If you are using Internet Explorer and Windows 7, you may have noticed that when you mouse over an IE browser window, a preview of the open tabs in the browser is shown. While this is useful to give you an idea of the sites you have open, it can get annoying if you have multiple tabs open at the same time. If you would prefer to disable this feature, you can.

Just go to Tools > Internet Options (in the upper right-hand corner of the browser) and then click on the “Settings” button in the window that pops up. In the list of Tabbed Browsing Settings, uncheck “Show previews for individual tabs in the taskbar.” Click on OK and you should be good to go.

A very useful feature in Microsoft Office is called “AutoRecover”, which automatically saves your document at specified time intervals so that in case of an application or system crash, Office can recover its latest version.

By default this is set to 10 minutes, but you can change this easily by clicking on the Office button within the application, and then clicking on the “Word Options” or “Excel Options” (or other application) button in the lower right hand side of the window. Go to the “Save” section and look for “Save AutoRecover information every…” and change the settings there. Be sure to click “OK” to save your preference. A word of caution: setting the interval at very short timespans such as every 1 minute can slow down your computer with frequent writes to the hard disk. Try a number between 5 minutes to 10 minutes first.

Leaving your computer for a short time but don’t want anyone peeking at your desktop or files? Simply lock it. When you lock your desktop, anyone who wants to use it will have to log in using their username and password.

One way to do this is to press Ctrl+Alt+Del and then click on “Lock Computer.” A quicker way is to press the Windows logo key and the L key.

With Microsoft’s move to transition users to the newer Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 platforms through XP support discontinuation announcements, it may be high time to start thinking of an upgrade – and how you can execute it efficiently and cost effectively.

One of the standard expectations when using technology is the inevitable need to change and upgrade. Technology moves forward on the principle that things that already seem great can be made even better – and more often than not, the improvements are worth the change.

This principle applies to the operating system and SMB platform you may be using now. While it may have served you well so far (after all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it, right?), that doesn’t mean that things can’t get any better – and in a measureable way that improves your productivity. With systems like Windows 7 (which isn’t exactly ‘new’, since it’s been around for a good while) and Windows 2008 R2 gaining ground in the market and proving their worth, it may be time to start thinking about moving up and upgrading your current software.

Here are some thoughts to start the ball rolling: studies and tests have shown that Windows 7 and 2008 R2 outperform their predecessors in almost every conceivable situation. And considering Microsoft’s recent announcement that they will discontinue support for Windows XP by 2014, the possibility of needing to upgrade becomes more pressing. Like it or not, you will eventually get left behind as technology marches on.

Of course, we realize that it’s not as simple as waving a magic upgrade wand and that’s that. It’s important to understand the way you do business in order to accurately assess how an upgrade will affect your operations. So please contact us and we’ll be happy to sit down with you and find ways to implement an upgrade in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.

Will the Windows Desktop PC become extinct? Is it going the way of the dinosaur? Are we seeing the beginning of an era in which a new wave of devices and operating systems will dominate the computing world? Read on and weigh in with your thoughts.

Last year, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, proclaimed the beginning of what he called the “post-PC” era. This, just after news of stellar numbers for Apple, surpassing Microsoft in market valuation for the first time in recent history—largely on the back of strong sales from its iPhone and iPad computing devices, threatening to displace the market for traditional desktop PCs according to many analysts. In some ways this is an ironic turn of events, considering that it was this same CEO and company that ushered in the PC era to begin with, more than thirty years ago.

But in that era, it was really the IBM PC that was the iconic symbol of that period. In August of this year, the IBM PC celebrated its 30th anniversary, which was introduced nearly five years after the arrival of Apple’s own desktop devices. But again in an interesting turn events, for nearly twenty of those thirty years, it was actually Microsoft and Intel, and not IBM, that reaped the benefits of the success of the PC device. It was Microsoft’s Operating System and Intel’s chips which earned the lion’s share of profits from the rise of the Desktop PC, not the manufacturers and assemblers. And as PCs decline as Steve Jobs predicted they will, this has prompted even the largest PC manufacturers such as HP to reassess their future.

But is the PC truly dead, if not dying? Even one of the IBM PC’s original inventors thinks so. In an interview with IBM Executive Mark Dean, who was one of the IBM PC’s original engineers, he predicts a day when the desktop PC will go the way typewriters did when desktop PCs came along. They will still be around for several years, he says, but in the future people will primarily use handheld or mobile PCs for work and play.

That may be true, but the future is not here yet. Earlier, Microsoft gave a statement that it still expects over 400 million desktop PCs running its operating system to ship this year—a business well worth over $19 billion dollars for the company. There are still several things that a Desktop PC, in particular those running Windows, can do better than handheld or mobile devices today, such as:

1. Running business applications. Although many applications may be moving to the cloud, many business-critical applications such as accounting and financials, operations, project management, and customer management still require a Windows PC.
2. Content creation. Have you ever tried to create a blog post, edit a photo, or animate or render a movie from a tablet? It may be possible but it’s still not easy—even for the pros. Most will still be doing their work on desktop workstations for still several years in the foreseeable future.

Do you agree? Are we in the beginning of a post-PC era or do you think it will be a PC-plus era as Microsoft believes? Weigh in and let us know!

In Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, you can set an animation to trigger when you click on an object. This is a simple way to add and control interactivity to your presentation. To add an animation trigger, select an object that already has animation applied to it.

On the “Animations” tab, in the “Advanced Animations” group, click “Animation Pane” and then select the animation that you want to trigger. Back in the Advanced Animation group, click and hold on “Trigger” and select “On Click of” and select the object for which you wish to trigger the animation when clicked.

With Windows 7, there are easier and faster ways to rename multiple files in one sweep. The first way is to click on a file’s name and rename it as usual, then press the “Tab” key to access the next file in the list.

Another way is to select multiple files (press the Ctrl key or Shift key and select the desired files), then right click on the first file and choose “Rename” to give it a new name. The rest of the files will be renamed with the same name. For example, if you name the first file “image”, it will become “image (1)” followed by “image (2)” and so on.

Microsoft has introduced into the market a nifty little cloud-based service called Microsoft Office 365 that allows users / subscribers to have access to Microsoft products without the hassle of needing to update and maintain software. Since it’s also in the cloud, it offers additional advantages to those who work on the go.

Small businesses now have the option to subscribe to a new service from Microsoft called Office 365. A cloud-based service that offers a particular set of Microsoft products based on different plans, Office 365 is designed to be a more manageable and cost effective means for smaller businesses to enjoy all the advantages of using Microsoft products without worrying about software maintenance and updates all the time.

Included in Office 365 are the set of Microsoft Office desktop applications as well as Microsoft’s Server products (hosted versions) which include Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync Server. All these are delivered and accessed through the Internet.

Depending on the needs of a particular organization, Office 365 offers several plans companies can subscribe to. Whether you are a mid-sized business with an internal or partner-supported IT arm, or a smaller one completely without dedicated IT staff, or even an educational organization, there is an Office 365 plan (plus add-ons) for you. Office 365 can also be accessed virtually anywhere and with any device, which allows for maintained or even increased productivity because of the ability it affords the user to work when on the go.

If you want to know more about how Office 365 can improve your business or organization, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. We’ll be more than happy to discuss the impact of Office 365 – both short term and long term – on the way you do business.

Read more about our Microsoft Office 365 services.

In Windows, there are various options for configuring the speed, look, and behavior of your mouse pointer to exactly the way you want it.

To do so, click the Start button, and then click Control Panel. Click Hardware and Sound, and then under Devices and Printers, click Mouse. In the Mouse Properties box, click on the Pointers and Pointer Options tab, and adjust the options to change the shape and size of your cursor by changing the “scheme”. In the “Pointer Options” tab, you can change the speed, visibility, and other characteristics of your pointer. You can add pointer trails, automatically snap the pointer to buttons and dialog boxes, and so on. These settings are especially handy when using small screens such as on laptops or netbooks.

For companies interested in trying out cloud-based services, email maybe something worth trying. Here’s a breakdown of two options from two industry giants that may be worth considering.

Google Apps
Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space.

1. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability—Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages—potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service.
4. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important.
5. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android.

Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology.

Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new—being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier.

1. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business.
4. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them—they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook.
5. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices—specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones.

Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance—this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with.

Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.