Off-Site Backup made Affordable and 3 Months Free too.

About a year ago we asked for volunteers to test an off-site backup solution called Symform. The test went very well, with some hiccups here and there that were expected from a beta product. Shortly after that, they named Amy to their advisory board, fixed those issues and the product released. (I don’t get paid for my advisory status with them.)

As a refresher, Symform takes your backed up data, breaks it up into pieces, encrypts it and sends those bits to random places in their cooperative storage cloud – 32 times. Because we don’t trust the cloud, incredible redundancy like this is important. Symform does this for a fixed monthly fee per server or per workstation regardless of the amount of data you store. It is amazingly brilliant technology that makes off-site backup affordable. No one else does this.

But there’s no perfect software or perfect solution, one of the problems that has cropped up is bandwidth. Depending upon your business, we might end up chewing up the bandwidth for backup not leaving enough for speedy day-to-day stuff. For most companies it’s not an issue because your daily Internet use is light, but some of you use a lot of Internet bandwidth for every day activities. An update was just released to solve this issue. We can now move the hosting of storage to our office and get it off your bandwidth bill. 

To kick things off, we’re offing 3 months free backup service if you sign up before the end of September. Here’s the pricing:

$50 per month per server

If you have bandwidth limitations and want to use some of our bandwidth to host storage, then it’s an additional $10 per month.

What’s New of Office 2010: Outlook

This is the third installment of our series on Office 2010. The previous ones were on Word and Excel and you can read them on our blog site.  As with Excel and Word, there are many changes to Outlook, so I’ll only mention what’s brand new and then point to some quick and easy training courses at the end.

Outlook has arguably become the most important application for many businesses. Our communications, calendar and tasks are here making up the organization of our days. Microsoft has really put in a lot of effort to making an already amazing application even better and I’m very impressed with the changes.

Here’s what brand new for Outlook:

Calendar Preview in meeting requests - Outlook shows a preview of your calendar in meeting requests. The Calendar Preview feature shows where the meeting appears in your Calendar together with any conflicting and adjacent meetings. No need to open your calendar when you get a meeting request in your Inbox!

Conversation actions - Outlook can help you manage your Inbox more effectively, with the Ignore and Clean Up commands. The Ignore button on the ribbon moves all of a conversation and any future replies to that conversation directly to the Deleted Items folder. The Clean Up button moves older, redundant messages in the conversation to the Deleted Items folder but keeps the most recent message.

Quick Steps - Quick Steps are one-click buttons that can perform multiple actions at the same time. You can create your own quickstep to create a new email and address is to a group of people for example with the push of a single button.

Roaming AutoComplete list – This had to be the most requested feature of all. Recipient AutoComplete lists are now stored on the Exchange Server. A user’s recipient AutoComplete list is now available to any computer on which Outlook 2010 runs that is connected to the same Exchange account. Names can be easily removed from the list by using the new inline Delete function.

And now for a little training

Make the switch from an older version of Outlook to Outlook 2010 (about 45 minutes)

Tame your Inbox and manage that mail (about 30 minutes)

Get Familiar with the Calendar (about 45 minutes)

Stalker Apps are Everywhere, even in your Photos

In the spring we participated in an excellent local conference in Royal Oak on Social Media. Great conference. The thing that surprised me though was the continual mention of FourSquare. FourSquare is a stalker app. You load it on your phone and every time you walk into someplace you hit the button and it announces on various social media where you are. I understand why retailers like this because they can hit you up with today’s special and learn more about their repeat customers. What I don’t understand is why people are willing to participate? Or maybe I do. I think it’s ego. I’m here! If you are the person that most frequents the location then you get to be Mayor. WooHoo, it’s not for me and I think it’s dangerous.

So now Facebook is in the game too. Having linked up with FourSquare they now offer something called Places. Here’s the twist, your friends can check you in to places, thereby helping a stalker find you, unless you turn this feature off. Do it now. Go to Facebook, My Account, Privacy Settings and flip Friends can check me into Places to Disabled. I’ll feel better about your personal safety.

The next latest thing is location services. Location Services is a very handy thing. On my iPhone it let’s the weather channel app show me the weather for where I am now. In Maps it shows me where I am now and helps me get to where I’m going. But did you know that when you take photo with the iPhone (or any gps enabled phone) that it embeds, latitude and longitude or address information into that photo? When you post that photo to the Internet that information goes with it. Someone created a website called I Can Stalk You, to prove the point that the information is out there. Fortunately you can turn this off too. It will be different on every phone but here’s how you do it on the iPhone. Go to Settings, General, Location Services then flip to Off next to Camera. While you are here flip to off any other application that you think doesn’t need to know where you are.

Be on the lookout for stalker apps. It’s the latest “cool” thing, but it can also the latest dangerous thing. Take care.

What’s New in Office 2010: Word

This is the second installment of our series on Office 2010. If you missed the first one on Excel you can catch it here As with Excel, there are many changes to Word, so I’ll only mention what’s brand new and then point to some quick and easy training courses at the end.

Here’s what brand new for Word:

Fluent UI – The fluent user interface consists of several components but the important part of it to understand is that Word is going to change the options available to you in the ribbon based upon what you are doing at the time. So if you start making a list, the ribbon menu will change to expose Word’s list features. Most people find this very helpful as it helps you use features that you may not have realized were there.

The Ribbon – The ribbon is the name for the menu at the top of the screen. This was new in 2007. What is new in 2010 is that you can customize and create your own tabs in the ribbon. People use this to organize their favorite features into one easy to find place.

Backstage view – Backstage view replaces the file menu of old. It is used to manage files and the data about the files, such as creating and saving files, inspecting for hidden metadata or personal information, and setting file options.

File format - The Word 2010 file format enables new features such as co-authoring, new graphic and text effects, and new numbering formats. Word 2010 works with Office Word 2007 documents.

Protected View - Files from a potentially unsafe location (such as the Internet or an e-mail attachment) or files that contain active content (such as macros, data connections, or ActiveX controls) are validated and can open in Protected View. When you open files in Protected View mode, the editing functions are disabled. This will help protect you from opening an attachment only to find it was a virus. You can open and edit files from trusted sources by clicking Enable Editing.

Collaboration and sharing features - Word 2010 supports co-authoring functionality. Co-authoring functionality simplifies collaboration by enabling multiple users to work productively on the same document without intruding on one another’s work or locking one another out.

Graphic enhancements -Word 2010 provides improved editing tools with a new set of Picture Tools that enable you to transform your documents into artistically engaging documents. New editing tools are as follows:

· Picture Correction Options

· Artistic Effect Options

· Background Removal

· Picture Layout Options

Now for some quick training to demonstrate a couple of these new features.

Make the Switch to Word 2010 from earlier versions ( about 30 minutes)

Understanding new Word security messages (about 10 minutes)

Create visually compelling documents using image editing, screen clippings and new SmartArt (about 30 minutes)

We hope that these references will help you make a smooth transition to Office 2010.

What’s New in Office 2010: Excel

By now most of you have installed a copy of Office 2010 and if you were previously using Office XP or Office 2003 as many were then you are in for a real treat. There are so many changes from those versions that it’s not possible to list them. So what I’m going to do is just post what’s brand new and then point to some quick and easy training courses at the end.

Here’s what brand new for Excel:

Backstage view -The new Backstage view replaces the traditional File menu. All file management tasks are available in Backstage. Click the File tab to access the Backstage view. Although it was previously possible to save and publish worksheet data to a SharePoint site, in Excel 2010, the options for doing this are now conveniently located together on the Share tab in Microsoft Office Backstage.

Sparklines - are a new kind of visualization in Excel 2010. They are small cell-sized graphics used to show trends in series of values by using line, column, or win/loss charts. Click here to see what they look like.

Slicers - make filtering and interpretation of data easier. They improve PivotTables and CUBE functions in a workbook. Slices filtered data interactively. They float above the grid and behave like report filters so you can hook them to PivotTables, PivotCharts, or CUBE functions to create interactive reports or dashboards. Click here to see what they look like.

Excel 2010 64-bit advantages - Applications built with the 64-bit version simply can use more physical memory than ever, especially important for those who need to work with really large data sets. In Excel 2010 investments were made in our 64-bit architecture to optimize our memory consumption while keeping the cell table (and related operations) as fast as possible.

Compatibility mode tool - New features in Excel 2010 are disabled when you are opening previous versions of Excel in Excel 2010. For example, new 2010 Sparklines and Slicers features are disabled with opening earlier version of Excel. Workbooks created in the Excel 97-2003 file format (.xls) automatically open in Compatibility Mode. Workbooks created in Excel 2010, but destined for others who use earlier versions of Excel, should turn on Compatibility Mode to prevent accidental use of functions and features that are incompatible with the earlier versions of Excel. This is very important for users who plan to share workbooks with other users who have not yet migrated to Office Excel 2007 or a later version.

File loading performance - File loading (opening and saving) lends itself well to parallel processing and the multi-core functionality of Excel 2010. However, the structure and content of workbooks significantly affects the performance gains. For example, if there is only one very large sheet in a workbook, a proportionally large amount of file loading time will be spent simply loading the one sheet. But if you have two very large sheets, Excel can fetch the second sheet off disk while the first sheet is still being loaded into memory.

PivotTable enhancements - PivotTables are easier and faster to use in Excel 2010. The description of those changes are too lengthy to recount here.

Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel add-in - If you need to model and analyze very large amounts of data, you can download the PowerPivot for Excel add-in and work with that data inside your Excel workbooks. By using this add-in, you can quickly combine data from multiple sources, including corporate databases, worksheets, reports, and data feeds.

Calculation Improvements – new version of solver, 50 new statistical functions

Filtering - For large worksheets filtering enables the quick location and display of specific data in tables and PivotTable views. Use new Search Filter capability to spend less time sifting through large data sets.

Excel Services enhancements - Many organizations use Excel Services to share workbooks and data with other people.. If you use Excel Services on a SharePoint site, you can take advantage of the following improvements:

· Share workbooks from Backstage   Before Excel 2010, it was previously possible to save and publish worksheet data to a SharePoint site. In Excel 2010, the options for doing this are now conveniently located together on the Share tab in the Microsoft Office Backstage view.

· More support for Excel features   Before Excel 2010, if a workbook contained unsupported features, it could not be opened in the browser. In Excel 2010, most workbooks with unsupported features will open. In addition, more Excel features are supported in Excel Services, including new Excel 2010 features such as Sparklines and Slicers.

· Edit and collaborate on workbooks   If you publish a workbook to a SharePoint site where Excel Services is installed, you can edit your workbook in a supported Web browser, in addition to viewing it. In addition, you and your colleagues can work on the same workbook at the same time. This means that you no longer have to e-mail a workbook around, or wait for someone to check it back in on the server before you can edit it. For example, imagine that you and your manager are currently viewing the same worksheet in different offices. If you make a change to the data, your manager will see that change on her screen.

Conditional formatting - Conditional formatting allows references to be made to different sheets on the workbook (cross-sheet conditional formatting). Use conditional formatting to discover and show important trends and highlight data exceptions. More styles, data bar options, and new icon sets made available. References to other worksheets allow in conditional formatting rules. Conditional formatting stores dependencies of the formulas used so reevaluation of the entire conditional format is not necessary as often. Pivot tables or scrolling refresh more quickly so they can display faster.

Icon sets - Icon Sets are a new kind of conditional formatting. An icon is drawn in each cell representing the value of the cell relative to the other cells in the selected range. Icons sets are a great way to create groups of similar data as a part of your data analysis.

Data bars -Data bars now drawn proportionally according to their values. Negative values more clearly displayed and zero values are suppressed.

Pattern fills - Pattern fills removed in 2007 have been reintroduced in Excel 2010. Charts formatted with pattern fills in previous versions of Excel will retain and display the pattern fills when they are opened in Office Excel 2007.

Charting - In Microsoft Office Excel 2007, you could have up to 32,000 data points in a data series for 2-D charts. In Excel 2010, the number of data points in a data series is limited only by available memory. This enables users — especially those in the scientific community — to more effectively visualize and analyze large sets of data

High Performance Computing Clusters – which in english means if you’re doing a huge amount of computing you can assign a group of computers to process the data and get it done faster.

Macro recording support for chart elements – even more places to automate Excel repetitive activities

So now that you’re overwhelmed with just the list of what’s new, never mind what’s changed, how about a little training? Microsoft has free bite-sized training bits available online. Here are two that you should make the time for right away.

Here’s a 30 minute short course on getting up to speed on the new version of Excel. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/make-the-switch-to-excel-2010-RZ101809963.aspx

A 15 minute course on new security features in Office 2010. You’re going to need to know how to use these for all parts of Office. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/office-2010-security-protecting-your-files-RZ101665538.aspx