Here are 5 reasons (courtesy of SharePoint for Project Management guru Dux Raymond Sy) why SharePoint 2010 will revolutionize your business: Blog post on CMS Wire

1. Buy a good-quality business PC from a reputable manufacturer. Dell, Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo all make high-quality business PCs. Make sure that it has at least 2 GB of memory (RAM) and a dual-core processor. If you need to do much in the way of editing photos, music or video, you will need more memory, processor power and graphics performance than a standard office PC. The advantages of getting a quality business system are many. Firstly, there will be little or none of the junk software found on home PCs. Secondly, they will be made using better quality components, that are made to run all day and all night. Finally, The Professional version of the Windows operating system gives you much-improved networking capabilities; well worth having, unless you’re sure you’re only ever going to have one PC in your business.

2. Get a light, fast security suite that gives you good protection but doesn’t slow the computer down. Having researched antivirus software thoroughly, we know that you can get effective protection from a fast, simple, reliable program.

3. Don’t run the CD that came with your printer or camera unless you really need to. If you have Windows 7 on your PC, just switch on your printer or camera and plug it into the computer with the USB cable. There’s every chance that Windows 7 will install it all by itself (the computer should be connected to the Internet at the time, so Windows can download any software it needs). Once the device is installed, you can use Windows’ own Scanner and Camera wizard to transfer pictures from your scanner or camera to the computer. If you don’t have Windows 7, or you have a device from an obscure manufacturer that Windows doesn’t recognise, here’s a tip. You will have to use the manufacturer’s CD to make your printer/scanner work, but look for a custom installation option that installs the essential software (drivers) only.

4. When you get a new broadband router from your ISPs, try just plugging it in and see what happens. Many ISPs, including the ones with the awful TV ads, send their routers out pre-configured, so there’s no need to install or configure anything at all on your PC. You might just need to restart it.

5. Try not to install any software you don’t need. The more programs you install, the slower the computer will get, and the greater the chance of two programs conflicting with each other. If you have Windows 7, you can set up your new PC with just the programs that you know are essential (antivirus and MS Office suite may be enough for many people). When these are installed and working perfectly, you can make a system image – a perfect copy of the entire system and its programs. If you need to experiment with some other programs, you can use the system image to restore your PC to its clean, perfectly working state, without having any debris from test programs left over. Do remember to make a separate backup of your data before you do this, however; the system image overwrites everything on your hard disk.

What’s new for users of Office 2003 or older

If you currently use Office 2003, or an even older version such as XP (2002) or 2000, you’ll notice a huge difference. The user interface has been completely overhauled. Roughly speaking, older versions of Office had numerous menus and one toolbar, whereas Office 2010 (like Office 2007) has one menu and numerous toolbars. Nearly all the commands are now found on a big toolbar called the Ribbon. Different tabs allow you to change the commands shown on the Ribbon. To get an idea of what the new Office programs look like and how to use them, see Microsoft’s online video guide to getting started with Word 2010: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word-help/acquaint-yourself-with-the-ribbon-RZ101816356.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HA010370239§ion=2 Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010 also use the new file formats that came in with Office 2007. If in the last 3 years you’ve been sent a Word Document, Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation that you couldn’t open, chances are it was in the new format. The Office 2010 programs will allow you to save files in either the old format (for maximum compatibility) or the new format (to take advantage of new features such as graphical effects in pictures, Word Art etc). You can also use Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010 to save directly to pdf format.

What’s new for users of Office 2007

If you already have Office 2007, you won’t notice such a major difference. Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010 look very similar to their 2007 equivalents. There are some nice new features, however. Word has an improved Document Map, that makes it easier to navigate around big documents with many sections, while Excel has sparklines, mini-graphs that fit into a single cell to show trends in data. Backstage View is an extended File menu in all programs, filling the whole application window, that gives you easy access to options for saving and printing (e.g. Print Preview) and others. It’s also possible to customise the Ribbon, so you can remove a command you never use and replace it with one that you need frequently. All the applications now use the Ribbon interface exclusively, so things like Publisher and OneNote that had stuck with menus in 2007 now have the new interface. Outlook, which in 2007 was part-Ribbon and part-menus, now has the Ribbon for the main window as well as sub-windows such as emails or tasks.

Should I upgrade?

If you already have Office 2007, upgrading to 2010 will bring you some small but nice new features, though it’s hard to justify the expense unless you need to buy additional copies of Office for more computers, or a more advanced version of the suite to get extra programs. If you’re still using Office 2003 or earlier, we’d say yes, you should definitely upgrade. Whilst Microsoft have released an add-in that lets you read and edit the new Office 2007/2010 format files, you may lose something in translation. A professionally formatted 2007/2010 document or spreadsheet may be turned into a most unprofessional-looking one if edited and saved by an earlier version of Office, which is unable to reproduce the new formatting effects. Additionally, nearly all computer programs, from Microsoft and other manufacturers, are adopting the new Ribbon interface. There’s no getting round this, you’ll have to learn to use it sooner or later. Naturally, we’re happy to provide training and assistance when you take the plunge.

How can I buy it?

There are three ways to buy Office 2010:

1. As a key card which activates a trial version that you installed yourself, or that came with your new computer. We don’t recommend this; it’s only very slightly cheaper than buying the full version with installation CD, but it’s limited to one computer and one computer only.
2. As a boxed CD. This is the best way for small businesses of up to 5 people. The licence allows you to install the software on one desktop and one laptop PC, provided they’re both used by the same person. You can also transfer it from your old PC to a new one.
3. Volume Licensing. For business with more than 5 PC users, Microsoft can give you a company licence which simplifies the process of installing Office on multiple machines. Please ask us for details.

Which version should I buy, and how much will it cost?

There are different versions of the Office 2010 suite, offering more or fewer individual programs. For most small businesses, the “Home and Business” edition will be ideal. It includes Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The suite costs £204 ex VAT (£240 inc VAT) if bought direct from Microsoft.

Office 2010 Professional includes all the programs in the Home and Business suite, plus Publisher and Access. It’s a lot more expensive at £366 ex VAT (£430 inc VAT). If you just need on of the extra programs, it may be cheaper to buy this separately, and then get the Home and Business Suite. The “Home and Student” version of Office 2010 is ideal for home use, as it costs only £110 inc VAT and can be installed on 3 computers, but please note that it doesn’t include Outlook, and is only licensed for non-commercial use.

Office 2010 Starter Edition is a very basic version that comes free with new PCs. It consists of simplified versions of Word and Excel; that’s it. It’s probably not enough to run a business with, but it’s certainly a good way of trying Office 2010 out.

If you have any questions about Office 2010, Solutions Shared are happy to help. We can advise you on which version is right for you, supply the software, install it, and provide training and support, so do give us a call.

That’s according to a study by the Department for Trade and Industry, which found that 70 percent of small businesses suffering a major data loss are out of business within 18 months.

What this means is most small businesses have failed to protect themselves from a plethora of problems. According to Ontrack, data loss is the result of human error 44% of the time, hardware or system malfunction 32% of the time, software malfunction 14% of the time, computer virus 7% of the time, and site disaster 3% of the time.

And data loss is bad, because your data is your business. To illustrate, consider the impact if you lost access to your IT systems, including:

* Customer databases
* Supplier details
* Financial documents, from invoices to tax records
* Product catalogues
* Marketing materials
* Letters and emails
* Document templates
* Staff records

You already have insurance to protect your business assets, and the same principle applies to your data. Regardless of where your data is, it needs to be protected—and protected continuously—from every possible threat.

The good news: A solid backup solution will allow you to get back to business within minutes or hours in most cases.

So protect your data, and secure your business.

Later today, Microsoft will release 11 security patches, covering security vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and Exchange. As usual, we recommend installing these updates on all machines as soon as possible. The breakdown of the patches is as follows:

• 5 patches with a severity rating of Critical for Windows
• 2 patches with a severity rating Important for Windows
• 1 patches with a severity rating Important for Windows and Microsoft Exchange
• 2 patches with a severity rating Important for Microsoft Office
• 1 patch with a severity rating of Moderate for Windows

Adobe Updates

Critical updates from Adobe are also due out today, fixing well-publicised flaws in Acrobat Reader. You should install these on all systems as well.

The Adobe updates are due as part of a quarterly patch batch. More and more vendors have begun updating regular patching cycles (following Microsoft’s lead perhaps), either monthly or quarterly, to help IT systems administrators predict and manage patching workloads.

Patch, Patch and Patch

As ever, we recommend installing all security patches for ALL of the software programs that you have on your machines, not just the Microsoft ones. More and more malware programs (viruses, Trojans, spyware, etc.) are targeting vulnerabilities in other non-Microsoft programs as their entry point into to your systems.

The table below shows the “qualifying purchases” (for Retail, non-volume license Office editions):

This time round there will only be three Retail (non-volume license) editions of Office:

• Office Professional 2010 – Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Access, Publisher and OneNote.
• Office Home and Business 2010 – Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote.
• Office Home and Student 2010 (for non-commercial use) – Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote.

Comparing these editions and their equivalent Office 2007 qualifying products, shows the following:

• All of the 2010 editions include OneNote, which was previously only included in the Home & Student, Ultimate and Enterprise (volume license) editions of Office 2007.
• If you purchase Office Small Business 2007 now, you will get an upgrade to Office Professional 2010, which includes Access. Previously you had to purchase Office Professional 2007 (or above) in order to get Access. So for once, Microsoft is giving you something for free!
• Similarly, if you purchase Office Basic 2007 (Excel, Outlook and Word) now, you will get an upgrade to Office Home and Business 2010, which effectively gives you PowerPoint for free.

So, if you have older versions of Microsoft Office and plan to upgrade them sometime in the next few years, I personally recommend thinking about doing it soon, and definitely before the 30th September.

I’m also appalled at how many of our competitor IT companies want to sell antivirus software purely based on the margin they can make or how easily they can install the antivirus software across multiple machines.

The unfortunate truth is that there is no antivirus product on the market that will catch 100% of all malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, adware, phising, etc.). However, some antivirus products are significantly better than others. In my opinion, you should not be buying your antivirus software based on the lowest price that you can get away with, but instead, you should be protecting your business with the best antivirus software available.

So what is the best antivirus software?

Each quarter several independent groups test the various antivirus programs in order to determine how effective they are. Personally, we believe that AV-Comparatives’ tests (www.av-comparatives.org) are the most comprehensive and reliable. They conduct various different types of test, to determine how effective the programs are at detecting all types of malicious programs (malware) under different circumstances. For some years, they have been testing 16 programs; this rose to 20 in February 2010.

So which one comes out on top? We’ll, it actually depends on how you interpret the results. On the “Stay Safe on the Internet” website (www.staysafeontheinternet.co.uk) (put together by my colleague David, with a little help from yours truly) we use the following five factors in order to compare antivirus programs:

• Protection, the ability of the program to recognise and block/remove viruses and other dangerous programs from your computer.

• Speed of the antivirus program, i.e. how much it affects the performance of the computer.

• False alarms, also known as false positives, occur when an antivirus program wrongly identifies a harmless program or file as being malicious.

• Ease of use is also a very important consideration.

• Telephone support from the manufacturer of the antivirus program is invaluable.

Taking these factors into consideration we have determined that the following are currently the top five antivirus programs:

• Kaspersky Internet Security – offers the best protection.
• ESET NOD32 – very light, fast, trouble-free antivirus program with outstanding technical support.
• F-Secure – good all round, with 24/7 telephone support.
• Avira – recommended for experts only, due to the lack of phone support (unless you can speak German).
  
• Gdata - same as Avira.

To see how these five programs compare visit www.staysafeontheinternet.co.uk/intermediate/antivirus/. For the full analysis results and to see how your antivirus program rates visit www.staysafeontheinternet.co.uk/intermediate/antivirus/testresults.html

At Solutions Shared, we tend to recommend ESET for business clients and either ESET or Kaspersky for home users, depending on their Internet surfing habits and the age of their PC (ESET is better than Kaspersky on older PCs).

Maximum Protection

Unfortunately simply having antivirus software will not guarantee that you will never be infected with some form of malware. Instead you need to apply a multifaceted approach, which includes all of following:

1) Installation of all operating system (Windows, Mac OS, etc) security updates as soon as they are released.

2) Installation of the latest security updates for application programs, including, but not limited to, Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, Real Player.

3) Ideally removing local administrator permissions from all staff – if you don’t have admin rights most “drive-by” malware installations will fail when you open the infected file or click the dodgy web link.

4) Educate your staff. A small amount of training goes a long way.  Staff should be provided with some basic education on how to be savvy email and Internet users.

Over the past few months we have seen more interest in server upgrades or first server installations within local small and medium sized businesses. Perhaps this is due to the relaxing of the recession? Perhaps those businesses with existing servers have simply struggled on long enough with their aging server(s) and are fed up with server crashes and poor performance? Whatever the reason, now is a good time to start thinking about getting your first server or upgrading your old ones. In fact, there has never been a better time. Why? You now have even more choice than before as to what server best matches your business needs.

Time to get your first server?

Traditionally most small businesses purchased Microsoft’s Small Business Server, as it was the only cost effective solution available to smaller companies. This has now changed with the launch of Windows Server 2008 Foundation in October 2009. Supporting up to 15 users, with all the features of a standard Windows server, Windows Foundation Server makes the sub £1,000 server a reality.

Time to upgrade your server?

Upgrading your existing server to Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 is now even cheaper with Microsoft’s Solution Pathway programme. Depending on your current server version you can access savings of up 30% of the cost of your Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 licenses.

Server Options and Benefit Comparison

The table below provides a high-level breakdown of the Windows server products applicable to small and medium sized businesses.

The table below shows a high-level comparison of the business benefits that can be obtained from each of the server products.

1. Upgrade to version 3.6 of Firefox.
2. Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter.
3. Ignore the warning message and proceed.
4. Type browser.taskbar.previews.enable in the filter bar.
5. This will display a single entry whose current value is False.
6. Double click on the entry to change its value to True.
7. That ‘s it!

The vulnerabilities in Adobe’s software have been the target of hacking attacks since mid-December.

Users of Adobe Reader 9.2 and Acrobat 9.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Unix are advised to update to Adobe Reader 9.3 and Acrobat 9.3, while users of Acrobat 8.1.7 ought to upgrade to Acrobat 8.2.

Adobe’s update article can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-02.html

Instructions for updating Acrobat Reader:

1) Open up Acrobat Reader and go to the Help menu.

2) Select the “Check for Updates” option.

3) Click on the “Download and Install Updates” button.

If you have a very old version of Acrobat Reader, then we suggest you go to Adobe’s website (www.adobe.com) and click on the “Get Adobe Reader” link on the right-hand side to install the latest version of Adobe Reader (9.3).