If you’re anything like I used to be (and still am to an extent), If I had a file and it needed to be saved it was going in ‘My Documents’ or at work my ‘G Drive’. It made sense I mean it was my document it seemed like a perfectly sensible place for it to go… little did I realize that ‘My documents’ soon became ‘My Nightmare’ Even worse was when ‘My Documents’ got so out of control I just started saving to the desktop. I remember thinking ‘I’ll surely see it there’… It didn’t take long for my background image of the junior cricket team I coach to disappear along with any ideas I might have had of where anything was on my computer.  It got so bad that I thought I had developed early onset Alzheimer’s! I could have sworn I’d created a document at some point I just could not for the life of me find it in ‘My Documents’. Sound familiar?

I thought that this organisation affliction may affect more than just me so here are a few tips on getting organised tech-style.

First of all if you are organising your work computer it’s probably your Company drive that needs some work usually named something like ‘G:’ or ‘F:’. It is also worth mentioning that files saved to the server (e.g. your company drive, G: etc.) will automatically be protected (backed up), if you are however simply saving to your ‘My Documents’ folder or Desktop then your documents aren’t necessarily backed up. Just think about what that means for a second. If you computer crashes, or perhaps you leave your laptop in a taxi – your documents are gone, and there won’t be much that can be done to recover them. Scary thought, huh?

Now let’s get to organising… to start, DELETE everything you don’t need. Give your PC a good solid clean out.  If you remove all superfluous files at the start it will make every other step a lot easier.

 Now saving everything to your Company drive folder isn’t a bad thing (in fact it’s generally encouraged); you just need to have neatly organised sub-folders within. Below are a few tips for devising a system that makes sense.

• A good way to think about your computer filing system is to start broadly and narrow down from there, clicking on a few subfolders will be far less irritating than not even knowing where to start.
• Keep it simple – Use as short a naming scheme as possible, especially for folders. Consider the broad areas in which you work in and name folders accordingly. It may be for example; ‘Clients’, ‘Marketing’ and ‘Sales’. You can get a little more detailed when naming a specific document.
• Adopt a naming system that you use for all your documents, make sure that it is something that can be sorted easily i.e. by date or client name etc.  Here at Grassroots IT our main focus is on our clients, this means we deal with multiple clients daily so the system that I have adopted looks like this “clientname_date_description”, also I use the United States date format so that it is sorts in order of creation in my folders.
• Try to get a naming scheme to be implemented across the board in your workplace, if this is not possible ensure you re-name any files you save that are emailed to you to fit in with your system.
• Avoid excessively large folders, if you have a great need for a large folder e.g. you have a thousand clients a good way to make this folder manageable is to create folders to sort them alphabetically i.e. have ‘A_Clients’, ‘B_Clients’ folders etc.
• Avoid having a Miscellaneous folder or maniacally saving to your desktop, if it’s important enough to save than take the extra 10-30 seconds and file it properly it could save you ample time and heart-ache in the future. Also this will help to avoid saving those files that really don’t need to be kept.
• Last but not least ALWAYS BACK UP if you’re backing up all your files regularly AND they’re organized you will always have what you need at your fingertips. remember this is done automatically if you’re saving to your server.

Try applying these simple tips and any others that work for you to your work or home computers, the same can also apply for your email inbox so you can efficiently get through your days without the unnecessary stress of a messy ‘My Documents’ or Company drive.

Sickies, mental health days, playing hookie, call it what you will. There are even those times when people are genuinely sick (and not just gutted at the latest loss by the Reds). I started to feel sick on Tuesday and early on in the day, decided that it was going to be better to work from home rather than inflict my cold (as I thought it was at the time) on everyone else in the office. So, from about 11am on Tuesday, I was working from home, sitting on the couch with my laptop and a mobile phone. Unfortunately, my “cold” turned out to be bronchitis and I spent the Wednesday, Thursday and most of Friday asleep, drugged up on various cold & flu meds, antibiotics and painkillers or on the couch with my dog and about a bajillion episodes of Law & Order on Foxtel to keep me company.

Now, this little diversion has a couple of points which I’ll summarise here before going into more detail.

1. If you’re well enough to work, but sick enough to infect everyone else in the office, working remotely is a great way to keep up your productivity without spreading germs etc and making everyone else sick
2. If you’re ACTUALLY sick, as in really truly sick, then don’t stress yourself any further by trying to work when you really should be resting. It’s taken me a long time to learn this and funnily enough, it’s come from the person who you’d think would be most likely to want me to work – ie, my boss.
3. I’ve been sick and would appreciate chocolates, flowers, get well cards etc

Now, a recent study (friendly, journalistic article link here) has shown that offering employees flexible work hours or working locations can have a positive benefit on both their job satisfaction and job performance.

One of the great things about Windows Small Business Server is its flexibility to accommodate multiple levels of remote access. For example, if your employees have a desktop in the office and want to work from home, SBS offers a platform called Remote Web Workplace. This allows you to take control of your PC in the office over the internet, as if you were sitting in front of it. With a little bit of tweaking/configuration from our side of things, we can even make sure that you can print to your local printer as well as any of the normal printers in the office.

If you normally use a laptop and it travels with you, we can set you up with a VPN connection to allow access to your company data files whilst you’re offsite. So, there’s no more forgetting important documents when you’re on the road or at a meeting with a client.

Best of all, SBS also allows for remote access to your emails through a variety of methods. There’s a website you can access, which looks and feels just like Outlook. We can also set you up with your office emails on your laptop from anywhere in the world. If you *really* want to be in contact 24/7, we can even configure a large number of mobile devices to pull down your emails, calendars, contacts etc from your mail server.

All of these options make for great flexibility in terms of working from home or elsewhere. It also allows you to remain in contact with the office while attending conferences/meetings interstate or overseas.

Now, as for point 2, if you are sick, as in REALLY sick, don’t push it. A report for Medibank Private commissioned in 2007 shows the staggering cost of what is being called “presenteeism”. The bottom line is that employees turning up to work whilst still sick costs Australian employers more than 3 times the cost of absenteeism. That’s $7 billion in lost productivity from absenteeism as opposed to $25.7 billion from presenteeism.

Of that $25.7bn, $17,476,000,000 is from direct losses in productivity. That figure alone is more than twice the total cost of lost productivity from absenteeism. What this tells me (from my totally un-scientific viewpoint), is that employees who come to work for 2 days when they’re sick, could take 4 days off to get better and we’d still come out financially ahead.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I were working whilst sick for 2 days, there’s a good chance that a single day’s rest and relaxation would probably have done the trick. So, in essence, taking time off to recover when you’re sick looks to be about 4 times more productive as going to work. You can tell your boss that the next time you’ve got a cold or whatever strain of flu hits us this year

Finally, we come to the last and most important point of my post. This is my favourite chocolate, these are the most expensive flowers I could find, and my ideal get well card should have puppies and kittens on the front and $100 notes in the middle

Being able to see colleague’s calendars in Outlook can be very useful for co-ordinating meetings, arranging appointments or just being a sticky beak.  In Outlook Calendar, in the Navigation Pane, there are several links to help you get started quickly with calendar sharing.

Open a Shared Calendar

You can open another person’s default Exchange Calendar if the person has granted you permission to do so. If the other person whose Calendar you want to open has not granted you permission to view it, Outlook prompts you to ask the person for the permission you need. If you click Yes, a sharing request e-mail message opens automatically. The message requests the person to share his or her Calendar with you and also provides the option to share your default Calendar with him or her. After you access a shared Calendar for the first time, the Calendar is added to the Navigation Pane. The next time you want to view the shared Calendar, you can click it in the Navigation Pane.

Research In Motion (RIM) today introduced BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express – free new server software that wirelessly and securely synchronizes BlackBerry smartphones with Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Windows Small Business Server.

I’m a little confused about this announcement today by Dynamic Business, given that there has been a ‘free’ version of the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) around for a while now. First it was called Blackberry Enterprise Server Express, then renamed to Blackberry Enterprise Server Professional, and now we seem to be back to Blackberry Enterprise Server Express. Technical details are a little slim, even on the official Blackberry Page, so it’s hard to piece together what’s so ‘new’ about this. The one bit however that does stand out is that this version is supported on SBS 2008, a definite improvement over the previous (?) version of the professional/express edition.

The product isn’t available until later this quarter, and we’re yet to see what ‘free’ actually means in this instance. One can only hope that RIM are pushing back against competitive platforms such as Windows Mobile and iPhone (which require no additional server software to function), and therefore free truly will mean free.

For all of you office worker warriors out there like me, you may find yourself in word 2007 doing certain actions day in, day out wishing there were a keyboard shortcut. Guess what? You can make one.

For me it’s using the paste special function so that I don’t lose my formatting when I’m pasting from the web or another document. So here’s how you do it.

First of all click on your ‘Office’ button  then right down the bottom on the

right hand side you will see the ‘word options’ button  click on it.

This will bring up you ‘Word Options’ page

Now click on ‘Customize’ in the left options bar. This will bring up the following screen:

Right down the bottom you will see the option to customize keyboard shortcuts, click this button and it will bring up all of your options for creating keyboard shortcuts. Just as an aside if you’re wondering what all that stuff is above the keyboard shortcuts, it is a list of commands that you use frequently and can add them to your ‘Quick Access Toolbar’ which is…

Anyway, back to customizing your keyboard shortcuts, click on the customize button to bring up this screen

Then find which category the shortcut you require is under. For the paste special function I just look at what I normally do.

E.g. I notice that the ‘Paste’ function is under the ‘Home’ tab

And then I found ‘EditPasteSpecial’ in the ‘Commands’ list on the right, I clicked on it and found that it already had a short cut which is displayed in the ‘Current Keys’ box (it’s Alt+Ctrl+V in that order  if you’re interested)  or you can ‘Remove’ the current key and create your own.

So there you have it warriors. Happy wording

I have just closed a ticket for a client who was having problems activating Windows 7 on his PC. As a result of these problems, he was getting a warning message popping up claiming that his copy of windows might not be genuine. Obviously, considering we had just sold them multiple activations of Windows 7 under a volume licensing agreement, this was of some concern to them.

The bizarre part is that the license key was legitimate and the workstations were behaving perfectly, except for the fact that they couldn’t check in to Microsoft to activate. The error code they were getting was 0x8007232b, which is apparently related to several problems with activations. In this case however, all that we needed to do was re-enter the activation key and re-submit the activation request. 10 seconds later, the activation was successful! Welcome to the fun world of Microsoft licensing

We’ve just started working with a new client and after the first day of audit work I’ve been thinking about one of the, to date unwritten, design rules that we follow; Simplicity. By integrating simplicity into the network design the network can become not only more manageable, but also far quicker and easier to diagnose, repair and change when required. That’s certainly not to suggest that more complex networks are unnecessary, or indeed less manageable, simply that in my experience it is best not to over complicate things unnecessarily. Of course as design requirements themselves become more complicated and involved so too may the network design follow.

Now in no way am I casting judgement on the network we are working with, or the IT people who have gone before us. We have very little knowledge of the requirements and constraints under which they designed this network, and essentially no pre-existing documentation. We will quite likely discover, once we have uncovered the original design intent, that the solution in place is actually quite elegant and appropriate. On the other hand, we may not. Either way the point is that this process has made me think on the virtues of simplicity.