Category Archives: Windows - Page 3

Upgrading to Office Communicator 2007

Posted by on March 21, 2008 No comments

Recently, my company laptop was upgraded to Communicator 2007.

Two things I did not like about this:

  • the “old” communicator 2005 had the possibility to do screen sharing. In OCS2007, it’s not there anymore. Of course, you can upgrade your conversation to live meeting, but we do not have that yet.
  • imageafter installation, my presence icons in Outlook 2007 did not work anymore.  And this made me realise how convenient these things are, and how quickly you get used to them: you start a new message, type in your recipient, you notice that he is in the office,… you close the message and go see him!
    Fortunately, I got them back to work by installing a microsoft update.

Microsoft OneNote as learning support

Posted by on December 16, 2007 No comments

I used OneNote already fairly often as a typical “meeting-note-taking” tool, but last week I tried to use it to make digital handouts: instead of just printing out my slide presentation, I created a new notebook, imported my slides “as printout”, distributed them across different sections, added keywords, diagrams, screen clippings… I zipped the notebook folder and made it available to students as a download before the session. The responses were very positive!

Of course, everybody needs to have OneNote.

There are good examples of educational use of OneNote. This post of Daniel Escapa is very inspiring! Check out his blog for more cool OneNote tricks. Did you know you could share OneNote files on SharePoint?

Want to know more? I learned a lot from this demo.

Service Pack madness…

Posted by on December 12, 2007 No comments

A busy day for the IT professional: Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Office 2007 and Service Pack 1 for SharePoint.

You know what to do…

Office 2007 SP1: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936982

WSS SP1: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841876

MOSS 2007 SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ad59175c-ad6a-4027-8c2f-db25322f791b&DisplayLang=en

Be careful when installing MOSS and WSS Service Packs. Things need to be tested and done in sequence! Read http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841876

and visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb735839.aspx.

A great software experience

Posted by on November 24, 2007 No comments

As an IT professional, you meet a lot of people who are disappointed, sad, angry or even frustrated about the quality of the software they need to use every day. Maybe it is good to share a positive experience with software…

A friend was celebrating her birthday, and as always a lot of pictures were taken. But the next day, the 4 GB SD card contained… nothing!

image In an ultimate attempt to save the pictures (they had been there, because we previewed them at the party on the camera), I called google to the rescue, to find a program called CardRecovery. I must say I was rather sceptical.

On the website, you could download a free trial version, that allowed you to preview the images, but not to recover them. That’s already something, at least you only pay when it works :-)

I installed the program, attached the camera, let it run for about half an hour, and… it showed me the preview of the 500 lost pictures! Including a “Buy Now” button, of course ;-)

I clicked the button, payed the price (29 €, very reasonable), entered the license key, clicked “Next” and it recovered the pictures. I did not even have to close the program.

So you see, lighten up! There is great software out there!

Vmware Fusion rocks!

Posted by on October 15, 2007 No comments

I have been quite busy the last two weeks with the preparation of our Clients’ Day. My colleagues have built a great infrastructure in Vmware, representing a “Virtual Company” with more than 40 servers, virtual desktop infrastructure, Office Communication Server… Really cool stuff.
Thanks to them, I was able to test Vmware Fusion, the virtualization tool for Mac. I now have the fastest Windows XP ever… on my iMac! Fusion has a sort of “quick install mode” for Windows: you specify your logon name, enter the license key, hit OK, turn around, and… it’s installed!