bruceb news

This week’s installment of Annoying Checkboxes is sponsored by Microsoft, which has already brought you the annoying checkbox to install the “Bing Toolbar” – the one that has to be unchecked every single time you install an update to Java. Since Java is updated approximately once every 72 hours, you’ve probably seen that annoying checkbox frequently. (If you open Internet Explorer and have a useless “Bing Toolbar” at the top of the screen, then you missed the checkbox.)

Now I’m training myself to watch out for a new Annoying Checkbox that turns up when Microsoft Office Home […] continued

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Previously:
Fear of Exchange
Moving Mail Online With Microsoft Online Services

Small businesses should strongly consider having their Outlook mailboxes hosted on Exchange Servers run by Microsoft for a small monthly fee. I’m going to recommend this to a number of my clients and I encourage anyone interested to contact me to talk it through. I’d like anyone in a business with 2-20 employees to read this carefully!

For businesses currently running Exchange in an onsite server (usually as part of Small Business Server), the move to hosted services does not significantly change the experience of using […] continued

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Previously:
Passwords: computer login
Passwords: e-mail
Passwords: Google Accounts & Windows Live ID
Passwords: password managers
Passwords: online passwords and LastPass

Let’s go over a few facts of life.

No one is enjoying the need to have a lot of passwords. It’s hard to remember the passwords, of course, but in our complicated world it has become even harder now to understand when passwords are required or what they’re for.

I feel your pain but I can’t change the world. At the moment your passwords are your defense against identity theft, financial loss, […] continued

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It feels as if the smartphone revolution has happened overnight. I am simply astonished at the number of business people and lawyers getting iPhones from AT&T and Android phones from Verizon. I rarely saw them in businesses a year ago – they were still perceived as gadgets, not serious business tools. Now it’s starting to seem unusual not to see them in everyone’s pocket.

The phones are capable of many wonderful tricks but almost everyone tries first to set up over-the-air sync of mail, contacts and calendar. It doesn’t always go well!

• Individuals who have fully

[…] continued

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I’ll be taking a personal day on Wednesday, August 25, to help my dad celebrate his 90th birthday.

My dad taught me to solder. Remember soldering irons? We’d use them to build Heathkit radios and test kits, painstakingly matching the colored bands on the sides of the resistors that we were soldering into little circuit boards and checking off each step in the directions when it was done. I was tremendously impressed when he built the family’s color television set. A TV set! How great is that! And he could fix it when it broke because, hey, […] continued

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I am pleased to announced a new service for my loyal clients: real-time server and networking monitoring.

This is the culmination of months of evaluation and testing. It represents a higher level of service that I’ll be delivering to my clients, at the same time that I’m helping reduce technology costs by handling problems before they turn into crises.

SERVER MONITORING

For less than $1 per day, I will set up 24×7 Round-the-Clock Monitoring that will check your server’s critical systems every fifteen minutes. Whenever it sniffs a problem, I’ll get an email showing the exact nature of […] continued

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I’m strongly urging my clients running Small Business Server to move their mailboxes to online hosted Exchange servers. I’ll give you a bit of background and tell you an anecdote to explain why Exchange frightens me, then tell you more about Microsoft Online Services next week.

Microsoft released the first version of Small Business Server in 2000. It was updated in 2003 and 2008, and a new version is planned for next year. It is a customized collection of several Microsoft server products, bundled up to be installed on a single server. The products are the same […] continued

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Here’s a nice notebook at a nice price: the Asus U43Jc, a 14” laptop that can be purchased from Amazon until September 5 for $999 – with a $150 Amazon gift card thrown in, effectively bringing the price down to $849. That’s quite good for a notebook with these specs!

The notebook features a cover and palm rest made out of bamboo, making the case look very sleek in a furniture sort of way. (It also lets Asus tout how environmentally swell it is.) It’s got great parts inside: an Intel Core i5 processor; 4Gb of RAM; […] continued

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Previously:
The Sad State Of Law Office Software
Law Office Case Management In The Cloud
Advologix Practice Management
Postscript On Cloud Computing

Larry Port, founding partner of Rocket Matter, dropped by the news page yesterday and gently suggested that Rocket Matter is actually a fine name for a law office practice management program. (He might be right. It does have the advantage of using words in the English language, which seems hard to come by for new products these days.)

It drew my attention to a short collection of articles that can be […] continued

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In June I wrote an article about LogMeIn Express, a free and extremely easy to use service being tested by LogMeIn for quickly sharing a screen with one person or a small group of people.

When I went back to look at it recently, I discovered that the service has been renamed “Join Me” and moved to https://join.me, which is odd but certainly easy to tell people on the phone. At the moment they’re trying to make it look hip by rotating a selection of big photos (beach sandals, water coolers) and cute slogans on the […] continued

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