Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 1:42PM What is Unified Communications? Take a look at this brief video from Vertical Communications describing what it is and what it means in their product line.
Friday, April 26, 2013 at 8:19PM One of the biggest requests that I hear from all the guys in our office is that they want the start button back in Windows 8 and they want to be able to select the desktop view as the default view in their installation of Windows 8. The latest rumors indicate that Microsoft may be moving to squash these apps, by enabling 8.1 to boot directly to the desktop and reinstating the start button. Discussions around code recently dug up in a DLL, buried within the bowels of a leaked version of Windows Blue suggests that this new minor revision of the desktop and tablet OS could offer users a way to skip the live tiles and go right to the familiar user interface that many long for.
Look at engadget for more information on the Windows Blue screenshot tour. There are also some interesting videos showing an installation of Windows Blue running on a virtual desktop. The videos are interesting with some of the changes in personalizing your Widows 8 experience to a much greater degree. This will be interesting to get our hands on once the beta version is released.
Friday, April 26, 2013 at 7:53AM Press Release from DELL SonicWall announcing the end of support for Gen4 Firewalls on July 1, 2013.
End of Support for Gen4 (and older) Dell SonicWALL firewalls will commence on July 1, 2013. All Gen4 firewalls, regardless of whether they are covered under a stand-alone support contract or through a Comprehensive GMS support contract, are subject to the same End of Support date. Our records indicate that your customers rely on one or more of these appliances:
Call us to discuss your options.
Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 11:43AM Published on Feb 18, 2013
A 3 minute overview of the new features and benefits of Sophos UTM Connected (UTM 9.1) The video explains how this release delivers faster wired and wireless connectivity in a secure and reliable way.
Our latest release, Sophos UTM Connected, lets you protect your users on the move against web-based threats and strengthen your wireless connectivity. At its heart is the software version 9.1 which is engineered to make our proven protection faster and even easier to use. Why Sophos UTM Connected? It’s all about creating ultra-fast wired and wireless connectivity in a secure, reliable way.
Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 10:20AM Sophos is one of most trusted security vendors that we use in our professional installations. In a good marketing decision they are now providing free videos and whitepapers to you for giving them your contact information. So this is a great place to pick up a little more information to help keep your systems safe.
A video series from SophosLabs
Ransomware: hijacking your data
Our experts at SophosLabs look in depth at ransomware variants and delivery mechanisms, and show how you can protect your data with a complete security strategy.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 7:41PM 
Download Documentation
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 4:50PM CourseSmart offers an education package to schools that allows professors to monitor what their students read in their textbooks as well as the passages they highlight according to a report from the New York Times.
CourseSmart acts as a provider of digital textbooks working with publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and John Wiley and Sons. The NY Times describes books in use at Texas A&M University, which present an “engagement index” to professors that can be used to evaluate students’ performance in class.
This will be another method the University and Instructors will be able to gauge why a student might be having problems in the course. It will tell them whether they have opened the digital textbook and what pages they have viewed, when they viewed them and how much time they spent reading the textbook.
So the question is going to be is how accurate this information will be in reporting back the students’ “engagement index”. Can the system be gamed and what assumptions does the software make in determining the index. Also, how does the software determine between someone studying really hard from one that is just plain clueless and in a panic trying to catch up on things they either don’t understand
Either way this is going into full gear next fall and it will interesting to see what the results will be. I think that if handled right it could be an effective tool learning more about the quality of the class content, instructor lectures and how much work is actually done by the student. All of these factors contribute to learning process.
For more info on CourseSmart click here…
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 1:18PM This newscast discusses one of the new ways that people are being tricked into sharing their personal information with scammers and tricksters. In this case the individual was called by someone claiming that they were from Microsoft and that he wanted to sell her a protection plan for her computer.
Rule #1: You are not going to get unsolicited calls from a real company. They may send you an email as advertising but nothing so in your face.
Rule #2: Anything having to do with connecting to your computer, again unsolicited by you should automatically flag an alert to you. Don’t trust this call.
Rule #3: Anything having to do with credit cards, banks or any other financial payment system that is again unsolicited by you should be flag as well. Tell the people thank you and hang up. Call your financial institution using a number that you know is right and ask them about whatever was proposed to you.
The key here is, if you haven’t noticed, don’t trust anyone that is trying to get information from your or access anything that you own that you have not asked specifically for them to do so.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 12:44PM So if you have allowing Dropbox to upload your pictures from your devices to your storage area then you are probably accumulating a lot of pictures there now. If you want to find a group of images around a theme you can now associate them with an Album. This will help facilitate showing them off when you want family or friends to see just a specific group of images. It would appear that each image can only be associated with one album at a time. Which is too bad.
This is a good start but hopefully they will keep working on it to give us some more capabilities.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 12:25PM Here’s a quick video on VMware’s Mirage product. Really looks interesting from an IT perspective in managing a large group of PC’s that have mostly the same setups on them. It allows you to separate the PC into logical layers and to keep backups of desktop images to enable quick recovery or rollback in case of failure.
Priced at $1,815/10 pack this is a relatively elegant method of ensuring uptime for your office workers on their machines.When you compare this cost to the downtime for your users and the support costs to bring them back up you can easily see the cost savings.
How can this product help you? Use it to speed up Window 7 Migrations, or to Simplify PC Backup and Desktop Recovery and easily Manage Remote and Branch Office PCs. If you have 10 or more machines then this product can be a big benefit for you.
Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 3:32PM The amount of storage is not the only reason to go Premium with Evernote. Yes the prime reason to go premium is to increase your upload capacity but you also get the following benefits:
Monday, April 15, 2013 at 8:51PM I saw this being discussed on Before You Buy and it really peaked my interest. One of the things that really caught my attention was that the charge lasts up to a year once it is fully charged. It will provide a decent charge for anything from a notebook to a phone. It will provide a laptop with anywhere from 2 –6 hours extended battery life, a netbook up to 8 extra hours, and a smart phone up to 42 extra hours. Use it for providing power to a hotspot or recharging any of your mobile devices. You can charge up to 3 devices at one time, can be recharged over and over again, is lightweight and has a 3 year limited warranty.
MSRP is $179 and it is one of the products that I think could help cut down on your mobile kit weight and provide a big benefit of offline power access.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 9:32PM Microsoft’s attempts to make SkyDrive the place to store your files in the cloud continues to move forward. If you are an Office 2013 user or are sharing documents with your team in the SkyDrive cloud any and all updates to the SkyDrive clients are always welcome. It seems to be getting better with each advancement and I am using it house all of my OneNote notebooks that I access from all my devices, whether it is my work or home pc, notebook, or any one of my many mobile devices but android and iOS.
Microsoft’s current release is v3.0 for the SkyDrive app for iOS that includes improved photo features, an updated UI, and a number of other new features and enhancements. You can install or update the SkyDrive app for iOS now via iTunes.
Here are the updates that have been made to v3.0 of the SkyDrive app for iOS:
Support for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini Updated app icons and user experience Works better with your photos: Download full resolution photos to your iPhone or iPadControl the size of photos you upload and download Photo metadata is retained when you upload to SkyDrive Opening and saving files to SkyDrive works better with other apps on your iOS devices Many other small changes, bug fixes and performance improvements
Friday, April 5, 2013 at 5:02PM Founder Arthur Frommer has bought his brand name back from Google, and he plans to continue publishing the printed guides. After Google announced that they were closing down the printed product of these guides a quick response from the original owner may guarantee publishing will begin again. Hopefully. When I was in the service I had several of his printed guide books in my car as we toured around Europe on the weekends. However with today’s electronic devices do we really need to have a physical book to be reading from? I have already purchased eBook guides that I use to get around different towns that my wife and I explore and I use either my phone or my Nexus 7 to be able to read them and this works out pretty well.
Frommer’s was founded in 1957 and has changed hands several times over the decades. Simon & Schuster bought the brand in 1977, and it shuffled through a handful of publishers before landing at John Wiley & Sons in 2001. Wiley said in March 2012 that it would sell off several of its publishing assets in a bid to re-focus the company, and Google bought Frommer's five months later.
Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 5:39PM So with all of the hype surrounding the Google decision to get rid of Google Reader I have had to decide what I am going to use post GRDR. I am not as happy with the interface in the desktop browsers but It is workable. It does fit in well both on my iPad and both the 7inch and 10.1 inch Android tablets that I am using.
It works nicely with Pocket, Instapaper and Email allowing me to grab things that I want to take more time with. I used GReader Pro prior to this on Android and Mr.Reader on IOS. These both had this same capability. I use these programs to allow me to quickly go through the RSS’s that I am scanning each day. I like it better than some of the other graphical programs like FlipBoard but I am worried what is going to happen July 1st when Google Reader disappears.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 8:56AM Google’s new note taking program seems to be taking a stab at the higher end note taking applications. Evernote of course is what comes to my mind being the current top contender in this application category. Evernote was initially put together as an application that can be accessed by many types of devices so your data is available to you no matter how you access. It is a
product that has far surpassed Microsoft’s OneNote which was the first to market and failed to capture the market share I thought it deserved primarily because it was only available on the Microsoft desktops. OneNote has been slow to coming to the cloud and this has been what has been holding it back.
Evernote is still king and both Google Keep and OneNote will have a hard battle ahead of them to surpass its current lead.
Here is a great comparison article by Christina Warren of Mashable discussing the differences between Evernote and Google Keep. Her conclusion, Evernote’s list of capabilities far exceed what Google is bringing to game. However, if you are a heavy Google application user, Keep’s integration with Google Drive might make it more appealing to you.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 4:27PM If you run into issues with QuickBooks not opening in Multi-User Mode or connecting to the server database try the following:
1) Make sure the server and workstations are all updated to the newest version of QuickBooks.
2) Try running the QuickBooks File Doctor on the Company file that they need to use.
(http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/QBFD/qbfd.exe)
3) Lastly, if the above do not work, open up services on the server and restart any service that begins with “QB”. Then on the workstations
Make sure to open task manager and “End Process Tree” on all processes starting with “QB”. Once completed try logging into the company file again.
If these steps do not work you may need to try reinstalling the program starting with the workstation first and then the server if necessary (remembering that
If you can access the company file from any workstation, back up the company file before proceeding). Once reinstalled, verifiy that they are completely up to
Date and try recovering and reopening the company file.
If this still does not work, calling QuickBooks is your only other option.
Chase Richardson
Apple Specialist & PC Technician
Bachelor's Degree in M.I.S
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 9:03AM Article ID: 978980
To work around this issue, use one of the following methods.
, and then click Control Panel.
Thursday, March 14, 2013 at 11:04AM What the heck am I going to do? My daily routine both in the morning and in the evening is to quickly sift through the many RSS feeds that I have subscribed to and is managed in my Google Reader account. I use several different programs as well as Google’s web interface to work with these feeds but the central control has been my Google Reader account for years. Now that Google has put it on the discontinue list I am going to need to do something to replace it.
I am not a big user of Facebook or Twitter, I guess I am still old school there. When I sit down to comment on a something that catches my eye, I like to provide as much information about that subject as I can as both a reference for myself as well as for others. The reason I have this blog is to offer up information that I find helpful to clients as well as our service people.
So what am I going to do to replace this tool? One of the programs that is being talked about out there is called Feedly. In a recent post from Feedly, they state that they have been anticipating Google shutting down Google Reader and that they have been working a project they called Normandy which is a Feedly clone of the Google Reader API. Feedly is planning to seamlessly transition to their Normandy backend when Google Reader shuts down.
If you are a Google Reader, give Feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlessly:
Feedly for iOS
Feedly for Android
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for Safari
Note 1: if you are migrating from Google Reader to feedly, here are some tips on how to personalize feedly to better match your existing workflows. If you have any feature request please add it on our feature request page.
Note 2: if you are a third party developer using the Google Reader API and would like to integrate with Normandy, please send an email to remi@feedly.com. We would love to keep the Google Reader ecosystem alive.
Friday, March 8, 2013 at 6:39PM I seem to be on a Microsoft Office kick right now so here is a little something that may help you diagnose problems with your MS Office installation. Look for it in the Microsoft Download Center. You can get the downloads you need there.
The Microsoft Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT) is a program that provides a detailed report of your installed Office programs. This report includes many parameters about your Office program configuration and highlights known problems found when OffCAT scans your computer. For any problems that are listed in the report, you are provided with a link to a public-facing article (usually a Microsoft Knowledge Base article) on the issue so you can read about possible fixes for the problem. If you are a Help Desk professional, you can also save the report to file so that the report can be viewed in the Office Configuration Analyzer Tool on another client where the tool is installed. The Office Configuration Analyzer Tool 1.0 also includes a command-line version that can be used to collect an OffCAT scan without user intervention.
