Dariusz Klimczak's Surreal Images Will Inspire Your Darker Half - The Phoblographer
Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client: Overview - Petri
Use PowerShell to Find and Remove Inactive Accounts from AD - Petri, VERY useful if you don’t live in the CMDLT wold...
10 things you can do right now to save money on your enterprise systems - TechRepublic
6 new travel routers reviewed - PCWorld
Make Mail messages look the way you want | Macworld
Hyper-V Virtual Machine Virtual Network Adapters: Overview - Petri
An older article but I’ve been a fan of NIN for a long time so I feel obliged to post it here, also some links to some cool audio/video Trent Reznor: 'I'm Not The Same Person I Was 20 Years Ago' : NPR
Free yourself from the command line with these 10 GUI tools for Linux - TechRepublic
Linux for Windows Server Admins: Services and Runlevels - Petri
Thanks again, Petri: Default Hyper-V Storage Paths: Overview
TechRadar: All latest feeds How to create the perfect website for your business
For many out there, creating a website is a daunting, lengthy task. Where do you start, and what are some of the pitfalls that businesses need to be wary of? Juan Lobato, the CEO of web creation company BaseKit, offers some of his tips for businesses looking to create a good-looking, functional website.
TechRadar Pro: How important is 'brand' for a website?
Juan Lobato: Businesses often worry about their branding first, before thinking about the many other aspects of a website such as security, responsive design, speed and so on.
Branding is important, definitely, and of course your website should be designed in a way that is both appealing and engaging for your audience.
But it is important to remember that brand is just one part of the overall business strategy – and the website. Brand alone will not make either the business or website successful.
TRP: Content, content, content: Is this as crucial as it's made out to be?
JL: Content is perhaps one of the most important aspects of any website. Why? A website is often the first port of call, giving potential customers their first experience of your company.
Whether it's the landing page text, the blog, case studies, videos – these all help shape your potential customer's view of your company. So yes, content, content, content should be the mantra for any business and it's website.
TRP: Mobile is the future – should businesses be making websites for mobile first, over desktop?
JL: A few years ago, the thought of even spending money to ensure your website could be viewed easily on a mobile seemed laughable. Now, with consumers often doing the majority of their web browsing on a mobile device, it's become the norm.
If you are a small business, say a café, then it's likely that people will be searching for somewhere to eat when they are out and about. If your website isn't designed for mobile first, then you're preventing your customer base from reaching you quickly and effectively.
TRP: Call to action: How can you use your website to drive business?
JL: Many businesses, once they have got their content strategy right, often fail to utilise it in a way that drives business. There are a number of tactics that businesses can use to ensure that their website and content works harder to stimulate leads.
This could be a 'tweet to share' functionality, meaning customers have to tweet about the fact they are downloading a piece of content, in order to get said content. Or it could be giving an email address in order to view or download a piece of video content.
Whatever it is, as long as the content is of a good enough quality, it should be used to drive new business, and not just given away for free.
TRP: Ecommerce is now becoming just 'commerce' - how critical is an ecommerce-optimised website to businesses?
JL: Ecommerce and online shopping is no longer the gremlin it once was. Sites like ASOS, and Amazon, with free delivery/returns and 'one click' payment methods, show just how easy it can be to make money online.
Businesses offering the ability to purchase goods online need to ensure payment tools are operational, efficient, but most of all secure.
As with any other aspect of a business, any ecommerce operations need to be tied in with the overall business strategy, but as long as your website supports the needs of your customers purchasing from you online, you should be on the right path to ensuring ecommerce success.
TRP: How will businesses deal with online security issues this year?
JL: If the website is taking credit card details, processing payments, or even holding onto customer data – security needs to be your best friend.
PCI DSS compliance is just one of the compulsory regulations businesses need to be able to prove adherence too, unless they fancy crippling fines.
With ecommerce transactions increasing year on year, businesses that play any part in the ecommerce ecosystem need to ensure that they are hosting and securing any customer data correctly.
TRP: What can businesses do to make their website appealing and engaging?
JL: This is perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions that we hear from businesses. Essentially it comes down to a few simple things.
First, make sure that you understand your business proposition and are communicating this to your audience, whether via your sales teams or PR activity. Without this, your message via your website will be just as confused as the messages your sales and PR teams are putting out there.
Secondly, make it relevant to your business: a consumer-focus website will often be very different to a business-focused one, and for good reason.
And finally, keep it simple. Simplicity means ensuring your website is reliable, easy to use, and fast. Get those three things right and you should be on your way to a website that people enjoy visiting.
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Organisations are wasting money licensing Microsoft Office applications that the majority of employees barely use, a study released this week by application analytics startup SoftWatch has found. Conclusion: many users could easly be migrated to far cheaper cloud applications such as Google Apps.
The firm carried out a 3-month analysis of Office suite use in 51 global firms representing 148,500 employees, revealing that seven out of ten employees weren't using any single application heavily, launching them only for viewing or light editing.
The average employee spent only 48 minutes per day using Office, largely the Outlook email client, which consumed about 68 percent of that activity. Excel was in second place with 17 percent, or an average of 8 minutes per day, leaving Word and PowerPoint trailing with only 5 minutes and 2 minutes per day each.
That email is popular and spreadsheets and presentations less so is not a surprise. The latter are occasional applications that non-specialist employees use only when they really have to and their importance can't necessarily be measured in terms of how often they are used so much as the impact that use has.
For Word, that sort of rationalisation gets harder to explain. Five minutes a day was a poor showing for an application Microsoft would like enterprises to believe is essential to the work day.
SoftWatch also looked more deeply at how people were using each application by dividing users into four categories; heavy users, light editors, viewers (i.e. people who looked at documents but did nothing else) and inactive users who didn't use the program at all.
Here the results were even more stark, with 29 percent of users either never using Excel/Word or only using it to view documents; for PowerPoint the percentage was an astonishing 70 percent. For Word, a further 62 percent were classed as light users, while another 53 percent of Excel users fell into this category.
As to PowerPoint, it was easier in the end to say who was using it than who wasn't - only about one in twenty could described as heavy users even when applying a low threshold of what defined this type of usage.
What the study seems to be telling us is that the age of the all-purpose Office suite based on monolithic licensing has probably had its day because most users simply don't use applications often enough to justify the cost. Exactly what model replaces it is where things become more complex.
In SoftWatch's view, the obvious answer is that organisations should start by moving inactive users - 70 percent in the case of Word and 30 percent for Excel - off those applications in favour of cheaper alternatives such as Google Apps. Light users - those using the applications for viewing or barely at all - could eventually follow, potentially saving large sums of money in licensing costs.
The challenge is working out who those people are, which is where Softwatch's Application Usage Analytics SaaS service comes in, the firm said. It could analyse who was using what and for how long over a given period.
"By uncovering the fact that MS Office applications are actually used much less than had been thought, SoftWatch removes the fear and doubt that traps decision makers when it comes to transitioning from Microsoft to Google Apps," said CEO, Uri Arad.
"For the first time they will have real data enabling them to make intelligent decisions about transitioning to Google Apps, enjoy the benefits of an alternative cloud-based solution and significantly cut their software license spending.The analytics provided by SoftWatch are a real game-changer in the competition between Google and Microsoft over enterprise office and collaboration tools."
SoftWatch currently has agreements with Google Apps resellers because this represented the obvious migration path but SoftWatc was, in essence, agnostic, he emphasised. The system was also capable of monitoring any on-premises application and not just Office.
After stripping out unnecessary licensing Office licenses, organisations were left with a hybrid environment, part cloud, part desktop Office.
"We believe that this kind of analytics might become a game changer," said Arad. He predicted that in future the analysis of application usage would underpin all software licensing decisions.
So far, SoftWatch is alone in the market for this kind of service although that is unlikely to remain true if organisations starts assessing cloud application migration in more detail. What Microsoft thinks of this kind of system is probably unprintable but with the cloud-oriented Nadella in charge, the slow death of desktop licensing is probably now seen as inevitable anyway. How the firm competes with Google's Apps will depend on what it can offer itself through systems such as Office 365.
The Phoblographer 10 Ways to Immediately Rejuvenate Your Photography
We are all leading busy lives. So, finding time to dedicate to our photography can be a real challenge. But if we have any hope of improving our skills as a photographer, we need time and a reason to practice. Photographers get better by making photographs, over and over again. Most of them don't have to be stellar images. What's important is that the practices of seeing, composing and editing our images help us to develop important skills. Don't wait for that vacation or a workshop you've scheduled for this summer. Try some of these simple and straight-forward suggestions today.
You don't have to wait until vacation or a workshop to take advantage of great light. Explore your neighborhood or nearby commercial district and discover what the light has to offer. Yes, you might have to get up extra early on the weekend, but once you are out there, you will feel it's well worth it.
Make your photography a part of your regular schedule by carving out time to make images. Whether it's an hour or more, it will be time well spent. Commit to it as you would anything else that's really important in your life that you feel has to get done.
Using a single fixed focal length like a 35mm or 50mm lens will not only teach you how to become familiar with the characteristics of that specific focal length, but also will encourage you to focus more on composition. Limit yourself to this focal length for at least 4 consecutive shooting sessions.
Though we are often taught to look for the light, observing the shadows will tell you a lot about the quality of light as well as reveal potential subject matter. Meter the scene using both evaluative and spot metering and discover the differences that can result by photographing such scenes with a different metering system.
By eliminating color, you can explore the scene based on light, shadow, shape and negative space. Save your images as raw + jpeg to retain the original color file.
Go to a local event or venue like a parade, race track or a high school football game and photograph everything but the actual event. Create candid shots or portraits of the spectators. Consider making environmental photographs which include the larger space and the small details. There's a lot more to photograph that you might have thought.
Explore your community at night using a fast lens like a 50mm f/1.4. Make images in a local bar, music venue or coffee house. Remember to increase your ISO and watch your shutter speed. Don't put your camera away after the sun has set. Record scenes with and without flash and discover how different those resulting images can look.
Even the most familiar and common scenes in your world can be transformed by the light and weather. Make photographs after a storm or at twilight to see how different the subject or scene can appear. Choose a location that's a short distance from your home, which you have ready access to.
Practice your editing skills by choosing the best photographs of a particular genre of photography that you practice (portraits, landscape, etc). Create a small book or zine of 12, 15 or 20 photographs and produce a self-published book from Blurb, MagCloud or even a PDF. If you have Lightroom, use it's convenient Book module to design it.
Create several opportunities to practice HDR, panning, fill flash or whatever new technique you are trying to understand and master. Don't just wait for an important event to try your hand at it. Practice will make perfect.
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