Small Biz IT

First NBN customer in SA : Broadband speed consistency makes fibre a winner

2011-07-04T14:00:00.004+10:00

If you thought that the National Broadband Network (NBN) currently being rolled out by the Australian Government would only help you download the latest Lady Gaga YouTube quicker you'd better be prepared to think again.

The NBN will completely change the way we think about working from home as it will offer staff the ability to easily work from home with both voice and data services without the current limitation of the poorly performing existing ADSL network.

In our office we currently use both voice and data service when working from home have seen the existing limitations first hand.

The following story appeared on the 28th June in ARN (Australian Reseller News) and explains the real benefit of the NBN to anyone wanting to work from home.

As quoted in the story "Download was recorded at 95.12Mbps and upload was shown to be 35.99Mbps through SpeedTest.net" that's a whopping 40 times improvement on an average ADSL connection download speed.

Read the story in full here First Internode NBN customer in SA: Broadband speed consistency makes fibre a winner

What I love about the Outlook Social Connector

2011-06-07T19:38:00.001+10:00

(This update is a repost from the Microsoft Office Blog written by Roby Kurian, Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Outlook) which shares my thoughts on using the Outlook Social connector.

I’ve been using the Outlook Social Connector for the last year with Office 2010. It’s a quick way to see the most recent interactions I’ve had with someone in a single place. I want to share what I’ve learned so you can get the most out of the Outlook Social Connector too.
The Outlook Social Connector is powerful and versatile — it can connect to SharePoint or social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn to bring activity feeds and photos into Outlook. One of the features that helps me most is seeing photos of people I work with. At Microsoft I often have meetings with colleagues who I’ve never met before. You might work in a similar situation if your company has offices located in many remote locations. It’s so amazing to walk into a crowded meeting and pick out the person I need to connect with out of a sea of unknown faces. The Outlook Social Connector brings photos from our SharePoint MySite, an internal social networking tool, into Outlook. Now when I’m collaborating with someone, I can put a face to the name. It brings a more personal and natural dynamic to the conversation.

The Outlook Social Connector People Pane appears under meeting requests I receive. Before I join a meeting, I’ll review the People Pane to familiarize myself with the names and faces of the meeting attendees.
I like the surprised look on people’s faces when I greet each of them by name and introduce myself. They’ll ask, “How did you know who’s who?” or “Have we met before?” I share my little secret; I think it helps more quickly establish a connection with my coworkers and get things done faster.
The Outlook Social Connector is also a big help when you interact with clients and partners. Recently, I was talking with a Microsoft partner in Australia who I’ve never met. Thanks to the Outlook Social Connector, I could see the photo she had posted on LinkedIn as part of her public profile.
After the introductions I said, “I can see the profile photo you posted on LinkedIn. Which city is that in the background?” We spent the next few minutes talking about the context of her photo and how the Outlook Social Connector works. She said that she was going to install the social network providers immediately after the call. It was a great way to start off the conversation with a casual chat that helped make a connection and led to a very productive call.
In another post, we shared with you many more ways the Outlook Social Connector can help you at work. What do you love about the Outlook Social Connector? Leave a comment and share your story.
--Roby Kurian
Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Outlook

Is facebook offline ?

2011-05-03T11:12:00.000+10:00

From time to time get calls from customers saying that their internet is down, when this happens we usually visit the service status page for that particular Internet Service Provider which normally lets us know if that ISP is having any service disruptions at the present time.

This saves us countless hours having to wait on hold only to be told "yes we know we currently have an outage"

However when this happens to a web based resource or cloud service it's usually a little more difficult to find what the story is.

Well now there is a website dedicated to showing the service status of the major cloud based services.

www.downrightnow.com is a site which simply lists major cloud resources such as Facebook, Gmail , Twitter, Youtube etc and will display along side the list any current service disruptions.

Take a look yourself and bookmark this page, perhaps next time someone says "if facebook offline?" you can reply with, well actually it is currently offline.

Microsoft Wired 600 Keyboard

2011-03-26T17:11:00.001+11:00

I mentioned in a previous post that my favorite keyboard is the Microsoft Wired 600 Keyboard, I thought I'd better explain why.

This particular keyboard has two key (pun intended) driving features behind my decision.

Price and lack of functions.

Price, at $19.95 it's priced amazing well for such a well built and great feeling keyboard. (You can also buy it bundled with a Microsoft Wired Mouse for $34.95)

Lack of functions, (yes that's right lack of functions) I often find that keyboards go over the top with extra keys, functions, zooms, sliders and gadgets. The Wired 600 simply adds a Play/Pause key, Volume up/down & mute keys plus a calculator key.

I personally find this lack of functions to be a major feature of this keyboard keeping it simple and straight forward, the wired USB connection is also a major plus as you'll never have to worry about the battery running out while your in the middle of writing that important email.

If your running a business I'd strongly recommended having a couple of boxes of the Wired Desktop 600 (that's the keyboard and mouse bundle) always on hand in your stationery cupboard and then when a new staff member starts simply replace the old dirty crumb filled keyboard with a new one for the new staff member.

iTunes doesn't play with Microsoft Keyboard

2011-03-26T16:23:00.014+11:00

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting at my keyboard reading away while iTunes plays into my headphones when my Son walks up to me and asks me something.

So I hit the Play/Pause key across the top of my Microsoft Wired 600 Keyboard (my favorite keyboard).

Nothing happens !! That's odd. Isn't this the sole purpose of this key, it's one and only task is to simply Play or Pause and for some reason it cannot even get this right.

Well after a little playing around I find that the Play/Pause key will correctly interact with iTunes only if iTunes is not minimized.

Surely we can get something as simple as a Play/Pause key to do what it's supposed to do.

After a little research I find that I'm not the only person to have pondered this particular oddity and I end up finding this little gem as a solution.

Download this small iTunes plugin file from this location
http://www.everythingitunes.com/os/windows/2008-01-04/mmkeysdll

Now simply copy this file to your iTunes plugin folder, for me this was located in
C:\Users\Nigel\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunes Plug-ins

Once you've copied the file, close and then reopen iTunes and that's it you're done the Play/Pause key should now do exactly what's it's designed to do Play and Pause.

Now what was it that my Son asked me ?