Andy's Techie Blog

Sometimes I’ll revisit my favourite collections of applications and utilities to make sure I know what the current features are, see if they can solve any current problems I have, make myself aware of anything new or simply just remind me of something I may have missed before

One of my favourite collections of utilities is the Sysinternals suite (I could write in length about LOTS of the utilities there!)

I revisited an application called Desktops last week and the penny dropped for me in how it could be useful for me having previously ignored it

This functionality isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination and is available natively in “other” operating systems but my point is I figured out how it would be useful for me

The utility creates up to four “virtual desktops” they are completely independent from each other and you run different applications on them.It’s a bit like having four PCs under my desk all running from one keyboard mouse and screen

Because I run two monitors as well I’m basically getting the ability to run eight different applications full screen. More importantly it helps me reduce clutter

There are some apps that I always have open regardless of whatever task I’m actually performing.

On a typical day I could have Outlook open, a couple of browser tabs for our SharePoint site, a couple of tabs for gmail and google reader, tabs for Facebook and Twitter (depening on how productive I’m trying to be)

That’s before I actually do anything, depending on the task I could have a couple of Remote Desktop sessions open, maybe a spreadsheet or word document, maybe a PDF plus additional IE tabs related to the task at hand. You get the idea!

My browser becomes the main area for clutter. I could have 10-15 tabs open and even if run multiple instances the the “inactive” tabs get in the way of the two or three I actually need

Desktops helps me create logical areas for specific tasks.

So now on desktop one I have Outlook open on the left and IE open on the right with various parts of our SharePoint site open in a few tabs

Desktop two will be where I open Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, BBC news, etc open

Desktop three and four then become dedicated to specifics tasks

The other advantage is it can help me avoid distractions. I’ve lost count on the amount of times I’ve been doing something, flipping through tabs and then been off on tangent because I’ve seen a new article in Google Reader for example. By separating these things out it can help with focus (well it seems to be doing it for me!)

You can get the utility from here (which is also where I got the images..)

There are a only two options to set

Your hot keys if you want them and whether you want the utility to run on start-up or not

As well as using the hot keys to switch between desktops you can click the tray icon and get a nice preview

I prefer the hot keys myself

It’s not without it’s faults – a couple of times I’ve tried to open something on one of the secondary desktops only for it open on desktop one. I’m not sure if this is the application at fault or the utility but it’s not a big deal

Now I just need another monitor and I’ve have twelve possible desktops!

With everything that’s been going on personally and professionally the last few months the newest version of Office sort of skipped by me

Sure I installed the “alpha” when it was released on one of my machines but I wasn’t using it full time

Yesterday I had to do a rebuild of my main office PC so I took the opportunity to install the Beta

This post isn’t about the shiny new features though, it’s about the different suites you’ll be able to purchase

This time around we get four retail versions (from the Office 2010 engineering blog)

Office Home and Student1	Office Home and Business	Office Professional	Office Professional Academic
Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010
Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010
	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010
		Publisher 2010	Publisher 2010
		Access 2010	Access 2010

On first glance I’m really pleased

OneNote for everybody!!!

However on second glance I’m a bit gutted as you’ll notice that once again there is no InfoPath unless you buy Office via licensing (Office Professional Plus for most businesses)

I commented before on how I think a lot of smaller businesses are missing out because InfoPath is inaccessible to them

It’s frustrating when we can sell Small Business Server 2008 with one of the key features being the inclusion of SharePoint and then not being able to create some really great solutions because a key piece of software isn’t as easily available. A quick search found Infopath 2007 box product to be somewhere in between £100-£140. Licensing is obviously different but if you’re going down that route you may as well just get Professional Plus

So it’s left to the SBS team to save us! Here’s my idea,

If you ever release SBS 2008 R2 (and I understand that is IF) can we get some InfoPath licenses added to the Premium CALS? 

I know that is unlikely to happen but a guy can wish right?

I’m not sure I’m being unreasonable or unfair here but I was a bit miffed after a telephone conversation I had this week

My youngest daughter is one at the end of the month so we decided to have a family gathering and naming ceremony all on the same day

The plan was that once the ceremony had finished our friends and family would retire to a local pub/restaurant where we could all get something to eat, chat and generally have a good time. The place we had in mind is some where we go to quite often and we’ve seen people reserve tables for these sort of circumstances

I made the call and explained we may have 30 to 40 people coming so we wanted to give as much notice as possible

The person I spoke to said they needed to speak to their manager and disappeared for a few minutes. When she came back I was told that they can’t make table reservations at a weekend, only during the week

I explained again that we have a lot of people coming and we wouldn’t want to turn up only for the place to be full or have all our guests at various different tables across the restaurant

She told me they have a roped off area that they only open when large parties arrived but she wouldn’t be able to reserve it for us.

I asked what would we do if we turned up and area had already been taken?

Her reply was

“You could call about an hour beforehand to see if we’re busy or not”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

We’re arranging a large group of people to arrive which takes a lot logistically anyway as most people aren’t local to us and they expect us to turn up and hope that they can fit us all in.

What if i called an hour beforehand and they were full? Do i just send everyone home?

I like to be a little bit more organised than that so we won’t be visiting their establishment.

I can’t get my head around why we couldn’t make a reservation and they were willing to throw away custom over it.

Maybe if they were worried about us making reservations and not turning up which would have caused problems for seating other guests I can understand but surely the answer there is to ask for a deposit?

Any other thoughts?

It’s come to light recently that some partners are having their SBSC status change without realising

The reason being that the Sales and Marketing Assessment you have to complete when signing up only lasts for two years. On top of this you don’t receive any E-mails or alerts to let you know.

Microsoft are aware of this and looking into it but in the meantime just do the following to check

Logon to the Microsoft partner portal (this link is for the UK)

Click “View Your Membership Account” and then click “Membership Center”

Select “Competency Summary” from the “Requirements & Assets” menu

Scroll down until you find the Small Business Specialist Community section

You’ll notice at the bottom it’s letting me know that I need to complete the assessment so click on the “Training and Assessment” link

This takes you to the assessment page – click start to begin (make sure you allow pop-ups from the site)

The assessment is shouldn’t be too difficult to complete if you’ve already done it once before. Once you pass you should see this

You can then return to the competency summary to check to see if you are compliant once again – this doesn’t appear to update straight away though (it hadn’t when I’d posted this) so check back later

Ok it’s not quite that bad….but Christmas and New Year were a bit of a blur and even though it’s the Wednesday morning I feel like I’ve been back at the office for weeks!

The year ended with Mrs P getting the operation I mentioned previously so the run up to Christmas was filled with visits to the hospital (which was 25 miles away)

Thankfully the operation went to plan and we’re eagerly awaiting January 18th for the "switch on” (full details on Bryony’s blog here) 

New Year came and went and as usual the break gave me plenty of time to reflect on the previous twelve months

As usual the annual Tubblog yearly review kicked me in the ass and reminded me I’ve still got plenty to learn when it comes to goal setting (go read it….seriously)

So looking back on 2009 there were a couple of things that stood out for me to reflect on

Family – My second daughter Evie was born, Even though it happened in January last year it was still far and away the biggest thing that happened to me last year. I’m immensely proud of both of my girls and can’t wait to see them growing during 2010

Blogging – I finally stopped cross posting here and to my Wordpress.com blog this time last year. I’m glad I made the jump and went self hosted but I do sometimes worry if the blog is relevant, interesting, etc. My output wasn’t as high as I’d have liked (I’m partially blaming Twitter!) but I still enjoy writing here and the blog has created a lot of opportunities for me which I’m very grateful for so I’ll be looking to post more frequently this year

AMITPRO – Myself and Guy Gregory took over the running of Midlands SBS User group. This was something I was very proud to be able to do. Getting involved with the group is one of the best things that has happened during my professional career. I’ve met some great people and have learnt so more from both a technical perspective and a business perspective and look I’m looking forward to seeing where 2010 takes us. Our next meeting is on 12th January if your interested

Economy – You may have heard there were one or two problems as far as the economy was concerned! The timing of the problems were a real kick in the teeth for us. Towards the end of 2008 we made plans to grow the business and made some investments. We took on extra staff, got some more office space, brought a van,etc, etc with the idea to spend 2009 growing the business. With the change in the business landscape we spent most of 2009 learning that we suck at sales and marketing which suddenly become a lot harder as people held onto their cash that bit tighter!

That is oversimplifying some but some of the things we wanted to do in 2009 just didn’t happen because someone moved the goal posts!

The downtime at the end of the year gave me time to think about where I want us to be this time next year and how best to achieve that…that probably means I’ll be tapping you up for opinions and ideas so in the vein of this great post on the Ostrich IT blog, I’m sorry

I’ve hit the ground running this year have got an awful lots of things sorted in these first few days of January which is why this post is late!

Whatever you did I hope Christmas and New Year were great and good luck for 2010!

I just wanted to relay a support call I’ve just dealt with as it really had me stumped. For a while I was concerned there was something really bad happening but now that I’ve gotten to the bottom of it I can breathe easy as it wasn’t actually all that serious

Our client called to say that she was expecting an e-mail from their German contractor and it hadn’t arrived. He’d resent it a couple of times to confirm he’d got the email address, etc correct

I logged onto the server and used Exchange message tracking to see if the e-mail had arrived

The message did arrive at the server as expected

My next port of call was to logon to the PC and check Outlook, sometimes I’ve seen similar cases where a filter has been applied by mistake that means the user has “lost” the message. Unfortunately this drew a blank as well

I used the advanced find feature to display all emails that had been delivered today and I even created a search folder to do the same thing but the message was nowhere to be seen

I logged in via Outlook Web Access to see if the message was visible there as I’ve also seen cases where the message is corrupt and Outlook can’t display the message but OWA seems to do ok with it. Again no luck here

So I checked to see if she hadn’t deleted the message by mistake. The message wasn’t in there but when I used the “Recover Deleted Items” feature in Outlook there is was! I thought this would be a simple matter of clicking the message and pressing restore……unfortunately not

After I clicked restore I expected the message to reappear in the Inbox but after waiting a few minutes, nothing

Confused I went back into the dialog in case I’d selected the wrong message. The message was still available for restore so I clicked it again. Once again the message failed to reappear so I went back in again

One of the columns is “Deleted On”, I noticed that time was only a minute ago

I recovered the item again, noted the time, waited a minute and went back in and lo and behold the deleted on time had changed to the time just after I’d recovered the item

Confused I turned to the server, this particular server uses McAfee GroupShield for checking inbound messages for malware so I trawled through the logs to see if it was picking this up as a dodgy message. I wasn’t holding my breath though as this isn’t how GroupShield works (the message is usually quarantined or a part of it replaced and the user alerted). As expected this was a dead end

I was starting to get a little paranoid now so checked the PC over for malware and my initial checks didn’t turn anything up. I even used SysInternals Process Monitor to track what was going on during the recovery to see if there was an outside process doing something but again this didn’t show anything of use

I fired up Outlook in safe mode but didn’t get very far as the recover items feature is an add-in itself!

I decided to keep my attentions on Outlook and created a new profile for the user. This time I disabled Outlook cache mode and recovered the item again

This time the message reappeared as expected!!

As soon as this happened a huge light bulb came on somewhere in the back of my head

There is a feature in Outlook that will ONLY work when cache mode is enabled

Outlook Junk Filter

I went into the options for this it hit me straight in the face!

This is how the junk filter was configured on the PC

Can you see the problem?

Only allow from safe lists and permanently delete suspect messages!!!

I’m surprised she gets any email at all! But if she only receives messages from a group of people that she always emails then they would be on her safe list

The junk filter checks for messages as soon as they arrive in the inbox, irrespective of whether that is because the message is an incoming e-mail or has just appeared there after being restored

I have no idea why this has changed. It must have only have changed recently because as I said earlier the configuration would surely mean she would notice lots of emails going missing.

Once I turned off the junk mail filter I was able to recover the message ok

Ordinarily when a client doesn’t require the Outlook junk filter because they are getting their spam filtered elsewhere I use the Office ADM files and setup group policy to explicitly disable the Outlook filter (Office 2007 version here) so I need to go and set this up I think!

Minor panic over!

If you saw Top Gear at the weekend (and if you didn’t, why not?! It’s one of the best programs on TV!) you’ll have seen Jeremy Clarkson salivating over a Range Rover.

It had a ton of gadgets but the one that jumped out at me was the “dual view” screen. Basically, the screen shows two different images. The driver gets the sat nav map and the passenger can watch a DVD

I blogged about this sort of technology back in 2007! I actually said at the time it would have an application for in-car entertainment but I’d love to see this on a larger scale

Imagine a cinema where one side of the room saw the regular movie and the other half of the room saw the movie with subtitles. The horrible mess which is involved in going to see a subtitled film would just disappear!

I’ve mentioned subtitled cinema on this blog quite a bit as it’s something that irritates me quite a bit so any solution would be a good one!

The Range Rover screen is only a 7-inch touch screen so not sure if it’ll make it to cinema sized anytime soon. Also movies are projected onto a screen as opposed to be it being like a massive flat screen! I still think there has to be a way for the same principle to be applied though

My job means on a day to day basis I try to help businesses improve by the use of technology. It’s very satisfying when you see “the penny drop” for someone after explaining a concept. I saw this after a SharePoint demo at the back end of last week – I love listening to conversations afterwards as co-workers start bouncing ideas off each other

Technology isn’t just for business though, smart use of technology in our everyday lives can have a huge impact. Whether it’s families in different countries staying in touch via Skype, or re-connecting with long lost relatives via social networking sites there is potential everywhere

We’ve had some news recently that shows how technology can have a dramatic effect on someone’s entire life

If you know me personally or have read this blog for any period of time you’ll know that my wife is deaf and has been since birth

Six months ago she decided to take a look into her options and the hearing team at Selly Oak hospital started an investigation to see if it would be possible for her to get a Cochlear Implant

Last week we had the “big decision appointment” and it was a yes. In addition to this they even had a date so on the 22nd December she’ll be having the operation! (less than ten days time!!) Bryony wrote a blog post about bringing the equipment home and the details of the appointment here

The big switch on will be in January so we’ve got a massive start to the year ahead of us

It’s not an exaggeration when I say this is HUGE. If all goes well Bryony will get as close to “normal” hearing as she will ever know, all down to a tiny computer that she’ll wear behind her ear

It’s certainly a different way to spend your Christmas and New Year!

Having a bit of writers block at the moment

I’ve started three posts this week and abandoned them for one reason or another

Hoping normal service will be resumed soon

I originally started another post that would mention this but I’ve decided it deserves a post all on it’s own

Over the last few days I’ve been playing with the new Xbox features (that’s the post I started, it’s on the way!)

When I first turned my Xbox on there was a handy little video displayed to explain what all the new features are so I fired it up

Mrs P was sat next to me and asked

“Don’t supposed it’s got subtitles has it?”

If you’re a new reader, my wife is profoundly deaf, she’s currently being assessed to get a cochlear implant next year. You can read about it here (www.thedeafone.co.uk) as well talking about her experiences around the CI process she also discusses what it’s like to be “the deaf one”

I pulled up the display menu and as expected there were no subtitles. If she wanted to find out about the new features either I had to explain them, she’d have to go to the website, or look through the online help

I’ve blogged on here a couple of times about the lack of subtitles in Xbox Video Marketplace, even though it looks like the system supports it, the video description usually lists “subtitles: none”

Since Zune Video was one of the new features I jumped into that to see if anything had changed

Again I was disappointed, where under the old system it looked like there “may” have been subtitles, this time around the was no mention of subtitles at all

What irritates me a lot about this that I can’t get any definitive answer as to why this is the case or if it’s ever going to change. Most Xbox games are pretty good when it comes to subtitles, in just about every game I’ve played cut scenes and the like have optional subtitles so that the story can be followed. I’m not sure what it’s like on the PS3/Wii though

While on this, www.deafgamers.com reviews games from a deaf standpoint so that as well as talking about the game itself it will highlight if you need to be aware of any issues where a lack of sound would interfere with playing the game. If a game gave instructions on how to control your character via voice over with no visual cues for example

Access for people with disabilities is a problem in the digital world as well as the offline world, when regular people upload videos to youtube they don’t think about adding subtitles. I’m not saying everyone should but one of the most popular sites on the Internet is generally unavailable to anyone with a hearing problem (or a visual problem for that matter!)

Did you know you can add subtitles to youtube videos?

You can add a complete caption file which specifies exactly when each line of word should be spoken or you can upload a transcript and youtube will try and figure out where it should all fit

There is a nice explanation of how this works here: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077

However, the tutorial video is on a tiny little screen and has no subtitles…..the irony

I could create a very long list of areas on the Internet that are just off limits to certain groups

I do appreciate this isn’t something that has an easy solution. Broadcasting companies in this country are legally obliged to provide subtitles for 90% of their content. What if the program you want to watch is in that 10%. (The BBC are committed to 100% subtitling of content) If we can’t get that sorted on a platform that is under complete control how does a system like the Internet stand a chance?

This is where I think the Xbox platform doesn’t have any excuse. Microsoft 100% control the system. They set standards for the type of content that is and isn’t allowed on their platform so why can’t we get subtitles set as one of those standards?

Zune marketplace in my opinion has NO excuse at all. They are streaming major cinema releases. They have subtitles created for them for use in cinema (again I’ve blogged about this in the past!) and for the DVD releases. 

Having not tried Sky Player on the website or on the Xbox I can’t comment on their ability to display subtitles. (again, I’ve got an opinion on this too) Does anyone know if they can? This another area where there really shouldn’t another reason not to do it

Just for balance there are some technologies that have been a great leveller for deaf people

Email, SMS, Instant messaging, twitter, forums, blogs, facebook, etc, all these services are based around visual functionality first. Some them do have video and audio but it’s the core functionality that means you need the keyboard to communicate means deaf and hearing people alike are on an equal footing

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about the issues a deaf person can face when the digital and analogue worlds cross check out the the “Pesky People blog”. This blog first came to my attention when it’s writer Alison attended the “Hello Digital” event in October. She had tried to make provisions to attended the event but was badly let down by the organisers and she talks about various disability access issues in depth on the blog – it’s worth a read!

So will anything change? I don’t know, going on my past experience around deaf issues probably not which is a terrible shame

It would be good if I could get some information from Microsoft as to what there policies are for disability access around the Xbox, especially where Video Marketplace is concerned

Also any opinions you have are welcome. Very few people come across disability issues on a day to day basis because it just doesn’t effect them. What lots of us take for granted as just regular day to day stuff is hard work for people with disabilities.

Did you hear a traffic report on your radio on the way into work today? If you were deaf you would have just driven straight into that five mile tailback

What about calling your credit card company as you’ve been incorrectly billed? Just a five minute call to get that straightened out? Not if your deaf, you either have to use minicom or type talk or get someone to call for you (then they insist on speaking to the account holder)

Just a couple of examples but it happens every day