bruceb news

Sometimes it seems as if we’re making progress against spam. Spam filters have improved and we don’t bother to check the Junk Mail folder any more because we know it’s all junk. Oh, sure, some crud gets through to the Inbox from the bad guys but on the whole complaints about spam have dropped way down.

But anyone with a blog knows that blog spam is flourishing.

A bit of background, then I’ll tell you why I’m so proud of Bruceb News.

WordPress is the dominant platform for websites with blogs, running more than 60 million websites worldwide. Here’s some information about WordPress if you’re not familiar with it. […] continued

Previously:
The Difference Between A Microsoft Account And An Office 365 Account
Understanding Skydrive, Part 1: Skydrive vs. Skydrive Pro
Understanding Skydrive, Part 2: The Basics
Understanding Skydrive, Part 3: The Microsoft Office Connection

Microsoft has steadily improved sharing in Skydrive. Among other uses, it has become one of the easiest and most attractive services to use for sharing photos, and it is one of the best ways to deal with files that are too large to email.

The basics:

–  You can share any file or photo in Skydrive with just a couple of clicks from the Skydrive web site, from your computer, or directly from Office 2013. […] continued

Previously:
The Difference Between A Microsoft Account And An Office 365 Account
Understanding Skydrive, Part 1: Skydrive vs. Skydrive Pro
Understanding Skydrive, Part 2: The Basics

Skydrive has become more compelling for business users because it is integrated with Office (Word / Excel / Powerpoint) in two ways:

–  Documents can be opened and saved in Skydrive directly from Office programs.

–  Office documents in Skydrive can be viewed and edited online in a web browser with Office Web Apps, web-based versions of the Office programs that are 100% compatible with Office file formats.

THE DOMINANCE OF MICROSOFT OFFICE

Microsoft Office is installed on more than 1 billion PCs. […] continued

Previously:
The Difference Between A Microsoft Account And An Office 365 Account
Understanding Skydrive, Part 1: Skydrive vs. Skydrive Pro

Skydrive lets you store files online and access them from anywhere, including PCs, Macs, and mobile devices. There are some good reasons to begin using it as the primary location for saving all of your files and pictures.

SKYDRIVE WEB SITE

Go to http://skydrive.live.com.

If you’re not signed in already, then sign in with your Microsoft account.

You will likely see some folders – by default, there are folders for Documents, Pictures, and Public. If not, create Documents and Pictures folders by clicking Create / Folder. […] continued

Skydrive is Microsoft’s service for storing files online and accessing them from any device. It is quickly becoming a core service for every Windows user, as important for you to understand as any program on your computer.

Skydrive is simple and flexible, it’s free, and it’s secure and reliable. Microsoft will give you a generous amount of storage space for your files. You can share them easily with others, making it the best way to share files that are too large to email. Skydrive is becoming more visible now as Microsoft builds it into the Office 365 service and Office 2013 programs (Word/Excel/Powerpoint/OneNote). […] continued

Office 365 is in the middle of a major upgrade. Many small business subscribers have already been upgraded and Microsoft intends to have all subscribers upgraded in the next few months. Hosted Exchange mailboxes are being upgraded to new servers running Exchange 2013; it doesn’t change the day-to-day experience of using Outlook but there are some improvements in webmail that are worth knowing about.

Outlook Web App (OWA), the webmail component of Office 365’s hosted Exchange mailboxes, got a lot of attention from the Exchange 2013 designers. It resembles Outlook 2013 visually, with a simplified interface, lots of white space, and flat controls. […] continued

We’re right in the middle of a perfect technology storm, a wild ride that makes the last twenty years look tame. A recent article about law office practice management programs will serve as an example but the principle is true in every area for every kind of business.

The storm is caused by a platform shift from computers to mobile devices. For business people, the small devices are largely a complement to the traditional reliance on computers, but there is an increasing urgency to the desire for business information to be available on phones and tablets. There are statistics here: 89% of lawyers are using a smartphone for law-related tasks outside the office, and using them for more than just calendar checks – most of the attorneys specifically claim to be using practice management apps. […] continued

Microsoft finally rolled out an updated calendar to Outlook.com this week, matching the modern look of the other parts of the service that were introduced last year – mail and contacts for Outlook.com and Hotmail mailboxes, and Skydrive for anyone with a Microsoft account.

Although Outlook.com was introduced in August, and Microsoft proudly announced that it was “final” in February, the calendar has been stuck with a dated Windows Live interface for seven long months. It’s not clear why it took so long to deliver this update to the calendar. Frankly it looks like a project that a smart intern should have been able to knock out in a month or two. […] continued

I’m leaving Google.

Oh, not completely. I’ll still use Google for searches and maps. I’m not crazy.

But I’m extricating myself from the Google walled garden as much as possible.

It’s about simplicity.

Some people have privacy concerns about Google, which collects more information about us than any other single data collector on the planet. Google has smart people working very hard to mine that data and use the conclusions to present ever more targeted advertising. That doesn’t worry me very much. My life is simple and open. Targeted ads aren’t creepy. In my view, since we’re going to be shown targeted ads anyway, it would only be a good thing if they were better – targeted more precisely based on better data. […] continued

Google Street View is one of the wonders of the world. I know you normally would never use your computer to kill time browsing the Internet but really, you should spend an hour looking around the world to discover what the Google Street View team is doing.

Google Street View is the feature of Google Maps that gives you a street-level 360-degree view driving up and down roads all over the world. When you drag the little man from the upper left on Google Maps, roads that have been photographed turn blue. Drop the man onto one of the roads and the display shifts to the panoramic photos. […] continued