I personally use eFax for my inbound and outbound faxing, but I just came across a free inbound fax to email provider and I thought I should pass on the link.

The company is called FaxDigits.

Let me know if you like the service.

Filed under: tools, internet | No Comments »

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Microsoft Office Groove is a one of the programs from the Office suite that not many people know about.

Groove is a useful application that allows you to create a workspace for collaborating with other team members.

The thing that differentiates Groove from other online project management solutions (which I’ll blog about in the near future), is that instead of hosting the workspace on a web site, Groove stores the workspace content on your local workstation and then replicates that workspace content to the workstations of the other workspace team members. This is known as peer-to-peer technology.

You can download a free trial of Microsoft Office Groove and have a play with it, but if you decide that you want to use it, then you’ll have to whip out that credit card and say goodbye to $229 if you buy it from the Microsoft web site, or $189 if you buy it from Amazon.

I recently came across a freeware alternative which works with the same peer-to-peer replication model, allows you to create unlimited workspaces, create notes, discussions, links, tasks, and add attachments. It also allows you to do basic instant messaging between other workspace members who are currently online.

The product is called Callanos Workspace, and is worth taking a look at for the creation of simple collaboration workspaces.

Here’s a link to a visual tour of the product.

Filed under: tools | 1 Comment »

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Here’s a large list of useful free MS Office 2007 software. You’ll find templates, add-ins, tools, training guides, extensions and many other goodies.

And here’s a large list of Windows Vista goodies, all of which are absolutely free.

Filed under: Windows Vista, Microsoft, tools | No Comments »

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Today I stumbled up a large list of freeware programs (and some shareware), which seemed to be very useful.

There’s quite a few tools in there which I’ve used in the past, and wouldn’t have an issue recommending (eg MailWasher, Adaware, HijackThis, Spybot search and destroy, Avast, AVG, iTunes, WinAmp, Audacity, DVD Decrypter, WinRar, Winzip, CursorXP, DesktopSidebar, Rainlendar, FlashGot, FreeDownloadManager, wget, DivX, KeePass, TrueCrypt, Filezilla, WarFTPd, Google Talk, Skype, Trillian Basic, AvantBrowser, Maxthon, Pegasus Mail, Thunderbird, Ethereal, NMeter, Nmap, Putty, RealVNC, TightVNC, OpenOffice, BartPE, CutePDF, PDF995, GIMP, Paint.Net, ActivePerl, Notepad++, Google Toolbar, DVD Shrink, VirtualDub, Mozilla Firefox, Apache, AnalogX, Cygwin, Process Explorer, SysInternals, TreeSize, TweakUI).

Wow, now that I look at the above, that’s quite a few programs which I’ve used regularly.

Now I’m wondering how many hundreds of crap programs I’ve experimented with and deleted within minutes.

Ok, let’s not waste any more brain cells on that….

I hope you find some useful free tools in there.

Filed under: tools | No Comments »

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

 Loading ...

I’ve used a quite a few RSS aggregators/readers in the past.

After trying out both software based and web based solutions around a year ago, I ended up choosing the web-based BlogLines. Part of the reason for this was the ability to access my RSS feeds from anywhere - even from an internet kiosk. I also found it was intuitive to use and seemed to do all I needed.

A work collegue recently tried getting me onto KlipFolio, which is a software-based program. Think of it as a widget which you can keep over your desktop and get a birds-eye-view of a whole pile of feeds quickly. Although the look and feel of it is quite sexy, and even though it does give you a good overview of all of the relevant feeds, I found it lacking when it came to reading through the RSS posts. Specifically, I found it lacking in two features which I’ll describe in the paragraphs below.
Read more »

Filed under: tools | No Comments »

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

We all have our favourite set of management tools which we can’t live without.

I have been a long time fan of the SysInternal utilities, and have used them to death at almost every customer site I’ve worked at.
It seems that Microsoft agree with me, since they aquired the SysInternals company a few months ago.

The tools are all free, and I give them my highest recommendation.
Read more »

Filed under: Microsoft, tools | No Comments »

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Those of you who have been using NT based Microsoft operating systems would all be very familiar with the good old boot.ini file which is normally on the root of your C: drive.

Boot.ini is just a plain text file, which can relatively easily be modified and tweaked.

With the release of Windows Vista, the boot.ini has been left behind, and manipulation of the boot manager menu has been replaced by the utility “bcdedit”. To access the syntax, go to a command prompt and type “bcdedit -?” (without the quotes).

Microsoft have a page showing how to use the bcdedit tool. It’s a short and sweet 14 pages worth!
Read more »

Filed under: Windows Vista, Microsoft, tools | 2 Comments »

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

There are many times that you’ll need to use a decent graphical editor in order to manipulate graphics. It could be needed for touching up screenshots for demos or documentation, a Powerpoint presentation, graphics for a web site, or even covering up that ugly pimple or whitening those yellow teeth on your favourite self portrait shot.

You will quickly find that the paint program which is built into all Microsoft operating systems (mspaint.exe) is almost useless. To do even basic manipulation requires something more advanced.

If you want an excellent graphical editor, you could go for Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, but that would set you back US$70 for every installation.
Read more »

Filed under: Digital photography, tools | No Comments »

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Microsoft technologies keep getting more and more powerful. In order to keep tempting you to upgrade to a new release, each new product version comes out with dozens of new features.

With so many features availabe, it becomes a challenge in having to correctly configure these feature-rich (and sometimes complex) products.

Microsoft keep trying their best to find the balance between the constant adding of new features vs trying to make each product easier to use at the same time.

Part of making programs easier to use comes down to issues such as: making the user interface more intuitive/friendly, better online help, task based access (vs just feature based access) to the main program functions, attractive GUI, wizards, etc.

I’ve read books which were 2 inches thick which dealt with just Active Directory, yet how many users out there think that they can successfully install Active Directory by running dcpromo, hitting the “next” button 5 times, hit the “finish” button and then hey presto, everything should work just fine! Yeah, right. Sometimes wizards are a good thing, but sometimes they can hide the underlying complexity and cause even larger problems.

It’s great to see Microsoft still working hard at supplying more and more tools to the IT administrator in order to help them install and correctly configure these complex technologies. Microsoft are doing so with the release of various Best Practices Analyzer tools for their main products.
Read more »

Filed under: Microsoft, tools | No Comments »

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...