Almost famous

I’d like to thank Wayne Small who have given me a bit of plug in his blog. Appreciate that Wayne. He was mentioning how I have applied the Community Blog kit to my Sharepoint blog and how different it now looks (for the better). I am preparing a detailed post about my experiences with this update and how simple it is and some observations I have come across. I just wanted to wait a while to everything works as expected before I comment too much. However, since Wayne has now graciously given me a plug I better hurry on and do it eh?

Video 41 – Configuring SBS monitoring

Our latest video is now available as always on YouTube. You’ll find it by clicking here. This video focuses on configuring monitoring on Small Business Server 2003, which will email health reports and alerts from your server. Sure, it isn’t that hard to configure but many people don’t even know that this feature is available.

As always, we are trying to improve the quality and professionalism of what we provide but that is hard without any revenue for our efforts. As such we can only continue to offer these videos whenever we get some free time. Initially we thought that perhaps asking for a donation from viewers would provide at least some low level of assistance. However, to date we have been very disappointed with the response (thanks to those that did donate – the small number of you – we really appreciate it). We are not asking for hundreds of dollars, AUD $5-$10 from people would really go a long way if enough people saw fit to donate.

So in light of this poor response we have opted to now provide a set of show notes on each video we do for a minimum of AUD$5 donation. The show notes will cover what the video covers but also provide some more advanced information about the topic at hand. We hope that perhaps this enticement will encourage people to support the work that we do by helping us fund our planned improvements. You can find a list of these by clicking here.

Book review – "The 4 hour work week"

It isn’t often that a book jumps to the top of my recommended reading list but this one from Timothy Ferriss has. Be warned you are going to have throw away many “traditional” concepts about work, career and life in general but you’ll be better for it.

Too often, as Ferriss says, we make the excuse of working for works sake rather than experiencing life. Imagine how liberating having enough money to be able to take six months off at a time and travel anywhere. The technology to achieve this is available now, the only thing holding you back is you and and antiquated beliefs. Why should you preparing for retirement when you SHOULD be living your life now?

This book will show you how to eliminate the unnecessary, become more productive, challenge your preconceptions and start creating a life that works for you rather than the other way around. It is packed with plenty of great tips and resources that make it easy to get the ball rolling.

All this may sound like a get rich quick scheme and there are many part of the book that are difficult to implement, however if you approach it with an open mind then I’m sure you’ll find something in here that will benefit you by making your life better. Remember, nothing in worthwhile in life comes on a silver platter!

10 critical things you should know about Small Business Server

We have just released an extensive report detailing 10 critical things you should know about Small Business Server.

The report was developed from the most common questions we are asked about networking with Small Business Server and doesn’t just contain information about software. The report will provide relevant information about what hardware to buy as well what other considerations you need to make when thinking about networking. If you want a reliable and flexible Small Business Server network then you need to have this report.

This report also contains many resources (webs sites, books, etc) that can be used to gather more information about networking with Small Business Server.

For more information about how to obtain the report click here or email robert@saturnalliance.com.au.

Better hope you don’t get this one

Here’s an interesting blog post about the latest in Trojan technology that is specifically targeting internet banking. You’ll find the post here :

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2008/01/banking_in_silence.html

If you take the time to read it you’ll shudder at the sophistication of the thing. It can manipulate DNS entries, HTML code, track cookies and more. Nasty, nasty to say the least.

It shows how much effort the bad guys are investing to getting your banking details. Why? Simple, that’s where the cash is – they are a business after all.

Gear up with Sharepoint

The drum beating around Sharepoint from Microsoft seems to be increasing (yeah!). They have just produced the following Gear Up web site that contains a whole host of information about driving adoption of Sharepoint within a business. If you are keen to get Sharepoint adopted in your business take a look at the Buzzkit available on the site.

On the site you find a huge amount of resources (videos, whitepapers, links, etc) that will help you through every stage of a Sharepoint implementation.

Hopefully now businesses will begin to understand the power that Sharepoint can unleash in their business. If you don’t contact me (director@ciaops.com) and I’ll explain why.

Search Server Express 2008 is now available

Man, have I been waiting for this. Microsoft has finally released an RTM version of Windows Search Server Express 2008. Better yet they haven’t changed the price! It is still free. Yes free.

Why have I been waiting for this? Simply because, not only can I improve the searching ability of my Sharepoint sites BUT I can also now index every document in file shares on my network. How helpful is that going to be? You don’t have to make any changes to your filing system, you simply tell Search Server Express 2008 to crawl you network file shares. It will index not only the documents but also the contents of these documents (ie Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc). So now you can use the Search Server interface to search for files as well as the contents of those files. How handy is that? Now all that information won’t remained buried.

When you combine the power of Search Server 2008 and Windows Sharepoint Services you have a really powerful solution to help you find and collaborate with the information in your business. Best of all, both products are FREE to download, you can’t get better than that can you? All you need is a Windows 2003 server to run them on.

Now that Search Server Express 2008 is available I’ll be downloading and implementing it internally. I’ll post my findings here and maybe even consider doing a video. If you want to download Windows Search Server Express 2008 you can do so from :

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/download.aspx