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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Co-Op sponsors CITRA
We’re pleased to announce that Co-Operative Systems has become a sponsor of CITRA, the fast-expanding, collaborative technology alliance. We are hoping that our involvement with CITRA will help improve the quality and appropriateness of IT services we offer to the sector, enable us to make new contacts and, where useful, enable us to share our knowledge and experience. Find out more
the wireless event
The "world's biggest wireless broadband show" is the claim made by The Wireless Event, now in its 4th year. Get to mingle with the Who's Who of Wi-Fi, and discover wireless broadband, VoIP and 3G data and content. All at Olympia, London on 17-18 May. Clicking on the "Register Now" section of the site gets a FREE entrance to the exhibition plus 2 seminars: "Wireless Networking for Enterprises" and "Converged Mobility".
www.thewirelessevent.com
Make your contact database work for you
This one day conference is a practical guide to planning, developing, purchasing and making contact databases work. The venue is Holloway Road, North London, on 16th May 2006, and is aimed at charities, community organisations and voluntary sector consortia. The cost is between £25 and £60 a place and is suitable for decision makers, senior managers and anyone with responsibility and accountability for the planning, purchase and use of a contact database. Visit www.paulticher.com/conference for registration.
The digital future according to ...
... leading exponents in the field. You can still listen in to web casts about a more secure digital future from key industry leaders like Mr. Microsoft (Bill Gates), Mr. Sun Microsystems (Scott McNealy) and Mr. RSA Security (Art Coviello). The keynotes will be available until mid-May after a brief registration process but the web cast downloads are otherwise free.
Web casts from RSA Conference 2006
Outsourcing to benefit most small businesses
Outsourcing is the future but small organisations don't spend enough time on strategy, says yet another report. Yankee Group's research shows that over three quarters of UK SMEs recognise that using an external service provider could benefit them with fewer IT staff, lower up-front costs and faster implementations.
www.yankeegroup.com
M$ discounts
A bevy of product discounts launched last month with Microsoft initiating promotions on many of their popular products. Notable offers are:
Every click counts
Find out more about Co-Operative Systems' corporate sponsorship of everyclick.
Internet Explorer beta 2 out now
IE7 Beta 2 is now available for general download. The new version boasts improved stability and a number of fixes relating to the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feed reader. Read the Microsoft Teams' RSS blogs and get the download from that page too.
Trojan hires mouse to enter bank horror
The discovery of a computer Trojan that captures not just key strokes but mouse clicks too came as a shock to financial institutions in Brazil. PWSteal-Bancos-Q is aimed at capturing snapshots of the mouse clicks of online banking customers to send the confidential info to the Trojan's author. However, security specialists are concerned that the technique will pave the way for a new breed of Trojan variants like previous screenshot snappers, making redundant the use of online banking virtual keyboards.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Office suite dreams
Is Microsoft Office out-of-office? Or is it back to basics? | ||
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One could be forgiven for thinking that there's not much left you could put into an office-style package. Even 10 years ago, purchasers of Word were bemoaning the amount of space eaten up by its installation, while astutely pointing out that 90% of people only used 10% of the features and, for the typing geeks and document layout propeller-heads, vice-versa. The average Microsoft Office suite - of which there are now half a dozen permutations based on Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Visio and Business Contact Manager to satisfy your enthusiasm and of course budget - packs in a whole ream more features than we saw in the 90s and established itself as the productivity suite de rigueur. However competitors haven't stood still and the ubiquity of a product, even an MS one, doesn't guarantee its share in the marketplace until the end of time. Rivals like OpenOffice.org 2.0, Sun's Star Office 8 and Corel's WordPerfect Office X3 have continually snapped at the heels of the gold medallist at this sport, and eventually in recent years, finding Microsoft's Achilles Heel: price. With OpenOffice.org just a download away and Star Office available with support for the equivalent of a couple of DVDs, where could new versions of Microsoft Office possibly go? Rumours that one day they will have to give it away remain just that, but in the meantime the eventually-to-be-released Office 2007 has gone back to its roots. The nervousness of organisations to make a switch between office software suites on the market stems heavily from relying on what they know, and this is where Microsoft have scored from the beginning: user-friendliness, a term which has since its inception has slowly passed into our language and then into our dictionaries. Yet if you put any office suite under the nose of a newbie - a complete computer beginner - you are suddenly taken aback by how many Microsoft skills we take for granted (What's a clipboard? How do I search for stuff? Why do green squiggly lines appear under some words?). By the look of the latest Microsoft Office 2007 beta, the concerns of these potential Office converts are being addressed - via new ribbon-style toolbars and explanatory pop-ups - and if it works, then that's a whole new paradigm on which to base computing interfaces. There's no doubt that users warm to any software that is easy to manipulate. To produce the results they expect, and elegantly at that, will have them reaching for their wallets even though the competition is giving it all away, and that's because the payback is perhaps a tangible period of hours or days away, not weeks or months. But the hardest test is to give an office suite to someone who hasn't learned anything about office suites yet. Perhaps your next software evaluation should be handed to a volunteer enevelope-stuffer. -IB- Paul Craig |
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2. Microsoft Office 2007 beta
A quick scan of features coming in the new Office suite. | ||
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You know when Microsoft is edging nearer to releasing a new product, because two things happen. Firstly, the industry starts muttering more excitedly about 'beta' versions and, secondly, the product codename changes to something friendlier or more logical. Both of these recent events herald the gradual, but impending appearance of Microsoft Office 2007, the suite-formerly-known-as Office 12.
What's in the box?With 4 server offerings and 13 programs arranged in 7 'flavours' (compendiums that mix-and-match the various programs, like Home and Student or Small Business Edition), there should be something to everyone's taste. You can see what is in each by looking at the 2007 Microsoft Office System Packaging table. What's on the menu? It's orrff love ...The most radical rethink on the Office interface is the appearance of a brightly-coloured 'ribbon' at the top of programs, mainly in the 2007 versions of Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook replacing the plethora of menus employed before. Smart tabs within the ribbon change according to the context and how often they are viewed or clicked by popping up appropriate tasks, though users vary in their acceptance of these dynamic menus, not dissimilar to current ones that can be turned on and off in Outlook, Word and also the Windows Programs menu. Some might find this reminiscent of an idea tried in in the old open source Star Office over 10 years ago and only time will tell how users adapt to the new ribbon menu. One can appreciate why this approach has been adopted when you consider that the original Word program used about 100 commands, while the latest Word 2007 runs to more than 1500 commands, which would translate to a lot of navigating with conventional menus. The lack of a drop-down File menu - replaced with an 'Office Button', perhaps echoing the Start button in Windows - is clearly a break with the past, but is intended to make it easier and quicker to get the results you want. Common cross-program tasks like saving a file or printing are easy to get to from icons in the Quick Access toolbar and keyboard shortcuts are still present too. Outlook 2007 beta now also benefits from the tabbed feature ribbon, for instance, in the email composition window. See it liveWith each new Office implementation, increasingly greater emphasis has been placed on layout and 2007 is no exception. The Live Preview feature shows immediately how a newly-selected font will affect the page and quick formatting capabilities do the same for styles, which now include a wide range of templates under Style Galleries. Another key theme that we'll hear more about in the coming months is collaboration; not that working together using computers is anything new, with the by-now-ancient track changes feature and today's Collaboration and reviewing tools in Office 2003, however, it's definitely moving towards the 'child's play' end of the spectrum rather than the 'chartered engineer' end. In this context, we see a Review tab which improves on the current Office 2003 process of editing by making it faster to locate Comment and Review tools. The spelling checker and the thesaurus tool are logically bundled here too in the same tab to aid the proofing stage and Research option look-ups link to texts at Encarta, Factiva, HighBeam Research and MSN Search (obviously a Microsoft-influenced thread there). Building on the success of old ideas like Babelfish, it seems Office 2007 will sport language-translation to complement its dictionary toolkit. Raiding the minibarCommonly-used formatting commands (highlighting text) are brought into a floating Mini Toolbar but this transparent apparition only hoves into view when you move a cursor over it. Another feature, somewhat like Tooltips that appeared when hovering over web links, are ScreenTips. These explain more details about features inside an application, so you know what effects you are trying to produce before getting stuck in. This kind of on-the-fly learning is a good thing and builds on a user's desire for information at the point of use and will resign the irritating Office help characters, like Clippy, to the stationery cupboard where they belong. Excel or fall behind?Some fairly run-of-the-mill operations seem to have undergone major but unnecessary changes, like deleting rows from the Sheet tab? And chart-dragging can't be performed by just grabbing the chart but only a corner. However Quick Styles allow new shapes to be brought in and WordArt helps make a chart more interesting, part of the new theme.PDF pleasureConverting files to Adobe's universal PDF format these days is becoming a given for any application and the quick PDF creation in MS Office 2007 lives up to that requirement taking just a few seconds, and is available from whatever part of the suite you are using. Contacts
-IB-
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3. CITRA - a growing resource for the voluntary sector
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CITRA, or the Charity IT Resource Alliance, is a rising collaborative technology alliance formed between eight key charity sector bodies to help improve access to relevant and trusted IT information, people and resources. With a combined membership of over 40,000 individuals and organisations it aims to benefit the whole of the not for profit sector in the UK. Co-Operative Systems is delighted to have joined CITRA recently as a sponsor, hoping to share its knowledge and experience with the charity sector. In its most public manifestation, CITRA is a web site based around modern 'community software', so that members can interact and discuss everyday solutions and problems encountered by the charity sector with regard to its use of Information Technology. But it's also much more than that. CITRA aims to be the leading IT information resource for the voluntary sector in order to enable charities to maximise the benefits of information, communication and technology. Accordingly, this exciting new virtual community let's you:
There's even a "How do I do stuff?" section, a Techie Things corner and a debating centre for 'Hot Issues'. Some relevant organisations are now beginning to bundle free membership so there are hidden benefits to be explored. A growing Resources directory rounds it all off by highlighting suppliers covering everyday areas such as Support, Software, Hardware, Networking, Consultancy, Web/Internet, Finance, Fundraising, Databases/CRM, Training and even Office Furniture. In common with most other community-based software, you get your own account that you can alter to show as many or as few personal details as you wish, plus the ability to configure when and how often to receive email notifications about parts of the site that change, for example, "tell me when new items appear in the Finance and Accounting Software section". Contacts
-IB-
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4. Broken broadband: knowing what to do next
Countless broadband customers who have suffered a disconnection get stuck into tinkering with their IT setup, without realising the fault is not theirs at all. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
There's nothing more frustrating than realising how much we depend on broadband Internet just at the point when the connection dies. And somehow that always happens at the moment when we need it most! Most people base their judgement of what to do next on their general (and perhaps less-than-rewarding) experience of computer reliability. So they plough into re-installing ADSL modem software or logging into the broadband router to re-configure it, when a few moments of easy diagnosis and information-gathering can save a lot of hair-pulling. How to diagnose what's wrong with your broadband It's not that difficult as there are broadly only 3 things that can go wrong:
On siteFirstly, many of us jump to conclusions and assume that it's our own fault because, a) Bernie was bumbling about in the server room rummaging for rewriteable DVDs, or b) Betty decided to re-organise the shelves that the ADSL router was sitting on. For most of the year however, the on-site equipment that handles networked broadband just sits there, quietly getting on with it. In the streetThe second stage at street-level too has been fairly static, though this beginning to change. The copper wires that convey your high-speed connection to the building have generally lain undisturbed under the pavements for years and will continue to pass data back and forth quite happily. At the ISPIncreasingly, faults appear at the 'far end'. ISPs are forced to upgrade their own equipment to keep up with consumer demand for ever faster Internet bandwidth. In the last year however, they have also been permitted to fit their own gear in local telephone exchanges, replacing BT's stuff or working alongside it, to guarantee end-to-end speeds for customers who subscribe to their services. This all adds up to twice as many boxes for ISPs (some of them relative newbies at telecoms) to keep tabs on. When you consider the possibilities for sticking an elbow or a screwdriver in another provider's equipment and the fact that some of the new technology is fairly leading edge, the margins for error get severely squeezed. So the short of it is, check all the lights on the broadband gear are on at your end, but don't spend hours doing it, because the chances are your ISP's service is down and a quick phone call to them will at least determine if they are experiencing problems, and perhaps a definite time when normal service will be resumed. Too often, the consumer is left rebuilding the configuration of their broadband router, with perhaps disastrous results, when all the time the line at the other end was dead. Prepare the ground now:
-IB-
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5. All that's fit to print: saving paper and consumables
Grab control of your printing costs. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
One of the first lessons we learn is that as soon as a new bit of technology arrives in the building, the next thing you know is that it becomes popular, then overused, then very expensive! Never was a truer word said of colour printers, or fast copiers. 
Now you can gain control of raging consumables costs and what's more, you can do it all from a PC. A.N.D. Technologies produce a copier control terminal that links into the network via an Ethernet socket associates itself with a network printer/queue object to allow ID- and PIN-secured printing by users on the network. This then makes it easy to track copies by client billing codes, and/or charge user account balances for copies made. The companion software programs - Pcounter 2.14a for Windows Pcounter 5.24a for NetWare - enable a variety of tracking functions on ordinary PCs and even counts pages on most major printing protocols including PostScript, PCL, Epson ESC/P, and support for TIFF file printing. Configurable pop-up windows which appear after print jobs at workstations, prompting users to enter client codes and job numbers, usernames and passwords for shared logon printer accounting, network passwords for printing security, or network group names. With logs of all print jobs safely stored on the collection PC, it's easy to compile stats on which printers get the most use (and thereby perform load-balancing based on maximum and minimum job sizes or page counts), which users and departments eat the most ink and paper, even down to separate pricing for colour and monochrome/greyscale print jobs. The system can even reject incorrect print job types to save that familiar situation where Postscript jobs sent to a non-Postscript printer spew out vast quantities of paper with one character on each page! ContactsContact us about installation.
-IB-
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6. Q&A: Removing the Windows logon screen
Question 
Hi Mark, We have two computers in our library that are only ever used for browsing the library catalogue. How do we get rid of the annoying login screen that Windows always displays? It's confusing for visitors and we continually have to give them a guest login. | ||
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Although the Windows login prompt is put there for security purposes under the assumption that every user will have their own profile, there are times such as this when the machine has just one purpose. Other examples are 'kiosk' PCs that are used only for web surfing - Internet cafe style - and don't touch the in-house network at all. Clearly you want your library computers to be ready for use just by switching them on, so that visitors can get on with research without bothering staff. Getting rid of the logon screen is not difficult, but you will need administrator-level access to make the change. In Windows XPHere's the Command Prompt method:
In Windows 2000Here's the graphical interface method:
This should save a lot of time with low-level support work for logins. -IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - Office Clipboard command options
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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