bruceb news

  Microsoft is now completely out of the accounting software market, following Friday’s announcement that it is dropping all of its remaining Office Accounting products.

At one time it appeared that Microsoft was going to be a player in accounting software for small business. It created overlapping products – “Small Business Financials,” “Small Business Accounting,” “Microsoft Office Accounting” – and claimed to be fully committed to staying in for the long haul. By the end of last year, it had killed all but the Office Accounting line, and that was already looking a little shaky.

On Friday, Microsoft bailed out completely, essentially conceding that Quickbooks cannot be dislodged as the owner of the entire market for small business accounting. […] continued

Here’s an Outlook feature that was new to me – there’s a way to overlay two Outlook calendars.

It’s becoming common for people in small businesses to share Outlook calendars. It’s easy if you have an Exchange mailbox in a business with Small Business Server or a mail system run by Microsoft Online Services.

Sharing your calendar is as simple as clicking on “Share My Calendar” to generate an email message with a link that automates the process.

When you open a shared calendar, it opens side-by-side with your own calendar. The checkboxes at the left make it easy to view your own calendar, the shared calendar, or both calendars side-by-side. […] continued

Microsoft Security Essentials, free antivirus and anti-malware security software from Microsoft, is now available from the MSE web site.

Click here for the Microsoft press release, or click here for more information about Microsoft Security Essentials.

If you want to switch from another security program, remember to uninstall any existing security software before installing Microsoft Security Essentials. You never want more than one antivirus program running on your computer.

I will be in touch with my clients soon to advise about this move and assist if necessary.

Microsoft will soon release Microsoft Security Essentials, free antivirus and anti-malware software for computers running Windows 7, Vista, or Windows XP. It is simple to install, effective, requires no attention, and uses almost no system resources. It is completely free – no registration, no login, no advertising for a “Pro” version.

DOWNLOADS  This is the website for Microsoft Security Essentials. I’ll let you know when you can download it. One reliable source says it will become generally available later today; an email sent to beta testers over the weekend said it would be made available within the next few weeks. […] continued

Microsoft has had aggressive prices for college students for years. Today it announced that college students can buy Windows 7 Home Premium for $29.99.

It’s all part of the marketing that is ramping up for the Windows 7 launch on October 22. It’s probably not a coincidence that the deal for students was announced shortly after Apple picked the same price, $29, for the “Snow Leopard” service pack that was released with great fanfare three weeks ago. Windows 7 is getting a warm response from almost everyone who tries it; it may be a good opportunity for Microsoft to regain some mind share in dormitories and classrooms. […] continued

[Disclaimer: This tip addresses a specific issue. If you’re not faced with this issue, don’t follow these instructions.]

In many offices, some programs are installed from a mapped network drive or require access to a mapped drive as part of installing the program. The setup program starts, the installation goes part of the way, and then puts up a dialog box for one reason or another asking where the mapped drive is.

And I’ll be damned, the mapped drive has disappeared. No N: drive or K: drive or whatever was there a moment ago.

It’s not gone. You can click on Start / Computer and see the drive just fine. […] continued

Trying to help a very small business decide on technology that will last for 5-10 years has always been an interesting challenge, and the choices are completely different now than they were just a few years ago. Small Business Server 2003 was an obvious choice for a long time but Small Business Server 2008 is only one of many possibilities now, and I’m frequently recommending alternatives, especially for businesses with 4-10 computers where SBS 2008 might be overkill.

Microsoft has quietly released an interesting product, Windows Foundation Server 2008, and I’m not sure yet where it fits in. It is a fully functional version of Windows Server 2008, which is a very solid platform indeed. […] continued

Many of you – most of you – will get the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on your next computer, so you can use more than 4Gb of RAM. Even if you don’t buy more memory than that at first, you’ll want the comfort of knowing you can add more later. You’ll recall that many devices that connect to the computer (printers, scanners, etc.) will need a new driver specifically written for a 64-bit operating system. Fortunately, those are becoming widespread and many of them are included with Windows.

Setting up the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on my fairly new Dell Dimension 9200 was a piece of cake – time-consuming but not because of anything having to do with its 64-bitness. […] continued

When I upgraded my office computer to Windows 7, I installed a new hard drive and left the original hard drive in the case as a second drive. That’s the easiest way to make sure that no files are left behind during the upgrade, since they can be copied into place from the old drive.

It also makes it easier to handle last-minute glitches. When I needed quick access to the system as it was before the upgrade, I could accomplish that in just a few seconds: I shut down the computer, unplugged the SATA cable from the new hard drive and plugged it into the old hard drive, and just that easily, the computer was firing up Windows from the old hard drive – from its perspective, nothing had changed from what it had been. […] continued

Fujitsu introduced a new compact office scanner, the ScanSnap S1500, a few months ago. It’s inexpensive for what it does ($450 or less), and quite fast – 20 pages per minute for single-sided pages, 40 pages per minute for two-sided pages. It produces nice PDF files in a hurry from a 50-page document feeder. On top of all that, it’s stylish. A nice little package!

My client called because the scanner software appeared to have installed correctly but the scanner didn’t show up in Acrobat as a source to create a PDF. One of the strengths of Acrobat 8 and 9 is that they take over the scanning process, hiding the proprietary controls provided by the scanner manufacturer so the scanning process is consistent no matter what scanner is used. […] continued