bruceb news

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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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’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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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 […] continued

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It’s rare now to find traditional POP3 email accounts, where messages are downloaded to a single computer and are only accessible at that computer. We move between different computers freely (home/work/laptop/netbook) and want our mail to be available on all of them. We are buying smartphones in staggering numbers and getting our email on the phone is a big part of the reason.

Seeing our mailbox from multiple computers and devices can be done clumsily with a POP3 account but it’s far easier with Gmail, Hotmail, or an Exchange mailbox. If you are using an email address […] continued

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Previously:
Windows 7 Searches – Small Business
Windows 7 Searches – Libraries

You’ve got a Windows 7 workstation in a small business or law firm. The network server is running Windows Search 4 and you’ve added the network locations with shared files to your Documents library. All the pieces are in place!

SEARCH ALL DOCUMENTS FROM WINDOWS EXPLORER

When you click on Documents on the Start menu, you will open your Documents library, which includes both your individual files and all of the shared company documents.

Do a search from the upper right corner of […] continued

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Previously: Windows 7 Searches – Small Business

When you click on Documents in the Start menu in Windows 7, your cursor arrives blinking in Libraries. I’ve been annoyed by that for months, but I finally had an “ah-ha!” moment when I discovered what libraries can do for searches. Let me give you some background about libraries, from the perspective of a small business or law firm user.

Libraries are collections gathered together from different places and presented in a single view. There’s no folder on your C: drive named “Libraries.” A library is a special view of files […] continued

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If the right elements are in place, Windows 7 can be used for lightning-fast searches through shared folders in small businesses and law firms. There are a couple of tricks to that process; it will take a couple of days to give you the background and show you some search techniques.

When Windows Search 4.0 was released in the summer of 2008, one of its important features was “remote query” or “remote index discovery.” A computer with Windows Search 4 responds to a search query from a remote computer by consulting its own index and sending the […] continued

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Here’s a procedure for people working in a very small business that don’t want to call me for every routine task.

Very small businesses frequently have a single folder for all company or firm files. It’s almost always mapped to a drive letter, so everyone stores all work files in the “N:\” drive or the “P:\” drive. Everyone has full permission to add, edit, and delete files and folders in the COMPANY or FIRMDOCS folder. There are subfolders for each client or project, so things get a little cluttered and messy after a while, but it works well […] continued

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Exchange Defender has a new tool for previewing quarantined messages.

Exchange Defender is the service used by many businesses to quarantine spam and scan incoming and outgoing mail for viruses before delivering mail to the company server. Exchange Defender sends a daily report listing all quarantined spam, as well as providing add-in software for Outlook and an online control panel for reviewing quarantined messages.

(Exchange Defender is well suited for any business running Small Business Server; almost all my clients with Microsoft Small Business Server rely on Exchange Defender. You need a partner to set it up for […] continued

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