Today we released the new version of our website with a new look as well as more information about our services. We have also modified the site to include a section about our web design services, including a few screenshots of some of the recent sites we have launched.

Please take a browse around the site. We’d love to hear what you think.

If you were at my presentation this morning and would like an electronic copy (pdf) of the document I handed out, here’s a link to Microsoft’s website where it came from:

Small Business Server 2008 Datasheet

I did a short presentation this morning about Windows Small Business Server 2008. Whenever I talk about the number of things that this system brings to the table, I get really excited for the small business owner with whom I’m potentially going to be working because it’s so common to come across offices that have a lot of technology investments but aren’t utilizing them to improve their business processes and boost their overall productivity. Instead, they (and often their employees) feel unproductive, and sometimes even “beaten” by their computers. They believe “this is just the way it is with computers”.

SBS offers a lot of the features that large business have come to rely on, but puts them in the perspective of a small business (up to 75 employees), running on a single server. This makes it affordable as well as relatively easy to maintain. Having everything centralized may initially seem like “putting all of your eggs in one basket”, but a server is designed to have hardware redundancy built in.

By keeping everything in one central location, you realize several benefits:

• Files are stored on the server and are protected from loss of an individual desktop or laptop
• Files can be secured according to the employees who need access (or don’t)
• Email within the company is more secure, as it never has to pass through the internet
• All mailbox parts are accessible from multiple locations, including your mailbox and all of its folders (including sent and deleted items), contacts, calendar appointments, and task lists. And anything done to something in one location is automatically reflected in the others – make an appointment on your phone, and it’s automatically on your Outlook at your office desktop – wirelessly if your phone supports it, which most “smart phones” do natively.
• Windows Updates can be controlled and monitored for the entire organization from a central dashboard, allowing a quick view of the security of the machines connected to the network
• Backups, backups, backups – All files in one place means that it is easier to ensure a complete backup of all of your important data and email. No more worrying about mail being inaccessible because a laptop was left at the airport, or was dropped, run over, or subjected to any other physical disaster

These are just a few of the benefits. If you are a business owner with 5 or more computers/employees or you know someone who is, please have them give me a call to talk about their options with Small Business Server or any other technology questions they may have.

I have uploaded a new video showing an interesting new feature of Windows 7 and that is “pinning” windows to the sides of the display. This is a useful feature that allows you to quickly and easily place two windows on the screen side by side for comparison, copying and pasting data, or many other reasons.

To pin a window to the side of the screen, you simply drag it by its title bar until the mouse cursor hits the left or right boundary of the screen. Before you let go of the mouse button, you will see a ghost of how the window will be placed. Let go of the mouse button and the window will drop there. Pull the window off the side of the screen, and it will automatically undock.

If you use two monitors, however, you cannot drag the window to the inside edge of either monitor to make the window attach at the middle boundaries – not very helpful.

But, you CAN do this. All you have to do is use the Windows Key Shortcuts on the keyboard to make this work. Win+Right and Win+Left will put the window through all of the available positions, including the edges between the two screens. Perfect.

Please check out this video to see this in action:

Rather than write a bunch of text for something that is very visual in nature, I decided that I would capture some screen recordings of a few of the new features in Windows 7. Many have dogged Vista over the last several years and Windows 7 seems poised to get Microsoft and its users past that and onto something better. Maybe this is what Vista should have been to begin with, but this time around we have a lot more interesting (and stable and fast) features to grab onto – both from an IT perspective AND an end-user experience angle.

So, without further delay, here’s the first in a series of videos that I will be doing going over Windows 7 and some other technology items. Enjoy!