Riverbank It management

We look forward to seeing you at Venturefest next Tuesday, 22 June, at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford.

If you have any IT issues you would like to discuss book a half-hour IT clinic with us at Venturefest. Are you thinking about cloud computing? Have you heard about SharePoint and wondering if it could help your business? Or maybe you just want all your IT to run smoothly and your current IT provider doesn't do that for you. Whatever your issue we would be happy to advise. Contact us now at help@riverbank.co.uk.

This week three of our customers' servers suffered disk failures. But no-one was affected. The reason was that we are monitoring their networks - the monitoring software gave us advance warning of problems so we could take preventative action.

Disks fail more or less at random so having three in one week is like the old joke about waiting for a bus - you spend ages waiting for one then three come along together. But it's a good illustration of the way that IT support is changing, and indeed the way it should be. Your support partner works hard in the background, almost unnoticed, to maximise the reliability of your IT system.

Maximium reliability of your IT delivers maximum uptime for you so you don't even notice your IT. It's just there at the heart of your business helping you do your work.

Today's second security alert concerns fake Twitter e-mails. Several Riverbank clients have received them this week.

Be alert for messages like this:

"Hi, You have 2 unread message from Twitter. Please click on the link below:"

If you receive an e-mail that doesn't seem quite right, do not open it. Even if it's from someone you know.

Last weekend an employee at one Riverbank client had her Yahoo account hacked. The hacker sent out messages to everyone in her address list. The e-mail led to a fake anti-virus warning. For the unwary who clicked on the link it disabled the computer's anti-virus software and installed malicious software on the computer.

Have you got a private e-mail account? Is the password a word that could be found in a dictionary or is somebody's name? If so, it's time to change it. Make sure it contains a mixture of upper and lower case and that it contains numbers and/or non-alphabetic characters.

My Dell mini 10 netbook has arrived and with it my paper-free future, perhaps. First impressions are great. It runs the latest Windows 7 operating system and has 120GB of disk space. The ten inch screen is bright and easy to read, the keyboard is an ok size and it should run for ages on its battery. And most important of all it received the "cool" accolade from my children. All that for around £250 plus VAT.

I'll report back on how it works out in practice and what others think of it. If you are a Riverbank client and you'd like to borrow it just let me know (e-mail me at malcolm@riverbank.co.uk).

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.