One of the sessions I attended last week at ABA Techshow was one that was aimed at helping attorneys and legal staff handle their email better. Since this is something we are going to be trying to help people do, in an effort to cut down on the ridiculous amount of email we store, I went looking for ways to help explain handling email better.

As the session went along, one of the speakers recommended using a second, web-based, email account for non-essential stuff. That way you don’t have mailing lists, newsletter subscriptions, Google News alerts, or other non-essential email keeping you from finding what you need in your Outlook, or interrupting you with a new mail alert. (Although they suggested killing that too, in all fairness.)

Anyhow, that got me thinking. Lots of places block access to web based email as a matter of policy. I began to wonder if unblocking that would put a small dent in the amount of email that our users are storing, and handling? After all, I know there are mailing lists I would rather subscribe to in Gmail, but don’t because I can’t access it at work.  That means, at least in my case, there’s a significant amount of email being handled by our Exchange server, and having to be dealt with somehow, in my Outlook, as opposed to just being over in Gmail, and me looking at it occasionally.

Now, I know the common refrain is that web based email account are a security risk, but is the risk that large, and does blocking access to web mail really mitigate that risk in a significant way? For example, years ago people decided to block it because of the virus risks, but just about all major web mail services do anti-virus scans on any attachments, and even then,  your desktop AV product should scan any attachments when you try to open them. So, to my mind, blocking might decrease the chance of getting a virus attachment slightly compared to depending on these other tools, but doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Now I know that’s hardly the only concern, but it’s just an example. Anyway, what do you think? I know some of you guys block web mail, and I’m sure some of you don’t. I also know almost all of us are struggling with what to do with all that email coming into, and being stored on, our networks and mail servers, so I’m curious about what you all think? Would allowing access put a dent in that, or is it not worth the increased risk?

My wife got wind of this tool in one of the PR/Marketing newsletters she’s subscribed to. It’s called Qipit, and the idea is that you take a photo of class notes,  a whiteboard, or other document, email it or SMS it to them and get a PDF version of it for your use or to share with others.

My question is, do you see this as a useful tool, or do you corporate security type folks see it as your worst nightmare, someone coming to work and photographing sensitive documents with their phone and being able to easily get them as PDF, completely bypassing all the measures you take to keep them from being emailed outside your organization?

Did you know that Microsoft have some free online training courses for Office 2003 and 2007? The Office Training Homepage helpfully shows you popular and new courses - worth checking out and referring your end users to.  If you have Software Assurance then there are additional courses available too under the Microsoft e-learning scheme. To access these courses you will need to request access from the person who administers your Microsoft Licensing. In my experience, getting the e-learning access for my users took about 4 weeks or repeated emails and phone calls with Microsoft before someone could fix the system to allow my users in, but the content was worth it.

Microsoft’s SteadyState 2.5 is now in Beta and supports Vista. Admittedly the application is in Beta but for those of you who need the ability to lock down a pc so that any changes made by users get removed on reboot, then SteadyState is well worth investigating. This application was last mentioned back in July, but the new version has recently been released.

We had an employee termination earlier this week. As is typically the case, upon the employee’s departure, there is a mad scramble to pick up the pieces to keep things moving along in this person’s place. One of the primary issues is access to e-mail.

In our case, the employee had saved most all of his e-mail to a local PST file keeping but about 2 weeks worth on the server. The problem was, he had password protected the PST file.

A quick google search indicated that PST file password protection really isn’t that complex. One of the first products that I located in my search was a utility called PST Password. Even better… it’s freeware!

I downloaded the utility, fired it up, opened up the protected PST file and it provided me with 3 possible passwords. The first one did not work, but the second one did. I was able to quickly hand this 800MB+ PST file back to the manager sans password and harmony was soon restored.

Technorati Tags: PST, PSTPassword, Freeware

I’ve recently had to conduct two interviews for a Network Engineer at our company and at both interviews I asked questions about keeping up to date with technology. I was surprised at the answers considering the job role. I asked if they listened to any podcasts or subscribed to any blogs. Both answered in the negative. I was really surprised as I can’t see how a person can effectively keep up to date with all the latest updates, patches, bugs, tools, software and tips that a network or systems engineer needs without subscribing to a podcast or at the very least some technical blogs.

Sometimes the excuse given is that people don’t have the time to listen to a podcast or read several blogs but they have the time to watch a couple of hours tv each night or spend 30 minutes at the coffee machine discussing the game or their drinking exploits!

Hopefully the Friends In Tech site helps with little tidbits of information that don’t take up a lot of time but do provide useful feedback - and this tip is about Microsoft’s new Technet Webcast Express - webcasts on various subjects lasting about 10-15 minutes to gain a quick overview on a product or it’s features. Currently there are 9 webcasts, 7 on Sharepoint and 2 on the Office2007 document format but keep an eye open for new Webcasts. If Sharepoint doesn’t get you excited then spend 10 minutes catching up with some product news from other bloggers in an area that you are interested in - and if you have an interview in the future - don’t forget to mention Friends In Tech as the blog you read to keep up to date!

In keeping with the sudden DNS focus of the blog, I saw this article today talking about how social networking sites, specifically MySpace, create such a huge increase in DNS traffic, and bandwidth consumption, that network admins are struggling to keep pace.

How MySpace is Hurting Your Network

I know we’ve had some discussion about MySpace in the forums before, but I’m curious how many of you Network Admins or IT policy guys are starting to deal with this, and what you’re doing? Is the ultimate answer just blocking all social networking sites? Do you think that’s going to be sustainable as more and more tools, including productivity tools, rely on networks like this? Maybe not MySpace so much, but certainly LinkedIn, Facebook and others will become places where your salespeople, for example, are expected to have a presence and interaction.

How do you keep bandwidth usage low, while still maintaining a strong online presence? Discuss.

For those of you who followed the suggestions in the recent ITT Minute about Microsoft downloads, you should know all about Microsoft Steadystate. This is the new version of Microsoft’s Shared Computer toolkit - a very useful utility that allows you to freeze, rollback and control the configuration of pc’s in schools, home or kiosk machines. The new version has several new features and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Steadystate download page. A handbook for Steadystate is also available.

When I ran across this mention on Download Squad of TestDisk, an open source, cross-platform disk recovery tool, I just knew this was a tool that Friends in Tech readers needed to know about. I can’t say that I’ve tried it out, but it certainly sounds like it could be a very useful tool. Has anyone had any experience with it?

In that same vein, I later stumbled upon the largest list of Sys Admin tools I’ve seen in one place before.  Definitely something worth bookmarking for future reference.

A long time ago back in July of 2005 on the In The Trenches Podcast, Uniform Server was mentioned as a free to download Windows Web server. From the Uniform Server website - “The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server. Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server”.

The new version, 3.4 was released earlier today and is well worth checking out. One advantage of this WAMP (Windows, Apache Mysql, PHP) application is that it is completely portable, no installation required so it can be used on a USB thumbdrive on multiple computers with no problem.

Update - Version number changed as it was 3.4 not 3.3 that was released.

Or if like me you were using the beta version of the software in order to find out what it does and how useable it is, Microsoft have now released a virtual image of Vista (30 day trial) so you can play around in a virtual environment without breaking anything.

Over on In the Trenches, we’ve spoken very highly about PSTools from Winternals, now owned by Microsoft. One of the early concerns was that the FREE tools would go away, but Microsoft has stated on a few occassions that this would not be the case. But what about the for-fee products that used to be offered by Winternals? Well, Microsoft is now releasing those tools, like the Administrator’s Toolkit, with a new name — Diagnostics And Recovery Toolset (DART).

If you’re curious as to what Microsoft has done to the suite of tools, go check out your own 30-day eval copy.

[Courtesy Kurt Shintaku’s Blog]

Beejive have opened up their beta test to the public prior to launching v1.0 of their multi client chat program for the Blackberry. This client application supports gtalk, msn, yahoo and aol so is pretty useful. Several changes have made recently to improve the notification of new messages and the release notes are worth reading.

The installation information has now been moved to their website at www.beejive.com To install the application OTA, you can just point your BlackBerry browser to www.beejive.com/download.Do you use your blackberry to IM people - do you use it for corporate use or personal use? Personally I use it for a combination of both, although if I had all my friends on the blackberry account I’d never get any work done, so I have a work account for google (my primary chat client) that I use.

One useful feature that I use is the ability to send a text message to another gmail chat account that is normally offline and everytime I arrive or leave a client I send it an IM so I can then later go back and fill out my time sheet. This is quick and easy and always available - my computer may not be turned on, or I may not have my timesheet paperwork with me, but the Blackberry is nearly always by my side. A quick “L company1″ or “@ company2″ gives me good tracking capabilities.

I stumbled onto an interesting, and free, tool to turn an Exchange Public Folder into a searchable knowledgebase of tips as I was browsing my feed reader this afternoon, thanks to IT Techno-Babble.

It’s from the folks who sell the Public Folder for Helpdesk product, which is an interesting idea in and of itself, called Outlook Knowledgebase.

Now, obviously, there are some nice features that integrate with the paid Public Folder for Helpdesk product, but even without those, this seems like a no-brainer way to throw together a knowledgebase to share tech tips, have them be searchable, and have it easily accessible to everyone in your organization without the need for maintaining any kind of database or webserver back-end. I might have to send this to our training guru and see if it’s something he wants to look at.

If any readers want to give it a shot, let us know how it goes!

With all the fuss about Daylight Saving Time a couple of weeks, there seems to have been very little said about the affects or problems that people had after the event.

I had several issues with out of date clients not being patched, the main ones being Windows XP service Pack1 clients that are not supported by Microsoft anymore and therefore not receiving non security patches via Windows Update. Instead we ran the daylightsavingsfix program from IntelliAdmin with a batch routine to run on affected desktops. Another desktop issue was caused by people somehow unchecking the observe Daylight Savings checkbox within Windows so their time was still an hour out!
The other issue that I had was with Kronos releasing patches right up to (and beyond) the DST timezone change but the instructions were not complete and it didn’t even update the timeclock machines out in the field so they were one hour out too.

Thankfully, the DST period is over…or is it?  Next weekend, is when the original time change would have taken place - do you have any plans in place to check that  machines do not change their time again?

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and various other social networks and/or web apps at various times. I’ve setup profiles and tried to use them to cross-promote my websites as well as Friends in Tech. So far, it’s been sort of a mixed bag, but an interesting way to keep in touch with people and let them know about other things I’m doing online.

All of this has got me thinking though, about how these tools could be used in the workplace. The first thing thing I could think of was using something like Twitter with a geographically diverse workforce, to do quick updates, arrange a meeting, etc. I also thought about having something like MySpace within a large corporation as a way for employees to connect with each other over shared interests, or to create profiles to describe what skills they bring to the table and can be a resource on.

I’m sure many of you guys use these tools, so tell us about how you’re using them? Are you doing it personally to connect with other techies? Have you found a way to incorporate them into your every day work life?  Do you wish your company would let you?

Discuss…

Previously in this mini series, in my previous posts (part 1, part2) the question was asked - What are the likely dangers if all of the users were in the domain admins group and what pitfalls could occur if the users were removed from this group.

The answer? The users profiles would get deleted when they logged out of their machine! A very unexpected result but as mentioned in part 2, the previous administrators decided to add everybody to all of the domain usergroups to ensure that everybody could do anything on the network and so the network administrators would not be bothered with user permission requests. Unfortunately, adding everyone to every group includes the Domain Guests group. It is a VERY little known fact, that if you are a member of Domain guests, your profile is deleted when you log off the network - after all, you are a guest in the domain so why keep your settings? The saving grace for the previous company was that if you are also a member of Domain Admins, your profile is not deleted. See Microsft KB Article 165398 for documentation on this fact.

By removing Domain Admins from the users group, the users were now part of Domain Guests and as they logged off the network, their profile was deleted. This includes all files in My Documents, their archived email, desktop icons and the current work they were using (stored on their desktop) as all these files were stored in the default location, c:\documents and settings - on the desktop machine, in their profile.

Once it was discovered that the profiles were getting deleted after logging off, everyone was told not to log off whilst I did some research to find out why this was happening and the above knowledge base article was found. Everybody was removed from Domain Guests but the problem still existed for the users who were currently logged on as group membership is refreshed at logon and so everyone was still a member of Domain Guests and therefore the profile would be deleted! For the first time in my life I was actually telling people to turn off their computers at the power switch rather than logging off and shutting down their computer. By pulling the power, the logoff functions would not run, the profiles would not be deleted and the subsequent logon and logoffs would work as originally intended.

As you can imagine, the solution to this perplexing problem was very welcome after a VERY long weekend. I hope you have enjoyed this mini series. Let us know whether you would like similar series to run. What did you like/not like about the series. My goal was to make you think, impart a little known fact that might help someone else and give you an answer to Mike Mcbride’s question - What did you learn this week?

I happened to be talking to our Network Engineer at work today and he was asking me if I knew of any tools that would help him keep his remote connections to terminal servers organized. Something that would just allow him to set-up the connections and credentials and choose where he wanted to connect in one window. Everything I could think of involved VNC or some other 3rd party tool being on the server so I didn’t have an answer for him.

About 15 minutes later I get an email from him that simple says “This is awesome!”, with a link to visionapp Remote Desktop.  Naturally I had to run over to his desk and check it out, and there he was proudly showing me the folders on the left with different login configurations for each folder, and the tabbed interface on the right where he was logged in remotely to multiple servers at once. He was pretty giddy. I was pretty impressed.

Check it out if you find yourself in a similar boat, wanting a tool that your budget doesn’t really allow for.

In my previous post I posed a problem where all the users were in the domain admins group and asked what dangers this could pose.  The responses included the fact that removing people from the domain admins group could cause issues with programs running on the local desktop if the previous setup relied on the administrative rights to allow users to be an administrator on the local pc.  This is a correct statement, but there is another gotcha that has yet to be revealed.

From my analysis of the network (after the gotcha was revealed) it was discovered that the previous administrators had been lazy and actually added everybody to all of the groups in  the domain so they wouldn’t have to worry about people not being able to do things. I removed them all from the domain administrators group to lock down security (they would need to be in the power users for some old applications to work)
So now you know all the relevant details that may lead you to the gotcha, what do you think is the problem?

I’m guessing not many of you techies will be dealing with Office 2007 in the workplace right away, but I also know that, eventually, you will be. That means you’ll be dealing with training users on the new interface and where they can find various options. You might want to make a note of this Neowin post pointing to Flash that just might help with the move from Office 2003 to 2007:

So far there are guides for Word 2003 to Word 2007, Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007. They are all flash applications simulating these threeOffice programs. If you click on a function of Word 2003, for example, the flash tool will run a short animation showing you where you can find this function in Word 2007.