LANcom Technology Blog

Ever been sent a link by someone and not been sure if it’s safe? Or maybe you want to buy something from a website but want to make sure it’s the real deal before you give them your credit card number. Here are three websites that can help you answer the question ‘Is this website safe?’

1. Norton Safe Web – Norton Safe Web allows you to enter a URL and receive a report on the safety of that site. Norton Safe Web will let you know if there are any specific threats present and will grade the site as either Safe, Caution, or Warning. It also allows users to place reviews, so if someone else has had a bad experience you’ll know about it. To try out Norton Safe Web click here.

    

2. McAfee SiteAdviser – McAfee SiteAdviser can also grade a website based on how safe it is, but goes one step further and lists all the external sites your site links to and whether they are safe as well. It also allows users to place reviews and even gives you an indication of how popular the website is. To visit McAfee SiteAdviser click here.

    

3. Online Link Scan – Online Link Scan is a free tool that uses a number of other services to see if a link is safe. It compiles the results of Phishtank, AVG, SiteTruth, and Google Safe Browsing engines to give you a quick overview of whether a site looks safe or not. To see what Online Link Scan has to say click here

As well as being a great way to test a link before you visit it, these websites can also be used to make sure your own website has not been infected with Malware.

Hat tip to MakeUseOf for the idea for this post

According to ComputerWorld, Microsoft will officially stop offering security updates for XP Service Pack 2 on the 13^th of July. This means that if you are still using SP2 after this date you could be at risk of malware. XP Service Pack 3 on the other hand, which is a free update, will be supported until April 2014.

According to a recent report, around three out of four companies are still running XP SP2 on some machines.

To find out what XP service pack you are running, right click on your on My Computer in your Start menu and select Properties. If you need to update to XP SP3 you can go to http://update.microsoft.com. Here you will be able to see all updates available for your computer and will be able to download SP3.

To read more about this from ComputerWorld click here.

Ever wanted to show a website as part of PowerPoint presentation? With LiveWeb, a free PowerPoint add-in, you can have a live website appear within one of your slides. This means that while you’re presenting you don’t have to go through the hassle of opening an internet browser and then going back to your presentation.

To use Live Web all you need to do is:

1. Go to the LiveWeb site and download the correct add-in for your version of PowerPoint. You will then need to unzip this file and store it somewhere on your computer.
2. Next open PowerPoint and install the Add-in. How you do this will be different depending on which version of Office you use, if you are using 2007/2010 click here instructions, if you are using Office 97-2003 you can just follow the instructions on the LiveWeb site. If a Macros warning pops up, just click Enable Macros.
3. Now next time you want to have a website in a presentation all you will need to do is go to Insert, Webpage and you will be able to easily embed a live webpage into one of you slides. These websites will be displayed during the slide show and be refreshed in real-time.

To visit the LiveWeb site and download this Add-in click here

Hat tip to MakeUseOf for the idea for this post.

Need your laptop battery to last as long as possible? If you ever forget your charger or you’re in a situation where you don’t have access to power, here are 5 simple tips to help you keep your laptop battery going.

1. Adjust your power settings – In Windows you can adjust your Power Options through the Control Panel, here you’ll be able to do things like reduce the length of idle time before your computer turns off the display.
2. Reduce the brightness on your screen - A lot of your laptop’s battery is used up illuminating the screen, but you can quickly and easily reduce this by reducing the brightness. Most laptops have keys on the keyboard that allow you to do this.
3. Turn off programs you are not using – Any programs that you’re not using should be turned off. This includes programs you may have running in the background like chat programs or iTunes.
4. Avoid using your CD/DVD drive - Accessing data off your hard drive or a USB uses less power than using your CD or DVD drive.
5. Avoid using external speakers, hard drives, or other external devices – If you can avoid it, don’t use external devices. Turning off your laptops internal speakers or muting the sound will also save you battery power.

Last year we blogged about Gmail’s Undo Send feature, which allows you to stop a message from being sent for up to 5 seconds after you have clicked the send button. This feature is great for when you send an email and then a second later realise it was to the wrong person, and now it’s even better.

Gmail now allows you to select how long you would like the undo send feature to be available, letting you choose between 5, 10, and 20 seconds.

Here’s is how to set this feature up:

1. In Gmail go to Settings (Top right of screen)
2. Then go to the Labs tab and scroll down till you find Undo Send and select Enable
3. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page and you will be taken back to your email.
4. Now click on Settings again and next to Undo Send: select the number of seconds you would like in the drop down box and then save your changes.

When you have the Undo Send feature enabled this box will be displayed near the top of your screen for the first 5, 10, or 20 seconds after you have sent a message.

If you realise after sending a message that you have made a mistake, all you have to do is click Undo.

Want to keep up with what’s happening at LANcom and other interesting news in the managed IT services market? You can now follow LANcom on Twitter.

Phill, Kevin, Waruna and I will all start tweeting in the next few days.

To visit LANcom’s Twitter homepage click here.

Never used Twitter before? To find out more about it click here.

Ever really needed to edit or create an Office document, but didn’t have access to a computer with Office? Microsoft has just released Office Web Apps on SkyDrive, which means you can now edit and create Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files for free from any computer connected to the internet.

These free versions have limited functionality, so they are not designed to replace Office on your desktop, but having the option to edit anytime and anywhere definitely makes working with these files more convenient.

The applications in Office Web Apps use a ribbon interface just like Office 2007, so if you are familiar with this you shouldn’t have any problems learning how to use it.

So what can you do with Office Web Apps?
There are no SmartArt tools and tools for working with pictures and tables are very limited, but all the basics are there. Office Web Apps also allows co-authoring in Excel and OneNote, which means you can work together with others on files at the same time.

How do you sign up?
Web Apps work as a part of SkyDrive, Microsoft’s free online file storage, which allows you to store up to 25GB of files. To use SkyDrive all you need is a Windows Live ID, so if you have a hotmail account you can use this or you can sign up for a Windows Live ID here.

Once you have a Windows Live ID you just need to click here and sign in to access your SkyDrive account. From here you will be able to upload Office files for editing or create new ones.

If you would like to read more about Office Web Apps from The Windows Blog click here.

Still using Windows XP and wondering when you will need to upgrade to Windows 7? As we mentioned previously on this blog Microsoft will be supporting XP with security updates until April 2014, but there are some good reasons why you may want to upgrade before this.

According to ComputerWorld, the IT research company Gartner says “Most organizations should try to eliminate Windows XP by the end of 2012″. This is because by 2012 many new versions of applications will not support XP, so if you are still using XP after 2012 you may not be able to use the latest versions of certain applications.

If you would like to read more about this from ComputerWorld click here. To find out about the top 10 benefits of Windows 7 click here.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a business collaboration platform which allows businesses to manage content and allows users to collaborate and connect with colleagues.

We will soon be using it here at LANcom and thought we would let you know about some of the great features in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Content management –With SharePoint 2010 you will be able to manage all your documents, records, web content and rich media on a single platform. You will be able to tag content to make it easy to find, enforce retention of information, and even create document sets so you can manage related content (permissions etc) as a single unit.

Sites – SharePoint 2010 can act as a one-stop shop for all your business websites. It provides you with easy to use tools that allow even a novice to create any type of site. Whether you would like to create a team site only accessible to a number of employees working on a particular project, an extranet site for your partners, or an internet site for your customers you will be able to do this from within SharePoint.

Collaboration – SharePoint 2010 provides some great tools that let users share information, find people and expertise, and locate business information. There are a number of ways users can work together from wikis to workflows and team sites to social bookmarking.
SharePoint 2010 also has Facebook-like personal sites which allow users to put information on a profile. There is also a newsfeed which helps keep others up to date on what their colleagues are working on.

Search – SharePoint 2010 has some really great search features which make finding information and people really easy. One feature is the ability to refine your search by what you are looking for. Say you are searching for a particular document; you could refine your results by file type, author, and date to speed up finding the file. The search box will also offer you search suggestions as you type, just like a search engine.

To learn more about Microsoft SharePoint 2010 click here.

Do you have a link you would like post and share online, but would like only certain people to be able to access it? Trick.ly is a website that shortens and password protects links so that anyone trying to access them has to accurately answer a question before being taken to the URL.

Say for example you want to post a link on Facebook, but only want close friends to be able to access it. With a Trick.ly shortened link, anyone who clicked on the link would have to accurately answer a question you created before they could get to the website.

To visit the Trick.ly site and try it out for yourself click here.

Hat tip to Seth for the idea for this post