ribbon. Return the Ribbon to normal display by clicking the Maximize The Ribbon button. In Word, you can also click the View tab and choose Reading View to hide the Ribbon and show the document in full-screen view. To return to editing the document, click Edit In Browser.

10: Share your thoughts

Because the Office Web Apps are new, your feedback is especially important for helping developers fine-tune the workings of the programs. You can send feedback to Microsoft about your experience with the Web Apps by clicking the File tab and clicking Give Feedback. A Web form is displayed so that you can send comments (with or without your e-mail address). Whether your experience has been good or bad so far, sharing your experience will help improve the service for all users — so don’t hold back.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice on using Microsoft'sOffice 2010  web apps.

It seems no one in the technology industry is talking more loudly these days about cloud computing than Microsoft. And that drumbeat continued at the annual Financial Analysts' Meeting this week, with COO Kevin Turner claiming that Microsoft has pole position in the race to the cloud.

Turner touted several of Microsoft's high-profile customer wins in the cloud, and also took a moment to linger on the record earnings the company reported last week. Datamation takes a look.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at either our Manchester IT Support Centre or our Daresbury IT Support Centre for advice on how Cloud Computing can benefit your business. 

A Plan-Net survey found that 87% of organisations are currently using Exchange 2003 or earlier. There has been a reluctance to adopt the 2007 version, often considered to be the Vista of the server platform — faulty and dispensable. But an upgrade to a modern, improved version is now becoming crucial: Standard support for the 2003 version ended more than a year ago, and much technological progress has been made since then.

It seems that unconvinced organisations need some good reasons to move from their well-known but obsolete system to the new and improved 2010 version, where business continuity and resilience are easier to obtain and virtualisation can be embraced, with all the benefits that follow. Here are 10 reasons your organisation should migrate to Exchange 2010.

1: Continuous replication

International research shows that companies lose £10,000/$10,000 an hour to email downtime. This version of Exchange enables continuous replication of data, which can minimise disruptions dramatically and spare organisations from such loss. Moreover, Microsoft reckons the costs of deploying Exchange 2010 can be recouped within six months thanks in part to the improvements in business continuity.

2: Virtualisation

Exchange 2010 supports virtualisation, allowing consolidation. Server virtualisation is not only a cost cutter, reducing expenditure related to maintenance, support staff, power, cooling, and space. It also improves business continuity — when a virtual machine is down, computers can run on another virtual machine with no downtime.

3: Cost savings on storage

Exchange 2010 has, according to Microsoft, 70% less disk I/O (input/output) than Exchange 2007. For this reason, the firm recommends moving away from SAN storage solutions and adopting less expensive direct attached storage. This translates to real and significant cost savings for most businesses.

4: Larger mailboxes

Coupling the ability to use larger, slower SATA (or SAS) disks with changes to the underlying mailbox database architecture means that far larger mailbox sizes will become the norm.

5: Voicemail transcription

Unified Messaging, first introduced with Exchange 2007, offers the concept of the “universal inbox,” where email and voice mail are available from a single location and consequently accessed from any of the following clients:

• Outlook 2007 and later
• Outlook Web App
• Outlook Voice Access — access from any phone
• Windows Mobile 6.5 or later devices

A new feature to Exchange 2010, Voicemail Preview, sees text-transcripts of voicemails being received, saving the time it takes to listen to the message. Upon reception of a voice message, the receiver can glance at the preview and decide whether it is an urgent matter. This and other improvements, such as managing voice and email from a single directory (using AD), offer organisations the opportunity to discard third-party voicemail solutions in favour of Exchange 2010.

6: Help desk cost reduction

Exchange 2010 offers potential to reduce help desk costs by enabling users to perform common tasks that would normally require a help desk call. Role-based Access control (RBAC) allows delegation based on job function which, coupled with the Web-based Exchange Control Panel (ECP), enables users to assume responsibility for distribution lists, update personal information held in AD, and track messages. This reduces the call volumes placed on the help desk, with obvious financial benefits.

7: High(er) Availability

Exchange 2010 builds upon the continuous replication technologies first introduced in Exchange 2007. The technology is far simpler to deploy than Exchange 2007, as the complexities of a cluster install are taken away from the administrator. It incorporates easily with existing mailbox servers and offers protection at the database — with Database Availability Groups - rather than the server level. By supporting automatic failover, this feature allows faster recovery times than previously.

8: Native archiving

A large hole in previous Exchange offerings was the lack of a native managed archive solution. This saw either the proliferation of unmanaged PSTs or the expense of deploying third-party solutions. With the advent of Exchange 2010 — and in particular the upcoming arrival of SP1 this year — a basic archiving suite is now available out-of-the-box.

9: Running on-premise or in the cloud

Exchange 2010 offers organisations the option to run Exchange on-premise or in the cloud. This approach even allows organisations to run some mailboxes in the cloud and some on locally held Exchange resources. This offers companies very competitive rates for mailbox provision from cloud providers for key mailboxes, whilst deciding how much control to relinquish by still hosting most mailboxes on local servers.

10: Easier calendar sharing

With Federation for Exchange 2010, employees can share calendars and distribution lists with external recipients more easily. The application allows them to schedule meetings with partners and customers as if they belonged to the same organisation. This might not appeal to every organisation, but those investing in collaboration technologies will see the value Exchange 2010 offers.

Taking the leap

Due to the uncertain economy, many organisations are wary of investing their tight budgets in projects deemed unessential. However, if they follow the “more with less” rule and invest in some good service management for their IT service desk, the resulting cost savings will free resources that can be invested in this type of asset. The adoption of Exchange 2010, in turn, will allow more efficient use of IT by end users and help the service desk run more smoothly, thus engaging in a cycle of reciprocal benefits.

Source: Tech Republic

If your organisation needs advice on the benefits of migrating to Exchange 2010 then contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice from qualified engineers and consultants.

With everyone from Salesforce to even Microsoft pushing cloud-based services and software, it should come as little surprise that the market for software-as-a-service options is booming.

That's the latest finding from researcher Gartner, which sees a 14-percent jump in enterprise IT spending on SaaS this year, compared to a year ago. And a large part of that is due to businesses increasing transition of their software and infrastructure to the cloud. In particular, Gartner sees project and portfolio management; content, communications and collaboration; and customer relationship management (CRM) software leading the list of enterprise software making the jump to the cloud. IT Channel Planet takes a look.

Global sales of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the enterprise application segment will jump more than 14 percent to $8.5 billion this year when compared with the $7.5 billion generated in 2009, a spike attributed largely to the business community's growing endorsement of cloud computing, according to data compiled by researcher Gartner Inc.

The researcher said that it expects worldwide SaaS sales in markets such as project and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration (CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM) will grow steadily—albeit at varied rates--based on increasing customer demand and the suitability of certain applications.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester or Daresbury IT Support Centres for advice on how our Cloud Computing solutions can benefit your business.

1: Change the default color scheme

This has nothing to do with how the Office programs work, but everything to do with the environment in which you work with them. Some folks probably don’t care a whit, but to me the baby blue default color scheme in Office 2010 is distracting and actually reduces my productivity. I’m not really happy with either of the alternatives, either. The “black” is a muddy gray/dark tan color and it turns the folder pane and Today pane dark with white text, making it difficult to read. And the “silver” isn’t very silver; it’s more of a light gray. But I settled on silver as the easiest on my eyes and the least in-your- face choice.

To change the color scheme in any of the Office 2010 programs, click the File tab, click Options in the left pane, click General in the left Options pane and select Silver in the Color Scheme drop-down box (Figure A).

Figure A

You can change the distracting baby blue default color scheme to silver or black.

2: Customize the Ribbon

When the Ribbon was introduced in Office 2007, there was a tremendous outcry. Part of that was just the human aversion to learning something new, but even those of us (yes, I confess to being one of them) who liked the Ribbon had a complaint: Why couldn’t we customize it to fit the way we work?

Microsoft listened and, in Office 2010, added the capability to customize the Ribbon. This makes it much more useful and should alleviate some of the confusion among those upgrading from Office 2003. Now you can customize the Ribbon’s main tabs and tool tabs, as shown in Figure B.

Figure B

New to Office 2010 is the option to customize the Ribbon to your liking.

You can remove commands you rarely use or group them differently to suit the way you work. You can create a new tab on the Ribbon or add your favorite commands to a new group on an existing tab. You can also rename commands. And of course, there is a “reset” option so you can return the Ribbon to its default look. You can even export your custom Ribbon and then import it into another instance of Office 2010. So once you get it configured just right on your desktop machine, you don’t have to go through that whole customization process again for your laptop. This Office Watch article explains more about customizing the Ribbon.

3: Customize the Quick Access Toolbar

Much as I like my customized Ribbon, there are some commands that I want to have available regardless of which Ribbon tab I’m in. That’s where the Quick Access toolbar comes in handy. Many Office users seem to overlook this little gem, but it’s one of the first things I set up when I install any recent version of Office.

I have my own set of commands that I put on the Quick Access bar, including Save, Save As, Undo, Redo, Email, New Comment, and New Document. I also like to move the toolbar so that it’s under the Ribbon instead of above it, as shown in Figure C. To move or customize the Quick Access toolbar, right-click on it and choose the appropriate action.

Figure C

A customized Ribbon still doesn’t take the place of the Quick Access toolbar.

4: Turn on Live Preview

Sometimes when you copy and paste material into an Office document, it doesn’t end up looking the way you thought it would. It can be difficult to know which of the Paste options (e.g., Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting, Keep Text Only) to use. Office 2010 helps to eliminate surprises by including the Live Preview feature, which lets you see exactly how copied content will look when you paste it in an Office application. When you right-click and hover the mouse pointer over each Paste option, you get a preview of what it will look like if you use that option to paste the content.

For some reason, the Live Preview feature is not enabled by default. To enable it, click File | Options and select the Enable Live Preview check box on the General page.

5: Tweak AutoCorrect options

AutoCorrect is a great feature that can save you a lot of time by correcting common typos automatically. However, it can also drive you crazy when it “corrects” what you intentionally typed. For example, by default when you type a word with two initial capital letters, Office corrects it by making the second letter lowercase. Most of the time, it’s a typo, and that’s what you want to happen. But what if you have a company name or product name that actually uses two initial capitals, such as TRick (a company named after someone named Thomas Rick)? Word will try to be helpful by changing it to “Trick.”

You could just patiently retype it the way you want it and Word will get the message and let it remain, but that takes extra time. You could turn off the TWo INitial Caps feature in the AutoCorrect settings, but then it wouldn’t correct the real typos of this nature. The best way to deal with it is to add an exception for TRick. Here’s how you do that:

1. Select Options in the left pane of the BackStage menu, then select Proofing.
2. Click the AutoCorrect Options button.
3. On the AutoCorrect tab, click the Exceptions button.
4. Click the INitial CAps tab and under Don’t Correct, type TRick and click Add, then click OK.

You can make exceptions for other types of corrections using the First Letter and Other Corrections tabs.

6: Create Quick Steps

One of the coolest new features in Outlook 2010 is Quick Steps. It allows you to create multi-step actions that you can apply to email messages. For example, I forward many messages to a particular person. Instead of having to click Forward, type in his name, and then click Send, I’ve created a Quick Step that lets me do all that by simply clicking a single button.

There is a wizard-type interface for creating a new Quick Step. Simply click Create New in the Quick Steps section of the Home tab and you’ll get the Edit Quick Step dialog box shown in Figure D.

Figure D

You can create Quick Steps to perform a multi-step action with one click.

6: Turn on Conversation view

In the beta version of Outlook 2010, the default arrangement for email messages was Conversation view. This view can make it easier to follow a discussion, as it consolidates all the messages in a conversation thread all into one nice package. In the final release, Conversation view was turned off by default. If you’d rather have it turned on, follow these steps:

1. In the left column heading at the top of your message list, right-click where it says Arrange By: Date.
2. Check the box that says Show As Conversations.

7: Install Social Connectors

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) is built into Outlook 2010. It lets you install plug-ins that aggregate social networking information about your contacts in the People Pane at the bottom of an email message in the preview pane. Connector plug-ins bring in your contacts’ status updates and other information from social networking sites. The feature also displays other recent email conversations with that person, recent appointments, and the person’s profile picture. For more on how to use this feature, see Five tips for adding social media to Outlook 2010.

When Office 2010 was released in June, plug-ins were available only for LinkedIn and MySpace Microsoft has now added plug-ins for Windows Live Messenger and Facebook. It has also made the feature compatible with Outlook 2003 and 2007. This BNET article has the details.

8: Change default settings

No matter which version of Office you install, you should always go through the options and tweak the settings to suit yourself. In many cases, the defaults will work fine but in others, you’ll be happier with an alternative setting. For example, if Word’s grammar checker drives you batty (considering it’s often wrong, especially when it comes to complex sentences), you can turn it off by unchecking Mark Grammar Errors As You Type in the Proofing section of Word Options. You can also click the Settings button and specify which grammatical issues should be checked, as shown in Figure E.

Figure E

Each Office 2010 application offers many configurable options you can tweak.

On the Save page, you might want to change the default setting so that the applications save documents in the older .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats instead of .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx if you often share documents with people who use Office 2003. You also might consider saving autorecovery information more often than every 10 minutes. If you’re a fast typist, you can create a lot of content in 10 minutes. You also may want to change default save locations.

The Advanced page gives you a plethora of options for editing, cutting and pasting, images, how document content is displayed, printing, and more. Want to be prompted before saving changes to the Normal template? There’s a check box for that.

10: Install add-ins

You can enhance the functionality of Office 2010 by installing add-ins for the specific functions your work requires. For example, I use Twitter extensively to announce the publication of my articles and point my followers to interesting or useful tech articles written by others. It’s much easier for me to tweet from Outlook than to open up the Twitter Web site, so I’ve installed Twinbox, an add-in that lets you create updates, receive updates from those you follow, and manage and search tweets the same way you search your Outlook mailbox.

The add-in behaves a little differently in Outlook 2010, compared to Outlook 2007. In the latter, Twinbox puts a toolbar in Outlook underneath the other toolbars. In Outlook 2010, the Ribbon contains an Add-ins tab. You’ll have to go there to find your Twinbox toolbar, shown in Figure F.

Figure F

Add-ins such as Twinbox can add to the functionality of Office applications.

You can manage add-ins with the Add-in Manager, which you’ll find in the Options dialog box for each application.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for more information on Office 2010 and how it can benefit your business.

Today, almost every organization archives at least some of its data. Some do so to comply with federal regulations, while others use archiving to facilitate their internal business requirements. Regardless of an organization’s reason for archiving data, the process can be trickier than it might appear at first. Unlike a typical backup, archives must be able to stand the test of time. Given the rapid pace at which IT evolves, longevity can be a tall order. This following list of considerations will help you improve the long-term usefulness of your archives.

1: Storage medium

The first thing to take into account is the storage medium you use for your archives. Since they will be stored for long periods of time, you must choose a type of media that will last as long as your retention policy dictates.

Tapes tend to become demagnetized over time, which can lead to data loss. As a result, tapes are rated according to their durability. A good quality tape should last for 10 years or more. In contrast, optical storage media will last indefinitely.

2: Storage device

Another major consideration is whether the storage device you are using for your archives will be accessible in a few years. For example, 15 years ago, I stored my archives on Zip disks. They were a good choice at the time because they were relatively inexpensive and you could fit a whopping 100 MB of data on a single disk.

Today, though, Zip disks are pretty much extinct. I still have my old Zip drive, but it connects to a PC via a parallel port. Like the Zip drives themselves, parallel ports are also extinct, so I can’t read the data from the Zip disks.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to predict which types of storage devices will stand the test of time. Even so, it is important to try to pick those that have the best chance of being supported over the long term.

3: Revisiting old archives

On a similar note, your archive policies as well as the storage mechanisms you use for archiving data will undoubtedly change over time. So be sure you review your archives at least once a year to see if anything needs to be migrated to a different storage medium.

For example, about 10 years ago, I realized that Zip drives were becoming extinct, so I transferred all of my archives to CD. Today, I store most of my archives on DVD, but because modern DVD drives will also read CDs, I haven’t needed to move my extremely old archives off CD and onto DVD.

4: Data usability

One major problem I have seen in the real world is archived data that’s in an obsolete format. For example, a few years ago I helped someone restore some document files that had been archived in the early 1990s. Although I was able to recover the data relatively easily, the documents were created by an application called PFS Write. The PFS Write file format was widely supported in the late 80s and early 90s, but today, there aren’t any applications around that can read the files.

To avoid situations like this, you might find it helpful to archive not only data, but also copies of the installation media for the applications that created the data. If you use this approach, don’t forget to also archive copies of any necessary license keys.

5: Redundancy

When data is ready to be moved to the archives, many organizations simply write the data to tape and then store the tape some place safe. The problem is that the tape is often the only copy of the archived data.

I once did some work for an organization whose standard practice was to write its archives to tape and store the tapes in a fireproof vault. The vault was of good quality, and the tapes actually survived a flood even though the vault was submerged for a few days. A couple of years later, the organization needed to restore something off one of the archive tapes, only to find that the tape was bad. My point is that even the most elaborate systems for protecting tapes will do nothing to guard against something as simple as a defective tape. Your only defense against this type of situation is data redundancy.

6: Selective archiving

Consider what should be archived. Sure, you want to archive your data — but not all data is equally important. For example, you will probably want to archive your financial records indefinitely, but is it really necessary to preserve your telephone call logs for all eternity? Determine what types of data are present in your organization and the useful lifespan for each data type. Then, design your archival policy around it.

7: Retrieval method

As you design your archival system, remember that over time, the archives will probably grow to a monolithic size. So you need an efficient way of retrieving data from the archives should the need arise.

It might be simple to dump your archive data to tape, for example, but how well are your tapes indexed? If you aren’t sure, ask yourself how much work would be involved in locating and retrieving a file that was archived three years ago. If you don’t even know where to begin, it’s time to consider a different method for archiving your data. Many commercial archival products provide a Web interface that simplifies the task of searching the archives for data.

8: Space considerations

Because your archives can become huge, you must plan for the long-term retention of all of that data. If you are archiving your data to removable media, capacity planning might be as simple as making sure there is enough free space in the vault to hold all of those tapes, and making sure that there is room in your IT budget to continue purchasing tapes. If you archive data to a network server, the capacity planning process will likely be much more important because of the limited amount of data that can be stored online.

9: Restoring to an isolated environment

As you develop your archive policy, you should stipulate how the data should be restored. My advice is to restore the data to an isolated environment whenever possible. I once saw a Fortune 500 company accidentally introduce a virus onto their file servers because they restored some infected archive files.

10: Online vs. offline storage

One last consideration is whether to store your archives online (on a dedicated archive server) or offline (on removable media). There are advantages and disadvantages to each method.

Storing data online keeps the data readily accessible. But the sheer volume of the archived data may make online retention impractical. Furthermore, data that is stored online may be vulnerable to theft, tampering, corruption, etc.

Offline storage enables you to store an unlimited amount of data. However, the data is not readily accessible, and it may prove to be difficult to restore the data should the need arise years from now.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice on a data archiving solution for your business.

Microsoft has stopped its support for Windows Server 2000 and cut back on support for its Windows Server 2003.

All public support for the server operating system ended on Tuesday, Microsoft said on its help and support page. Windows Server 2000 customers will only have access to self-help online support, including access to FAQs and community support forums.

In addition, the company took Windows Server 2003 off mainstream support, but customers will continue to receive security updates and access to paid support for the software until 2015.

However, specific patches called hotfixes are now only available to customers who purchase Extended Hotfix Support. The company will not make any design changes or feature requests, according to Microsoft's support lifecycle policy FAQ page.

The upgrade from Windows Server 2003 to a later version of the software such as Windows Server 2008 could be costly, according to research company eDigitalResearch.

"It's not the licence costs, it's the act of managing the transition to a different server setup," Shane Wright, technical director of eDigitalResearch, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

Costs could include running test servers, certification, regression, performance and compatibility testing, Wright said.

"Desktops can be upgraded piecemeal... the server infrastructure is often all or nothing — especially if any new features are to be taken advantage of," he said. "It's a necessary process."

Source: ZDNet

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The new Backstage view in Office 2010 is a smart design strategy that enables you to find, protect, update, and share the files you create — all in one window. The three-column layout provides lots of information without packing the screen or burying the tools you need. While you’re scouting out Backstage view, be sure to try these 10 things.

1: Find the files you want

Searching for that one missing file — the one you were just working on last week but can’t quite remember the name of — is frustrating, and many of us spend way too much time looking for things that were “right there a minute ago.” Backstage view makes it easy to find the files and folders you need by keeping track of what you’ve used when.

The Recent tab displays all the files you’ve recently used (starting with the most recent file at the top of the list), as well as the folders you’ve opened and any files or folders you’ve pinned to the top of the list. At the bottom of the tab, you’ll see the Quickly Access This Number Of Recent Documents number picker. You can use this option to specify the number of  recently used files you want to see on the Backstage view tab list. They’ll appear just under the commands in the left pane of Backstage view. You might never have to hunt for a lost file again.

2: Recover unsaved files

Have you ever closed a file without saving it because you didn’t think you’d need it… and then seconds later thought, “Oh no!” Office 2010 holds out a safety net by preserving your unsaved documents automatically. You can get to your unsaved documents by clicking Recover Unsaved Documents at the bottom of the folder list in the Recent tab or by clicking the Manage Versions button in the Info tab. When the Open dialog box appears, simply choose the file you want and click Open (and remember to save the file before you close it this time).

3: Get file information in a single click

The Info tab (Figure A) provides you with — yes, info — about your current document. In the center column, you’ll find tools that enable you to protect, check, and manage versions of the file. In the column on the right, you’ll see file properties, which tell you things like the file size, the number of words, the date the file was created, and the names of any authors working on the file. If you have Office Communicator, you will also be able to see the online status of your co-authors (a green icon means they are available; a yellow icon means they are busy; and a red icon means away). You can customize the file properties shown by clicking Show All Properties at the bottom of the list.

Figure A

You can review and enter file properties in the Info tab of Backstage view.

4: Add keywords to your files

Today, most of us don’t just create documents — we create content that can be used in Web posts, email messages, reports, and more. Reusability is the name of the game. Tagging a file is a way to ensure that the content you create will show up in searches, which means you can locate it two, four, or six months down the road when you need to compile new catalog copy or send a mailing out to your list of recent program graduates. You can add keywords to your documents by using the Document Properties in the Info tab. Click in the Tags field and type your keywords, followed by commas (for example, sales report, 2010 northwest region, computer sales, marketing) and save the file. The tags will be visible with the file properties when you use an Office 2010 file or view your file in Windows Vista or Windows 7.

5: Check file compatibility

You can have your Office 2010 program evaluate the content you’ve created and let you know whether people using other versions of Office will be able to view your tables, links, diagrams, etc. Run the Compatibility Checker by clicking the Info tab, clicking Check For Issues, and clicking Check Compatibility. The checker displays a report letting you know which features — if any — are unsupported and gives you the option of changing them.

6: Save directly to shared workspaces

If you work with files on a server or shared Web space, you can open and save files as though they were located in just another folder on your hard drive. When you click Save As, a new Workspaces folder appears in the Microsoft Word group toward the top of the left panel (Figure B). Click Workspaces to save your file to your shared space. You will be prompted for necessary permissions or login if needed.

Figure B

You can use Save As to save files directly to your shared workspace.

7: Find software information

None of us looks forward to long waits or frantic searches for information when we need to call technical support about a problem we’re having with software. Office 2010 makes finding the information you need easy by including the status of your software — including your program version, all included programs, and your serial number, in the right panel of the Home tab in Backstage view. Also in Backstage view, you can click Check For Updates to make sure you’ve downloaded the latest patches for the programs you’re using.

8: Protect your files

Office 2010 has dramatically improved its file security features, but much of what happens to safeguard your file happens behind the scenes. Developers found that many of the vulnerabilities Office users experienced occurred during the file open process. For that reason, your Office 2010 application checks a file’s security during the file opening procedure and displays an alert in the message bar if the file needs to be opened in a limited view, called Protected View.

To further protect your files in Backstage view, click Protect Document in the Info tab. This displays a range of options you can use to mark your file as final, set a password, add user permissions, and more.

9: Prepare files for sharing

The Save & Send tab in the core Office 2010 programs provides tools for saving your file in a variety of formats and sharing it through various means. You can save the file to send as an attachment to an email message, save it to the Web (using your Windows Live SkyDrive or SharePoint Workspace 2010 account), publish it to your blog, or create a PDF or XPS document. When you click your selection, the panel on the right side of Backstage view changes to offer additional choices. For example, when you click Save To Web, you will be prompted to choose the Web site you want to post to and select the destination folder for the file.

10: Preview and print in one step

In Office 2010, the preview and print process has been simplified so you can do it all — preview and print your file — in one step. Simply click the File tab to display Backstage view and click Print. On the right side of the window, you see the document as it will appear when printed. Choose the options in the center of the Print tab to let the program know your print preferences, and the preview window will change to reflect your choices. When you’ve got things the way you want them, simply click Print to print the file.

Source:TechRepublic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for more information on how Office 2010 can benefit your business.

Microsoft has released details of two upcoming editions of Windows Small Business Server, one an update of its current bundle and the other a new package targeted at very small offices and home businesses.

The products, which are scheduled for public beta release in August, were unveiled at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, DC, on Monday. The update — code-named Small Business Server (SBS) 7 — is a straightforward revamp of its enterprise suite of Exchange Server, SharePoint and other server tools. The small office suite — code-named Aurora — is a new product that builds on the same Windows Server 2008 R2 core as the next release of Windows Home Server.

Aurora is aimed at businesses with five to 20 users and "ad-hoc IT budgets", Microsoft said. "It's a super-simple server for the very small business," Windows Server senior product manager Michael Leworthy said at a press briefing.

Aurora handles networking and file services locally with minimal management requirements, and it has tools for connecting to cloud-hosted services like email. Remote access tools give users access to files when on the road, as well as allowing IT staff to see if PCs have been backed up.

Like the upcoming Vail release of Windows Home Server, Aurora will use Microsoft's drive-pooling file system, which treats all the drives in a server as a single-storage fabric. Aurora will also support content duplication by default, with all files stored on multiple disks. Leworthy described it as "normalising all my drives, so I can add as many as I want, and it'll look and feel like one big drive". Users will be able to use external drives for backup and to extend the storage pool.

Aurora will use a simplified dashboard for all management tasks, with a Users view for handling all Active Directory operations. The same dashboard will also cover identity federation with cloud services from Microsoft and partners, and will display network health diagnostics for the server and for desktop PCs.

In addition, Microsoft is starting to integrate cloud services with on-premises hardware resource in the new server software. Leworthy described Aurora as a "cross-premises solution that not only has the things we know and love around SBS, but also with hybrid hooks into cloud services".

Those cloud services will be provided by Microsoft and third parties, using Aurora to manage user identities when connecting to services. Users will not need to manage passwords and accounts on their PCs, and they will be able to use any service that accepts federated Active Directory connections.

In contrast to Aurora, the SBS 7 update is meant for larger businesses with 75 users. Like the current SBS product line, it will come in Standard and Premium editions. However, it will not have the same drive-pooling or cloud service features as Aurora, instead continuing to use Microsoft standard NTFS file system and local applications, with Exchange 2010 for email and Windows SharePoint Foundation for collaboration.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the best server solution for your business.

1: Web application compatibility

It seems that Microsoft has finally realized the benefits of making its software cross-browser compatible. SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 have been developed using existing Web standards as opposed to code that will work only with Internet Explorer. The result is that Exchange 2010’s Outlook WebApp feature and SharePoint 2010 run just as well on the latest versions of Firefox and Safari as they do on Internet Explorer. Microsoft has indicated that it plans to adhere to Web standards going forward.

2: Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft has stated from the beginning that Internet Explorer 9 is going to be geared toward improving the browser’s support for Web standards. For example, HTML 5 features were first introduced in Internet Explorer 8 but were not completely supported. Internet Explorer 9 will fully support HTML 5 and will finally offer support for the <video> and <audio> tags.

So why is Microsoft suddenly focusing on Web standards? Internet Explorer has historically delivered an inconsistent browsing experience from one version to the next. As a result, every time a new version of IE is released, Web developers are forced to test their sites to make sure that they work correctly with the new browser. Now that Web standards are being put into place, Web sites should continue to work with new versions of Internet Explorer, so long as the sites adhere to the standards.

3: The universal pass-through port

The practice of encapsulating packets into the HTTP protocol and then sending them through TCP port 80 is nothing new. Various software publishers have been using this technique for years as a way of getting certain types of traffic through a firewall without having to open additional ports. Lately though, this method seems to have become the de facto standard way of doing things.

I recently attended Microsoft’s TechEd conference in New Orleans. While I was there, I spent some time walking through the exhibit hall and talking with as many software vendors as I could. I was amazed by how many vendors had designed their wares to tunnel traffic through TCP port 80. It was something that almost everyone was doing.

That being the case, mark my words: It will be only a matter of time before today’s firewalls are considered obsolete and more intelligent, application-layer firewalls become the norm.

4: File support

Another trend I’m beginning to notice is more broad support for standardized file types. For instance, for many years you had to have Adobe Acrobat Reader if you wanted to open a PDF file. Today, countless applications can read PDF files and almost as many can create them.

Although I am using PDF support as an example, it seems that nearly every application I’ve been using lately supports a huge number of file types. Take Microsoft Word 2010: It is natively capable of saving files in 17 formats and can import data stored in numerous other formats (spreadsheets, images, HTML code, etc.).

There was a time when file formats were mostly proprietary. Today though, all the popular file formats are open source. This has led software publishers to support most of the popular file types, so the type of file that data is stored in tends not to be an obstruction to using the data across a wide array of applications.

5: PowerShell

PowerShell has been a part of Windows Server for quite some time now, but in my opinion, it has only recently begun to go mainstream. Microsoft is starting to build the GUI interface for many of its server products on top of PowerShell. This means that for such products, any administrative function that can be performed through the GUI can also be performed from the command line using PowerShell.

Eventually, Microsoft will be designing all its server products to be based on PowerShell. The company has already begun requiring PowerShell cmdlets to be used (as opposed to the GUI) for some of the more advanced administrative functions in products such as Exchange Server and System Center Data Protection Manager.

6: Operating system features

Over time, certain file types have become a standard. For example, ZIP files are a standard way of compressing or archiving files and .ISO files are a standard format for CD images. As such standards have become accepted, Microsoft has gradually integrated support for them into Windows. Vista, for example, included native ZIP file support. Windows 7 has built-in support for burning disks based on ISO files. Now let’s just hope that Microsoft eventually builds native PDF support into Windows just as it has included PDF support in Office 2010.

7: The Hypervisor

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you are no doubt aware of virtualization’s ever-increasing popularity. One reason why server virtualization and desktop virtualization have become so popular is that they provide a way of standardizing the Windows operating system.

In a Hypervisor environment, the operating system does not communicate directly with the hardware. Instead, it communicates with a thin layer of code called the Hypervisor. The Hypervisor’s job is to facilitate communications between the operating system and the hardware. By doing so, the operating system can be configured without regard to the underlying hardware. This makes it possible to move a virtual machine from one host machine to another without having to reconfigure the device drivers.

In the future, I expect all Windows operating systems to run within a virtual machine on top of a Hypervisor (Windows XP Mode in Windows 7 already does). Doing so would allow the operating system to run a much more standardized configuration than is possible for an OS that has to communicate directly with the underlying hardware.

8: Windows Mobile

Today, the vast majority of large organizations support users who rely on smartphones. The problem is that there is not yet a clear standard for managing mobile devices in the enterprise. Microsoft allows for mobile device management through System Center Mobile Device Manager or through Exchange Server, but these management tools work only with Windows Mobile devices. Likewise, Blackberry and Google offer their own proprietary management solutions.

Some organizations have found it to be increasingly difficult to support only one flavor of mobile device. As a result, third-party applications have begun to pop up that offer universal mobile device management capabilities. Such products have been developed by using the APIs provided by the individual mobile device vendors.

Right now, such third-party solutions are still relatively new. As time goes on, though, look for them to become the standard for managing mobile devices. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft eventually provide management support for non-Windows devices just to avoid losing out to the competition.

9: Social networking

One of the hottest trends in in computing today is social networking. In some ways, it seems that social networking features are beginning to become standard components in the current generation of software. For example, the first time I saw a demo of SharePoint 2010, I was stunned by how much it reminded me of Facebook. Likewise, Microsoft has included a social networking connector in Outlook 2010, and Windows Phone 7 will offer full integration with the most popular social networking sites.

10: Automatic updates

One last trend I want to mention is that of automatic updates. Although automatic updates were once a “Microsoft thing,” today you would be hard pressed to find a software vendor that does not include some sort of update mechanism in its wares.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the most appropriate software solution for your business.

BT has been reprieved from the threat of imminent strike action by thousands of its employees, following the cancellation on Monday evening of a ballot for industrial action.

The Communication Workers Union, which represents over 50,000 of the 96,000 staff at the telecommunications and services company, stopped the poll because of legal fears. It said a series of letters sent to the union by BT effectively amounted to a legal challenge to the proposed strike.

"The ballot has been cancelled following legal advice which clearly outlined that under the notoriously restrictive trade union laws in the UK, certain technical breaches would potentially invalidate the ballot," said the Communication Workers Union (CWU) in a statement on Monday. "On taking legal advice regarding the questions put to the union by BT, the decision to cancel the ballot was taken on Monday 5 July."

"We're bitterly disappointed... and of course it doesn't help to resolve the outstanding issues over pay which we have with BT," said Andy Kerr, deputy general secretary for the CWU, in the same statement.

Neither the union nor BT commented on the basis for the legal challenge. The Financial Times reported that people familiar to the situation said the CWU was unable to supply workplace addresses for some of its members in the ballot, which meant that BT might have been able to get an injunction against a strike.

The BT staff represented by the union — over half the telco's workforce — could have gone strike as early as 12 July, depending on the outcome of the ballot. It would have been the first national strike against BT since 1987 and would have involved mainly call centre staff and engineers.

Union members are unhappy over proposed pay increases, cost savings, and executive pay and bonuses, a spokesperson for the CWU told ZDNet UK.

Initially, BT offered staff a two-percent pay rise this year, with a bonus of between £250 and £500, depending on company performance, but with no guarantee that there would not be compulsory redundancies. In reponse, the union asked for an increase of five percent, noting that this was at the level of inflation. The CWU also pointed out the financial packages received by the likes of BT's chief executive Ian Livingstone, who took home 79 percent more in pay and bonuses in the year to 31 March 2010, compared with the previous 12 months.

After the union started moves toward strike action, BT changed its offer to a pay rise of two percent in 2010, followed by an increase of three percent in 2011, plus the bonus. In addition, the company promised not to make any compulsory redundancies among what it calls 'direct BT staff' in 2010 or 2011.

BT said it was pleased the ballot had been withdrawn. "There were procedural issues regarding the ballot that we raised from the start, and the union have now accepted this to be the case," the company said in a statement on Monday. "Our door remains fully open to the union, and so we hope we can sit down and resolve this matter."

The CWU said it would attempt to re-open the ballot in the future, but would meanwhile re-enter negotiations with BT.

"We will take all necessary steps to allow us to re-ballot our members as soon as is practically possible. In the meantime, we will also be taking up an offer from BT for a meeting to see if there is a way to resolve this dispute without the need for industrial action," the union said in its statement.

Comments on a Facebook page set up by the CWU showed some BT workers were dismayed at the derailment of the ballot, with some suggesting that voluntary redundancies could have affected the running of the poll.

Source: ZDNet

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Microsoft has caught 25 UK-based firms that have confessed to selling pirated copies of Windows software pre-installed on new computers since the beginning of 2010.

Based on tip-offs from wary consumers, the company's investigators found 21 businesses based in metropolitan areas that were selling machines pre-loaded with non-genuine Windows software, a spokesperson for Microsoft UK said on Tuesday. Four eBay-based sellers were also identified in the crackdown.

Customers thought they were getting a bargain on genuine pre-loaded Windows and Office software, but were unaware they had paid for pirated copies of software downloaded from the internet, as well as locally-made illegal copies of genuine Microsoft software.

"At a time when UK resellers are looking to expand their business post-recession, piracy not only impedes growth, but puts local hard-working computer shops out of business," said Michala Wardell, head of anti-piracy at Microsoft UK, said in a statement.

Counterfeiting cost the software industry more than $51bn (£33.5bn) in profits in 2009, according to a report released by the Business Software Alliance and IDC that was released in May. The study estimated that for every $100 of legal software bought, another $75 of pirated software made its way into buyers' hands.

The companies identified by Microsoft were scattered throughout the UK and include areas such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Huddersfield, Leeds, Kent, Warrington, Sheffield and Swansea. Each paid Microsoft an undisclosed amount and agreed to stop selling the pirated software as part of a settlement with the company, which said it would go to court if they did not comply.

Of the 25 resellers contacted by the software giant, Microsoft says most admitted the mistake openly, although many blamed wayward employee behaviour or said that they were not aware of the illegality of the practice.

The Microsoft UK spokesperson said that the majority of the companies involved have agreed to work with it on software procurement and resale in the future.

Source:ZDNet

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If you purchased, installed, and activated a qualifying Microsoft Office 2007 product between March 5, 2010, and September 30, 2010, you may be eligible to download Office 2010 at no additional cost. Click here to upgrade now!

Source: Microsoft

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Microsoft shipped the enterprise release of Office 2010 in mid-May, followed by the consumer release of the business productivity applications suite in mid-June.

However, with so many new capabilities in the updated suite, it's important that support staff clearly understand how Office 2010 has changed from Office 2007 or even earlier versions and be able to jump in when users need help.

Source: Internet News

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Almost as soon as Apple's latest iPhone had been removed from its box, customers were reporting reception problems, discoloured spots on the screen, easily scratched exteriors and issues with third-party accessory connections.

The most prominent complaint was customers noticing that touching the seams of the antenna band running around the iPhone 4 — particularly when holding the device in their bare left hand — interrupts reception, slowly causing the phone to lose its signal.

Some iPhone 4 owners may find they strangle 3G reception after a minute or so if their hands are positioned touching the bottom bar and the side bar of the phone. Others are having trouble re-creating the problem, but it appears to vary by device, person and location.

Source: ZDNet

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Cloud computing services, championed by companies as diverse as Google, Salesforce and IBM, are generating big time revenues today with even rosier forecasts for future growth.

Gartner this week confirmed what the rest of the IT industry has known for years: the cloud is the next sure-fire growth market for hardware, software and services providers around the world.

In a report released this week, Gartner is now projecting worldwide cloud services revenue will soar to more than $68.3 billion this year, a 16.6 percent improvement from an already-robust 2009 and a harbinger of things to come.

Source: Internet News

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Microsoft's flagship Office 2010 software suite has gone on sale worldwide to consumers.

The release concludes a long trial programme which saw details of its web-friendly features widely previewed.

Microsoft has also released cut-down versions of Office programs for the web and handsets that can be used by those who do not possess the "full" version.

Also included in Office 2010 are features that hook into popular social networking sites such as Facebook.

Office conflict

Office 2010 is being made available in a variety of formats suited to different groups of people. Microsoft said it expected the Home and Student version to sell for about £109 and the Professional edition for £429. Stand-alone versions of the programs making up Office are also available.

With Office 2010, Microsoft had worked hard to make a user's experience with the software as consistent as possible on the PC, web and mobiles, said Jacob Jaffe, a Microsoft spokesman. Web versions preserve the look and feel of documents and other files created with "full" versions of Office.

"It's important to have the same information show up no matter where and how I am accessing it," he said.

The web versions of the programs inside Office are immediately available to anyone who buys the software. Microsoft said ad-supported versions of these programs will be free to use for anyone with a Windows Live ID.

With the web versions of its popular programs, Microsoft is pitching itself into competition with rivals such as Google, Adobe and OpenOffice which offer web-based office software.

Despite the growth of these and other alternatives, Microsoft Office is still dominant inside businesses.

Microsoft said those that have been using the trial, or beta, version of Office 2010 can continue to use it until 31 October. At that point they can uninstall it in favour of a full version of the 2010 release, download a new trial or revert to an earlier version of Office.

Source: BBC

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A new World Cup-themed malware scam this week is using a PDF attachment and a malicious link in tandem to trick high-ranking executives at dozens of Brazil's largest corporations into downloading malicious digital cargo.

This latest socially engineered World Cup malware campaign has been under way for a little more than a week, according to an advisory on Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence blog.

Source: Internet News

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1: All CPU Meter

The gadget I used to monitor my dual-core computer running Vista wasn’t available in a quad-core version, so I switched to All CPU Meter (Figure A). It supports up to eight cores (so I have room to grow). All CPU Meter isn’t as complex as some, but the simplicity works in its favor. It monitors your memory usage as well as CPUs, and it packs a lot of information into a small space. I also like that you can change the background color to match your preferences.

Figure A

All CPU Meter really does monitor all of your CPU cores — up to eight of them.

2: Windows Orb Clock

During all the time I used Vista and the first year I used Windows 7, my analog clock gadget of choice was the electric blue version of the one that comes with the operating system. But now I’ve switched to a much cooler model: the Vista Orb Clock (Figure B). Of course, the same orb is also on the Windows 7 Start menu. I love its clean look and the nice symmetry of having it just across from my Start Menu orb (since I have my Taskbar set to the vertical position.

Figure B

After years with the electric blue clock gadget, I’ve replaced it with the Windows Orb.

3: Clipboard Manager

I’ve also replaced the Clipboard gadget I was using with Vista. I liked being able to access previous Clipboard items — without opening an Office app — but the old one was a little cheesy looking and limited in its functionality. Clipboard Manager (Figure C) looks slick and is feature-rich. You can customize the background to fit your desktop, and not just the color; you can use a photo as the background if you prefer.

You can save up to 999 clips (that’s a lot of clips!) and you can delete any clip or send it to the Clipboard or to your Favorites list with a right click. The Favorites feature lets you create boilerplate text you use often. I also like the ability to mark clips with timestamps. And unlike the old Clipboard gadget, this one supports images as well as text. It even has a privacy mode, which prevents clips from being displayed on the main gadget so that passers-by who glance at your desktop can’t see what you’ve saved to the clipboard.

Figure C

This little gadget has a big fly-out that packs a lot of functionality into a small package.

4: Facebook Explorer

One big change in my online life since 2008 is that I’ve become thoroughly immersed in social networking. Much of the discourse that used to take place through email discussion lists now occurs via Facebook. A Facebook gadget seemed like almost a necessity, but the first one I tried (Facebook Sidebar 1.5) didn’t work. It never picked up my info even though it said it was connected. So I tried Facebook Explorer, which worked nicely. It can be configured to run in a smaller or larger width and one of three heights, and you can specify how often you want updates (from every one to 60 minutes). It gives you a compact view of your own status and information or friends’ activities, as shown in two views of the gadget in Figure D. You can also update your status in the flyout.

Figure D

Facebook Explorer can be adjusted to the size that best fits your desktop.

5: Ultimate Explorer

Ultimate Explorer lets you search popular sites from your desktop without having to go to those sites first in your browser. It’s a compact little gadget with that can search Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Digg, and many more. You can make it larger if you have plenty of desktop real estate, and you can select up to eight search sites for “snap search,” which enables you to “snap” quickly from one search engine to another. It also includes a flyout calendar and events feature. And unlike the vast majority of gadgets, it even has a flyout Help section, as shown in Figure E.

Figure E

Ultimate Explorer lets you search many sites quickly and easily.

6: App Launcher

One aspect of Windows 7 that annoyed and frustrated many users was the omission of the Quick Launch toolbar. If you’re like me, for years you’ve relied on the Quick Launch bar to access your frequently used programs. There is a way to get Quick Launch back, but unlike with previous versions of Windows, you can’t separate the Quick Launch bar from the main Taskbar. That means it takes up precious space on the Taskbar that you might need for open programs, system tray items, etc.

Enter the App Launcher gadget (Figure F). It serves the same purpose as the Quick Launch bar but can be placed anywhere you want on the desktop. You can add whatever programs you want by dragging them to the gadget, configure the number of icons to display per row and whether to center them, and change the background image.

Figure F

App Launcher v3 makes a nice little replacement for the missing Quick Launch toolbar.

7: MiniTV

Want to take a break and catch up on the news? The MiniTV gadget allows you to choose from a number of stations (many of which I’ve never heard of, as well as familiar ones, such as NBC News and C-SPAN). You can watch the program in the tiny gadget window (Figure G) or you can double-click it to display full screen. Just double-click again to get out of full screen mode.

Figure G

MiniTV lets you watch television in a tiny gadget window or full screen.

8: Traffic by Bing Maps

Traffic is a simple little gadget that can be useful if you’re about to head out into the big, bad world. I don’t use it as much as some folks would, since I work from home. But I still have to venture onto the major freeways now and then, and it’s nice to know in advance if there are going to be problems along a particular route. One caveat is that you need to live in (or be traveling in) a major metro area to use it. You can zoom in or out, and clicking the traffic info button (which is represented by the red light icon in Figure H) will take you to a full sized map of the area on Bing Maps, complete with the traffic data.

Figure H

Traffic by Bing Maps helps you avoid congestion when venturing into metro areas.

9: Magic Folder

Okay, granted, the icon isn’t the most professional looking, as you can see in Figure I. And many folks won’t like the idea of having a folder make decisions about where to save their files. But for those who always seem to end up with dozens of files sitting on the desktop because they never get around to moving them into appropriate folders, Magic Folder could be a godsend. You just drag your files to the magic folder and it examines the file extensions and sends the files to the “right” folder. For example, .doc files go to the Documents folder; .jpg, .gif, and other image files go to the Pictures folder. The nice thing is that you can add or remove the file extensions recognized by the gadget, change where specific extensions should be put, and you add your own folder locations. If you want to maintain more control, you can set the gadget to prompt you before it moves a file to a folder. Oh, and you can also change the appearance of the folder icon to something a little less…  magical.

Figure I

The Magic Folder gadget might have a goofy looking default icon, but it can help disorganized people get more organized.

10: Open/Close DVD

Open/Close DVD is utterly simple. But it’s handy to have if your computer is sitting under your desk like mine, making it difficult to get to the button for opening the DVD drive door. Just click the open button (the down-pointing arrow shown in Figure J) and it opens; click the Close button (the up-pointing arrow) and it shuts. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. One thing to watch for: If you have more than one drive attached, it will open/close both of them — there is no option to select a particular drive.

Figure J

The Open/Close DVD gadget does exactly what its name says, no more and no less.

Source:TechRepublic

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HP has its sights set on the clouds as it rolls out a new line of printers that will enable users to initiate print jobs from any Internet-enabled device by sending an e-mail.

Think the cloud is just for storage, services and computing? HP doesn't. The company has taken the wraps off of a new line of network-enabled printers that will have unique e-mail addresses, enabling users to print remotely from any device that's connected to the Internet.

HP's announcement, which kicked off Internet Week in New York City, came with a slew of partners, including Google, which is powering the cloud-based service, as well as several content providers that have developed printing apps. HP is also teaming with Yahoo in an effort to monetize the ePrint initiative through targeted ads.

HP has unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its suite of consumer and business printers, announcing plans to redesign nearly its entire line with new cloud capabilities that will let people initiate a print job remotely simply by sending an email.

For HP, which introduced its first Internet-aware printer last year, the move extends to printers the same fundamental shift that has been reshaping the IT landscape as more and more facets of computing move to the cloud.

Source: Internet News

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Computer companies covet small businesses because they comprise a huge, multi-billion market of millions of prospects. But selling effectively to SMBs (small-to-midsize businesses) is tricky because their needs are so diverse.

Another factor is that SMBs have minimal to no IT staff and require products and services that are simple to use and reliable. Now HP, already a major player in the SMB space, hopes to make its product line more appealing to this fast-growing market.

As the economy begins to ride out and recover from the recession, computer giant Hewlett-Packard sees that small businesses are ready to cautiously resume spending on IT.

At a media event, HP officials briefly detailed a few new product offerings, but spent the bulk of their time talking about the company's expanded efforts to win more of the multi-billion small business market.

HP also hinted at an upcoming cloud computing announcement aimed at small business, but gave few details. "Looking to the future, we're seeing strong growth and opportunity for a Web-empowered ecosystem that will connect your computers, printers, your iPhone, whatever, to retail partners," Todd Birzer, a marketing manager with HP's printing and enterprise solution group, said. "This will be an HP cloud, but I'm not going into details today."

Source: Internet News

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New research shows large proportion of senior business decision-makers and IT professionals still left confused by cloud computing.

A new report into SMEs’ perceptions of the cloud has uncovered some surprising attitudes to cloud comptuing.

In contrast to the perception that security is the main barrier to adoption, the research, which was undertaken by Redshift Research on behalf of GFI Software, indicates that only 12 percent of the SMEs questioned cited security as be their biggest concern. However, 44 percent of respondents said that upfront costs are a major factor in choosing not to implement cloud computing.

However, 43 percent of respondents who have chosen not to deploy cloud computing would reconsider if the vendors’ terms and pricing were improved while 40 percent would reconsider if contracts were less restrictive.

Cloud confusion

The study also shows that IT vendors and resellers are overestimating the market’s understanding of the terminology surrounding cloud computing. 64 percent of senior business decision-makers do not understand the term ‘cloud computing’, whereas only 15 percent have never heard of ‘managed services’ and 11 percent for ‘hosted services’.

Given these terms are practically synonymous with cloud computing, it appears there is too much emphasis on jargon, and not enough on the basic components of cloud-based services, says GFI.

Walter Scott, CEO of GFI Software claims the firms’ confusion is down to scaremongering by on-premise providers. He says: “Unless these trends can be reversed, UK SMEs are unlikely to reap the benefits of cloud computing for many years to come.”

The report also shows that of those companies who have so far moved some services over to the cloud, 16 percent have seen a full return on investment (ROI) in less than six months and the vast majority report full ROI in less than a year.

Hybrid option

Meanwhile, a hybrid approach of deploying certain applications either on-premise or in the cloud is gaining increasing traction.

Says Scott: “SMEs should not be confined to strictly either on-premise or hosted technologies, but should instead be given the option, according to their own needs. This demand is growing steadily in the UK and there is great opportunity for vendors and resellers who can offer this choice and allow SMEs to maximise their potential return on investment.”

Source: Chanel Pro

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Have you warmed up to the Office 2007 interface by now? Me neither. I’ve tried to embrace the changes. I have. But the Ribbon still seems like a trip to Bizarro World.

I rely heavily on the long-standing keyboard shortcuts, which are my lifeline to familiar dialog boxes. But I still spend a lot of time wandering around searching for the tools to perform what used to be instantaneous actions in earlier versions. If you’re in that boat, too, maybe this list will save you a little time.

1: Apply a different template to a document

I get tons of Word documents that people have created using their own custom templates. I have to apply our Normal template to those docs to make sure they include our in-house styles. And where do you suppose the necessary options are for this formatting task? The Developer tab… of course!

1. Click the Document Template button in the Templates group of the Developer tab. This will open the Templates And Add-Ins dialog box.
2. Click Attach to open the Attach Template dialog box, where you can locate and select the template you want.
3. Click Open to return to the Templates And Add-Ins dialog box. Select Automatically Update Document Styles (optionally) and click OK.

2: Convert text to a table and vice versa

Once upon a time, table options were consolidated on the Table menu. Now, the option to convert text to a table is on one tab; the option to convert a table to text is on another.

To convert text to a table:

1. Select the text and click the Insert tab.
2. In the Tables group, click the Table button and choose Convert Text To Table from the drop-down list.
3. In the Convert Text To Table dialog box, choose the desired options and click OK.

To convert all or part of a table to text:

1. Select the table or table rows you want to convert.
2. Click the Layout tab under Table Tools and click Convert To Text in the Data group (Figure A).
3. In the Convert Table To Text dialog box, select the desired options and click OK.

Figure A

3: Set AutoFormat and AutoCorrect options

AutoFormat can be useful, whether you run it on a finished document to polish things up or you use it to fix things (such as fractions and hyperlinks) as you type them. But those are options you definitely want to configure yourself so there are no surprises. The same goes for AutoCorrect. Setting up these features the way you want requires a trip to the Word Options pane:

1. Click the Office button and click Word Options.
2. In the left pane of the Word Options window, click Proofing and then click AutoCorrect Options in the right pane.
3. In the AutoCorrect dialog box (Figure B), click on the tab whose options you want to set — AutoFormat, AutoFormat As You Type, or AutoCorrect. Then, select the desired check boxes and click OK.

Figure B

4: Insert a comment

If you’ve used Word’s Ribbon for a while, you may have developed the habit of going to the Insert tab for its weirdly diverse assortment of insertable things — cover pages, equations, hyperlinks, cross-references. So you might think there’s an option there for inserting a comment. Nope. Different tab. Here’s how to add a comment to a document:

1. Click the Review tab.
2. In the Comments group, click New Comment.

5: Insert a field

This might be the winner in the contest for the most insanely obscure and counterintuitive Word 2007 feature. Yes, you insert fields via the Insert tab. Whew. But you could spend an entire workday wandering among the groups trying to find some clue that points you to the Field dialog box. For some reason, fields are lumped in with Building Blocks:

Click the Quick Parts button in the Text group of the Insert tab.

At the bottom of the drop-down list, you’ll see the Field command. Choose it to open the Field dialog box (Figure C). Now you can specify the desired field and its options just as you did in earlier versions.

Figure C

6: Draw a text box

When you want to insert a plain text box, there’s no Drawing toolbar button to click and drag. The button lives in the Shapes palette and appears as an option on the Text Box drop-down list. First, you need to click the Insert tab. Then, you can use one of these approaches:

1. Click Shapes in the Illustrations group to display the Shapes palette (Figure D). You may spot the Text Box button in your Recently Used Shape section. If not, it’s the first item under Basic Shapes.
2. You can also click the Text Box button in the Text group of the Insert tab and choose Draw Text Box from the drop-down list. Word will turn the mouse pointer into a drawing pointer.
3. Another alternative exists if you select a text box that’s already in your document. If you click Format under Text Box Tools, Word will display a Text Box button in the Text group, at left end of the Ribbon.

Figure D

7: Access document properties

Document properties are bits of metadata that can help you organize and find various documents. Adding details like a category, summary, and keywords can save you and your colleagues a lot of time down the road, but locating the Properties dialog box takes some digging:

1. Click the Office button and choose Prepare (Figure E).
2. Word will then display the Document Information Panel with fields for some basic properties, such as Title, Subject, Status, and Comments.
3. Click the Document Properties drop-down arrow and choose Advanced Properties to open the familiar Document Properties dialog box with additional options.

Figure E

8: Insert a section break

You can insert a page break using the button in the Pages group of the Insert tab. But if you want a section break, you have to go to the Page Layout tab:

1. In the Page Setup group of the Page Layout tab, click the Breaks button (Figure F).
2. Choose the type of break you want from the list of options.

Figure F

9: Turn off Snap To Grid

When you need to move objects around in a document, Snap To Grid can be great for lining things up. But I’m generally happier positioning things where I want, without grid constraints. You can temporarily override Snap To Grid by holding down [Alt] while you drag an object into place. But that gets old if you do a lot of dragging.

Word still offers a Snap To Grid check box so you can toggle the behavior off if you want. But the option is now tucked away — and it’s not even available unless you have an object selected. Here’s how to find it:

1. Click on an object or shape in your document.
2. Click the Format tab under Drawing Tools.
3. In the Arrange Group, click Align and choose Grid Options from the drop-down list.
4. Under Show Grid, deselect Snap Objects To Grid When The Gridlines Are Not Displayed (Figure G) and click OK.

Figure G

10: Change case

Word’s Change Case feature has long been one of its handiest devices. It’s not smart enough to apply true title case (where articles and prepositions are left uncapitalized), but it will still save you a significant amount of time. If you’re a keyboard shortcut person, you can still use [Shift][F3] to toggle selected text from one style of capitalization to the next. But to select an option from a list, you’ll need to locate the right button:

1. In the Home tab, click the Change Case button in the Font group. Word will display what’s billed as a Change Case “gallery” (Figure H), although it doesn’t give you a live preview of your selection as other galleries do.
2. The options are identical to the ones in earlier versions, except that we now have the more honest and accurate Capitalize Each Word instead of Title Case. Same thing. As soon as you choose an option, Word will apply the change.

Figure H

Additional resources

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that you can add some of this stuff to the Quick Access Toolbar. In addition, Microsoft and other vendors offer various tools to help make the Word 2007 interface more tolerable if you’re attached to earlier versions.

Source: Tech Republic

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Microsoft's image with consumers has had its ups and downs in recent years. However, Windows 7's release appears to be rapidly rehabilitating Microsoft's (NASDAQ) image as it begins to erase bad memories of Windows Vista, according to a new consumer survey.

The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), released this week, shows that the company's low satisfaction scores for the past three years appear to have been vanquished by the advent of Windows 7.

Source: Internet News

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Over time, you may find that your Active Directory database becomes cluttered with obsolete data (such as references to users or servers that no longer exist) or that it begins to malfunction. Here are some things you should consider before you set out to clean up or repair your Active Directory.

1: Look for the simple solutions first

In spite of outward appearances, erratic Active Directory behavior is not always related to a corrupt Active Directory database. For instance, take a situation in which you can’t create or remove a domain. While it is possible for a corrupt database to cause this problem, it’s more likely that the domain controller hosting the FSMO roles for the domain is down. Another possibility is that the user who is attempting to perform the operation may not have the necessary permissions.

2: Verify that DNS is functioning properly

Active Directory is completely dependent on DNS. So if your DNS server fails, it will be only a matter of time before Active Directory begins to have problems too. If you are receiving error messages such as Domain Not Found, Server Not Available, or RPC Server is Unavailable, you may have a DNS server issue.

3: Never underestimate the power of DCDIAG

Windows domain controllers include a command-line utility called DCDIAG. Running this utility performs a number of diagnostic tests on a domain controller. Often times, DCDIAG will help you quickly determine the cause of the problem.

4: Delete extinct metadata the right way

One of the most common issues with Active Directory is that it contains numerous entries related to servers that no longer exist. While you can use ADSI Edit to manually remove references to extinct servers, doing so often does more harm than good. Active Directory is a relational database. Removing an entry for an extinct server can orphan other database entries and cause a whole slew of problems. A better approach is to use the NTDSUTIL tool’s METADATA CLEANUP option.

5: Use ADSI Edit sparingly

You can use ADSI Edit to manually create and delete Active Directory entries. However, ADSI Edit is very unforgiving. Making a mistake can destroy your entire Active Directory. Therefore, it is important to know when and when not to use it. For example, Exchange 2007 can’t be uninstalled until the last public folder has been removed, but a bug prevents you from removing the remaining public folders. I have found ADSI Edit to be useful in working around this issue, but I am extremely hesitant to use it for other purposes.

6: Don’t use domain controller snapshots

With virtualization all the rage, it’s no surprise that many organizations have virtualized their domain controllers. Most of the server virtualization products on the market allow you to create a snapshot of a server. That way, if something goes wrong with the server, you can roll it back to a previous state without having to restore a backup.

While I’m all in favor of backing up your domain controllers before attempting to repair Active Directory, you shouldn’t use snapshots. Rolling back a snapshot of a domain controller can have catastrophic consequences. Active Directory transactions are numbered. Rolling back a domain controller causes the numbering sequence to be disrupted. This leads to all sorts of domain synchronization issues.

7: Remember that Active Directory is based on the extensible storage engine

Normally, NTDSUTIL is the tool of choice for repairing Active Directory problems. But in the case of severe corruption, NDTSUTIL may not be able to fix the problem. If this happens, your best bet is to restore a backup. If that isn’t an option, though, you can try using ESEUTIL.

ESEUTIL is a database maintenance tool for extensible storage engine databases. You can use it to repair structural problems within the database. You should use this technique only as a last resort because data loss is a possibility during the repair process.

8: Understand the difference between authoritative and non-authoritative restore

When you restore the Active Directory database on a domain controller, the restoration is usually non-authoritative. This means that the restoration process restores the domain controller to the point at which it existed when the backup was made. The domain controller is brought into a current state by the replication process. Other domain controllers replicate any missing entries to the recently restored domain controller.

An authoritative restore does not backfill a restored domain controller using data from other domain controllers. Instead, you are effectively telling Windows that the recently restored domain controller contains the desired data and that you want to remove any subsequent data from the other domain controllers in the organization.

9: Check NTFS permissions

When Active Directory related services fail to start on a domain controller, the problem is often mistaken for database corruption. But often, an overzealous administrator has recently tried to secure the system volume. Excessive NTFS permissions can actually prevent Active Directory from starting.

10: Back up your domain controllers

Before you perform any major repair or cleanup work on your Active Directory, it is imperative that you perform a full system state backup of your domain controllers. As I’m sure you know, countless knowledgebase articles talk about the importance of backing up a system prior to modifying the registry — and modifying the Active Directory database is much more dangerous than editing the registry. If you make a mistake when editing the registry, you can destroy Windows. If you make a mistake in Active Directory, you can destroy the whole thing, which potentially affects every system in your organization. Therefore, you should never underestimate the importance of a good backup.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at either our Daresbury IT Support Centre or our Manchester IT Support Centre for more Tech Tips.

Microsoft's CEO Summit is an annual event at which the company spells out what technology developments are crucial for the world's top executives to understand. For Microsoft, which is highly invested in reshaping its offerings to embrace the burgeoning interest in cloud computing, that meant that the topic of company CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote was none other than the cloud and the opportunities that Microsoft sees in it.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had two words for the world's most important business leaders attending the company's CEO Summit this week -- "the cloud."

Of course, by the cloud, Ballmer meant Microsoft's cloud computing infrastructure and the application services the company is selling, or plans to sell, via that infrastructure.

Source: Internet News

Converge IT provide Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure and application services to small and mid-sized businesses throughout the UK. Contact Converge IT at our Daresbury IT Support Centre for information and a quotation.

Transitioning from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange 2010 is relatively painless, but it does require a great deal of planning. This article describes some of the things you need to know as you get ready for your transition.

1: You may not be able to reuse all of your server hardware

Exchange 2010 requires a 64-bit Windows operating system. Since Exchange 2003 works only on 32-bit versions of Windows, an in-place upgrade is out of the question. You will have to acquire at least one new server before you can transition to Exchange 2010. Depending on how your Exchange organization is configured, it may be possible to perform leapfrog migrations, in which existing server hardware is reused after the server’s contents have been transitioned. Leapfrog migrations are not always possible.

2: You can say goodbye to any legacy Exchange Servers

The transition process requires you to place your Exchange organization into native mode. As a result, you will have to decommission or upgrade any Exchange servers that are running versions of Exchange older than 2003.

3: You’ll have to make changes to your Active Directory

At a minimum, your Active Directory must be set to the Windows Server 2003 functional level. In addition, you will have to make sure that at least one global catalog server in each site is running Windows Server 2003 SP2 or greater. Finally, you will have to upgrade the Active Directory schema before you will be able to install Exchange 2010.

4. You’ll need some retraining

Exchange 2010 is nothing like Exchange 2003. Even the management tools have changed. The Exchange System Manager has been replaced by the Exchange Management Console and a command-line tool called the Exchange Management Shell. When you also consider all the architectural differences, you can see why retraining is essential.

5: Front-end Exchange servers have been replaced

Some articles on migration and transition seem to compare Exchange 2003 front-end servers to Exchange 2010 Client Access servers. In some ways, this is a fair comparison, because Client Access servers (commonly called CAS servers) host OWA. While front-end servers were optional in Exchange 2003, though, CAS servers are required in Exchange 2010 even if you never plan to use OWA. Every client connecting to an Exchange 2010 organization (including Outlook, OWA, and ActiveSync clients) connects through a CAS server.

6: Routing groups and administrative groups are gone

Routing groups and administrative groups were a staple in Exchange 2003. However, these features were removed in Exchange 2007 and are not present in Exchange 2010 either.

7: You’ll need to plan for backward compatibility

Exchange 2010 Client Access servers and Hub Transport servers are not backward compatible with Exchange 2003. Therefore, you will need to leave your front-end servers, your bridgehead servers, and possibly even your mailbox servers in place until the transition is complete. If you remove these server roles too early, users whose mailboxes still reside on an Exchange 2003 server may lose functionality.

8: The Client Access server has a built-in proxy

Once you implement an Exchange 2010 Client Access server, you should configure your external DNS entries so that all OWA requests flow to it. But you should leave your Exchange 2003 front-end servers in place. The Client Access server has a built-in proxy. If users who have an Exchange 2003 mailbox connect to an Exchange 2010 Client Access server, the request will be automatically redirected to an Exchange 2003 front-end server.

9: You’ll have to learn the server roles

In Exchange 2003, there were really only two server roles: front end and backend. Exchange 2010 has several additional roles. Before you begin planning your Exchange 2010 deployment, it is absolutely critical that you take the time to understand these new roles.

10: You’ll need to use PowerShell for some management tasks

The Exchange Management Console (Exchange 2010’s replacement for the Exchange System Manager) is built on top of a command-line interface called the Exchange Management Shell. The Exchange Management Shell is a Windows PowerShell environment with numerous Exchange specific cmdlets.

This means that any administrative action you can perform through the Exchange Management Console can also be performed through the Exchange Management Shell. But the reverse isn’t true. Although the Exchange Management Console contains the basic mechanisms for managing Exchange, Microsoft hides most of the more advanced functions. It is unrealistic to expect to be able to manage Exchange 2010 without occasionally having to use PowerShell commands.

Source: Tech Republic

Upgrading to Exchange 2010, contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre to speak to an experienced engineer.

RIM announced BES Express — a free version of BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) — in February. Vodafone began offering its BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which it calls the 'BES Express tariff', on Thursday.

BES Express lets BlackBerry users synchronise their email, calendar appointments, contacts and notes with their organisation's Microsoft Exchange or Windows Small Business Server.

For their £10 a month, the user gets 500MB of data. An additional £2.50 per month adds support from Vodafone's BlackBerry-certified and Microsoft-accredited teams. Vodafone also offers a £400 set-up process, either on-site or remotely, from a BlackBerry-certified specialist.

The tariff is available as an add-on to all Vodafone Business plans.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre or our Daresbury IT Support Centre for advice on choosing and installing the best Blackberry solution for your business.

From Windows to Linux to Mac and back, it’s becoming more and more difficult for companies to pin themselves down to one single platform. As a result, we need applications that can span those various platforms. Here are 10 of my favorite cross-platform applications.

1: Firefox

There is little doubt that one of the most popular cross-platform applications is Firefox. No other browser has come as close to usurping Internet Explorer as the reigning king of the Web as Firefox has. A good cross-platform browser has become essential, since so many applications and services are now handled online. Thankfully, the rise in popularity of cross-platform browsers like Firefox has helped ensure that companies don’t lock down their sites and services to a single browser.

2: OpenOffice

Applications like OpenOffice enable those who can’t afford Microsoft Office to function in a business (business-like or educational) environment. OpenOffice is one of the pillars of the open source communities and is one of the most important cross-platform applications available.

3: TeamViewer

If you do any support, you know the importance of a good application that allows you to remote into a client’s machine. There are plenty of them out there; some of them are cross platform by way of being used within a browser. But few of them are truly cross-platform applications. TeamViewer is one such beast. With a client for Windows, Linux, Mac, and iPhone, there will rarely be a client or situation you can’t support.

4: Adobe Reader

There’s no shortage of PDF readers out there. And for every platform, there is a unique PDF reader. But none of those unique viewers offers the quality and ease of use that Adobe Reader provides. It is the standard for PDFs, and with clients for just about every platform, it’s a clear winner over the competition.

5: Chrome

Never before has a Web browser caused such a buzz. Not only did Google Chrome turn heads, but it also gave the competition reason for concern. Google Chrome is fast (the Linux version has been tested as the fastest rendering Web browser on any platform), it is stable, extensible, and as cross platform as any other browser (not called IE).

6: Thunderbird

If you’re looking for a stand-alone email client and you need it to traverse the landscape of all your platforms, look no further than Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a true emailers’ email client. With its slick, tabbed interface, you will find no email client that looks and performs as well across your operating systems. And like its cousin, Firefox, Thunderbird is theme-able and has a vast repository of plug-ins to make it even more useful.

7: Apache

Apache is one of the most-used Web servers in the world. When you add to that the fact that you can use Apache on Windows, Linux, and Mac, it’s hands down the winner among Web servers. And to top it off, Apache is free. How can the competition win against such a mighty contender?

8: MySQL Workbench

Although this tool is new to the world, you will not find a better database administration tool anywhere for any platform. With this MySQL admin tool, you can work your MySQL magic on all platforms. The only downfall? For some platforms, you have to use the development release. But according to my experimentation, the development release is as stable as any other database admin tool available.

9: VMware

Although I am a HUGE fan of VirtualBox (which is also cross platform), VMware can be used across platforms for just about any reason. From a single user wanting to experiment with other OSes to massive enterprise rollouts, VMware can do pretty much anything. It’s proprietary, but it’s worth every penny.

10: VLC

You will be hard pressed to find a more flexible, useful media player than VLC. VLC is available for Linux, Mac, Windows, *BSD, UNIX, Solaris, and more. It can play nearly everything and even do it across a network. It has a tiny footprint, it’s open source, and it’s free. What more do you want in a media player?

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester or Daresbury IT Support Centre for advice on your business platform and applications.

Microsoft is preparing to launch its latest weapon in its ongoing battle with Google.

The software giant will launch its flagship product Office 2010 to businesses on 12 May.

The latest version of the software has a free online component - called Office Web Apps.

Analysts believe the web offering is a response to Google, which has been encroaching on Microsoft's core business with its free online tools.

Crucially, Microsoft will also offer its online office suite to all users of one of the world's most popular social networking sites, Facebook.

"There's no question - Microsoft is responding to Google's threat," said Whit Andrews, analyst at research firm Gartner.

'Microsoft world'

Google and Microsoft have increasingly begun to stray into each other's traditional markets.

Microsoft has thrown its full weight behind its search engine Bing, whilst Google is about to launch its own operating system, known as Chrome OS. It is critical that Microsoft capture users who are not tethered to the same desktop PC every day

The battle for the Office software market started in 2006 when the search giant launched the first elements of its Google Docs.

"Until Google emerged with a credible suite of networked applications, Microsoft was not compelled to do anything."

Google Docs now offers word-processing, spreadsheet software and a presentation tool, amongst others. Businesses can pay for premium versions.

It currently has a small (4%) but growing share of the market.

By contrast, Microsoft dominates the Office software space, with a market share of more than 94%, according to Gartner. The vast majority of sales are to businesses.

Business "is still overwhelmingly a Microsoft world", said Sheri McLeish, analyst at Forrester Research.

Google Chrome OS will be released in the second half of 2010

Microsoft retains its dominant position despite the free offerings from Google and other alternatives such as Zoho or the free office suite OpenOffice.org.

However, Mr Andrews warned that these offerings - and particularly those that were web based - were likely to appeal to younger people, who have not necessarily grown up using Microsoft products.

"If all your content is generated in the Google apps system and it lives there, you would need to have a really good reason to move," he told BBC News.

Social software

Office Web Apps offers a free version of programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.Office 2010 is the ultimate freemium deal - where some basic services are offered for free, while power users are happy to pay a premium  

The service allows people to access and edit documents from within a web browser, as well as share and collaborate on files. It lacks the entire gamut of features found in the desktop versions.

Microsoft has said that the suite will be offered free to its 400 million Windows Live users.

"It is critical that Microsoft capture users who are not tethered to the same desktop PC every day," said Mr Andrews.

"They need to be able to serve the growing netbook community and people using their phones."

The firm has also integrated the social web into its software in a bid to attract new customers and keep the desktop software relevant in an increasingly online world.

Its Social Connector service allows people to suck in information from social networks such as LinkedIn and MySpace into the Office Outlook e-mail program.

The firm has also released a trial version of its online apps that integrates with Facebook.

"With the changes that have happened with social networking and web applications, Microsoft is bringing [Office] up to the present day," said Ms McLeish.

The software for PCs and phones will be launched at an event in New York on 12 May. Business customers will be able to use it straight away, whilst home users will have to wait until June to buy the full version.

Source: BBC

Contact Converge IT at either our Manchester IT Support Centre or our Daresbury IT Support Centre for advice on how Office 2010 can benefit your business.

Microsoft will launch Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on Wednesday in what the company says is a major part of the biggest wave of enterprise products that it has released so far.

However, key to volume purchasers making the most of their Microsoft Office 2010 investment is another important product -- the SharePoint collaboration server -- according to a report from analyst firm Directions on Microsoft.

"There are a lot of interesting features [in Office 2010] for working in groups that really benefit from SharePoint 2010," Rob Helm, managing vice president of research at the firm told InternetNews.com. "It's the hub around which a lot of decisions are going to turn."

Source: Internet News

Contact Convrege IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on how Office 2010 and SharePoint can benefit your business.

The so-called consumerization of IT trend has seen social networks and other collaborative technologies increasingly find their way into the enterprise.

While many companies welcome improved collaboration as a means to more streamlined communications and increased productivity, gains can quickly be undone by security mishaps. eSecurityPlanet reports on Microsoft's latest moves to make its popular SharePoint platform more secure.

Microsoft quietly announced that it is shipping two new IT products aimed at keeping the enterprise safe while at the same time enabling secure collaboration among workers using its SharePoint tools.

The two Microsoft products—Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint and Active Directory Federation Services 2.0—began shipping Wednesday, according to company officials.

Along with the new products, Microsoft is also talking up the security philosophy behind the products and how that fits with the company's overall vision of secure collaboration using Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration technology.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at either our Daresbury IT Support Centre or our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on your business SharePoint solution.

A worm is spreading via Yahoo Instant Messenger that tricks people into downloading what they think is a photo from a friend but is instead malware that installs a backdoor on Windows systems and spreads to a victim's IM contacts.

The worm, seen spreading on Thursday, arrives via a message from a contact with the word "photo" or "photos" and a smiley face icon, along with a link to a Web site resembling a Facebook page, MySpace page, or some other page where photos might reside.

If the user clicks on the link on a Macintosh system, an executable file will be downloaded, but no further action will occur. On a Windows system, the executable will download and if the user runs the file, the computer will become infected and the malicious message will be distributed to all of the IM contacts.

Yahoo said in a blog post that it was aware of the issue and working to address it. "We recently learned of an issue where some users have received spam messages from their contact list. Yahoo Messenger has quickly worked to resolve the situation," the post said.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at either our Daresbury IT Support Centre or our Manchester IT Support Centre for more information.

Adding a drop-down menu to a primary or introductory slide is a good way to give viewers a bit of control over a self-running presentation. You can spend a lot of time programming objects, or you can use animation. The latter is easier to implement and doesn’t require the skill level that programming does.

The technique is simple really: You combine AutoShapes to build a drop-down menu type group. Then, you add a bit of animation so that the drop-down menu’s submenus seem to drop down from a main menu when clicked. The example in this article, which you can build in 10 easy steps, is simple by design, so as not to confuse the technique with the possibilities.

1: Design the menu

The first step is to design the menu. If the presentation is complex enough, you might use flowchart software. For most of us, pen and paper will do. The point is to allow users to choose a specific slide or a subset of slides to view instead of forcing them to sit through a linear presentation. That means the menu must clearly represent the direction or subset.

Menu items can have submenus, and those submenus can have submenus, but simple is best. If you truly need submenus, consider creating a main menu slide that links to a choice of submenus, rather than trying to fit them all onto one slide.

2: Add the main menu

You’ll need a clean slide for your main menu and in most cases, it’ll be the first slide in the presentation. To this slide, add an AutoShape for the main menu by choosing Basic Shapes from the AutoShapes drop-down list, clicking a shape, and then clicking in the slide. Use the handles to size the shape. Then, add the appropriate text, as shown in Figure A. To add text, right-click the shape and choose Add Text. Then, simply type the appropriate label. You can also change the font, size, and weight.

Figure A

This AutoShape represents the drop-down menu’s main or top level.

3: Add a submenu

Next, add the first submenu using an appropriate AutoShape. Position it under the main menu AutoShape (Go To, in this case). Add the appropriate text, as shown in Figure B.

Figure B

Choose a smaller AutoShape for the submenu.

4: Add remaining submenus and format

Repeat step 3 to add the remaining submenus. Add text for each and format as necessary. Figure C shows three submenus. Viewers are free to choose the information they want to view.

Figure C

Submenus direct users to specific slides.

5: Group submenus

To get all of the submenus to drop down together, you must group them. Select them all (don’t select Goto) by holding down [Shift] while you click each submenu. Then, right-click the selection, choose Grouping from the resulting context menu, and choose Group, as shown in Figure D.

Figure D

Group the submenus so you can animate them as a group.

6: Add animation to the submenu group

Now you’re ready to add the animation that will display the submenus when someone clicks the Go To button. Do so as follows:

1. Choose Custom Animation from the Slide Show menu. In PowerPoint 2007, click the Animations tab. Then, choose Custom Animation from the Animations group.
2. Select the submenu group.
3. From the Add Effects drop-down list choose Entrance.
4. From the resulting submenu, choose Wipe, as shown in Figure E.
5. From the Direction drop-down list, choose From Top.
6. Click the Play button (at the bottom of the Custom Animation pane) to preview the effect.

Figure E

Add an Entrance effect to the submenu group.

7: Set the Go To trigger

Right now, clicking anywhere in the slide will display the drop-down submenus. That might be adequate, but more than likely you’ll want a click to the Go To button to be the only trigger. To limit the click to the Go To button, do the following:

1. Choose Timing from the submenu group, as shown in Figure F.
2. In the resulting Wipe dialog box, click Triggers.
3. Select Start Effect On Click Of and choose the Goto button from the drop-down list, as shown in Figure G.
4. Click OK.

Figure F

Choose Timing from the group’s drop-down list.

Figure G

Specify the Go To button (which PowerPoint identifies as a rounded rectangle object).

8: Link a submenu

Individual submenus need a hyperlink to their target slides. Add a hyperlink to the first submenu as follows:

1. Click the top submenu (Instructions), which will select the entire submenu group.
2. Click one of the submenu’s borders and its handles will turn gray, as shown in Figure H.
3. From the Insert menu, choose Hyperlink.
4. In the Hyperlink dialog box, click the Place In This Document shortcut (to the left).
5. Select the target slide, as shown in Figure I.
6. Click OK.

Figure H

Select just one submenu.

Figure I

Identify the target slide.

Repeat steps 1 through 5 to link all of your submenus to their target slides.

9: Set up the return trip

Most likely, you’ll want to let users return to the main menu slide by clicking a hyperlink on the target slides. With a target slide (Instructions, Apply, and Status) current, you can use an Action Button to return home — in this case, that’s the first slide in the presentation:

1. From the AutoShapes menu, choose Action Buttons.
2. Click the Action Button: Home button, as shown in Figure J.
3. Click inside the slide. It’s best if you position the Home action buttons in the same spot on each slide.
4. PowerPoint will launch the Action Settings dialog box. In this case, you’ll retain the defaults shown in Figure K, so click OK.

Figure J

Use the built-in Home action button.

Figure K

Accept the button’s default setting, which links to the first slide in the presentation.

By default, this button creates a hyperlink to the first slide in the presentation. It won’t always work that way, but it’s good to know that the method used to add a hyperlink in step 8 isn’t the only route.

Repeat steps 1 through 4 to add a Home action button to each of the target slides.

10: Test the drop-down main menu

At this point, you have the basic pieces in place, so press [F5] to see how they work together. The first slide displays just the Go To button. Click the button to display the drop-down submenus, as shown in Figure L. Click any one of the three submenus to access its target slide. Then, click the Home button to return to the main menu slide.

Figure L

Click the Go To button to display the drop-down menus.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at either our Manchester IT Support Centre or our Daresbury IT Support Centre for more Tech Tips.

Commentary - Small businesses today are facing a crisis of their own making. As technology has made it easy for companies of any size to distribute projects and workforces, small firms have been quick to adopt flexible work arrangements as a means to retain top talent, foster work/life balance and/or increase productivity. However, there are unwanted side effects created by this flexibility. Schedule and/or time zone differences can make it challenging to bring groups together (even virtually). Shorthand communication tapped out on mobile devices has replaced direct, verbal communication and the nuance and personality that create effective work relationships can be lost.

This collaboration crisis was caused by technology – wi-fi networks, notebook PCs, video conferencing and so on – and it must also be solved by technology. Traditionally, finding a technology solution has been challenging for small businesses because they did not have the resources to invest in a unified communications solution. However, new technologies and offerings have eliminated the financial and management barrier to unified communications technology for small businesses and can help these smaller firms avert this crisis.

Starved of face time

A recent survey commissioned by Microsoft from 7th Sense Research on telecommuting revealed that the top complaint amongst the 3,600 workers in 36 markets surveyed was the lack of face-to-face interaction with colleagues. While face time with colleagues and decision-makers is important in today’s economic environment, technology advances are changing interpersonal relationships in the workforce. We all know of work environments where colleagues sitting only a few feet apart send email or text messages rather than speak directly.

How does a small firm create an environment where telecommuting and remote communications resemble face-to-face collaboration as much as possible? The answer isn’t simple. However, the existing infrastructure powering the IT capabilities of today’s businesses, especially those on the smaller side of the scale, presents an enormous opportunity to foster collaboration in a way that is just as effective and meaningful as in-person interactions, regardless of whether workers are remote or located in the same complex, building or office.

Critical turning point

Today’s businesses thrive in real-time, instant communication, a need that has been cultivated by email and instant messaging (IM) technologies. Email programs like Microsoft Exchange and IM systems like AOL IM and Windows Live Messenger have become fundamental technologies for today’s businesses, and this in turn has made it easy for employees to work remotely or companies to distribute projects outside their four walls.

However, just because workers are able to communicate instantly, doesn’t mean they’re collaborating and being productive. Presence is important – especially at small companies. This goes beyond the ability to merely “be in touch” and gets into how small businesses are able to help people work more effectively, share information more effectively and communicate more effectively to harness the collective intelligence of the group. And, this must be accomplished without losing the flexibility and scalability (both up and down) that gives small firms an edge in attracting both talent and customers.

Unified Communications, unified workplace

Unified Communications (UC) is a technology approach that integrates key communication services, such as email, instant messaging, presence, document sharing and telephony, into a single communications system and dashboard. UC offerings that unite these core communications capabilities – heavily relied on by both remote and on-site workers – present an opportunity to fuel collaboration and productivity no matter the worker’s location. Businesses that use UC solutions represent the next chapter in work culture: the unified workplace.

What technology broke, technology must fix

As work arrangements continue to evolve through the next few years, we’ll see a stronger presence of unified workplaces as small businesses are able to make communications technologies an underlying component of the organization. Email, IM, phone, voice and other services will be delivered through a single system over the Internet and integrated into every aspect of the business – from project management to daily tasks – and collaboration will be fully restored.

The changing nature of workplace environments is undeniable and although today’s standard communications technology has helped workers stay in contact more easily, it hasn’t helped small businesses collaborate effectively. And since smaller businesses are founded on collaboration and their success is strongly dependent on it, the adoption of unified communications and a bolder move towards the unified workplace must be taken in order to avoid the loss of what helps businesses grow, thrive and succeed: collaboration.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre or our Daresbury IT Support Centre for advice on flexible working technologies and unified communications for your business.

The 3G model of Apple's iPad is off to a strong start. In its first weekend, the device has racked up 300,000 units sold, according to an analyst's estimate.

But are all of those early adopters pleased with their new purchase? It would appear not, as many have taken to the Web to express their dissatisfaction with the device's 3G coverage, noting that the iPad can handle data transmissions better when it runs on a Wi-Fi connection.

Apple's iPad 3G hit retail stores and landed on doorsteps of those who pre-ordered it on Friday -- with the result that the Apple tablet has already surpassed 300,000 units sold, according to one analyst who follows the company. However, owners are finding their iPad 3G experience a little lacking.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster checked with 50 Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) retail stores in addition to attending the iPad 3G launch at retail stores at New York and Minneapolis, leading to his 300,000 unit-sales figure. Supply is limited, with 49 of the 50 stores Munster checked out on Sunday sold out of the 3G.

Munster now puts the iPad installed based at 1.3 million, with 1 million Wi-Fi units and 300,000 3G. He projects that the eventual split will reach 60 percent Wi-Fi and 40 percent 3G. He also expects there will be continued supply shortages thanks to high demand and low supply. All told, he expects Apple to ship 4.3 million iPads this year.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for any technology related investment for your business.

SharePoint is one of the most flexible server applications available today. But because of its highly dynamic nature, a SharePoint deployment can quickly get out of hand. Here are some of the most common challenges in managing a SharePoint deployment.

1: Enabling Office integration

SharePoint 2007 is designed to interoperate with Office 2007 to a high degree. If you have users in your organization who are still using older versions of Office, you may find that those legacy versions become a barrier to productivity. So you may want to consider deploying the latest version of Office to all SharePoint users.

2: Preventing site sprawl

One of your primary goals must be to prevent site sprawl. You can use several techniques for this. One of the most effective is to limit the number of people who allowed to create SharePoint sites. Experience has shown that if you allow users to create new SharePoint sites on a whim, some users will create sites they don’t even need, just because they can or because they’re curious. It’s better if site creation is handled by a dedicated group of people within the IT department. I also recommend establishing clear guidelines as to who is allowed to request a new SharePoint site, and under what circumstances.

3: Site lifecycle management

Unlike typical Web sites, many SharePoint sites have a limited useful shelf life. For example, it’s common for users to create SharePoint sites that are dedicated to a specific project. When the project is complete, the site is no longer needed. So it’s important to have a procedure in place for determining which sites are still in use. When a user requests that a new site be created, you should document the name and contact information of the person making the request, as well as the URL of the resulting site. This allows you to contact site owners on a periodic basis to find out whether the site is still needed.

4: Locating documents

After deploying SharePoint, some organizations eventually begin replacing file servers with SharePoint document libraries. The idea behind this move is that SharePoint contains powerful indexing features that can make documents easier to locate than they would be if they were located on a file server. Although SharePoint has a decent search engine, document libraries can and do become overloaded. It can therefore be tough for users to find the information they need within a large document library.

One way to make it easier for users to locate SharePoint documents is to enforce the use of metadata. SharePoint contains options that allow you to define individual content types and to create custom metadata fields for each one. You can require users to enter relevant metadata for each document they create. This metadata goes a long way toward helping SharePoint return relevant search results.

5: Information overload

Providing good metadata for the documents stored in a document library improves the relevancy of search results, but it will get you only so far. Another thing you can do to improve search results is to implement a policy for document lifecycle management.

While some business documents may need to be retained indefinitely, other types probably have limited usefulness. For example, the odds are good that nobody in your organization cares about a marketing proposal from 10 years ago. By working with the managers in your company, you can find out which documents are really important and come up with a plan for automatically purging other documents after a specific length of time. Doing so reduces resource consumption and helps to de-clutter search results.

6: Governance

The subject of governance seems to come up more often in regard to SharePoint than just about any other application. There is a reason for this. Without proper governance policies, a SharePoint deployment can quickly spiral out of control and evolve into something that doesn’t even remotely resemble the organization’s original SharePoint vision.

The only way to prevent your SharePoint deployment from getting out of hand is to make some tough decisions up front about how the deployment should be used and who has permission to do what. In other words, you need to decide things such as who has the authority to create a site, what types of data are allowed to be stored within SharePoint libraries, and what types of customizations you want to allow.

7: Disk space management

Disk space management is something of an art form. Most network administrators are used to dealing with file servers that store data on dedicated volumes. SharePoint, on the other hand, stores its data within a SQL database. While you can use quota management to ensure that users don’t consume an excessive amount of disk space, it is important to realize that multiple lists or libraries can be linked to a common database. Therefore, you must design your quota structure to take into account possible growth of other lists or libraries that may exist.

8: Web part management

SharePoint sites are built around the use of Web parts. This approach make site creation easier, but it also means that any changes to Web parts result in changes to every site that uses them. You’ll want to take measures to prevent Web part customizations from being made in a haphazard manner. A modification that enhances a Web part’s functionality on one site may wreck havoc on other sites that are using that Web part.

9: Service level agreements

Many organizations discover that it doesn’t take long for a SharePoint deployment to grow from being something of a novelty to becoming a mission-critical application. As with other mission-critical applications, administrators are often pressured into accepting service level agreements for SharePoint deployments.

My recommendation has always been to use the quest for service level agreements as a bargaining chip. For example, you could explain to the managers in your company that for you to be able to deliver the level of service they are requiring, you need additional server hardware or other IT resources.

10: Disaster recovery planning

I have seen a few real-world situations in which administrators verified that their backup software supported SharePoint but never really looked at what was required to perform a restoration. Unless you’re going to be performing a total restoration, most backup applications require SharePoint data to be restored to a recovery farm.

A recovery farm is a separate, dedicated SharePoint farm. Although a recovery farm does not require the same hardware resources as your production SharePoint servers, it does have to be configured with the same features, templates, patches, and software versions as your production farm. That being the case, a recovery farm isn’t really something you can just throw together at the last minute when you have to perform a restoration. You will need to have it in place in advance.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice and implementation of your business Sharepoint solution.

1: Determine needs

The first step to building a custom toolbar is to determine what tasks users will want to execute from it. A document or template’s purpose will define those needs, but there are a few tips that will apply to almost all situations:

• One toolbar can do the job of many. Instead of adding a custom toolbar, consider altering the built-in toolbar by adding the needed functionality. More toolbars aren’t necessarily a good thing.
• Use custom toolbars as an interface to custom tasks. For instance, you might add a custom toolbar that applies custom styles in a specialized template.
• Use custom toolbars to categorize custom tasks. In a large application with many tasks, you might want to add several custom toolbars, each executing related tasks. Then, display each custom toolbar as needed.
• By adding only the tools a user needs to a custom toolbar, you can limit choices and eliminate errors generated by inappropriate requests.

In general, the first tip is the most important. Just because you can add custom toolbars doesn’t mean you should. Too many toolbars will create clutter, present too many options, and confuse users. Create a custom toolbar that provides the functionality necessary to get the job done and no more. You can always add more toolbars (and commands) as needs arise.

2: Open the Customize dialog box

You’ll perform almost all of the customization in the Customize dialog box, shown in Figure A. While this dialog box is open, Word suspends normal activity. Specifically, the active toolbars and menu bar are in edit mode. Clicking an icon or menu in this mode, allows you to alter it in some way, without executing its task as clicking it normally would.

Figure A

Use the Customize dialog box to create custom toolbars and alter existing ones.

There’s more than one way to open the Customize dialog box:

• From the Tools menu, choose Customize.
• OR right-click the background of the menu bar or any toolbar and choose Customize from the resulting submenu.
• OR choose Toolbars from the View menu and then select Customize from the resulting submenu.

With the Customize dialog box open, go ahead and click a few toolbar buttons or try to access a menu. You can’t because those objects are in edit mode.

3: Generate and name the new toolbar

The next step is to actually generate a new toolbar. With the Customize dialog box open, click the Toolbars tab and then click the New button. In the New Toolbar dialog box, shown in Figure B, give the new toolbar a name and identify the document (or template) to which the toolbar belongs. If you add the toolbar to Normal.dot, it will be available to every new document you create. Click OK to generate the new toolbar, shown in Figure C. At this point, it’s just an empty shell. In addition, the toolbar appears at the bottom of the Toolbars list on the Toolbars tab.

Figure B

Give the custom toolbar a meaningful name.

Figure C

This custom toolbar doesn’t contain any buttons or menus yet.

4: Choose a built-in command

Now you’re ready to start adding commands to your toolbar. To replicate a built-in command, click the Commands tab in the Customize dialog box. The Categories list represents the built-in menus and existing tools. Select Styles and Word updates the Commands list, as shown in Figure D.

Figure D

Add a predefined style to the custom toolbar.

5: Add a built-in command

After finding the built-in command, you’re ready to add it to the toolbar. From the Commands list, drag Normal to the custom toolbar. Figure E shows the insertion cursor as you hover over the toolbar.

Figure E

Drag a command to the toolbar.

Release the command to add it to the toolbar. Repeat this process to add Balloon Text to the toolbar. Figure F shows the custom toolbar with two styles: Normal and Balloon Text. Don’t click Close just yet.

Figure F

This toolbar will allow users to quickly assign these two styles to text.

6: Add a built-in menu

You’re not limited to specific commands; you can add an entire menu. That’s especially convenient when you’re building a custom toolbar as a primary interface. That way, you can offer some familiarity and functionality, while still limiting access. For instance, you might want users to have access to the options on the Edit menu. To add this built-in menu to the toolbar, do the following:

1. Click Built-in Menus in the Categories list (on the Commands tab in the Customize dialog box).
2. Drag Edit to the custom toolbar and release it. There really isn’t room, but don’t worry. Simply position the insertion point at the border as shown in Figure G, and Word will make room for it.

Figure G

Drop a built-in menu onto the custom toolbar.

As you can see in Figure H, the Edit menu in the custom toolbar works just like the built-in Edit menu on the menu bar.

Figure H

You can add a complete menu system.

7: Add a custom command

Adding built-in commands and menus affords you a lot of flexibility when creating special templates for your users. However, the real power lies in giving users the opportunity to execute custom but automated tasks. The short route is to use a custom tool to execute a macro as follows:

1. Choose Macros from the Categories list, and Word will update the Commands list to the left. Figure I shows the macros available to the current document.
2. Drag a macro from the list to the toolbar and release it, as shown in Figure J.

Figure I

The document’s macros are available.

Figure J

Add a macro to the custom toolbar.

8: Update the caption

By default, the new macro button’s caption isn’t particularly helpful, so let’s change it to something user-friendly. Right-click the new macro menu and change the Name setting to Print Shortcuts, as shown in Figure K. Just repeat this process to add any other necessary macros to the custom toolbar.

Figure K

Give the macro button a name that users will recognize.

9: Work with the toolbar

Once you’ve created the custom toolbar, you can manipulate it the same way you do the built-in toolbars. Show users how to display it by righting-click the toolbar or menu bar’s background and checking the toolbar, as shown in Figure L. Or choose Toolbars from the View menu and select the toolbar. To hide it, simply unselect it from the list. To dock the toolbar, double-click its title bar. Some users will be familiar with these tasks already, but they might not realize they can display and hide a custom toolbar.

Figure L

Select the custom toolbar to display it.

10: Use VBA for more control

Allowing users to pick and choose their toolbars is fine. However, if you want to maintain more control in a template or document, use VBA to hide and display toolbars. The possibilities are numerous, but the following procedure displays the Special Functions toolbar when users open the document:

Sub Document_Open()
'Display custom toolbar.
CommandBars("Special Functions").Visible = True
End Sub

Simply replace the name of any custom toolbar to make sure that toolbar is available. Use the CommandBars property in the following form to hide a toolbar:

CommandBars(barname).Visible = False

For example, the following statement hides the Standard toolbar:

CommandBars("Standard").Visible = False

To hide the menu bar, use the following statement:

CommandBars("Menu Bar").Enabled = False

Just when, and if, you execute these statements is up to you.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at either our Daresbury IT Support Centre or our Manchester IT Support Centre for more Tech Tips.

British businesses have seen a rise in data breaches as they fail to protect against threats brought in by the adoption of new technologies, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In addition, infections of computer systems have trebled in two years for large UK companies, according to the auditor's Information Security Breaches Survey 2010, published on Wednesday. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) polled 539 companies for the report, which is published every two years.

"Organisations are really struggling," said Chris Potter, a OneSecurity partner with PwC, at the Infosecurity Europe 2010 conference in London. "The overall context is pretty gloomy."

Sixty-two percent of large businesses reported infection by a virus or malicious software in the last year, compared with 21 percent in 2008. Reports of attempted break-ins to systems have nearly doubled, from 31 percent to 61 percent. Denial-of-service attacks have also increased, up from 11 percent to 25 percent. Overall, 92 percent of large enterprises said they had been hit by a security incident in the past year.

"Fifteen percent of large organisations detected successful penetration of their systems and networks over the past year," said Potter. "Large organisations hold data on all of us. Are you comfortable that one in six organisations have hackers crawling around their networks looking at your data?"

Big businesses are also having to pay out more to deal with security problems. The average cost of dealing with the worst incident seen rose from £90,000-£170,000 to £280,000-£690,000.

Small companies — those with fewer than 50 staff — have also been hit harder, with 83 percent saying they had seen a security incident in the past year. That compares with 45 percent in the last PwC report. In addition, the average cost to small organisations of dealing with a severe incident rose from £10,000-£20,000 to £27,500-£55,000.

The issue is not that businesses are spending less on information security, but that they are implementing technologies without thinking through the possible security ramifications, according to Potter.

Technologies experiencing rapid uptake in businesses include software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing, virtualisation and VoIP. Forty-seven percent of those polled said they now use VoIP, compared with 17 percent two years ago. Furthermore, 85 percent now use a wireless network, compared with 42 percent previously.

Many of the data breaches occurred due to human error or misconfiguration of systems, according to Potter. He suggested that companies should think about information security when bringing in new technologies, including following international security standards such as ISO 17799.

Security expert and Jericho Forum board member Adrian Seccombe said businesses were definitely rushing to implement new technologies, and suffering as a consequence. However, he said technology vendors themselves were not building security in from the beginning, which they should be doing.

"We still suffer from bolt-on security syndrome," said Seccombe. "I'd blame it on the vendors of products and services. People who roll out technologies without architecting security in from the beginning are those who are at fault."

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice on how best to protect your business data.

Small and midsized businesses might be the lifeblood of the U.K. economy, but according to the latest Internet security survey from Panda Security, their generally lackadaisical efforts to protect consumer data is also making them a prime target for cyber thieves.

More disturbing, particularly for customers swiping their credit cards or purchasing products and services online, the survey reveals that the vast majority of SMBs claim they don't know how to effectively prevent identity theft, lack the resources to install the technology that could thwart the majority of cyber attacks and, worse, seem to believe that it's really not their problem.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre for advice on protecting your busines data.

Microsoft saw its profits leap by 35% in the first three months of 2010 - as its Windows 7 operating system continued to prove popular.

The software giant made a net profit of $4bn (£2.6bn) and said it had also seen "strong growth" from its Bing search engine business and XBox Live.

Sales hit a record $14.5bn, up 6% on the same period a year earlier.

Windows 7 has proved to be Microsoft's best-selling operating system to date after the disappointing Vista.

The company's results are closely tied to computer sales because its two most profitable divisions make the Windows Operating System and Office business software.

And the firm said business customers were "beginning to refresh their desktop".

Microsoft is the latest technology company to report earnings results.

Yahoo and Apple both announced higher profits earlier this week, while Google reported strong figures last week.

Source: BBC

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre if your business wants to understand the benefits of upgrading to Windows 7.

BT has announced it will install ADSL2+ broadband equipment in 150 additional telephone exchanges, bringing up-to-24Mbps downstream speeds to an extra three million citizens.

The rollout will take total coverage of ADSL2+ up to two-thirds of the British population, and will be spread thinly across the UK.

However, some areas will benefit from the expansion more than others — in particular the home counties, the south coast, the West Midlands, the Liverpool-Manchester belt and Northern Ireland. Most of Wales, East Anglia, the south-west, the north-west and Scotland will miss out.

London, Manchester and Leeds already have close to ubiquitous ADSL2+.

BT would not say when it expected to complete the installation. But it did say it would meet its earlier roll-out target for ADSL2+ of 75 percent of the population by the first part of next year.

The announcements were made on Monday at a private event in London called the BT ISP Forum. "We are delighted to confirm this next tranche of exchanges, but it doesn't complete the year's roll-out schedule. We expect to announce more exchanges this summer as we remain fully committed to our intention to deliver WBC [Wholesale Broadband Connect] to up to 75 percent of UK homes and businesses by Spring 2011," said BT Wholesale's general manager for broadband products Emma Elshof at the event.

Wholesale Broadband Connect is a service to ISPs from BT Wholesale that is a prerequisite for ADSL2+ rollout.

Though ADSL2+ speeds decrease markedly with distance from the exchange, the installation of the new equipment offers the prospect of slightly faster broadband speeds for most citizens. The company's maximum download speed with ADSL2 was 8Mbps.

BT has been steadily rolling out ADSL2+ across its footprint in tandem with its 21st Century Network (21CN), a programme that has seen BT start to radically change and simplify its core network. Though the 21CN project has been downsized, it is supporting faster access speeds.

21CN has enabled BT to put concrete numbers on the speeds it can offer. BT said Monday that from 7 June, BT Wholesale will promise to ISPs taking its copper-based services that 4Mbps downstream throughput on consumer lines and 8Mbps downstream throughput on business lines will be achieved for a set percentage of the day. Guarantees will also be available for fibre broadband lines. ISPs will be able to log a fault if performance falls below those levels, BT said.

As well as supporting ADSL2+, the fact that the exchanges in question have been connected to 21CN will also mean they can be upgraded to super-fast broadband — either fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) or its slower counterpart, fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC). These will give 100Mbps and 40Mbps downstream speeds, respectively.

As well as offering the faster download speeds, BT Wholesale is testing faster upload speeds. This is being achieved through the use of Annex M of the ADSL2+ standard, which can enable 2.5Mbps upstream for homes close to their exchange. Ten of BT's wholesale ISP customers are testing Annex M in small-scale trials.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre to find out if your business can benefit from super fast broadband.

We recently covered the basics of the DirectAccess, a new remote access technology that enables users to connect to the corporate network without using a traditional network-level VPN connection or a reverse Web proxy and reverse NAT solution. DirectAccess automatically establishes a connection to the corpnet before users log in. After logging in, they can connect to corporate information resources in the same way as computers directly connected to the corpnet over a wired or wireless connection.

The experience for remote DirectAccess users is the same as for users directly connected to the corpnet. Access to file servers, database servers, mail servers, collaboration servers, and any other type of server you can imagine is the same for DirectAccess remote users at it is for users on the corpnet.

Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010 (UAG) is the next version of the Intelligent Access Gateway 2007 (IAG). UAG is designed to be a single point of inbound access to your corporate network. UAG does this by consolidating a number of remote access technologies onto a single box. These remote access technologies include:

• SSL VPN portal, which uses reverse proxy like capabilities
• Remote port and socket forwarding over an SSL tunnel
• Remote Desktop Gateway (RDG) so that you don’t need to install the RDG on a separate machine on your network
• Network-level SSL VPN, with support for both the SSTP and Network Connector protocols, enabling administrators full network access similar to that offered by traditional VPN servers
• DirectAccess server, enabling domain computers to transparently connect to the corporate network regardless of that user’s location, without requiring any user input to connect to the network

While DirectAccess is included with Windows Server Standard and Enterprise Editions, there are many advantages to using Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010 as your DirectAccess server solution. In this article, we’ll look at what DirectAccess offers and consider some of the benefits of using UAG.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Manage remote users with the same tools and technologies you use when managing corpnet users

With DirectAccess, remote users use domain member computers to connect to the corpnet over the Internet using secure IPsec tunnels. Domain member users are able to connect to the corpnet to access resources they need. Even more important, IT can manage users in the same way that they manage users on the corpnet. Group Policy Objects can be applied to users, desired configuration and other management settings can be applied using System Center Configuration Manager, and just about any management system you use for end-user command and control can be applied to DirectAccess users located anywhere on the Internet.

2: Manage remote computers with the same tools and technologies you use to manage corpnet computers

Similar to end-user management, you can use the same tools and technologies you use to manage computers on the corpnet and apply those to computers located anywhere over the Internet that connect to the network using DirectAccess. DirectAccess client computers connect to the corpnet even before the user logs in so that these computers are more available for systems management. Unlike the situation where users have to use a VPN connection to connect to the corpnet to establish a link to your management systems, the DirectAccess client is always connected, significantly increasing the chances that the DirectAccess client computer will be updated and managed based on corporate policy and reducing the chances that the computer will fall out of compliance.

3: Increase end-user productivity

The problem with other corpnet connectivity methods is that end users always have to “do something” to connect to internal resources they need. They might have to establish a VPN connection or maybe they need to connect to an SSL VPN portal. Maybe they have to remember a URL to connect to a SharePoint or OWA server or maybe they need to configure their applications to work differently when connecting remotely compared to when they’re on the corpnet.

DirectAccess takes the onus of “network location awareness” away from end users. With DirectAccess, they turn on their computer, and the connectivity to what they need just works. No VPN connection required, no special inside versus outside URLs, no application reconfiguration. Users seamlessly connect to resources they need regardless of their location. DirectAccess takes away location as a factor for information access — information is always available to your authorized users.

4: Separate intranet and Internet traffic to improve performance

Traditional VPN solutions often require that all traffic go over the VPN connection between the VPN client and server. This can have a profound negative effect on over corporate Internet bandwidth, since the VPN users must compete with the corpnet users to Internet bandwidth. DirectAccess solves this problem by enabling users to use the DirectAccess connection when connecting to corpnet resources, and use their established Internet connection when connecting to the Internet. This significantly improves performance for both remote DirectAccess users and users located on the corpnet.

5: Provide an always on and secure connection to the corpnet over the Internet

DirectAccess client connections are always on, which means you need to be sure that the connection between the DirectAccess client and server is secure. Security of this connection is assured using IPv6 and IPsec. The DirectAccess client establishes a IPsec connection to the DirectAccess server, which can be the UAG DirectAccess server. During the IPsec connection establishment, the DirectAccess server authenticates to the DirectAccess client and the DirectAccess client authenticates with the DirectAccess server. IPsec encryption is used to insure that private communications are not intercepted over the Internet.

6: Simplify your DirectAccess deployment with UAG

DirectAccess is a technology included with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. However, the Windows-based DirectAccess solution can be complex to install and configure. When you use UAG as your DirectAccess solution, you get unified management and control over the DirectAccess solution with UAG DirectAccess arrays. In addition, you can benefit from hardware consolidation by bringing multiple solutions into a single UAG DirectAccess server or array by incorporate multiple remote access technologies, IPv6 to IPv4 translation technologies, network load balancing and array functionality into a single server or array.

7: Expand DirectAccess Client Access to IPv4 only resources

The Windows DirectAccess solution enables DirectAccess clients on the Internet to access information resources on the corporate network without needing to “do anything” to make it work. However, those resources need to be IPv6 aware. If the information is contained on a IPv4 only server, the Windows DirectAccess solution will not provide DirectAccess clients access to the information. The UAG DirectAccess solution solves this problem by using DNS64/NAT64, which enables DirectAccess clients to connect to IPv4-only resources on your corporate network. In fact, with the UAG DirectAccess solution, there is no need for any IPv6 resources on the corporate network - making it possible for you to take complete advantage of all that DirectAccess offers today without needing to embroil yourself in the complexities of IPv6.

8: Ease Management Duties with the UAG DirectAccess Console

With the Windows-only DirectAccess solution, configuration of more than a single DirectAccess server means creating the configuration on each server separately. Also, monitoring and continued management has to be performed on each server, since there is no shared configured available in the Windows only DirectAccess solution. In contrast, with UAG DirectAccess, you can configure DirectAccess server configuration once, and have it automatically deployed to up to 8 servers in a DirectAccess server array. The array also provides a single console where monitoring and reporting are done, provide a single view of the DirectAccess solution from within UAG.

9: Improve High Availability with UAG DirectAccess and Network Load Balancing

The Windows only DirectAccess solution has very limited support for high availability. In contrast, the UAG DirectAccess solution has high availability built-in. UAG DirectAccess integrates with Windows Network Load Balancing to help insure that the array of UAG DirectAccess servers is always available to your users and that the load is distributed evenly among the servers, so that performance is optimized and users have a good end-user experience even if one or more UAG DirectAccess servers go offline.

10: Enhance Remote Access Security with Integrated Support for Smartcards and Network Access Protection (NAP)

DirectAccess clients need to meet the same security requirements as computers you directly connect to your corpnet over a wired or wireless connection. That means you need to make sure that only authorized users can connect over DirectAccess.

One of the best methods to authenticate users is two-factor authentication. You can configure DirectAccess to require that users present a smartcard and pin before they are able to log onto the network over DirectAccess. In addition, you can use DirectAccess with or without UAG, to enforce Network Access Protection (NAP) enforcement for DirectAccess clients. NAP insures that the DirectAccess computer meets your corporate security requirements before the machine is allowed to connect to network resources.

You can configure DirectAccess to provide the NAP clients access to remediation servers so that they can self-remediate, and then provide them full network access after remediation. With UAG DirectAccess, you can enable NAP support by putting a checkmark in a single checkbox - it’s that easy!

Source: Tech Rebublic

Contact Converge IT at our IT Support Centre if your are reviewing how DirectAcess can benefit your business.