Month: November 2008

Great cloud apps

Here are some applications available in the cloud that I have come across recently and think are pretty good.

Slide Rocket –  www.sliderocket.com

A PowerPoint competitor. It has some really nice effects. There is a free version that does all the basics but for a fee (which I think is a little pricey) you get additional features like being able to webcast your presentation.

Zamzar – www.zamzar.com

A great online tool that allows you to quickly and easily convert between different formats. Great when you need to quickly convert Office 2007 back to Office 2003 and you can’t access the software but it does so much more!

iDrive – www.idrive.com

With this free software you can store up to 2GB of data in the cloud, encrypted with your own key. Even better for US$50 pa you can store 150GB. The iDrive software allows you to configure scheduled backups, appears as a ‘standard’ drive on your Windows machine and can even recover deleted files. Best of all it uses SSL to transfer the data and encrypts it in storage. So what’s the problem with storing data in the cloud now?

Picnik – www.picnik.com


Use this site to edit your digital images. For most people this site is going to do everything they require without the need for expensive desktop software. If you pay a small annual fee you get even more features. You can even work on images sorted in places like Picasa, Flickr, etc (which I note are also in the cloud).

These are but a few but I’ve certainly added them to my list of favourites. This stuff is just better and better all the time.

Just gotta love VoIP

A while back I converted to naked ADSL. This meant that I could do away with the standard phone line and the normal line rental. Problem was now no normal phone line to make voice calls. Solution was to get an ATA and enable VoIP over the new naked ADSL broadband connection. Apart from not having to pay line rental I’m only billed on the calls that I make, which are at a cheaper rate than Telstra anyway. So I’m miles in front.

 

Now the other day I was umming and erring as to whether I should join in a conference call to the US in which I was interested. I finally decided that it would be worth it so I dialled in using my VoIP phone line. I was expecting to pay $10-15 for the call which lasted about 45 minutes. Boy was I surprised when I received the bill.

 

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As you can see, that 45 minute phone call to the US cost a total of 91 cents! Yes 91 cents, even at 8.30am in the morning. Now I’m sure there are even better plans than that available but I gotta say I’m impressed and if I was a traditional phone company I’d be shaking my boots when VoIP becomes mainstream. In these economic times VoIP can really save you some bucks.

Intro to Search Server Express 2008 video

I have just completed a new video about what I believe if one of the most “unknown” technologies from Microsoft – Search Server Express 2008. It provides such a great capability and is a FREE download from Microsoft but no-one seems to know about it. I really can’t fathom this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dkycMN4RsE

The video will take you through the basic installation and setup procedure that should allow you to get Search Server Express 2008 running in your business. This is also another example of a technology that you can virtualize quickly and easily.

 

Search Server Express 2008 will allow to to search any SharePoint site, network file share, Exchange Public folder and web site in your organization. It is based on the same technology used for SharePoint so it looks like a SharePoint site. So if you have network shares that are chock full of all sorts of files in which no one can find what they are looking for, rather than going through the whole share file by file simply drop in Search Server Express 2008 and index the suckers. Once indexed you’ll be able to search the contents of most of them (Office, HTML, Text, Acrobat, etc) so to find all the business information you need now all you need to do is like what you do on the Internet – run a search.

 

Search Server Express 2008 is featured in my Windows Sharepoint Operations Guide (http://www.wssops.com) which has a whole section dedicated to installing and configuring the product.

 

Sure Search Server Express 2008 isn’t prefect. I’d like to be able to integrate directly into SharePoint search, I’d like to be able to have external results displayed from Google rather than Live.com but these are small gripes compared to the functionality your receive. I have configured Search Server Express 2008 to run previously and it was invaluable assistance when attempting to location information inside a document I ‘knew I had created’.

 

If your or your customers business is struggling to find digital information in a maze of network shares and public folders why not drop in Search Server Express 2008? For the price there isn’t much out there that can beat it.