4 years into our business we are one of a handful of Dell Server Certified Partners in BC and now we’re Microsoft Gold Certified Partners as well.  With most of our clients so closely tied to Microsoft for their core infrastructure, it’s important that we foster an extremely close relationship with Redmond.  This relationship allows us to better serve our clients by being better able to support their core products.

1.  Windows Search.  Introduced in Vista, and refined in 7, Windows Search is a key feature of the new OS.

Snap is a quick (and fun) new way to resize open windows, simply by dragging them to the edges of your screen. Depending on which edge you choose—top or bottom, left or right—the window will expand vertically, fill the screen, or you can even position windows side by side. Snap makes reading, organizing, and comparing windows a...well, you get the picture.

3.  Live Taskbar Previews

With Windows 7, you can point to a taskbar icon to see actual images of all of your open files or programs. Then, move your mouse over the image to preview the window full-screen. Click on the full screen image, and you can start working with it immediately. You can even close windows from the thumbnail previews—a big time saver.

4.  Pin

In Windows 7, you can use pinning to make your PC work even more the way you want. One big improvement is the ability to control where your programs appear on your taskbar. Always want your web browser right next to the start button? Drag the icon where you want it, and it'll stay there till you move it. You can also pin your program icon to the taskbar, so it's there all the time. You can even pin specific documents and web sites to Jump Lists on your taskbar.

It must be hard for Microsoft each time they sit down to their “Ok, let’s figure out how we’re going to rebuild Office and sell a bajillion copies” meeting.  It’s already the giant among giants when it comes to Productivity Suites.  Apparently though, those meetings are pretty successful.  Office 2010’s Beta program saw 9,000,000 copies of the software downloaded.  Collectively, we added about 6 downloads to that number right here at Adaptive.  Huge.

That said, here are my top 5 favourite features of Office 2010.

1)      Vastly improved Copy / Paste functionality.  One of the things that would drive me crazy in previous versions was that there was no easy way to paste from the internet, without getting the internet formatting.  That’s all fixed!  Notice in the screenshot below that there is now an area in the right click context area that gives you “Paste Special” functions,like “Paste without Formatting”.

2)     Outlook got the ribbon!  This one is going to be a love it, or hate it feature.  If you loved the ribbon when it made its debuit in 2007, you’ll love it in Outlook.  If not…. Yeah, you’re not going to like it now.  Personally, I think it works well, and it’s nice to have uniformity.

3)     Easier Printing.  The print screen has been completely redone making it far simpler.

4)     Right click Contact Search.  I’m constantly wanting to phone someone after I receive an email and usually, I have to go look in my contacts to find their number.  Now, I just right click their name and start dialing.

5)     Improved Imaging.  (Shamelessly torn right from the Office website)  New and improved picture formatting tools, such as color saturation and artistic effects, let you transform your visuals into works of art. And a wide range of new customizable themes and SmartArt® graphic layouts offer more ways to make your ideas stick.

Forthcoming Hewlett-Packard printers that are priced at more than US$99 will let users print remotely using mobile phones and other wireless devices, without needing a traditional PC, the company announced on Monday.

By next year, more printing will be done from the Web than traditional PC-based word processing programs, a trend that has pushed HP toward developing Web-friendly printing services, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP's Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), during a press event in New York.

HP's Inkjet and Laserjet lines along with other consumer and enterprise-level printers will have the capability, called ePrint, to print from Web-connected devices. Joshi said customers would not pay a "premium" for ePrint.

Each printer with the ePrint capability will be assigned its own e-mail address. If someone wants to print a document from an iPhone, the document will go to HP's data center, where it is rendered into the correct format, and then sent to the person's printer. The process takes about 25 seconds.

The advantage for consumers is that the process does not involve a PC. No drivers have to be installed, Joshi said. The ePrint feature works with mobile devices from Apple, such as the iPad and iPhone, plus Palm, Android and Microsoft smartphone platforms. HP's technology holds a special advantage for iPad users since the device does not have native printing capabilities.

HP envisions scenarios where consumers send photos directly to a printing shop or use their printers -- some of which have scanning capabilities -- to scan documents and load them into Web-based productivity suites such as Google Docs. Those documents could then be accessed and printed by someone else using an HP printer's touchscreen interface.

The printers will also be able to support third-party applications. Live Nation, for example, will have a customized application to print items such as concert tickets and logistical information.

Google is also interested in Web-based printing and is working on Cloud Print, expected to be released by the third quarter. The feature will be designed to offer printer dialog interfaces for Web applications that let users send content directly to a printer over the Internet.

That is particularly important for Google, as it plans a third-quarter release for its Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system that will heavily rely on Web services.

"We want to make it easy for developers to add print capabilities to applications with just a few lines of code," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management for Chrome who spoke at the HP event.

For example, a PDF (Portable Document Format) file could be opened in a Web-based viewer such as Google Docs, which would have a printer dialog box embedded. The document could then be sent to a remote HP ePrint printer via its e-mail address.

HP is also pushing a service called Scheduled Delivery, where people can set up a daily feed of content that will be printed at a regular time, such as news content from msnbc.com or kids' activities from Disney.

Cloud-based services aren’t new. I wrote last month about Google’s attempt to take on Microsoft in the corporate e-mail market. Suffice it to say that Microsoft didn’t take that news well.

Having long been a certified Microsoft partner, we were pleased to find out about their entry into the cloud-based corporate e-mail market with the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. Microsoft is offering integrated Exchange 2007, SharePoint 2007, Live Communications Server 2007, And Office Communications Server for one per-user fee. These are the most commonly purchased software packages that we deploy. Roughly 70% of the clients that we have use Microsoft Office with Microsoft Exchange Server, and because of that have to worry about all the head-aches including purchasing licenses, hardware, managing the backups, deployment, downtime, and maintenance. In a cloud environment, you let Microsoft take care of all of those things.

The benefits go way beyond that though. Microsoft has enterprise-level spam and antivirus filtering that gets added to your mail system. Their servers span the globe so that no one outage can bring you down. They guarantee a 99.9% uptime on all their systems which calculates out to less than 53 minutes down per year. Their infrastructure synchronizes with your infrastructure, so there’s no hassle getting set up. Using their system there’s no need for things like SSL certificates, that can run a few hundred dollars per year. Their systems are already setup to synchronize with iPhone’s and other ActiveSync devices. And finally, because you’re using Microsoft’s servers, there’s no tether to your office. All of these systems will link through single sign-on application that can be put on any Windows machine in the world.

Oh yeah, you get free Microsoft tech support if something goes wrong too…

Right now, the only catch is that the Microsoft service doesn’t synchronize with Blackberries. Certainly prospective users would be able to download their mail to their phones, but Blackberries won’t automatically synchronize calendars or contacts with the Microsoft service. Those of you on iPhones, Android devices, or Windows 7 mobile phones need not worry as they will work seamlessly.

The cost of the service is about $12 per user, per month. For a network of 25 users, the actual cost works out to $3,792 per year. That cost is roughly 1/4 of what it would cost to implement an adequate server with all the licensing included for the same office. Considering the cost of deploying and maintaining your own servers, the total cost of ownership on the Microsoft online service is very aggressive.

As always, post in the comments or send me an e-mail with any questions you might have.

Ian

At as far as your social networks go…  Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, MySpace, Blogspot and a thousand others.  If you’re a writer, or maybe you use social networking in your business to keep your customers up to date, you know that it’s a pain to have to update several different sites with your content.  Wouldn’t it be magic if you could just send an email to one place, and it would update all of the aforementioned sites?  Enter, posterous.com.  We’ve been using posterous for a couple months now, and it is nothing short of magic.  I send an email to post@posterous.com with the content of my blog post, and voila!, it updates our blog, our Facebook page, our Twitter, and my personal LinkedIn page. 

So if you’re like me, and want to keep your content fresh, and consistent, check out posterous.com.  If you need a hand setting it up, feel free to drop me a line in the comments.

Bye-Bye Anna Kournikova!  It’s been ages since someone told us that they got a virus on a computer by opening an email someone sent them.  For the most part, computer users have figured out what emails they can safely open, and what’s a hoax.  Thankfully, it seems that email hackers can’t spell, and that usually tips us off…

But there’s a new breed of cyberpunk, and this one is outright criminal.

Fake antivirus programs which trick the unwary of their hard earned money are among the fastest growing threats in cyber space. 

According to a report by Kasperksy Lab called “Rogue Antivirus: A Growing Problem”, there are now more than 30,000 programs that pretend to be anti-virus programs spreading across the Internet, with between 10 to 20 new rogue programs being discovered every day.  This is in comparison to only 3,000 such rogue programs in the first half of 2008.

According to the author of the report, Mr Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, senior malware analyst with Kaspersky Lab, these rogue antivirus programs are increasingly popular with cybercriminals.

“The massive increase in the number of rogue antivirus programs suggest this is a very profitable business for cyber criminals.  The scare tactics they use increase the likelihood of success.”

“The rogue antivirus can be downloaded onto a user’s computer by Trojan-Downloader or it can come from visiting an infected website.”

“More often than not these programs are downloaded by the users themselves.  Cyber criminals use Hoax programs or adverts to trick users into doing this.  Hoax programs are a type of fraudware designed to persuade users they need to download a particular antivirus solution which will be installed on the victim’s machine even if the user declines the offer”.

“The unsuspecting user is then warned that their computer is under threat and told they need to pay money for the solution.  But the solutions are bogus, and the user gets nothing and the criminal the money,” Mr Zakorzhevsky said.

A huge percentage of the viruses that we remove are of this “fraudware” nature.  Here are some tips to avoiding them.

1)      Know the brand of antivirus software you have on your computer.  If you get a notification from an apparent antivirus program that you’re not familiar with, assume it’s a fraud.

2)      Close “fraudware” with the Task Manager (opened by hitting ctrl-alt-del), or by right clicking the icon down in the task bar.  Quite often clicking anywhere in the window of the “fraudware” is enough to install it.

3)      Note the website you were trying to get to when you were presented with the “fraudware” and avoid it in future.  It’s been hacked.

Several of our clients received this notification from Microsoft today, so we thought we'd make you all aware of it.

As you may be aware, there are a number of Microsoft products which will go out of support during the coming year. We want to help your business avoid the risk of running unsupported products in your environment and to assist with IT planning for 2010. The purpose of this communication is to remind you about our lifecycle policy and timelines, highlight the implications, and outline available options to mitigate these risks. 

What's the situation?

· Both Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000 are approaching 10 years since their launch and both products will go out of Extended Support on July 13, 2010.

· Windows XP was launched back in 2001. While Extended Support for the latest Windows XP Service Pack 3 continues until 2014, Service Pack 2 will go out of support on July 13, 2010. From that date onwards, Microsoft will no longer support or provide free security updates for Windows XP SP2.

· Windows Vista RTM support ends on April 13, 2010.

If any of these products will continue to be used in your environment after July 13, your company may be exposed to potential risks. 

What are the potential risks?

· Unsupported and unpatched environments are more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Microsoft provides free security patches for supported products, but not for unsupported products.

· Problem resolution services are provided for supported products. In the event that you encounter an issue/outage in your environment on an unsupported product, our engineers may not be able to help resolve this until you've upgraded to a supported level.

What are the available options?

1. Upgrade to the latest supported version

a. For Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP1 & SP2 - We recommend upgrading to the latest Windows Operating System, Windows 7, or alternatively upgrading to the latest Windows XP Service Pack, SP3. This is an ideal opportunity to take advantage of the new features of Windows 7 to improve security, end user productivity and supportability. Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor will help you determine if your current PC is ready for an upgrade to Windows 7. In addition until April 30, 2010 you can get Windows 7 Professional at an approximate 15% discount off the regular price of Open License, Open Value, Select, and Select Plus. For more information click here.

b. For Window Vista RTM - We recommend upgrading to Windows Vista Service Pack 2 or migrating to Windows 7.

c. For Windows Server 2000 - We recommend upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2 or migrating to Windows Server 2003 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 offers many advantages, particularly in the areas of security, manageability and virtualization. If you're interested in learning more about how our infrastructure technologies can help optimize your current environment and processes, we are offering complimentary infrastructure workshops delivered by Certified Microsoft Partners. To request a complimentary workshop, please click here (for English) or here (for French).

2. Remain on unsupported version - Accept the risk of no security patches and no problem resolution support for these products running in your environment.

Where can you find more information?

For more detailed information on resources and tools, please visit the Windows Server 2000 and Windows XP End of Life Solution Centres.

Full details of the product support lifecycle are available on the Microsoft website: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle

In order to mitigate the risks to your business, please do not hesitate to contact your Microsoft Partner to discuss your options in greater detail.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback.