Two ways to boost your productivity

Recently we’ve found two ways to really boost our productivity. The first is using dual screens on our desktops. Our new HP desktop machines not only came with Vista but also came with dual video outputs (digital and analogue). Initially we set up the analogue since it was easier but recently we have finally gotten around to also enabling the digital output. After a little bit of fiddling and locating a suitable monitor we are proud to say that we have it all working. Boy, what a difference extra screen real estate makes. On one screen we have our Outlook open so we can see all our emails and on the other we have all our other applications like web browser, word processor and the like. We can’t tell you how much easier it is to work with two documents at the same time if you can actually view them simultaneously. You can be doing research on the web while remoted into a client’s machine all without having to minimize windows. Totally brilliant and we recommend it to all. We now wonder whether adding more than two monitors to our desktops would increase productivity even further?

The second method we have found of increasing our productivity is by using Microsoft OneNote. Having used OneNote before we found that it really didn’t suit our needs but the new version is certainly and improvement. We have installed the OneNote data notebooks on a network drive and shared it between multiple machines. This now means we can simply cut and paste from one machine and retrieve it on another. Even better we can take ONeNote ‘offline’ and use it stand alone and then have it automatically resync when we return to the office. This make it particularly handy when we take our notebook PC offsite. We can pump all our client notes into it quickly and easily and then when we return to the office it is sync’ed with our other notebooks as well as being backed up. We think that it is a boon that lots of the information we used to jot down in paper notebooks can now be stored in OneNote, allowing it to be searchable.

As with any productivity improvement there is an upfront hit in getting the systems working but both duall displays and OneNote have begun to make a real impact to our productivity and we thus recommend them to all.

Do you reckon this will affect SBS sales?

If you don’t already know, Microsoft is soon to release a product is calling Home Server. Interestingly it will network up to 10 PC’s and provide some basic networking, backup and file sharing. Now if you think that only home users are going to use it then we would suggest you think again. We will bet that a significant number of the 1-10 user SBS space will seriously consider Home Server. What will that mean…ummm…well unless you need some of the specific SBS features why would a business now buy SBS? if you just want basic networking why would you now buy SBS when you can get Home Server pretty cheap?

In our experience most of the 1-10 size businesses don’t really need Exchange server, they can typically get away with POP email accounts, so what’s their need for SBS now? Now you can look at this in two ways. Firstly, you could view it in the light of tha fact that the demand from the 1-10 user business is going to decrease. Or secondly, you could say there is an opportunity to sell this product into businesses that may not have even considered a server (including some homes as well).

To our minds there is little doubt that Home Server is going to affect the low end sales of SBS and that if you are serious about your business then you need either to prepare for the short fall or the opportunity depending on your business model.

Unable to uninstall Livestate Desktop V3.0

Recently tried to update a customer from Livestate Desktop Recovery V3.0 to the latest Backup Exec Desktop System Recovery 7.0 and guess what? when you attempt to uninstall Livestate from Control Panel you get a message that you “must uninstall a previous version”. Say what? There was no prior version, so now what.

Well, you could go through the registry manually and remove all the entries to Livestate but let us tell you that there are heaps. A much better option is to call up Symantec Tech Support and tell them you are having issues. They will send you a batch file that uninstalls Livestate manually.

This was almost identical to the issue that we had with Livestate 6.0 Server recovery and the only solution was once again a batch file from Symantec. Hmm.. not impressed at all Symantec, not at all. We really hope that when it comes time to uninstall Backup Exec Desktop System Recovery 7.0 we don’t have the same issues.

Installing Small Business Server Video series

We have just uploaded the first YouTube video is a new series we are creating that will show you how to install Small Business Server on new hardware. This first video will show you how to boot to the initial blue screen (DOS) environment, then partition your hard disks and commence the Windows Graphical User Interface (GUI) installation. Click here for a direct YouTube link to our video or click here to go to our Supportweb site for a listing of all our video creations.

As always we welcome any feedback or questions you have have on our videos. Please stay tuned for more videos in this series.

If you find our videos at all beneficial we ask you to consider supporting us directly by making a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au. All donations allow us to devote more resources to the content we provide as well as improving its quality.

Web site security threats

We recently attended a security seminar presented by Trend Micro where they said that most of the security threats faced by computers these days are being delivered by web sites. Note how we didn’t say malicious web sites, why? Well, the example that Trend gave was that the web site for the Miami Dolphins football team in the US had been hacked and a small piece of code had been added to their front page that when opened would download a trojan to the viewers computer. Once the trojan was downloaded, it would then execute and download more malware, ultimately allowing the PC to be controlled by hackers for whatever purpose they deemed.

Now you might think that this is all a bit far fetched and only happens in places like America, well think again! The following report in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights how the same thing happened to the web site of the Sydney Opera House. According to the story :

The code would infect web browsers that were not patched with the latest security updates with Trojan software, most likely designed to capture sensitive information such as internet banking details from victims’ computers.

and

Ms Swaffield says NSW police were informed of the security breach, the incident was documented but no action was taken. The Sydney Opera House site is visited by more than 300,000 internet users every month.

Hmmm..interesting eh? If you want a reason to ensure that your workstations are up to date look no further than this story because as it says the trojan would “infect unpatched machines” and that up to 300,000 people use this legitimate web site every month.

So don’t just think that it is your emails that are your biggest security threat, it is all those network users surfing web sites on unpatched machines that can cause major problems.

For the full story see : http://www.smh.com.au/news/security/hackers-infected-opera-house-website/2007/06/11/1181414219766.html

Removing personal information from Office 2007 documents

We just came across this great little tip to remove all your personal information from Office 2007 documents when you are preparing to publish them. In some cases, this is information such as comments and revision marks or information that was hidden and then forgotten. This type of information usually doesn’t pose a security risk but it might not be information you want distributed when you send out the final Office document.

Office now provides an inbuilt tool called the Document Inspector which can identify and purge this unwanted information. To use the Document Inspector in Word 2007 say :

1. From the File Menu (or Start ball), select Prepare, then Inspect Document.

2. Clear the check boxes next to any items you don’t want the inspector to scan for, and then click Inspect.

3. A results page will display the type of items found and a Remove All button next to each type of item to clear it from the document. Simply press this button to purge the information required from your document.

SBS 2003 Installation Part 3 video

The next video in our series of installing SBS 2003 is now on YouTube. To view the video simply click here. This video covers the installation of the premium components of Small Business Server that being SQL Server 2005 and ISA server 2004. If you are installing SBS Standard then you can skip this video because it is not relevant to that product.

If you find our videos at all beneficial we ask you to consider supporting us directly by making a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au. All donations allow us to devote more resources to the content we provide as well as improving its quality.