Month: June 2007

I struggled for quite a bit this evening trying to transfer my Quicken 2007 over to my Vista workstation and get it up and running. I encountered two issues that several other people have also encountered, but the solutions were not always exact or correct. The two main problems I encountered were: 1. After installing Quicken, every time I would start it up it would give me a pop up window with the error message: “Quicken is unable to complete the unlock process”. The popup window kept appearing no matter how many times you closed it, and eventually I had to … Continue reading Quicken and Vista

This comes from a recent Sunbelt’s WServerNews e-letter, but the remarks are similar to what’s being said all around the web: Just Say NO to iPhone You are going to be asked (or already have been) to hook up the iPhone to your network’s email system in some way. The problem is that the only protocol the iPhone supports is IMAP and that just does not cut it. The iPhone cannot work like a RIM BlackBerry or Windows Mobile. There is no built-in sync with Outlook that is secure enough. It does not work with Lotus Notes either. I think … Continue reading iPhone not ready for Business prime time?

It’s a known fact that Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) very often get bloated (in file size). And if your company creates and stores lots of documents on your SBS server, especially documents with lots of graphic images, you begin to eat up a lot of disk space. Until now, your choice was to zip those large documents. I recently stumbled over a tool called NxPowerLite that will compact Word, Excel and Powerpoint files (either in-place or create new versions of each file), primarily by compressing the embedded graphic objects in the file. The compacted file can still be opened, read, and modified by … Continue reading Reducing size of Office 2003 documents

Just saw that version 3.0 of the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (MSAT) was released. The prior version was released back in 2004.   MSAT is a risk-assessment application designed to provide information and recommendations about best practices for security within an information technology (IT) infrastructure.   It walks you through a long series of multiple choice questions in the areas of Infrastructure, Applications, Operations and People. It generated a 43 page report for me when I completed it – complete with best practices, findings and recommendations.

I recently configured 12 computers for a training room for a client. One goal was to be able to secure the setup of each computer. My objective was to be able to reboot the computers and have them automatically restored to a known good state. The solution I settled on is a product called Deep Freeze from Faronics. Right now, I’m using the Deep Freeze Standard version, but I can see where their enterprise version would be very helpful down the road. The product works exactly as its advertised. Users can delete programs or icons, add new programs, download files (even … Continue reading DeepFreeze your kiosk/traing room computers

Do you remember what happened in 1996/1997? Corel buys Wordperfect (I still miss WP5.1 DOS on a floppy) The original Palm Pilot was released Netscape Navigator 2.0 was “the” browser Windows NT 4.0 made its debut Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 3.0 for free Office 97 is released (come on, admit that you still like Office 97, and that you have people still using it!) Altavista releases BabelFish Microsoft released the Intellimouse — a wheel mouse And finally, MSNBC went on the air Happy memories! -kw

> As my saga to setup OWA continues, I have been asked by the ISP:>> what is the mailserver hostname to use for the MX record and what> would you like us to set the preference to?Well – that really has nothing to do with OWA specifically. Your domain’s MX record is how the rest of the world finds the server which hosts mail for your Internet domain name.Whomever hosts the domain’s public DNS (which may not be the same as the ISP; that term generally mean “the company I pay for my Internet connectivity) will needs to set up:1. … Continue reading Revisiting MX and A records

RWW is a great feautre of SBS, but it does lack the ability to easily track RWW usage from users. As a reminder, Dana Epp’s company (Scropion Software) has a program called RWW-Guard that not only offers the ability to use a two-factor authentication process, but it will also track RWW logon usage. http://www.scorpionsoft.com/products/rww-guard/howitworks.html -kw

Two years ago I decided to invest in some USB external hard drives and appropriate software, and then on a routine basis, go around and make a full image backup of each workstation and laptop in the office. [Routine defined as “whenvever I have a chance” which means “maybe twice a year!”] My primary reason for this was for disaster recovery purposes. Here in Florida, if a hurricane is coming, I can grab the USB drives and know I could restore data or complete systems. I’ve been using both Acronis TrueImage and StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect. Both do a good job, and give … Continue reading Thank God for Image Backups!

Cell phones are great (when they work), and even better when they sync up with your email, contacts, tasks and calendar items from Outlook/Exchange. However, recently I had to resync a phone, and I’m still not sure what I did to create this situation, but afterwards I found that most of my task items were duplicated (and sometimes in triplicate) within Outlook. I was not looking forward to deleting each of these tasks by hand. So a quick Google search got me to the Mapilab web site http://www.mapilab.com/ where they have a nice collection of Outlook and Exchange tools and add-ins, … Continue reading Dealing with duplicate tasks / contacts in Outlook