LANcom Technology Blog

If there’s a webpage that you would like to be able to reference while you are offline, then you can save that page to your computer and view it even when you are not connected to the net. This is particularly useful if you want to work offline on you laptop, or if you’re your internet connection is quite slow and the page takes a long time to load.

To do this in either Internet Explorer or Firefox all you need to do is:

1. Go to File, Save As (Save Page As in Firefox)
2. In the Save As type box select Web page, complete
3. Click Save

(If you are using Internet Explorer 7 then you may need to press Alt to get the File menu option to appear)

Want the the ultimate wireless keyboard and mouse combination?

With the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 both mouse and keyboard are wireless, rechargeable and can be used from up to 9 meters away, but perhaps the most interesting feature of the Entertainment Desktop 8000 is the keyboards intelligent backlighting. This backlighting comes on automatically when you approach the keyboard and turns off when you’re away. It also adjusts the intensity of the lighting depending on the lighting in the room.

As for the mouse it has many of the great features seen in other mice in the 8000 series such as:

• High Definition Laser Technology, which means your mouse will be more precise, more responsive, and deliver smoother tracking.
• A magnifier button, so you can quickly and easily increase the size of anything you see on the screen.
• The Instant Viewer, so you can instantly see all your open windows and simply point to the one you want to open.
• A battery indicator light

Some of the other great features include:

• 4 USB ports integrated into the charging station.
• The ‘My Favourites’ button, which gives you access to the folders, files, and Web pages you use most with one-touch.
• Media Controls on the key board, which allow you to easily navigate to next track, previous track, play, pause and volume control.
• One touch access to the Windows Media Center.
• One-touch access to gadgets such as weather information, news updates, traffic maps and slide shows of online photo albums.
• Press to launch your Start menu and search your PC or the Web (Must have Windows Vista installed to work this feature).

For information on the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 click here.

A new study has found that being able to work from home results in increased job satisfaction, less motivation to leave the company, less stress, improved work and family balance, and higher performance ratings by supervisors.

It also found that the general belief that working away from the office has a negative effect on relationships with managers and co-workers was not entirely true. Only employees who worked away from their offices three or more days a week reported worsening of their relationships with co-workers.

This study undertaken at Pennsylvania State University combined research on over 12 thousand employees with flexible work arrangements.

If you’re interested in learning more about remote working and the options available click here to view LANcom’s Squidoo lens on this topic, or click here to download our free report.

Hat tip to ComputerWorld for the idea for this post.

Everyone here at LANcom would like to thank Adventure World for being absolutely great people to work with. Earlier this month we awarded them the first LANcom Technology customer of the month award, which took the form of an Egyptian themed chocolate cake shaped like a pyramid.

Google Analytics is a free service, provided by Google, that tracks your website visitors and provides you with excellent tools for analysing the information. So why would you want to track the traffic of your website?

So you can:

1. Identify whether any changes you make (to your website or website marketing) are having the desired effect.
2. Identify areas for improvement e.g. is one page on your site causing potential customers to leave?
3. Create and track goals for the future
4. See how visitors interact with your site. Seeing where people go and what they do may help you gain a better understanding of your customers e.g. what they are most and least interested in.

So why would you use Google analytics?

1. Its free and fast to implement – All you need to do is sign up, then get your website developer to paste the four lines of code Google provides you with on to every page of your website.
2. It’s fully integrated with Google Adwords – So if you are using this form of advertising then it’s easy to see how effective it is and how you might be able to improve it.
3. It has all the features you would expect from a high end analytics offering while still being user friendly.

Google analytics can tell you a great deal about the visitors to your website such as: what pages they are visiting, how long they spend on each page, how many of your visitors are new to the site or are returning, where they come from geographically, how they got to your site and much more.

Click here to sign up for your free Google analytics account or for more information click here

Thinking about buying a new server? Here is a 10 page report we have designed to help you avoid the pitfalls of what is a very complicated decision.

The PFD is now available for free to download from our website click here (registration required).

Our previous blog post was about how we stop spam getting into your inbox, but if what you really want to do is get those annoying spammers back, why not hit them where it really hurts…the bank account.

At least that the idea behind KnujOn, (that’s no junk backward) an organisation that spends its time following the links in spam messages and getting the illicit websites they lead to shut down. That way the spammers can no longer make money from spamming about that site. Since March 2005 KnujOn.com has shut down over 50,000 junk mail sites.

It’s free to be a user, all you need to do is forward your spam emails to one of their public reporting addresses (click here for a list), but you can also become a registered member. Registered members get the benefit of weekly status reports of what is happening with their spam email.

If you would like to learn more about KnujOn click here for a Computer World article on the organisation.

To visit the KnujOn website click here.

Being bothered by Spam? Wondering what’s the best way to deal with it?

At LANcom we use IronPort Anti-Spam technology to stop Spam for ourselves and our 770 clients. Last month we stopped 17.7 million spam and virus messages from clogging up the inboxes of our customers.

So what makes IronPort Anti-Spam so good? Well IronPort takes a unique approach to stopping Spam with their Context Adaptive Scanning Engine (CASE), which asks four basic questions of all emails. These are:

1. Who? IronPort uses what they call a reputation filter to identify suspicious senders. How this works is IronPort appliances around the world report back to the IronPort HQ on suspicious traffic i.e. if someone is sending a very significant amount of emails to people in a great number of locations it is quite likely that they are a spammer. Once a spammer has been identified they can then be blacklisted. IronPort stops 80% of spam with this first outer layer of defence.
2. What? IronPort will now analyse the content of the email according to certain rules that would suggest that it is obviously spam.
   
3. How? IronPort will also look at the overall structure of the email and apply rules to this as well
   
4. Where? Finally IronPort will access the reputation of any links within the message body because if an email contains links to an untrustworthy website, e.g. one known for Phishing scams or spyware, it is likely spam.

If an email has made it past the outer layer of defence (the reputation filter) all the factors mentioned above contribute to the CASE score, which will ultimately determine whether a message is let through to your inbox or not. The end result is much more accurate than traditional spam filtering techniques.

Click here to learn more.

Camtasia Studio allows you to record what is happening on the screen of your computer, edit it, and then produce that video into the file format of your choice e.g. Adobe Flash, Windows Media streaming video, Quick time movie, AVI video etc. You needn’t record the whole screen as Camtasia allows you to select the area you want to record and if your computer has a microphone you can also record sound.

About a year go on this blog we posted about Camtasia, and how it could be an extremely useful tool in computer training because, unlike traditional computer training where a someone shows you how to do something once, Camtasia recordings can be played over and over.(Click here to see the original post). The recordings are also excellent for PowerPoint presentations (you can put recordings into them, or record a presentation for someone who is unable to make the meeting) and on the web.

Well now the latest version, Camtasia Studio 5, is out and it’s got some great new features that will make your recordings even easier to create and customise.

The recorder in Camtasia Studio 5 is now much easier to use. The new ‘Snap to App’ feature means that selecting the area you would like to record is a breeze. With this you can select an application Window e.g. an Excel spreadsheet by simply clicking on it and you can then resize it, if you want, to a number of preset sizes.

When it comes to editing your recording the new Smart Focus feature will, if you select it, automatically apply zooms and pans to your recording based on where the action is on the screen. You can do this manually yourself but using the Smart Focus feature is much faster and if it applies a zoom or pan that you don’t like you can easily detect it.

Want to try it out? To download a free 30 day trial of Camtasia Studio 5 click here.

Or if you just want to learn more about it click here

Wondering what Office 2007 could do for your business? Here is a quick list of some of the main benefits.

1. Find and use the features you need - The new ribbon, which replaces the old menus seen in previous versions of Word, exposes more of the features you need to use every day so that you don’t have to dig through menus to find them. It also exposes more of the functionality so that you can find things that previously you may not have known were there.
2. Search, manage and prioritise your e-mail - The advanced search features in Outlook 2007 helps you quickly find critical information and the Colour Category feature helps you more easily sort and manage email messages by allowing you to create custom colour categories.
3. Share documents with confidence - If you want to share a documents with others within your organization Office 2007 offers you some great tools to help you manage their revisions and comments. These include the ability to easily compare two versions of a document with all the differences clearly marked and the ability to mark your documents as Final preventing anyone else from making inadvertent changes. With a free add-on to Office 2007 you can also save your documents as a PDF file which means that when the file is viewed online or printed, it retains exactly the format you intended, and data in that file cannot easily be changed.
4. Create professional-looking documents in less time- Office 2007 has a lot of new features which will help you reduce the amount of time you spend formatting and help you create a great looking document. One example of this is Live Preview, which allows you to see what your formatting changes will look like before you actually make them. Word 2007 also offers you a number of preformatted elements like cover pages and textboxes that help you build a document much faster and the new SmartArt tools allow you to create professional looking diagrams in minutes .
5. Analyse your information to make better decisions - Microsoft Excel 2007 includes new tools that make it much easier for you to filer, sort and visualize your business data so that it’s easier to analyse
   

A diagram created using the new SmartArt tools

To learn more about Office 2007 click here.