First off, Happy New Year – the title should really have read “the technology fortnight in view” but frankly not a lot happened in my technological world over Christmas (except for a frightening increase in blobs of plastic lying around the place), and anyway – who’s counting? To kick off 2008 I found a great tip if you’ve ever lost the switch to classic view or switch to category view section in Windows XP, here it is: Classic View and Category View in Windows XP Control Panel. By the way did you hear about or take part in the Highlet campaign? It was fun while it lasted but hopefully, I’ve written The last word on Highlet … for now anyway. I also read on the news that a major high street retailer is filing a profit warning due to poor sales over Christmas. I wonder if this could have anything to do with an increase in online sales? Possibly.
As part of my New Year drive I just bought half a dozen 2.5″ 120Gb Portable USB drives. The idea behind these is that they will be contain weekly backups of essential business data then they will be rotated offsite at our secure storage facility. Why? Tape (8mm and DLT) is great but it takes a long time to restore data and being able to get it back quickly (especially when users accidentally delete stuff) is a great boon and now these things are very low in price they are perfect for storing data for quick retrieval. If you have ever worried about major loss of data you may want to spend some time and energy thinking about your business continuity plans.
For now I am still fighting with secure certificates on mobile device so we can use ActiveSync push technology with our Exchange Server 2007. It seems that some devices work whilst others don’t – so far the Nokia e61i is working great but the Sony Ericsson p1i is struggling a bit. I’m pretty sure there is a simple solution to this and I don’t intend giving up until I get it sorted! I plan to dig out the Blackberry 8820 this weekend to see if that works so watch this space.