Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

CSE Awarded ESET Silver Partner Status

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

We are very pleased to announce that CSE have achieved Silver Partner Status with ESET.

This has been achieved within the first 12 months of registering as a reseller for the ESET products and is in recognition of our having completing both technical and sales training as well as reaching certain revenue levels and shows that we are able to supply, install and support the products to a high standard.

Have a look on our website for more information, there is also a link to a free scanner that you can run to see if you have any infections www.cselimited.co.uk the link is neaxt to the blog link.

If you have any requirements why not drop us a note from our contacts page and we can get back to you, there is an offer on at the moment for 3 years for the price of 2 until the end of August 2010 so could be a good time to switch. www.cselimited.co.uk/contact.html  

We have been very happy with the ESET range of products and would recommend them but if you are not convinced we can also arrange a free trial for you. See www.cselimited.co.uk/security-antivirus.html for more details.

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Retrieve that document or folder without going to your backup.

Friday, June 11th, 2010
 

At one point or another most of us have accidentally deleted a file or folder on our systems, hopefully you have a good backup and your IT team can recover the file for you. But this takes time of course, wouldn’t it be good if there were a way to retrieve the file yourself?

Volume Shadow Copy or VSS has been available since Windows Server 2003 and what this does is take a snap shot of your network drives at set points, this then allows you to look at previous versions of files. If this has been set up on your servers, or if you are using one of the later operating systems such as Windows 7 or Vista then you can access previous versions of your folders via the Explorer screen. Once you have opened up Windows Explorer simply find the folder that contained the file or folder that you deleted and highlight it, then right click on your mouse and select properties.

Screen shot of previous versions of folder

Screen shot of previous versions of folder

Once of the tabs that will be revealed will be “Previous Versions” clicking on this will offer you a selection of previous versions of the folder which you can look through and find the files that you are missing.

These are the files that are recoverable in this folder These are the files that are recoverable in this folder

From here you can then restore them or save them to where you want and hey presto you have your file or folder back again and without going to the tape backup.

Make sure that you have your VSS turned on and set to take snapshots correctly so that the next time you accidentally lose some data you can get it back again quickly and easily. If you need help then look here for how you can get help to set this up correctly.

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Cloud v’s On-premise

Friday, June 4th, 2010

I thought that this week I would air my thoughts on the pro’s and cons of cloud computing against having the hardware and software located on-site on the local network. It would seem that cloud computing is the latest “big thing” and it may well take off in a large way over the next few years as people first prove and then trust the technology.

In effect cloud computing allows companies to buy in to services hosted in the “cloud” or “on t’internet” if you prefer. So rather than buying server hardware and all the associated software and licences that go with it such as Microsoft Exchange server and sharepoint it is possible to subscribe to a service and pay per seat per month, typically about £5 per user per month for Exchange and about £9 for Exchange and Sharepoint with some data storage etc.

The cloud computing concept is a good idea in theory, however it’s not quite as cut and dried as you might think, firstly you have to get over the idea that your data is not held in your offices, if you are a smaller firm of less than 250 staff then it wont even be on a dedicated server, rather you will have a slice of a shared server with your data ring fenced just for you. My problem with this is that once your data is up there in the cloud it is very difficult for you to be sure that no one else has access to it. We have all heard of several big names that have been compromised lately by cyber attacks and some could even be called cyber warfare, and one could imagine that an orchestrated attack against  these resources would be attractive to those who are interested in this sort of thing and once they are in to the system presumably they would have access to hundreds or thousands of companies details/data or even just turn off the service to cause economic havoc. I know that you could be targeted directly if you had your own server in any case but it’s still worth bearing in mind.

My second issue is that once you host most of your data off site you become totally reliant on your communications lines, and if like most small businesses that’s a broadband line then the risk of it being off for a day or so once or twice a year are not that unlikely, and if you are unlucky enough to have had a problem then you will know that they often come in spurts so you may have a period of time where a line is unreliable. This would cause major business disruption if your data was in a data centre in London and you were sitting in your office in Wigan!

On the other hand if you are the type of company that has a lot or remote staff and not many internal people then it might make more sense to host this type of service in the cloud than at your office, you may not even have an office in which case it could help with collaboration on projects and smooth workflows. Another point to consider is that with the subscription based model you would get all the latest updates and upgrades applied automatically within the cost of the agreement so if that’s important then it could be good for you.

Talking about the costs, don’t think that the cloud based option is a money saver, it’s not meant to be, when you think that the average server is in use for 4 or 5 years for a small business and that you pay a one off fee for the perpetual licence for the software then its easy to run a comparison, lets look at a 10 user SBS Standard network running Exchange. A simple server (ML150 with 4 hard drives) might set you back about £1K and the server software another £750 plus installation & configuration (bear in mind that you still need someone to do the configuration on the cloud based system so not much saving there) then at the £9 per user per month it would equal the online option after about 20 months, meaning that you would have 2 years “free computing” and of course if you have your own box then you can run other software on there too such as your accounts package and other business software etc.  The cost equasion seems to stay like this through the range of users ( 150 users = £16,200 / year) so cost is not the reason to go to the cloud in my view.

In conclusion, whilst I can see that it would be very useful for some small businesses to go to cloud computing it’s not for everyone, I think that the good old box in the rack or in the corner is here for a while yet, and for those who need the functionality that cloud based systems offering, there is the option to have a mix on both on premise and cloud based services, they will work together and will synchronise well.

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Oooops! McAfee Anti-virus update cripples PC’s

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

It would appear that a mistake by McAfee, one of the largest anti-virus companies, has caused thousands of PC’s around the world to fail because of a “false positive” issue, i.e. identifying a clean bit of code as infected/bad. Not a bad little virus in itself I suppose :-)

The problem has occurred because an update that they sent out, wrongly identified a part of the Windows operating system, svchost.exe as the wecorl.a virus. This meant that the antivirus software quarantined the file which stopped the operating system from working and resulted in machines constantly restarting and not being able to complete the boot sequence. 

The problem was spotted quickly and McAfee have apologised for the mistake and released a fix, of course because the eroneous update was only in the wild for a short time not everyone will have been affected and it appears that the bulk of the problems were in the US…… this time. This has caused McAffee a major problem and I suspect rather a few red faces as they work to help their customers who were affected by the problem to recover. The other anti-virus companies are, in public at least, sympathetic, no doubt thinking that “there but for the grace of God” etc.

So how can this happen? Well in truth I can’t say what caused this particular issue. McAffee say that there was a problem with their QA process (having made recent changes) which allowed a faulty code to get in to the update. However a simple overview of how anti-virus software detects viruses might be useful here.

Viruses like any other software are just a bunch of code, long string of characters, the antivirus software is looking at this code and checking the character sequences against known sequences that it holds in a database. Now if you are looking for the whole virus then you can have the AV software look for the very long sequence of characters and only identify code as a virus if it is an exact match, fine but what happens if the virus writer changes the code slightly and re-releases the virus, as a variant? Well some of the code will be the same so you have to look for shorter and shorter sequences. The shorter the sequence that you are looking for the more likley it is that it can match a sequence in existing legitimate software, so you can see that there always needs to be a balance to ensure that the software identifies viruses positively whilst not identifying good software as a virus, a false positive.

Of course there are other methods that the antivirus software packages use such as sandboxing code (allowing it to do what it wants to do in a controlled environment where it can’t get at the main system and watching to see if it tries to do something naughty) and then quarantining the code if it is likely to be a virus.

So for all of you who have not been affected you  can smile a bit, but just be aware that your antivirus software is updating several times a day and hope that your antivirus vendor does not have a similar problem in the future.

And before signing off, in answer to those of you who are wondering if you would be better off not having any anti-virus software at all?  The answer is NO.

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Office 2010 is on the way

Friday, March 19th, 2010

So what? you might ask, it’ll only be a revamp of the older office 2007!

Well having had a look at it I can only say that I was impressed! There has obviously been a lot of thought put in to how to improve the user experience, and enable the average user to be able to perform tasks that would previously had to be put out to a specialist.

The ribbon is still there, I know that a lot of people don’t like it but once you get the hang of it it does make sense, with functions being grouped and displayed according to what you are doing, and you can customize the ribbon if you want to. The simple fact is that if you tried to get all the functionality in to the old toolbar system the screen would be full of buttons without any workspace so I guess that it will be here to stay for the foreseeable future. They have conceeded the fact that the pearl in the top left was not very intuitive and this has been replaced with a file button that doesn’t look as nice but at least you know it’s there!

Some of the improvements will appeal to some more than others but some of the things that appealed to me were:

  • The improvements in the way that email can be managed in Outlook, with the ability to compress long email threads in to conversations, choose to ignore future emails on the same thread (i.e. automatically delete it) the ability to add rules to emails, when used with exchange, that prevent confidential emails being forwarded, copied, printed or sent out of the building.
  • The fact that when keeping notes in Onenote it now tracks what you were looking at at the time and inserts a link allowing you to keep the context of your thoughts.
  • The ease with which you can edit picures and video within the document that is being worked on instead of having to use a picture or video editing package.
  • If you work on documents in collaboration with others then there have been further improvements to allow simultaneous working, with only the paragraph being edited being locked for editing rather than the whole document meaning that you can have two people editing a document at one time if you need to.
  • I can see that the presence facility in Outlook/Exchange would be good for some people, the fact that you get details of if someone is in or not when typing a name in the address bar could be useful in a larger organization.
  • The massive improvement in Powerpoint, which frankly has to be seen to believed. click here to have a look
  • Office is available for use on a larger number of devices such as smart phones and even offers web based and subscription options.

 With office 2010 starting to ship from May through July depending which version you buy but to make sure that people purchasing and activating Office 2007 either under OEM or FPP before then they will be entitled to a free upgrade to Office 2010 available to download up until the end of September.

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Choice of web browsers

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I thought that you might like to be made aware of something that you are likely to see on your computer in the next few weeks asking you to choose which internet browser you want to use.

You may be aware that Microsoft has been embroiled in a long running legal case with the European Commission relating to competition laws. One of the sticking points has been that Microsoft bundles an internet browser in with the operating systems called Internet Explorer. An agreement has now been reached whereby Microsoft will be giving the users the ability to choose from a range of browsers thus levelling the playing field for other browser manufacturers.

This will be achieved via the automatic updates that your computer downloads from the internet, the updates are due to be rolled out from March 1st and will result in your having to make a positive choice about which internet browser you want to use.

The first screen that you will see is shown below:

 
 
 

The second screen will give you the various options that are available to you along with links to learn more about the packages on offer. The options will be delivered in a random order so as to be as fair as possible. See below:

 
 

So what should you do?

You will need to pick one and we would suggest that you pick the internet explorer 8 option unless you have a real desire or need to use one of the others. On the grounds that you will only be getting this message if you are using Internet Explorer and working on the premise that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” you can carry on using the internet in the way that you have been used to working in the past. After all if you had really been bothered about using something else you would already have downloaded it and been using it already.

 

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