Entries Categorized as 'Information'

Get the best communication tool for your Utility firm!

Date March 17, 2011

Now you all may think how is SharePoint beneficial for a Utility sector, right? For any industry, communication is the key passage for information sharing, decision making, so on and so forth. SharePoint helps provide this benefit to all the industries across the spectrum. Same payback it will provide to the utility industry as well. Using SharePoint Server 2010, employees or workforce of the utility sector can collaborate, communicate and manage documentation and data ingeniously.

Using SharePoint server 2007, you can update, share, and discuss data such as customer communications; employee authored content, interactions with service providers and experts engaged on projects; and news related to the company, that too all under one roof. Taxing to and fro of emails can be dodged. In SharePoint Site, staff and management will be able to glance through or make changes in the company content right at one place. Less storage space is also required. News stories meant for the company’s intranet folio which essentially needs to be analyzed by the concerned superiors before getting posted can be done swiftly concurrently at the central space.

Using another such solution from Microsoft, i.e., Dedicated Exchange Server, employees and employers can enhance their email communication. The main advantage using Hosted Microsoft Exchange is that it can be integrated with SharePoint site. It also allows for wireless synchronization, archival of emails, download of heavy attachments even on the phone, access to contact list, so on and so forth. Cheap Exchange hosting services are available in the market. Also, application hosting and free hosting templates for project management, content management, document management, etc. are easily available these days.

SharePoint is Great for Social Networking!

Date March 2, 2011

The corporate world today has deemed SharePoint Site as the full-bodied web solution, however there is much more to find out about SharePoint and its usability features. So why do you think SharePoint is the finest tool for social computing?

Whilst you make a social network by means of SharePoint, users, private spaces, etc. are by default being developed for each user you adjoin. These individual spaces are known as My Sites, which operates similar to other existing social network sites, however with additional features and abilities. The My Site feature in SharePoint allows to see and administer data, links, calendar, associations, and other private data.

Originally speaking, in SharePoint Server 2010, each My Site has an integrated blog. Additionally, users can generate new SharePoint sites and fasten them to an on hand Team Site. This provides a blog to the team that adjoins additional content and value along with their document repositories, calendars and lists. SharePoint also allows for blog archiving which can also be indexed. Thus, it makes the blog a storehouse for combined facts and data.

People Search is an imperative SharePoint Server 2007 feature for big or emergent organizations. It helps search and find exact people much easier. Several kinds of search features are available to use, for instance the By Expertise search feature. Also, search results can be differentiated by tabs such as job title or by social distance.

Microsoft SharePoint Services also has integrated wikis for information sharing and information and group collaboration on content. SharePoint Wiki features include approval workflows and permissions, document check-in, and version history. There is also an option to use hyper-V hosting with a dedicated SharePoint server. SharePoint price is also not too expensive.

Free hosting templates, hosted blackberry, and Exchange host are also available through SharePoint hosting providers.

Three ways to take down your competitors

Date October 19, 2010

Online business markets are fiercely competitive and site owners are becoming increasingly aware that they have to outperform their rivals in order to succeed. There are many ways to help your business to stand out from the crowd and be noticed and some of these methods are ethical and some of these are not.

If you are currently tempted by unethical techniques which may help you to do better than your online competitors, stop and think about it carefully. Unethical and even illegal techniques are not beneficial for online businesses in the long run. You may think you can use them, achieve results quickly and get away with it without any repercussions but this is highly unlikely. Whatever search engine optimization services you opt for, they reflect on your business reputation and brand too. Please tell me more! »

Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Date October 19, 2010

Email hosting is very important for all kind of business—be it small, medium, or large. Keeping this in mind, consequently Microsoft designed its Small Business Server package including significant components like Microsoft Exchange in it. As you know the Microsoft Exchange Server features electronic mail, calendaring, managing contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage, etc. Microsoft Small Business Server package would have been incomplete without this component, isn’t it? Yes!

Hence, if you glance through, Microsoft has been upgrading the SBS versions over the period of time which also meant upgradation of the Microsoft Exchange Server. For instance, Small Business Server 2003 includes Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 which is 32-bit only and doesn’t install on the various 64-bit versions of Please tell me more! »

Have you tried the Word Automation feature in SharePoint 2010?

Date September 22, 2010

What is Word Automation Services in SharePoint Server 2010?
Ever tried to transfer .docx files into PDF? Most of us try to perform server side conversions of Open XML files (.docx) into fixed formats (PDF and XPS) using the Word desktop application. Now this conversion can be done hassle-free with Word Automation Services.

As an element of SharePoint Server 2010, Word Automation Services allows you to perform file operations on the server that previously required automating desktop Word:
* Converting between documents formats (e.g. DOC to DOCX)
* Converting to fixed formats (e.g. PDF or XPS)
* Updating fields
* Importing “alternate format chunks”
Features of Word Automation Services

Features of Word Automation Services include the following:

o Reliability – Word Automation Service was built from the ground up to work in a server environment, which means that you no longer have to worry about issues like dialog boxes that bring the process to a halt, expecting a user to provide input; creating interactive user accounts under which to run the application to avoid running into permissions issues, etc.
o Speed – The service is optimized to perform server-side file operations, and in doing so provides performance significantly better than existing solutions.
o Scalability – The service can take advantage of the processing power available on typical server hardware (multiple processors, additional memory). For example, although a single instance of WINWORD.EXE can only utilize a single core of processing power, with Word Automation Services, you can specify the number of simultaneous conversions (and the # of processing cores) to use based on the available hardware.

What Word Automation Service doesn’t do in the SharePoint Server?
One of the most important things to understand about Word Automation service is what it doesn’t do. Word Automation Service is not intended to be a 1:1 replacement for the existing desktop object model. Instead, the server is one half of a replacement for the existing object model – the other half being the Open XML SDK.
o The SDK is designed to handle tasks that don’t require application logic, such as inserting or deleting content (paragraphs, tables, pictures), inserting data from other data sources, sanitizing content (removing content, accepting tracked changes), etc.
o The service is designed to handle those few tasks that do need application logic: reading the entire document formats that Word supports, converting to the entire output format that Word supports, recalculating dynamic fields, etc.

Word Automation Service is not featured in SharePoint Foundation 2010. Nevertheless, there is still life left in SharePoint family of products including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0 that has free SharePoint templates for business use.

Yahoo Team and McAfee: Web Security

Date August 23, 2009

by: Djai Tanji

McAfee and Yahoo announced their partnership on Web’s security wherein Yahoo’s search engine is making available to users the warnings about unnecessary and malicious code on Web sites that will be detected through McAfee’s security technology. McAfee calls the technology, SiteAdvisor and this has been integrated into Yahoo’s search engine mechanism making a user, after performing a search, obtain the flagged sites after clicking “searchscan.” However, no Yahoo advertisers will be picked up and flagged in the SiteAdvisor. The yahoo security warning system does not block users from accessing the page but will recommend to avoid the flagged content. With all this preclusion of users from visiting malicious websites, yahoo will lessen the channels obtainable for spam, adware, malware and phishing to spread.

How websites deal with SQL injection

Date July 20, 2009

by: Djai Tanji

The substantial SQL injection attacks that struck Microsoft-based websites claimed as one of its victims Autoweb which is a U.K. based advertising and marketing site. The continuous attack that hits Autoweb exploited susceptibility in a single line of code in the web application to cut through the company’s Microsoft SQL database and knock the site offline. Autoweb’s IT staff then realized that database tables which stores content provided by car dealers had been overwritten with a 30-character script and that gave them a window of opportunity. Autoweb blocked the attacks by looking at log files which originated from IP addresses in China. Autoweb did an everyday backing up and asked assistance from Secerno, a U.K. based firm to build a database security appliance.

The Spam Battle Rages

Date June 29, 2009

A man is convicted to serve five years in jail after being convicted of being the creator of a botnet that had in it’s peak infected almost half a million computers, spreading spam and adware. The man, Jeanson James Ancheta at a young age of 21 is set to serve a total of 57 months in prison, which is considered to be one of the the longest ever sentence for computer crimes. He drew the curiosity of government cyber-security people when he tried to infiltrate computers owned by the US Naval Warfare Center and the Defense Information Systems Agency, both of which were being constantly attacked by hackers and botnets. Please tell me more! »

Microsoft Set to Release Own Anti-Virus

Date May 29, 2009

The software giant announced that it will be releasing their own Windows embedded anti-virus that raises some eyebrows in the IT industry. Why, well the company has been known to be the most attacked PC platform on earth compared to other operating systems due to their ways of old. This hatred of the company stems back from the days when Microsoft was involved in what can be called “steal then deal”, when they were involved in getting nifty software form the many start up firms who produced respectable programs they embedded within their OS releases. This is sure to result in lawsuits which the company then opted to settle out of court, buying out the rights and even the company in a hostile take-over. Please tell me more! »

An Internet of Criminals – A Look Behind the Scenes (Part 2)

Date April 29, 2009

Meanwhile, the cure the anti-virus programmers are not always perfect, so it can be considered a first response which may not fully contain the situation. This is where people make the biggest mistake in their security platform, that the programs they have installed are there to protect and prevent whilst the truth cannot be farther from the truth for the infection has already been active, way before it was detected. The follow-up security updates to security software makes the necessary adjustments enough to cope with the spread, halting it in it’s track, hopefully. The false security we feel works only if the threat is known which is true for variants of already known threats. New viruses are only known as much as the programmers who race to find a cure for it can work. Please tell me more! »