bruceb news

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 committed to Google Gmail and Google Calendar have an easy time with Androids, but their lives are full of sorrow and pain if they get an iPhone without thinking ahead.

[…] continued

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 as the enterprise versions – with some simplified management consoles and controls (and a limit on the number of users), but otherwise identical to the full products. […] continued

Previously:
The Sad State Of Law Office Software

I’m going to work up to specific products, but let’s start with the concept of storing valuable, confidential data in the cloud, on servers run by some big company.

As a lawyer in a small firm, think of the scariest example you can imagine – say, your highly sensitive letter to a client outlining the risks in your litigation strategy, or notes on the phone conversation with a client where she confessed to killing Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick. Save the file as a Word document on the server in the file room. […] continued

Microsoft released a patch yesterday that should be installed promptly on all Windows computers. Most of you will find that it was installed automatically on Monday night. If your computer restarted last night, you’re almost certainly fine – but be alert in case the Windows update icon is trying to get your attention from the lower right corner of your screen! If you want to make sure it was installed, look in the update history on your computer for KB2286198, the reference number for Microsoft’s security bulletin.

The patch fixes a particularly nasty vulnerability, yet another way that the bad guys could take control of your computer and force it to do evil deeds just by luring you to a poisoned web page or convincing you to click on the wrong thing. […] continued

Previously:
OneNote 2010 – Introduction
OneNote 2010 – Outlook Integration

Stick with me. I’m going to describe the feature built into OneNote 2010 that works so well – quietly, seamlessly – that it deserves to be noticed, used, and celebrated.

OneNote 2010 is designed to be used on multiple computers. When you create a notebook, the first option is to store the notebook online. It’s not a requirement but it’s highly recommended.

It doesn’t change your use of OneNote. The program opens and you can use it, regardless of whether you’re online or offline.

But when you’re online (and you’re almost always online), anything you do in the notebook is synced almost instantly to the copy of the notebook stored in the cloud. […] continued

Previously:
OneNote 2010 – Introduction

OneNote 2010 has been tightly integrated into Outlook, as well as Word, Powerpoint, and Internet Explorer. It opens up a completely new way to use OneNote – almost as an accessory to those programs rather than a standalone program, with all of OneNote’s power to hold different kinds of information (notes, pictures, links, screenshots) and link those notes to items in the other programs.

OUTLOOK

The easiest example: think about attending a meeting that’s on your Outlook calendar. When you highlight the appointment in your calendar, the ribbon bar includes a OneNote button, as shown above. […] continued

Microsoft OneNote 2010 is the best reason to buy Microsoft Office 2010. It was already a hidden treasure in Office 2007, and the improvements in the new version take it to a new level. OneNote 2010 is so good that you should consider buying Office 2010 just to get it. Microsoft has demonstrated its faith in OneNote by including it in every version of the Office 2010 suite.

In the next couple of days, I’m going to highlight some of the new features in OneNote 2010 that make it so useful.

First, a brief introduction for those of you that aren’t familiar with OneNote yet. […] continued

Microsoft is finalizing a new version of Windows Live Sync, its free software for syncing files among different computers. The new version replaces the two overlapping programs available from Microsoft for the last few years, Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh, combining features from both of them.

This should be good news. Microsoft has declared that the entire resources of the company are being devoted to moving us to the cloud. The file syncing program could have been an important part of that transition to a new way of working with our files that is less tied to particular computers. […] continued

There is an interesting consequence to the development of a global population obsessed by technology: it’s become very difficult to introduce a new service and have sufficient capacity for it to start successfully.

It’s nothing new. Back in 2004 online gaming service Steam crashed repeatedly in the first few days after Half-Life 2 was released. In 2006 Google had to suspend signing up new accounts for its web site hosting service due to heavy demand after it introduced a new web page creator. In 2008 Microsoft underestimated demand for Photosynth, a service for linking photos into three-dimensional reconstructions, and had to limit access to it until things died down. […] continued

Wayne Small, an Australian SBS consultant, took a look at Google’s license agreement recently and wrote up a nice reminder that big companies do not make any pretense of playing nicely with your information.

Google Terms of Service cover all of Google’s services, including Gmail. There are some provisions that shouldn’t be surprising – for example, that Google can turn services off without warning or notice, with no consequences.

You probably already know that Google runs through the text of email messages to decide what advertisements will be presented, but it’s interesting to find out that Google has reserved the right to filter, modify, or remove anything you receive by email. […] continued