bruceb news

Microsoft Office 365 has been tremendously successful so far, certainly from a sales perspective (millions of subscriptions, although the exact number is kept under wraps), but more importantly it’s also been successful from a technical perspective. There has been no downtime for the last few months. My clients are ecstatic that I can set passwords not to expire. Smaller businesses are being migrated from the older Microsoft Online Services platform; my clients’ experiences have not been completely smooth but no data has been lost and support for minor glitches has been readily available. Life on Office 365 is good.

So although I’m going to describe a technical issue, it’s a fairly insignificant one that has affected less than a dozen people in my personal experience. […] continued

A few days before Christmas, Microsoft delivered the “Office 365 Integration Module for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials,” a long awaited add-in that integrates Microsoft’s new server software for very small offices with its hosted Office 365 service.

In some respects this is what SBS 2011 Essentials should have included all along, and the combination is a compelling choice for many very small offices considering their first onsite server or a replacement for an aging Small Business Server 2003 tower. You’ll find a full description of Small Business Server 2011 Essentials here:

• Overview
• Remote Access
• Backups

Separately, the two products are already compelling choices for small businesses. […] continued

While we’re talking about the Kindle Fire, it’s worth noting one strange omission: the Kindle Fire does not have a built-in connection to Exchange mailboxes. The picture on the left shows all the built-in mail connectors: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and “other” (which covers POP3 and IMAP accounts). Where’s Exchange? (Or, as it’s quaintly known on Motorola Android phones, “Corporate.”)

Under the hood, a Kindle Fire is running a highly customized version of Google’s Android operating system. Android has always supported ActiveSync, the engine that drives the process of syncing with an Exchange mailbox. All Android phones and tablets can connect to an Exchange mailbox and sync mail, calendar, and contacts. […] continued

Small law offices have had few appealing options for case management and billing in the last few years. The only choices have been old warhorses that are showing their age badly, with interfaces that were obviously designed decades ago, and in some cases running on databases that are long obsolete. Amicus, Time Matters, Abacus, Timeslips, and the rest – quirky, tired, buggy (despite their decades of development), and increasingly unable to cope with new operating systems and new versions of other office software.

The landscape is finally changing. I’m going to call attention to several new programs and services for law firms and small businesses that look just grand. […] continued

This is likely to be a short-lived problem but perhaps knowing about it will help a few of you avoid some anguish.

PayPal sends email messages about transactions in your PayPal account – typical formatted HTML messages with a logo and a couple of images.

Starting on Wednesday, PayPal mucked up the code in its template for some of those messages, causing one of the image links to point to a nonexistent online location.

When Outlook tries to preview PayPal messages, there is a lengthy delay and Outlook displays “Not Responding,” as if it has crashed.

It’s not Outlook’s fault. After a minute – or two or five – the message is displayed and Outlook goes back to normal. […] continued

If all goes well, Mad Mimi is going to take over the mailing list for subscribers to Bruceb News. Here’s the story that led me to the odd logo on the left.

If you send an email message to more than 25 people, most of them won’t receive it. The message will be filtered as spam and tossed into a junk mail folder.

Vertical Response and Constant Contact have made a nice business out of handling mailing lists for businesses that send out email blasts regularly. When I’ve used them in the past, they had all the hallmarks of tools for big companies – lots and lots of options, infinite flexibility, complicated controls for layout and design, sophisticated analytics for judging the success of email campaigns, and much more. […] continued

It is increasingly necessary to send large file attachments by email. It continues to be a bad idea! It clogs up your mailbox and slows down your mail server and generates endless frustration when messages don’t arrive – but none of that matters. Businesses are creating larger and larger files and email is the way business is done, whether I like it from a technical perspective or not.

Microsoft has bowed to the inevitable and permits Office 365 subscribers to send up to 25Mb of file attachments to a single message. As businesses move to more recent versions of Exchange, mailbox size limits are slowly increasing at big and small companies. […] continued

Office 2007 introduced ribbons to replace menus in Word, Excel, and most of the other programs, much to the consternation of old-timers. Since then, Microsoft has adopted ribbons for almost all of its software; the sweeping redesign of the Office programs was completed when Outlook got its ribbon in 2010.

The ribbons in each of the Office 2010 programs are customizable. You can add buttons for all the commands that you reach for all the time – the ones you assume everyone else also uses constantly. (They don’t. You’d be amazed.)

Before you go too far, take a look at some free customized ribbons from Microsoft. […] continued

Microsoft Press has two quite useful books for you to download, absolutely free. The books are in PDF format, fully searchable and easy to read onscreen. (Don’t print them. It misses the point.)

The Windows 7 Power Users Guide by Mike Halsey is packed with illustrations and diagrams and guides that cover all the important Windows 7 features. It has the kind of busy page layout that you see in most kids’ textbooks now, bursting off the page with columns and sidebars and overlapping pictures and arrows and boldface type. (It must appeal to somebody.) Despite the “power user” title, it’s not particularly technical. […] continued

Previously:
The Problem Of Saving Email

Inspired by Small City Law Firm Tech
Saving Email – It’s Just the Right Thing To Do (Outlook – All Versions)
Simply the Best, Better than All the Rest – Saving Email in an Acrobat Pro Package

Email can be gathered on an ongoing basis into a single PDF file for each case. If a law firm or business puts together a system to save email regularly and convinces everyone to use it, the result is an up to date collection of all the communications relating to a case or project, gathered into a single file that is searchable and sortable, stored with the other related documents and scans for that case. […] continued