LANcom Technology Blog

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.

LANcom has a new service called the LANcom Hosted Phone System which allows you to have all the benefits of an advanced VOIP phone system without a large capital investment. With this service you just pay a small monthly fee per-user and LANcom will set up and run your phone system for you.

Here are some on the main benefits of the LANcom Hosted Phone system.

1. Cost – Switching to a VOIP phone system can save you a lot of money on phone calls, but in the past these savings had to come after a large capital investment to get your phone system set up. With the LANcom Hosted phone system we will deliver and manage your phone system for you, allowing you to have a feature rich system for just a simple monthly fee.
2. Mobility – With this technology you will have access to your phone system anytime, and anywhere you have an internet connection. If users want to work from home they can simply take their phone handset home with them, log in to the phone system from their home internet connection, and take calls as if they were at the office.
3. Flexibility – This system can integrate with Outlook and mobile phones allowing you to make and take calls how you want. You could for example set both your desk phone and your mobile to ring when you have an incoming call, so you can answer your calls no matter where you are. You can also setup rules for how your calls are directed such as ‘whenever I’m out of the office for the day calls go straight to voicemail’ or ‘whenever I’m at lunch calls go to my mobile’. You can also have your voicemails sent to your Outlook inbox.
4. Scalability - With this service you will not need to worry about upgrading your phone system as your business grows. The LANcom hosted phone system can easily grow and evolve with your business. Adding a new user is easy, and whether you have 20 users or 20,000 the LANcom hosted phone system can to support you.
5. Collaboration – The technology in this system makes conference calling easy. You can setup a conference from your computer, creating a number for everyone to call or have the system call you. You can even have the whole conversation recorded so anyone who misses it can catch up. You can also share your computer screen or just a particular document with other computers, meaning you can create and edit documents together.
6. Unified communications – One of the best things about this system is the Unified Communicator Client. It is from this program on your computer you can access everything to do with you communication. From this client you can: see who else in your organization in online and their availability, securely instant message others in your company, see your voicemail and call history, set up audio or video conferencing, and much more.

If you would like to learn more about the LANcom Hosted Phone System please contact us at info@lancom.co.nz or 09 377 8282.

Did you know you can use Google to find websites that are similar to a website that you have found useful? Last week Google announced that they will soon be displaying a list of similar pages at the bottom of search results when you search for a particular site, but the ability to find similar websites has actually been around for a while.

To use the similar pages feature all you need to do is click on the Similar link which appears underneath a search result.

So in this example if you wanted to find other news sites similar to nzherald.co.nz you would click Similar and see a list including stuff.co.nz, tvnz.co.nz, and scoop.co.nz.

To read more about this feature from the Official Google blog click here.

If you use Gmail you may be interested to know that it will now notify you if it detects suspicious activity on your account. From now on if someone logs into your account from one country and then a short time later someone logs in from another, Gmail will display a red warning message saying “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…”.

If you know this login was you then you can ignore this message, but otherwise you may want to change your password.

To read more about this new feature from the Official Gmail Blog click here.

Citrix XenDesktop is a desktop virtualization solution that allows you to have your whole desktop environment stored and run not on specific computers, but on your server. With Citrix XenDesktop your operating system, your applications, and your files are all stored and run on your server and are simply projected to whatever computing device you are using.

So what are the main benefits to your business when using Citrix XenDesktop?

1. Mobility and flexibility – With Citrix XenDesktop users will be able to login and fully experience their desktop from any PC, Mac, thin client, or Smartphone. Not only will users be able to access their desktop securely from anywhere at any time, they will be delivered a high definition experience with better reliability and higher availability than a traditional PC. In fact, XenDesktop works so well that Citrix themselves have a BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) policy. This means that employees are allowed to work on any computer they like because XenDesktop allows you to have a fast reliable experience regardless of your hardware.
2. Lower hardware costs – When your desktop is virtualized the server does all the work, which means users can work from thin client devices lowering your hardware costs. Another result of this is a lower power bill as thin client devices are more energy efficient.
3. Security – When using XenDesktop all your data and information remains secure of the server, so if a laptop or PC is stolen no company information will be able to be obtained from it.
4. Growth – A new desktop can be created instantly and can be made available to employees anywhere in the world, allowing your company to grow with ease.
5. Easier upgrades - Having a desktop virtualization solution allows you to migrate to new operating systems like Windows 7 quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively.

If you would like to watch a video on Citrix XenDesktop click here.

If you are interested in learning more about this technology please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@lancom.co.nz

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.

Want to make your PowerPoint presentations more interesting? Microsoft has released 157 professionally designed PowerPoint templates to help you.

This template set includes templates for: static and animated picture effects, static and animated text effects, 3D shapes and objects, animated charts and graphics, and backgrounds for your PowerPoint slides.

Each template can be easily customised and comes with complete instructions for doing so if you need them.

To download these templates click here. You can also see many of these effects in action in a video on this page but you will need to have Silverlight installed to watch it.

Hat tip to Lifehacker for the idea for this post

Looking for an easy way to manage and analyse performance reviews? Sonar6 is an award winning online performance management solution, which we will begin using here at LANcom this year.

Why did we choose Sonar6? It came highly recommended by one of our clients and is another great example of where outsourcing an area outside of your main focus to experts can give you a strategic advantage.

Sonar6 has an easy to use graphics-based interface and a lot of great features for assessing staff performance. With Sonar6 you can:

1. Easily rate performance with simple drag and drop sliders
2. Compare employee ratings with their self appraisals or with historical ratings
3. Review a person individually or as part of a team
4. See a helicopter view of the whole business and see who the stars are and who is under performing
5. Invite employees, managers, colleagues and even clients to have their say and compile the results into a comprehensive review

To learn more about Sonar6 click here to visit their website. There is both an online demo and a free 30 day trial if you would like to try it out.

Microsoft Office 2010, which is due to be released in the first half of next year, has some great new features. Here’s a quick look at some of the best ones.

Free online versions
Perhaps the most talked about aspect of Office 2010 is the free online Web Apps versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. While these free versions will have limited functionality you will still be able to create and edit files from any computer connected to the internet, which could make working with these files much more convenient. Although a lot of people will still buy a desktop or paid subscription version for the additional features, having the option to edit files anytime and anywhere is definitely a bonus.

Microsoft Office Backstage
In Office 2010 Microsoft Office Backstage view replaces the file menu and acts as a centralised space for all your file management tasks and commands you commonly use when opening and closing a document. It is from the Backstage view that you do things like saving, printing, sharing, and changing permissions. Microsoft Office Backstage view is designed to make it easier to work on your files by bringing together related tasks, e.g. printing and page layout options, that were previously located in different places.

Collaboration
Office 2010 has a number of features that make working with others easier. One such feature, Co-authoring, allows you to publish a document for collaboration. This means multiple people can work on different sections of the same document at once. Another new feature is the ability to broadcast your PowerPoint presentations without having to set up a web meeting. This can be done through SharePoint or your free Windows Live Account.

What’s new in Word?
The new Paste Preview feature allows you to hover you mouse over different paste options and preview how they will look before making your decision. If you copy and paste a lot this could potentially save you a lot of time.

What’s new in Excel?
The new Sparlines feature in Excel allows you to create small charts in a single cell, which you can use to quickly identify patterns within your data.

What’s new in PowerPoint?
Want to add video to your PowerPoint Presentation? In Office 2010 you can embed and edit videos from within PowerPoint with features such as trimming, fades and reflections.

What’s new in Outlook?
The new Conversation management tools in Outlook 2010 allow you to cut down on the amount of clutter in your inbox. With the new Clean Up feature you can instantly delete all unnecessary emails in long email threads, so that only unduplicated information is left. You can also use the ignore feature to send an entire conversation to the Deleted Items folder.

This post covers just a few of the great new features available in Office 2010. If you would like to learn more about Office 2010 click here.

A while ago on this blog we looked at Optical Character Recognition software (OCR), which allows you to covert image files of text into text you can edit on your computer (read more). Well now there’s a brand new online tool which makes doing this even easier.

With the NewOCR website all you need to do is browse to the file you want to convert, select the language, and then click send file. Thats it, no registration is required.

With New OCR you can:

1. Upload and convert as may files as you want
2. Convert text from JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, and multipage TIFF files up to 5MB
3. Convert multipage PDF documents up to 20MB
4. Download your results as a Word or text document
5. Convert documents in 29 different languages

To visit the NewOCR website click here.

Hat tip to MakeUseOf.com for the idea for this post