Office 2010 Has More Than You Think
Microsoft’s Office 2010 has been out for a couple of years now, but how many people actually know about it and its full capabilities? It’s like those people who are just discovering Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. I mean peanut butter inside of a pretzel inside of a pint of ice cream, is that even possible? I guess so because we landed on the moon. Well Microsoft Office 2010 has been around for some time as well and I bet a lot of people are still using older versions of Office mainly because, hey it works. Sometimes Microsoft’s biggest competitor is itself, but in this case Office 2010 does have some nifty features that older versions of Office don’t have, and I find that these useful features save me time during the day that I can spend doing more appropriate things, like say eating ice cream. Read More »
Changing World of End User Devices
Let me start out by saying that I am not an Apple fan boy. I am not a Microsoft zealot or a Linux aficionado. I use them all daily; it is all about usability to me. Read More »
Exploring Microsoft Windows 8: Search Functionality
Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system is bringing some of the most radical changes to the OS since Windows 95. Our own Chris Ward gave a great preview of what’s to come, and I’d like to focus on some of the baked-in features which have received a complete overhaul. It’s very clear that not only is Microsoft improving the functionality & performance of the OS (what can it do & how fast does it do it), but they are also paying extremely close attention to usability (how easy is it to use). And this feat is made all the more complicated because not only do they need to focus on the classic desktop, which we’ve come to know & love, but they now must also consider the experience of someone using a tablet which is a dramatically different way to navigate around the operating system. This is the first part in a series of discussions around the features of Windows 8, some old, some new. Read More »
The Taxonomy of IT – Part 4: Order and Family
The Order level of IT classification builds upon the previous Kingdom, Phylum and Class levels. In biology, Order is used to further group like organisms by traits that define their nature or character. In the Mammalia Class, Orders include Primates, Carnivora, Insectivora, and Cetacea. Carnivora is pretty self-explanatory and includes a wide range of animal species. However, Cetacea is restricted to whales, dolphins and porpoises and indicates more of an evolutionary development path that is consistent between them. Read More »
A Deep Dive Preview of Windows 8
I took the plunge over this past week and decided I would check out the Windows 8 customer preview. Now one would think that I would simply spin it up in a VM given my background in the virtualization space but that would have been way too easy. No, I wanted to see it on bare metal so I blitzed my primary work laptop and went about installing natively. First impression during the install process… Holy **it, this is crazy FAST! Yes, I have an SSD drive and I was installing from a USB 3.0 external hard drive but still; WOW the core install was done in less than 5 minutes from start to finish. Installing Windows 7 Enterprise via the exact same method was more like 20 min, so far so good. Read More »
King Philip Came Over For Good Steak: The Taxonomy of IT PT 2
IT’s Kingdom Classification- Phylum
In Part 1, I set up a conversation that compares the classification of IT to the taxonomy for biology, which we all (ideally) learned in high school. Using the seven levels of classification, I began to outline how we can determine the genealogy of technology as it exists today in IT environments. The hope is that we can use this taxonomy to categorize IT environments and identify those where our specific services and values align, and to better guide our customers moving forward. Read More »
