Technology Advisor Blog

I was composing a new email and noticed the ruler across the top.  While the ruler is useful in some cases for advanced formatting (aligning text and images), it was a nuisance for me and I started searching the tool bar for how to get rid of it.  I must have toggled it "on" by accident, and now it was stuck there.

We've had several days of power outages after a surprise October snow storm, and this serves as a good reminder to think about disaster planning and business continuity.  Today, businesses of all sizes need a data disaster recovery plan, which helps ensure the company will continue operations after experiencing some type of disaster due to:

Yesterday, during a meeting with a local business group, we started talking about data backup, and one of the attendees mentioned she's using Dropbox to backup the book manuscript she's been working on for a year.  While Dropbox is THE hot new Internet start-up (check out the recent article in Forbes), and it's a beautifully simple tool for collaboration and mobility, I cringed at the thought of relying on this service to protect a years worth of work.  I strongly suggested that she set up a secondary backup for her work, and also mentioned to the rest of the group to check into security and privacy concerns. 

I talked to a client earlier this week about using "Bcc" - "Blind Carbon Copy" when sending emails, and I thought this would be a good subject for a blog post.  "Bcc" allows you to copy someone on an email without letting any of the other recipients know.  It's a handy tool in some cases, but it's also worth knowing a bit more so you don't make mistakes.

After a busy day at the office, it's time for IT support for the kids.  Last weeks call for help was an urgent - "The printer isn't printing!"  Typically, the printer is off-line, or the wrong printer was selected, but this time was different: paper was coming out, but it was blank.  I checked the ink cartridges and they were all fine.  I thought maybe the ink level indicator wasn't working, so I put in a new black cartridge.  No success.  The page was completely blank.  The work of fiction needed to be printed, so I changed the font color in the document to navy blue, and it printed fine. 

After our last webinar, one of our attendees asked:  "In old versions of Microsoft office, you used to be able to ‘turn on’ short cuts; this essentially allowed you to see, when clicking on an action, say ‘cut’ or ‘copy’ what the short cut key for it was – can I do that in the ribbon?  I have looked but don’t see anything.  I use short cut keys a lot and know a number of them ‘by heart’ but it would be nice to see them in the ribbon too."

One of the questions we're hearing more and more from our small business clients is how to get control over out-of-control web usage in the office.  So much business is conducted on-line that employees need to be connected to the Internet, but in some cases, things can get out of control when some employees spend too much work time on personal web usage such as shopping, Facebook, or going to sites they're not supposed to.  If web usage can't be controlled through other management techniques, or if your business has compliance requirements, it's time to think about content filtering for your site.

One of the strong recommendations we're making to our small business clients is to invest in gateway security to protect the perimeter of their network.  Everyone these days knows how important anti-virus and anti-spyware protection are at the desktop, but far too often, small businesses only have a basic router protecting the entry to their network. With more sophisticated security threats cropping up daily, this level of protection just simply isn't enough. 

It seems there's always a new computer threat to watch out for, and the most recent breach in the news is really scary.  Dutch Certificate Authority (CA), DigiNotar, was recently hacked and the result is that fake SSL security certificates were issued.  This is the Internet equivalent of impersonating a police officer.  We're all taught to be careful on the web and a look for an https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) connection so we know we're safe when transmitting data.  But when the certificate itself is fake, we can easily be fooled.

When your computer is running s-l-o-w, and work is piling up, we can all relate to how annoying it is!  Before you give up, here are a few things that you can check to help things get faster.