Although it is similar to the regular Windows clipboard, the Office clipboard has additional functionality. It allows you to store up to 24 of your most recently copied or deleted items, and to paste one or more of those items into another Office program.

Using the Clipboard in Office 2007 and 2010
To view the Clipboard pane, go to the Home tab, find the Clipboard panel at the far left and click on the dialog launcher (the diagonal arrow at the lower right of the panel). The Office Clipboard pane opens and anything you copy to the clipboard gets saved in the pane. You can select any item, right-click on it, and select Paste or Delete.

Using the Clipboard in Office 2003
To view the Clipboard pane, either click the Edit menu and then the Office Clipboard menu item, or select some text and press Ctrl-C twice. In Office 2003, the clipboard pane appears at the right side of the screen by default. Otherwise, there are no notable differences between the way the feature works in Office 2003 and in Office 2007 and 2010.

Clipboard Options
At the bottom of the clipboard pane, there is an “Options” button. It offers the following choices:

• Show Office Clipboard Automatically
• Show Office Clipboard When Ctrl + C Pressed Twice
• Collect Without Showing Office Clipboard
• Show Office Clipboard Icon on Taskbar
• Show Status Near Taskbar When Copying

Which means that we now save around $1500 a month. Every single month!

And that it took months, not years, to recover our upfront capital and implementation costs.

In addition to the ongoing savings, the VoIP system we installed now gives us a great range of features, including voicemail-to-email, flexible inbound call routing, least-cost outbound routing, fax to email, and an interactive voice response system.

If you put all those facts together, the bottom line is that VoIP is a great option for any organisation that makes or receives phone calls!

Contact the IT Department for more information, or for a free telephone Bill Analysis to calculate the monthly savings you can make using VoIP.

To set a folder as a Favorite, first make sure that the Navigation Pane is visible (it should appear on the left side of Windows Explorer). To make the Navigation Pane visible, follow the instructions below.

With the Navigation Pane visible,  simply drag and drop any folder you use frequently into the Favorites section. This will create a link to that folder. Clicking on the link will now take you straight to that folder, saving you the time of navigating back to it time and again!

You can also drag and drop documents or other files directly into any of your Favourite folders.

Making the Navigation Pane Visible

If the Navigation Pane is not visible on the left side of Windows Explorer, then select the Organise menu item, and click on Layout and then on Navigation pane.

You will now see the Navigation Pane, with the Favorites section at the top of the pane.

What Is VoIP?
In a nutshell, VoIP is a technology that enables you to make phone calls over the Internet. There’s no change to you as a user – you still call the same mobile or landline numbers from a  phone on your desk. It’s just that the call goes out over the Internet rather than through the telephone lines of a company like Telstra or Optus.

Why Use VoIP?
The main reason is cost savings. VoIP calls are generally much cheaper than regular phone calls. At the IT Department we have used VoIP for over five years, both for our internal and external calls. By choosing our VoIP services carefully, we have managed to reduce our average call costs by 90%.

Dollars and Cents: How Much Money Can I Save?
The short answer is that the savings are different for every company. The quickest way to find out is to let us to do a free Bill Analysis for you. Send us a copy of your telephone bill, and we’ll let you know what you will save.
The longer answer is that the call cost savings depend on the quantity and type of phone calls that you make. A call to a mobile phone with a traditional provider tends to cost around 35c per minute, with a flagfall of 45c. The same call made using VoIP can cost as low as 10.5c per minute, and has no flagfall! So if your organisation makes 250 mobile calls each month, with an average call time of 3 minutes, that’s a cost saving of around $295 (an 80% saving). Every single month!

Why Not Use VoIP?
Truth be known, there’s aren’t many reasons not to use VoIP anymore. Historically there were potential issues with call quality, and a limited number of VoIP providers. In the past year however, VoIP has matured into a stable and high-quality business-grade telephony solution.

Contact the IT Department for a free telephone Bill Analysis, or if you’d like more information on VoIP.

If so, you will be glad to hear you can schedule when you an email to go out!

Firstly, type the email, add recipients, get everything ready to go. Then:

1. For Outlook 2010 select the Options tab, for Outlook 2000-2007 click the View menu
2. For Outlook 2010 Click the Delay Delivery button, for Outlook 2000-2007 select Options
3. Select the date and time you want the message to be delivered (Ensure “Do not deliver before” is ticked)
4. Click Close
5. Send the mail, it will sit in your Outbox waiting for that magical time

NB. Outlook must be open to process the request, even if you are using Exchange.

• How long before it must be up again?
• What does it cost you for your staff to be unproductive?
• Who contacts whom to get the power back online?
• Who do you contact if they’re not available?
• Do you have redundant parts or services that can be activated?
• What can we do now to minimise risk and / or interruption before this happens?

A short story to illustrate:

Two companies recently merged and were in the process of consolidating their two data centres. About 80 per cent of the way through the power-up of the new systems, there was a loud snap and all electrical power died.

The electrician’s post mortem was succinct: “The electrical panels were from the 1940s. To get 30-Amp lines for the UPS’s, a previous electrician had simply “bridged” two 15-Amp breakers.”

When the first panel blew, affected systems switched to backup power supplies, blowing the second panel, until all seven panels in the building were wrecked. Thanks to 70 years of evolutionary wiring, five of those panels were located in parts of the building not leased by either company. With the distribution panels fried, generator power couldn’t get to the UPS’s and system administrators had only enough time to shut down the systems cleanly before battery power failed.

The bottom line? The downtime cost the company more than it would have spent on building an offsite secondary data centre.

Funny for us, not for them.

Disaster recover (DR) plans should be put in place for internet outage, server failure, and other scenarios. If you cannot recall the last time these plans were tested, or if you would like advice in these areas, contact The IT Department to help document and practice your IT Disaster Recovery plans.

Window Management. You can “dock” a window to the left or right half of the screen by simply dragging it to the edge; similarly, you can drag the window to the top of the screen to maximize it, and double-click the window top / bottom border to maximize it vertically with the same horizontal width, the keyboard shortcuts are:

Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow dock;

Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximizes and restores / minimizes;

Win+Shift+Up Arrow and Win+Shift+Down Arrow maximizes and restores the vertical size.

Display Projection. Just hit Win+P, and you’ll be rewarded by the following pop-up window:

Use the arrow keys (or keep hitting Win+P) to switch to “clone”, “extend” or “external only” display settings. You can also access the application as displayswitch.exe.

You can also press Win+X to open the Windows Mobility Center, here you can turn on presentation “mode” that switches IM clients to do not disturb, disables screensavers, sets a neutral wallpaper.

Cut Out The Clutter. Working on a document in a window and want to get rid of all the extraneous background noise? Win+Home minimises all the non-active background windows, keeping the window you’re using in its current position.

Command Prompt Junkies Only. You can hold the Shift key down while selecting the context menu to get the option to open a command prompt at that folder.

Rearranging the Furniture. You may not know that the icons in the new taskbar aren’t fixed in-place. You can reorder both pinned shortcuts or running applications. You can also start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1,Win+2,Win+3 etc.

Peeking at the Desktop. You’ve probably seen the small rectangle in the bottom right hand corner: hover over it (or press Win+Space) to “Aero Peek” (see any gadgets or icons you’ve got on your desktop), click on it to jump back to the desktop.

Running with Elevated Rights. Quickly launch a taskbar-docked application as an administrator by holding down Ctrl+Shift while you click on the icon, and you’ll immediately launch it with full administrative rights.

One More of the Same, Please. If an application is already running and showing in the taskbar, you can simply hold down the Shift key while clicking on the taskbar icon to open a second instance.

Walking Through the Taskbar. Another “secret” Windows shortcut: press Win+T to move the focus to the taskbar. Once you’re there, you can use the arrow keys to select a particular window or group and then hit Enter to launch or activate it.

Pin Your Favourite Folders. If you’re always working in the same four or five folders, you can quickly pin them with the Explorer icon on the taskbar. Hold the right-click button down and drag the folder to the taskbar, and it will be automatically pinned in the Explorer Jump List.

These are just a few pointers that can hopefully help you make more of your day by spending less time at your PC.

Right-click an empty part of the desktop, select Personalise > Desktop Background, then hold down Ctrl as you click on the images you like. Choose how often you’d like the images to be changed (anything from daily to once every 10 seconds), select Shuffle if you’d like the backgrounds to appear in a random order, then click Save Changes and enjoy the show.

Truman Hoyle completed an analysis of some of the big fish contracts in the cloud computing space earlier this year. They found many common areas that you need to be thinking about when engaging a cloud service provider.

Jurisdiction

The contact will specify where disputes are to be handled, and they may not be where you expect, Amazon has chosen the Federal Court in King’s County, Washington, USA, Salesforce.com has chosen Singapore, IBM will settle where the deal was signed.

Variation to terms

“That’s not what it said when I signed it”, maybe not, but here in point 846, sub point 36, paragraph 2 it says it was your responsibility to keep abreast of the changes. It may sound outrageous, but you will apparently find this often enough. The best way to protect yourself is to only deal with someone you consider ‘reputable’.

Privacy when your data is stored overseas

Most providers will have a clause suggesting they cannot guarantee how their suppliers will treat your private information, and that your information may be stored in any other country which may not have the standards of our beloved Australian government, certainly this is Telstra’s position.

Most international companies shoot for US standards, which aren’t great, but some will also meet European standards, which shows privacy concerns are taken more seriously.

Security and backup

So you store your email on cloud X, they get hacked, your data gets stolen or deleted, or both. Guess who’s responsible, many providers would say that you are, “We will have no liability to you for any unauthorized access or use, corruption, deletion, destruction or loss of any of your content and applications,” says Amazon.

Do bear in mind though, these larger companies do have strong incentive to keep up to date on security and patching, it would be very embarrassing for Google Apps if they were ever broken in to.

SLAs

Most enterprise grade cloud service providers will offer some form of credit if their service experiences downtime. Or at least they promise a percentage uptime with compensation if they can’t meet it. Read carefully, SoftLayer will guarantee 100% uptime, and pay up if they don’t provide, but only if the downtime lasts longer than 30 minutes continuously, Amazon make you apply, while 3Tera monitors for you and applies credit automatically.

SLA alone should not be used to choose which vendor you use.

Contract end

This area is shown to be vague for most vendors, few providing any clarity around what they will or won’t provide with respect to your data, its preservation, your access to it and what form it may be in.

Warranties and warranty exclusions/limitations

The report also noted that few cloud providers were willing to provide warranties around how fit-for-purpose the service is, outside of existing provisions under statutory law.

Loss and limitation provisions

Further to what we discussed under security and backup, some providers refuse liability for direct loss, meaning clients cannot sue if unable to access data. Many contracts will cap the liability to 12 month’s fees for liability.

You can read the full report here if you are interested, or you can contact The IT Department if need help dissecting a cloud service provider’s contract.