As Information Technology professionals we are always being asked the question why did my <insert Office 2003 application here> fail me?

Why did my excel 2003 workbook crash after working on it for hours?

Why does my outlook 2003 out of office assistant not work?

Why does Word 2003 not open a .docx file even though I have the converter installed?

These and a myriad of other issues which frustrate end users on a daily basis all have the same easy answer……Upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010. Microsoft Office 2003 was release in, you guessed it, 2003!! There have been so many improvements and additions that both thrill and scare users.  Most notably the infamous ribbon that is the first thing you see when upgrading to 2007 or 2010. So far, I haven’t seen any real reason for the fear and trepidation most users have when you mention upgrading their Microsoft Office from 2003 to 2007 or 2010. 

The bottom line is you will get a richer more reliable experience from the newer versions of Microsoft Office.

Recently, a customer contacted me with a corrupted Excel workbook representing 100’s of hours of work that suddenly could not be opened.  If you have never heard a grown man cry, just wait until he loses a document like this. Fortunately for the customer, I was able to open the spreadsheet in Excel 2007, and 2010, and help him meet his deadline.  Of course, I had already quoted an upgrade to Office 2010 which he originally decided against, but now it all became clear, and he was eager to upgrade to Office 2010 as soon as possible.

To most of us, having a cell phone that is 7 years old would be unimaginable. It’s the same for the aging software that you are running on your computer.  Save time and frustration and upgrade to Office 2010 today.

See the below links for some of the cool new feature of Office 2010!!

Protecting your small business against cyber threats is getting harder every day; it used to be that having a good anti-virus program installed on your computer was all you needed.

Now you need to worry about web security, email security, network security, not to mention the physical security, and social engineering. Things are getting much more complicated.

Attacks can happen in many forms, at the moment, the most used method is via the web, someone might hack into a popular website, imbed malicious code which when accessed can be used to exploit vulnerabilities on your system and possibly gain access to your computer or use it to infect others, send out spam, etc. Or maybe you download something you want, and along with it you get something you don’t want, and didn’t notice was downloading at the same time.

There are so many threats out there, from spyware, viruses, and Trojans, to internet scams, to disgruntled employees trying to get into your systems that can make your head spin trying to protect yourself from all of them.

So here are a few of the most basic things you can do to protect yourself:

1.       Change passwords often and using strong passwords -this is probably the simplest thing you can do to be safe, and the one that often gets overlooked

2.       Maintain software updated – most applications will prompt for updates every once in a while, just accepting the update can keep you a little bit safer

3.       Patch the Operating System – this will keep your servers and workstations protected against the latest exploits, even if you access a malicious website you will be safer if your OS is up to date

4.       Install a good anti-virus and anti-spyware tool – this will protect you in case someone sends you an infected file via email, or something is lurking around in your network

5.       Network Security – use a good firewall and make sure all your devices (ie. firewall, switches, routers, wireless access points, etc) across the network are well configured, with the default passwords and web interface access ports changed, running the latest firmware, etc.This also includes wireless security, perhaps operating in the DMZ, and with good encryption.

6.       File Access Control – this should be implemented on server shares so users only have access to shares and folders they really need, keep confidential information accessible only by users who really need it

7.       Physical Security – this one is often the most overlooked one of all, you can protect everything else, but if anybody can just get to your systems, sit down and have at it with no questions asked, then you could have all your information stolen or infected very easily. This includes an automatic screen lock after a certain time of inactivity on desktops and servers, a locked server room with access limited to IT staff, good battery backups, and perhaps implementing a policy against personal laptops within the company network which could introduce viruses or other malware to your systems

8.       Safe internet usage practice for staff -  this includes training your staff to not open emails from people they don’t know(especially attachments), not accepting file transfer from Instant Messaging tools, and if possible restricting social networking sites, and personal browsing on company computers

9.       Backup your systems and data – this means regularly backing up, testing the backups, keeping copies of the backups offsite, making sure they are running properly, etc

There’s much more that can be done, but these are the most basic steps every small business should be looking at to keep their company information and systems safe.

Having been an early adopter of Hyper-V on Windows 2008, the improvements of Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 were definitely welcome with the Live Migration feature being the most useful in keeping virtual machines highly available.

Assuming you already know how to cluster your servers and understand CSV’s (Cluster Shared Volumes), configuring your server to be highly available is quite simple. You should carefully consider your host specs though because Live Migration doesn’t work with different CPU architectures. For instance, you can’t Live Migrate from a host using AMD processors to a host using Intel processors. Also, Live Migration is picky about the family of processors within the given architecture chosen, so make sure your processor specs are as similar as possible .There are ‘Processor Compatibility’ settings to allow you to migrate using different processor versions but if at all possible, try to purchase your hosts with the same specs to avoid not being able to use the Live Migration feature at all.

To use the Live Migration feature, you simply need to make your virtual machine highly available by choosing the ‘Configure a service or application’ under the ‘Services and Applications’ tab under your Cluster Management. The virtual machine has to be off in order to make it highly available. Once the virtual machine is configured and started, simply right-mouse click on the virtual machine and select “Live migrate virtual machine….” and select the cluster node. The amount of memory the virtual machine is configured to use determines the amount of time it takes to migrate it because in reality, that’s all that’s really being migrated.

Modern computers really are getting faster. But it's been said that until things happen instantaneously, they’re not fast enough. Even at the Help Desk, the "clicks", the mouse drags, opening programs... They all seem to start taking longer and longer after a while.

So what can be done to speed things up?

Keyboard shortcuts can be used to cut down on the number of mouse clicks and the time spent moving through options. Windows comes with several useful shortcuts.

One I use every day is a shortcut to open Windows Explorer to browse for files - hold down the Windows key and press "E" (Win+E). This is the equivalent of opening "My Computer".

Win+D minimizes all programs, so that you can see the Desktop ("D" for desktop). This is handy when you need to find a file on your desktop fast. Conversely, if you want access to a file on your desktop, and don’t want to minimize all your windows, press Win+E to open Windows Explorer and then select “Desktop”. Your desktop is just another folder in Windows and you can work on it like any other folder in Windows Explorer.

Have a bunch of Windows open and you want to switch to one that's buried? Press Alt+Tab to switch to another window. If you like, you can press and hold the Alt key and then tap the Tab key. Windows will pop up a display showing your open windows and you can select which one you like. This keyboard shortcut becomes really handy if you have two windows that you need to switch back and forth between, say if you’re copying and pasting a bunch of elements. When you press Alt+Tab, it always goes back to the last open window, so even if you have a lot of windows open, you can use Alt+Tab to just switch between your two most recent. You can also hold down the shift key to go backwards – Shift+Alt+Tab. With Vista and Windows 7 (with the Aero 3D GUI enabled), you can press Win+Tab for a neat 3D way of picking a window.

Want to close a bunch of windows? Start pressing Alt+F4 - that's the keyboard shortcut for closing a program. Every time you press Alt+F4 another program closes, so you can repeatedly tap Alt+F4 and eventually have all your programs closed.

Pressing Win+L will lock your computer so it’s protected while you’re away from it. Nobody can access your computer without putting in your password. This is handy for quick trips to the kitchen for coffee. This is a case where the keyboard shortcut is much quicker than the combination of mouse clicks and keyboard presses normally needed to lock your computer.

Win+R opens the “run” dialog box. We use this a lot at Help Desk to get to the command prompt (type cmd and press enter), or to open Windows Explorer to a known location (you can type in a path to open it, i.e. C:\Windows).

Cntl+C and cntl+V can be used to copy and paste in most programs and in Windows. Highlight or select something (you can use cntl+A to "select all") and press cntl+C to copy it. Cntl+X is the same as "cut", when you want to move something instead of copy it. Then switch to the program you want to paste into and hit cntl+V to paste what you copied or cut. This also works in Windows Explorer and is handy for copying or moving files.

Cntl+Z is handy as it invokes "un-do" in most programs. So if you're typing or pasting a bunch of text and didn't get what you expected, just tap cntl+Z to undo the mistake.

F5 is used to invoke “refresh” on many programs, including Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. You can also use the backspace key in IE to go back to the previous page.

Finally, it’s possible to create your own keyboard shortcuts to launch files and applications. The only caveat is that the file (or a shortcut to that file) must exist on your desktop. Start by right-clicking on any icon on your desktop and selecting “properties”. About half way down the shortcut tab, you will see “Shortcut key:”. Click in that field and press the shortcut key combination that you would like to assign to that icon. It has to be ctrl+alt plus any other key. So let’s say you have an Excel spreadsheet call “my log.xls” on your desktop. You might assign ctrl+alt+L to that icon. Then when you press that combination, that file will open.

If you’ve been around Windows servers long enough, I’m sure you’ve seen tasks you’ve grown accustom to in one version being changed to a location with no real reason in mind and have asked yourself many times “Why did you move that Microsoft?”. Print Management in Windows Server 2008 is no exception. Every time I open the Server Management console, I feel like I’m working on a Small Business Server and I find it takes more clicks to execute on the tasks that I need to do. For instance, it takes five clicks just to get to the place to install your printer drivers. Oh yea, I almost forgot - you have to install the role first!

So, if you are running your print server on an x64 platform and you have x86 clients that will be using your print server, make sure you deselect the x64 checkbox and select the x86 checkbox on the first screen after the welcome screen in the “Add Printer Driver” wizard. This will save you a lot of time.

In all fairness to Microsoft though, the ability to view the print jobs and view the printer administration web page after selecting the ‘Printers’ tab in the management console is very useful.

 - Brian Pastre, Premier IT, Inc.

We are always on the look out for cool tools to make organizing the busy executive’s life easier.  Here is a brief description of a new free program from Microsoft to print a wide variety of weekly, monthly, and yearly calendar views for easy reference and productivity. We have used this tool to resolve calendar printing issues our user base has found after upgrading to Outlook 2007.  We fell in love with the wide range of options and infinite possibilities available to make the most out of our most valuable resource, time.

Some people like PCs, others like MACs. Which one is better is not a question that will ever be answered. It’s a personal choice more than anything. Both can do the same things, it all depends on what you use it for, how well you know it, your hardware and so on.

However, when it comes to the corporate world things change a bit.

The simple fact that you can’t manage MACs as easily as Windows creates a problem for IT departments.

Sure, you can add them to Active Directory, but no matter what, having more than one operating system to support complicates things, as you can’t script out simple tasks anymore and that can mean having to do things locally one by one, or creating different scripts for the same things; a big problem in some instances.

Some Mac people also like to update their Operating Systems without informing the IT department or making a backup first, so when Apple releases buggy updates it causes grief for a lot of people.

Also, despite the fact that people tend to think that Macs have less problems than PCs, I find that is not true in the business world.

There is no email client that handles big mailboxes very well. Mail and Entourage tends to crash or run extremely slow when the mailboxes get too much past 1GB, not to mention when the contacts or calendar applications decide to just delete all your entries with no warning. In a world of emails containing attachments upwards of 7MB this can be a problem very quickly.

 In the recent years Apple has been gaining a bigger and bigger market share, but I think these and other factors like costs and applications compatibility still make PCs the best choice for companies big and small. That’s not to say you shouldn’t get a Mac for your home though. Not being susceptible to as many cyber attacks is a pretty big thing nowadays.

 - Aline Menezes, Premier IT, Inc.

This device may one day be touted as the device that changed the way we compute, but for now I am going to wait for a more powerful model that acts more like a normal laptop computer and maybe down the road they will incorporate video conferencing with their iChat program and that would be very cool.

 - Jay Groves, Premier IT, Inc.

It's probably not a case of "If..." but "When...".

You trash an Excel spreadsheet and would simply like to start over. But, you already clicked save and your beautiful spreadsheet is gone. Of course, Premier IT is backing everything up and can restore your file from last night's backup, but that's going to take some time.

Turns out, there's something you can do yourself. Windows can be configured to make "snapshots" of your files and it is indeed possible that you can retrieve that prior version of your spreadsheet.

Microsoft calls it Shadow Copies. But it might be better to refer to it as "Previous Versions", because that's what you will see when using this feature.

Conceptually, Shadow Copies is a service that makes a snapshot of your files, usually twice a day. So long as you know where to find these snapshots, you can go back in time and retrieve an older copy of a file - even if it's been changed or deleted.

You can use this feature by opening the file's properties from Windows Explorer. If you're looking for a file that got deleted, you can open the properties of the folder that contained it.

So for example: I have a file that I would like to restore from yesterday. I open Windows Explorer (sometimes it's quickest to just open "My Computer") and browse to the folder that contains my file. Right click on the file name and select Properties. Select Previous Versions and you should now see a list showing dates and times. These are the various snapshots of this file. Select one and click on Restore. You will get a warning saying that the current version will be over written with the older version. Be careful, because anything you typed into the newer version you're replacing will be lost because that version of the file is replaced with the one from the older snapshot.

And then your file goes back in time.

If you deleted the file (or moved it), you can right click on the folder that the file was saved in. You can then select the previous versions tab and you will see snapshots for that folder. Be careful here, if you click on the restore button, it will roll the entire folder back in time, over writing all the files in that folder. I wouldn't recommend this. Instead, click on view and you will get a new window that looks like a Windows Explorer view of your folder. But you will also see that in the address bar is a date and time. So what you're really looking at is the snapshot of a past version of the entire folder. From here, you can just drag a file out (or select copy and then paste to the new location) to recover your file.

If you're just curious about that older file, you can simply copy it to an alternate location (I like the desktop for such things), open the file and compare it to your current version. That way you can have both versions, which could be handy for combining the best of the old version with the best of the newer version.

There are a few caveats to Shadow Copies. By default, Windows XP does NOT support it. Most versions of XP have been upgraded so that you can use Shadow Copies so long as your file is on the server. Vista and Windows 7 not only have it built in, but can restore local files stored on your hard drive. Finally, Shadow Copies needs to be turned on and configured. By default Vista will have it turned on for your C: drive. But for servers, even though it's generally turned on, it's possible that it's been disabled if the server is running short of space. All those snapshots take up disk space and disabling Shadow Copies is a quick fix for disk space issues.

 - Robert Wakefield, Premier IT, Inc.