LANcom Technology Blog

According to ComputerWorld, Office 2010 will officially be released to businesses on May 12 and will go on sale to the general public sometime in June.

Microsoft has also put together a program to provide free Office 2010 upgrades to those that purchase Office 2007 between now and September.

Office 2010 will replace Office 2007 and has many new and improved features including: Backstage View, Co-authoring, Broadcasting of PowerPoint presentations, Excel Sparklines, and video/audio editing from within PowerPoint.

To lean more about the new features of Office 2010 click here.

To read more about the release of Office 2010 from ComputerWorld click here

Here’s a really easy tip from the Sentenc.es website:

Treat all email responses like they are an SMS text message and have a set length that you can’t go over. Since it’s hard to count letters, count sentences instead. For example, you could choose to write all your email responses in three sentences or less.

To read more about this tip click here.

Hat tip to Seth’s blog for the idea for this post.

Word clouds can be a great way to quickly display what words appear most in a body of text and gives the reader an idea of what the writing is about before they read it. Wordle is a free online tool which allows you to easily create word clouds by simply copying and pasting the text you want to use.

When creating a word cloud with Wordle you have the abillity to choose between different colours, layouts, and fonts. Here’s a word cloud we created from text on the homepage of the LANcom Technology site.

Once you have created word cloud using Wordle you can then print it, save to their public gallery, or use the print screen button on your keyboard to capture an image of it.

If you would like to create a word cloud for your website, blog, or another project click here to visit the Wordle site.

We have covered time management and finance tracking tools on this blog before, but what makes 1DayLater different is that it allows you to easily track everything from one application. 1DayLater is a new online tool (still in beta) so there will be improvements to it in time, but so far here is what you can do with it.

1. Track you time, your money, and your mileage
2. Easily analyse how your time is spent with great looking charts
3. Search through your history
4. Export any information you have entered as a spreadsheet

To find out more about 1DayLater click here.

Hat tip to MakeUseOf for the idea for this post.

Looking for a little inspiration or a new perspective? Here are three sites that could help.

1. TED - TED is a non profit organisation devoted to spreading ideas worth spreading. Each year they hold a conference in Long Beach which brings together prominent thinkers and challenges them to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
   The great thing about the TED website is that it has videos from all best talks from their conferences. These talks range from being informative, to funny, to inspiring. So if you would like to hear some ideas worth spreading click here.

    

2. ChangeThis – ChangeThis is a website that publishes manifestoes (a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts) as short PDF documents which anyone can download, print, or email to others. ChangeThis is a great way to learn about emerging business ideas and includes manifestoes by many influential business thinkers such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Chris Anderson. To visit ChangeThis click here.

    

3. Seth’s blog – Seth Godin is a best selling author and writes the most popular marketing blog in the world. On Seth’s blog he frequently helps his readers to think about business in new ways. To check out Seth’s Blog click here.

If you’ve got any sites you would like to add to this list please leave them in the comments.

Did you know that the same stock photo can sometimes be found on multiple stock photography websites and listed under a range of different prices? If you ever purchase stock photography then SpiderPic is definitely a site you should check out.

What SpiderPic does is allow you to compare the price of stock photos on different sites. You can either enter the URL of an image you have found to see if it is cheaper elsewhere, or you can search for images from within SpiderPic. When searching SpiderPic, if you find a picture you like you can see all the sites it’s available from and the cost at each.

SpiderPic searches Fotolia, iStockphoto, Dreamstime, BigStockPhoto, and CanStockPhoto. To visit the SpiderPic site click here

Hat tip to lifehacker for the idea for this post

If you have ever thought about how hard it would be to track down an email someone in your company sent or received years ago, then you can probably understand the benefits of having an email backup and archiving solution.

A good email archiving solution provides you with an easy way to backup your emails, and advanced search features allowing you to quickly find a particular email no matter old or buried it is. You could create such an archive by choosing either a hosted solution accessed via the internet or an in-house software solution.

Here are five reasons we think you should consider a hosted solution:

1. Reduced costs – The biggest benefit of choosing any hosted solution is reduced costs. With hosted email archiving your up front costs will be reduced because you won’t need to purchase the software, purchase hardware to install it on, or hire someone to install it. In addition to this your maintenance costs are eliminated because you won’t have to maintain the hardware or pay for software upgrades.
2. Fast to set up – Setting up your own software based archive could take weeks, while a hosted solution can be up and running in under 24 hours.
   
   
3. Hassle free upgrades – With a hosted service you will always have access to the most update version available. Updates to the service will be applied automatically meaning you don’t have to download or do anything to access any improvements.
   
   
4. Available anytime anywhere – When you have a hosted email archive all you will need to access your old emails is the internet. You will be able to log in to your archive from anywhere at anytime.
   
   
5. Scalability – One thing you won’t need to worry about with a hosted solution is running out space. Whether you have 5 employees or 500 a hosted solution provider can accommodate you, so as your business grows your hosted solution easily grows with you.

If you would like to learn more about MailTidy, LANcom’s hosted email archive solution click here.

Want to survey your customers and find out how you can improve your business? SurveyMonkey is a great web-based survey tool with both free and reasonably priced services.

With SurveyMonkey you can easily create both online and email surveys and have all the results compiled for you.

With the free version of SurveyMonkey you can:

1. Ask up to 10 questions in a survey and receive up to 100 responses
2. Choose from 15 different formats for each question
3. Select one of 15 different visual themes for your survey
4. Collect your responses either via email or the web
5. Get real time results

The paid version of SurveyMonkey, which we are looking at using here at LANcom, has many more features. As well as being able have unlimited questions and responses there are also many more options for customising the survey and analysing the results. This version, called Unlimited costs $200 US annually. There is also a Pro version which limits your responses to 1000 per survey and costs $19.95 US monthly.

There are many ways you can use a survey tool like SurveyMonkey. You could measure your customers’ satisfaction, get feedback and suggestions on how you could improve your products or services, learn more about your customers, or even use it as a tool in event planning. To visit the SurveyMonkey website and learn more about this service click here.

Need a picture that matches the colour scheme of a project you are working on? Here’s 2 websites that could help you find it.

Multicolr Search Lab - This website searches Creative Commons images on Flickr and allows you to pick up to ten colours for it to try and match to a photo. To make one colour more prominent than the others all you need to do is select it more than once. To see the full sized image you can just click on the picture to be taken to the Flickr page.
To visit the Multcolr Search Lab click here.

Flickr Colour Selectr – This site also searches Flickr for Creative Commons images, but unlike Multicolr Search Lab it only allows you to search for one colour at a time. What makes this site great is it allows you to enter the exact colour you are looking for and it will then provide you with images as close to that colour as it can find. To visit Flickr Colour Selectr click here.

Note: Before using any of these pictures make sure you check the Creative Commons licence by clicking on Some rights reserved under Additional Information on the Flickr page. This way you can be sure to comply with any restrictions on the use of the image. Some of these images may have Non-Commercial or No derivative Works conditions on them.

Last week Google released a new feature called Social Search, which was previously only available in Google Labs, to everyone on Google.com. What Social Search allows you to do is easily see content that people within your social circle have posted online regarding what you are searching for.

How does this work?
For example, say you are searching for information about a particular holiday destination. With Social Search you will be able to see any photos or blog posts your friends and family have added to the web to do with that destination in the results. These results will appear under a heading Results from your social circle.

The great thing about Social Search is that it allows you to quickly find information from people you trust.

Here is the video from Google explaining this new feature

 

To read more about Social Search from the Google blog click here.