Posts tagged ‘windows 7’

Oct 9

Controlling Where Users Save Documents

There are several levels of lock-down security that can be implemented to ensure documents are saved to a specific location, including network drive or SharePoint library. The requirements of document storage and the amount of security determine the method which will be used for enforcing your policy.

Passive Measures

The first, simplest, and most cost-effective, especially when you have a number of workstations, is to limit where Microsoft Office documents are save, by using settings within Microsoft Office itself. Each program employees are using needs their settings individually set to your chosen location. This is especially useful for organizations wishing to have their users save to a SharePoint location, since SharePoint is optimized to be at its’ best for Microsoft Office documents, and most organizations are using Microsoft Office exclusively. This method can also be used for network drives as well.

If an organization that wants their users to save to SharePoint and does not require users to have the advanced features of the Desktop version of Microsoft Office, then they can set options within the SharePoint library to cause the documents to be opened directly within SharePoint using the Web Edition Programs of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. That is not practical however for special archives where documents are being prepared from templates with many features and defaults, because it would change the nature of future documents as well as past documents, should they be edited post-implementation. However if you are a small business just starting out, limiting use to the Web application and not installing Office on the local machine enforces strictly that all work gets done in SharePoint. This is also helpful with older computers, which may be very slow running Microsoft Office. Running on the Web Application provides another advantage: you are just running a web browser; the actual application performance will be faster, for the Web Application is running on the Servers.

Policy Enforcement

Mapping My Desktop and My Documents Folder to

The two methods above only involve saving Office Documents, but some organizations are also saving Adobe Acrobat *.pdf and / or Image *.bmp *.jpg *.gif *.png files of substantial importance, then you may want to include additional features. Most people save documents to their “My Desktop” or “My Documents” folder. This procedure can be used to enforce saving documents through proper configuration.

The first step is to use the Registry Editor’s HKEY Current User Software Microsoft Windows Current Version, Policies, and Explorer. Simply create a new DWORD named NoDrives. The value of the DWORD needs to be in hexadecimal format. You can blank out one or more drives, and the value of the letters A-Z of one or more drives need to be converted into a hexadecimal value. Arrange the letters from Z-A (Descending Order). Put a zero under each drive letter you are not hiding and a one under the ones you are. Starting with the one furthest to the left, you have a binary number. Convert the binary number to hexadecimal and enter it into the DWORD value. When a user opens up My Computer, they will now see all drives except the ones that have been hidden according the hexadecimal encoding. At this point, you will have successfully hidden the drives of the local machine.

Now map your network drive to the machine if this has not been done already or map the SharePoint library as a drive. Multiple SharePoint libraries can be assigned multiple network drive locations. Target both the My Documents and My Desktop folders to folders with the same names created into the appropriate target destinations using folder and search options of these folders.

Further Security Application for SharePoint

If you have SharePoint 2010 or Office 365 with SharePoint 2010, you have additional options available to protect important documents. Specifically there is a check in and check out version control that can be implemented very quickly and easily within the settings of each SharePoint document library. When you add this level of security, each person who wants to edit a document signs it out. This prevents one person from signing it out except as read only until the other user checks it back in. It is easily apparent who has stewardship of the document in question, and if anything goes wrong, an administrator can undo the latest checkout and have the last version intact. Version control allows both major and minor versions, and you can keep all versions of a document or restrict the versioning to a particular number. Strict archives will do well to enforce major and minor versions with enforced checkout maintaining all versions without limitation by number of versions. Storage conscious small businesses may elect to keep only 5 versions of a document, to improve storage utilization. However we advise organizations to carefully check their compliance requirements, for we are very sensitive to the needs of organizations to maintain compliance to industry standards as well as, state, federal, and local government standards.

Who Have We Helped With These Issues Recently

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Aug 17

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Windows 8 and the Changes That Will Change How You Compute

Windows 8 has not been experienced by many people, because the consumer preview did not have all of the features, and because the official launch has not happened yet. Many are interested not just in the new features, but what the paradigmatic change in the user experience will be, once there is no more Windows Start button. There are a lot of changes that make Windows 8 from just another Operating system roll-out. There are security and functionality enhancements, as well as a cleaner and less confusing interface. Previous functionality is missing, replaced with new functionality, and users are already beginning to wonder what the changes are going to do for them, and why these changes were important in the first place!

The first thing that is going to change is that more users will want to try to add touch-screen technology as an additional way to interface with their computer or other device besides the keyboard and mouse. Some worry that the keyboard and mouse will be phased out due to lack of demand, however the number of third-party keyboards being sold for the iPad and other tablets and even phones is evidence enough that the keyboard is here to stay. Less clear than that is the fate of the mouse, which can be easily replaced by touching and tapping on a screen. However I am sure that mice and trackballs in keyboards are here to stay: humanity stays with the familiar, and the QWERTY keyboard we all grew to know on the typewriter has finally made it to the PC, blackberry, and iPad.

Now that you know that you have either the choice to explore touch-screen or you can continue to use a traditional keyboard and mouse, as I do, you might worry about the lack of a start menu. This removal of the Windows Start Button and Start Menu is worrying so many people, and it will be hyped many more times in respectable journals from now through Christmas. It is nothing but hype. While it is true that the start key and start menu have been removed, they have been replaced with a tiles system that you can lay out in a convenient way. You will be using your entire desktop background as a giant start menu. Another improvement which is not immediately obvious but will prove very important is the removal of the application icons. The icons and font styling of many applications force you to re-focus to the style of each particular application. With Windows 8, the icon and most of the visual customizations are gone, giving you a consistent look and feel when looking at titles and statuses of applications, without the need to immerse oneself into the world of that application. Together this will mean that there is indeed a super-start menu instead of the one that was there before.

With Windows 7, users were generally using the Windows user interface on their desktops, possibly on their laptops, but they were unlikely to use it on their phones and tablets. With Windows 8, the phone, the desktop, the laptop, and the tablet will share the same style of desktop and operation. Many people will also be using SkyDrive or Office 365 SharePoint for storage, and this integration with the cloud will link their documents and settings across devices for a seamless user experience everywhere. This will be helpful at home, at work, and on-the-go.

Once people try out Windows 8, they will find that many of the things about Windows that were annoying, are now gone. They will see improvements that go beyond what they have imagined, and of course the same completely stable Windows core that we have all grown to know and love with Windows 7, with enhancements, will give us the reliability everybody has come to expect.

May 23

Microsoft Windows Intune by the Web and I

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Windows Intune: Remote Security, Repairs, Windows Installation and Licensing 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week

Windows Intune Users Log In Here

Company Overview

The Web and I is a premium I.T. Services company serving the New York City Metropolitan Area and Long Island since 2007. Our I.T. experience, however, dates back to the 1970’s, logging in to ARPANET with a 2 baud handset modem which would cradle the telephone’s handset. The telephone was, of course, nothing like telephones today.

Since then, we have gained experience working for various universities including NYU School of Medicine, Columbia University, as well as business computing experience in insurance, healthcare provider, law firms, mortgage firms, and real estate firms and Publishing with Thomson Reuters.

Background on the Web and I and Computer Support for Organizations Large and Small

With experience in computer support, applications management, and preventative maintenance and business network management, we are always looking for ways to better our response time and ways to support our client’s P.C.’s. Some of the challenges in providing effective and affordable service are:

Cost of travel requires additional expenses for our clients.
Time of travel requires additional cost to clients.
Technicians have no advance knowledge of what to bring or what will be encountered, possibly requiring extra visits and extra expenses

Expertise

The Web and I has been an early adopter of Microsoft Cloud Services, our senior systems engineer was one of the first users of Microsoft Office Live in New York, and he still maintains the original site on Office Live. It will soon be transitioning to Microsoft Office 365.

The Web and I are registered Microsoft Windows Intune partners. We keep up with all Microsoft requirements and news so you don’t have to. We are very enthusiastic Microsoft partners, and we help them with their testing and with our input into potential improvements in any way we can. Our mission reflects theirs: to provide the best computing experience with the greatest functionality and the most uptime.

Martin Low, our Senior Systems Engineer, served as the Systems Administrator on the team implementing InfoEd at Columbia University, linking together thousands of faculty and staff to a centralized grants management system with direct EDI data transmission to Grants.gov, the centralized portal for grants from the U.S. Government. This system had highly functional inbound and outbound interfaces to systems such as space management, library bibliographic services, all faculty, and finance and accounting systems. The process of implementation required a full set of ERP studies to determine a new plan for all of the University Systems to work together, avoiding duplication of effort. Many brilliant new decision-making metrics resulted including the ability to calculate grant dollars per square foot of research space allocated to faculty, number of classes taught and publications per year related per square foot allocated to faculty, live tools to analyze and optimize grant and project budgets utilizing drift analysis, and efficient workflows for clerical staff. Mr. Low and his division was also responsible for the upkeep, deployment, software installation and licensing, network security, and computer repair for fifty users including PC’s laptops, Macintosh, Linux, Unix, blackberry services, Treo services, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Mr. Low was instrumental in assisting in the data mapping and design of all applications to ERP systems.

During that time, we had to respond to computer users in person, even using car service to get around the Manhattan Campus to service different computers. Travel time was an added expense and delay, and we never knew what to expect until we got there, which increased the amount of time it took to solve problems.

The Solution: Windows Intune

With Windows Intune, we can remotely:

Scan your computers for viruses.
Defragment hard drives.
Remove spyware.
Deny employee access to websites.
Install Microsoft Windows or Office: you will have the latest licensing from Microsoft.
Instant Microsoft Licensing compliance: you will be prepared for Microsoft to audit many U.S. small businesses in 2012 for software license compliance.

How Windows Intune through the Web and I is Better

With Windows Intune from the Web and I, you benefit not just from a product and licensing, but also from our collective expertise and presence. Our clients will tell you: We are there when you need us!

May 13

Computer Repair

The Web and I is the best place to go for computer repair. Not for Profit and Senior Citizens receive reduced rates at cost, and in some cases can be provided on a pro-bono basis.

Whether you have outages, laptop screen damage, a virus attack, you need a cleaning or you need a new version of Windows or MS Office or installed, we can handle any problem for a fraction of what you think. No job is too small for us.

The Web and I can fix all kinds of problems with your computer. We can work on desktops, laptops, and servers.

Do you have an older computer that you are attached to but is just too slow? The Web and I has the solution for that too! Just have us put on Linux as your operating system. Linux is like Windows and has similar features, but is more secure, reliable, and takes up less processing power and memory. Add new life to your old computer today with Linux.

Sometimes people need a hand learning changing technology. The Web and I is here to help you do just that. We will happily train you to use your computer to do the things you want, to sell things on Ebay, to use Email, to make mailings, write reports, and more! We offer special rates for small businesses, and for home use so call now: (646) 853-0573.

UPDATE! New Service

The Problem: Need service remotely, saving money and ensuring licensing compliance and enterprise security.