Riverbank It management

Get more from Microsoft Outlook by making it work harder for you. Here are some bright ideas from the Riverbank technical team.

Auto-complete e-mail addresses
When you are sending an e-mail type the first few characters of the e-mail address then get Outlook to look up the rest of the address. Press Ctrl K to force Outlook to do this lookup.

Speedy send for e-mail
Type your e-mail then pres Ctrl Enter. This is the keyboard shortcut for Send. Save yourself precious seconds (think – how many times do you press Send in a year?).

Web conferencing is set to become a mainstream business tool, and soon. There are a lot of pressures driving us towards it:
• rising fuel costs
• volcanic ash reducing the opportunity and desire to travel (“will I get back?”)
• climate change pressures encouraging us to reduce travel • economic pressures to keep costs down
• the feeling that whatever changes the new government makes will not be good news

These pressures mean that change could come much faster than we anticipate. If you want to be in a position of leadership with your customers you need to be able to offer them virtual meetings over the web. The technology is all there, but there is a bewildering array of options and prices.

You can start simply and cheaply. All you need is a computer connected to the Internet, a headset and optionally a webcam. You can of course spend as much as you like, and £20,000 would buy you a very nice video conferencing suite.

Microsoft Office 2010 is now available. Major changes include closer integration of traditional Office components like Word and Excel with SharePoint, making it easier for multiple people to work together on a single document and making it easier to work online/offline.

The infamous ribbon, introduced in Office 2007 to replace the traditional menus, is now fully customisable. This should be a great benefit because you can put all your favourite options on one bar, making life faster and easier.

If you would like to see Office 2010 in action call Riverbank to arrange a demonstration.

Netbooks were last year’s revolution. With seven to ten inch screens these low-powered computers were designed to give you access to all the world’s information – the Internet. But that didn’t really happen.

What did happen is they grew larger and more powerful because people want to use them as small laptop computers. And this makes a great deal of sense. In a knowledge economy it’s the information you create that creates value, so you spend a lot of time putting information in. This requires processing power and a useable keyboard and screen, so customer demand forces up the size and power of the netbook.

So why choose a netbook? One great example was a four-day meeting I attended last month. One of us had a small netbook computer and was able to enter and organise his thoughts on the go. One of us had a pad of paper and was forced to spend hours after the meetings writing up his notes (ok I confess, my notes). Having seen the comparison I’m never doing that again. I’m buying a netbook – it’s small enough to be discreet and not affect the human interaction in the meeting and it has enough battery power for a day-long meeting. If you are a Riverbank client and would like to try it out, you are more than welcome.

Apple’s iPad reaches the UK later this month, having already sold a million units in its first month the US. It is certainly revolutionary, an inflated iPhone crossed with a laptop computer, but is it any good?  Some are calling it a game-changer whilst to others it’s more of a computer without its most vital component, the keyboard.

It’s a game-changer because it takes the best aspects of the iPhone and moves them up to the computer market. It’s lovely to operate and undoubtedly great to use. If you want to view a landscape photograph just turn the iPad round to landscape, if you want to edit a document in portrait view just rotate the iPad again. Now you can’t do that with a normal computer.

The weakness of the iPad is apparent if you want to enter lots of information – it doesn’t have a keyboard. The world hasn’t yet invented the successor to the Victorian typewriter keyboard and although the iPad does have a virtual keyboard on the screen it isn’t going to suit touch-typists.