LANcom Technology Blog

Exclaimer Signature Manager is software that allows you to manage all the Outlook email signatures across you organisation. With this software you can easily create a great looking email signature and then enforce the design as a corporate standard across the company.

Over the last week we’ve been trialling Exclaimer Signature Manager at LANcom and have found it to be very useful. If you have received an email from LANcom lately you might have noticed our new signatures.

Here’s a quick overview of what you can do with Exclaimer Signature Manager.

1. Create your own email signature template or use one from the Signature Manager gallery - Signature Manager has an extensive gallery of ready to use signatures if you don’t want to design one yourself.
2. Include information from your Active Directory - This means that Signature Manager can automatically insert each person’s information such as their name, job title, and phone number into the signature design.
3. Update all of your organisation’s signatures at any time from one place – Signature Manager gives you the ability to easily change everyone’s email signature at once, at any time. This means you can quickly update or tailor your signatures to promote certain products at different times.
4. Create and manage web style banner ad campaigns within your signature – With Signature Manager you can insert banner ads below your signatures to highlight your new products, specials, events etc.

Pricing for this software varies depending on your number of users, but you can trial it free for 30 days. If you would like to learn more about Exclaimer Signature Manager click here the visit the site.

Just updated to Office 2010 and looking for some tips? You can sign up The LANcom Microsoft Office Secret and receive a new tip in your inbox every week.

The Office Secrets series is an email we send out every Friday containing one tip or ’secret’ explaining how to use a feature of an Office program. Previously these have been tips for Office 2003 and 2007, but starting this week we will include a 2010 secret as well.

If you would like to sign up to receive these weekly emails, or would just like to learn more about them click here.

Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a free data analysis add-in that allows you to manipulate and analyse large sets of data, from multiple sources, with ease. As a business intelligence application, PowerPivot integrates with many data sources to help you gain better business insights.

So what can you do with Microsoft PowerPivot?

1. Work with 100s of millions of rows of data – The PowerPivot add-in allows you to work with much more data than you could with just Excel.
2. Pull data from multiple sources and combine them – With PowerPivot you can import data from almost anywhere including relational databases, multidimensional sources, cloud services, data feeds, Excel files, text files, and the web.
3. Create relationships between the imported data and analyse it using familiar Excel tools – PowerPivot allows you to easily create relationships and analyse all your data using the tools you already know like PivotTables, PivotCharts, and slicers.
4. Use new DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) Formulas– The new DAX formulas in PowerPivot are specifically optimized for business intelligence use.
5. Publish to SharePoint – If you use SharePoint 2010 you can publish your analysis so others in your organisation can see it and to continue to slice and dice the data.

Here at LANcom we use PowerPivot to analyse data pulled from our professional services automation system and our IT monitoring software, and we have found it to be very useful.

For the best results when using PowerPivot you will need the 64-bit version of Excel 2010, but it is still possible to use it with the 32-bit version. If you would like to learn more about PowerPivot click here to visit the website.

Ever get annoyed by how awkward it is to change batteries in devices that require them to be put in a specific way round? Soon you might not have to worry about which way round you load your batteries . Microsoft has just announced a new battery contact technology called InstaLoad, which allows batteries to be put into a device without worrying about positive and negative polarity.

This technology works for both rechargeable and disposable AA, AAA, C, and D batteries. It doesn’t matter whether you are using multiple batteries or just one, you will still be able to put them in any way and they’ll work.

InstaLoad battery contacts will be particularly useful for devices that require regular battery changes or battery changes at inconvenient times/places. The diagram on the left shows how batteries could be placed any way inside a wireless mouse.

If you’d like to learn more about InstaLoad technology from the Microsoft website click here.

Hat tip to geekzone 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.

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.

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.

Still using Internet Explorer 6? Microsoft has just launched a new campaign encouraging those that sill use IE6 to upgrade because it is not as secure as IE8, and could leave your computer at risk of malware.

To find out what version of Internet Explorer you’re using click on Help or the Help icon (looks like a question mark) in Internet Explorer and select About Internet Explorer. Next to the word Version you will see the number.

According to Google Analytics 10% of people who visit this blog and 11% of those that visit our website are still using Internet Explorer 6. If you would like to upgrade click here to download IE8 from the Microsoft website.

Google Translate, the translation tool that allows you to easily translate 57 different languages is now even better. Google Translate now has text-to-speech functionality for 34 different languages. This means that you can now hear how the translation to another language sounds instead of just seeing the text.

To use this new feature all you need to do is click on the speaker button next to the translation

To read more about this new feature from The Official Google click here. To visit Google Translate and try it out for yourself click here.