Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Thursday night I went to my first Brisbane Drupal Meetup. It was great. There were 8 or 9 people there so most of the time was actually spend learning a little about each other (and kidding Mark about coding on reel tapes).

Jeff and Sheree and Josh from Marmalade Soul organised it. I also picked up cards from Mark, Chris, and Tony. Nick from Our Brisbane who I had already met because I am hosting and maintaining www.studybrisbane.com.au was there too. He is a real funny guy!

I had decided to present a summary of the tools and methodologies we employ here at Jethro in looking after something like 30 Drupal websites. As promised I have listed below the major tools and their uses below. This is a much bigger subject than the 10 minutes I gave to it on Thursday and I am really interested in seeing what others are doing.

Disclaimer: Yes I live in a Microsoft world. No I do not hate Macs or open source. and yes, sometimes Microsoft products are not the best products to use. On their own. But; most of the Microsoft tools that we do use are either because they are awesome or because of their integration and synchronisation with other MS tools. They are also generally easy for new staff to learn to use.

I have something like 20 or more websites open in browser that I want to be able to review or recommend. I haven’t got time so I will link them here, tag on delicious and clip into socialmedian as appropriate.

Here goes.

Microsoft

• Windows Live One Care for Server. Free trial. Works on Server 2008 Standard 64 bit, SBS 2008 Standard and Premium.
• File Dialogs – adding My Places in the File Open and File Save As dialog boxes. Quickly find frequently used locations on your PC or network.
• Adding signatures to email in Windows Live Hotmail
• Plugins – Flickr for Live Writer, Flickr for Outlook, Flickr for Word. Zemanta for Windows Live Writer. Hat tip to Sarah Perez from Channel 10 for this. (see our Geek Girl profile on Sarah)
• Another from Sarah is the Circle Dock Application launcher. Go straight to Circle Dock.
• How to share large files without attaching them to email
• Bulk convert old documents to new Office 2007 format from Digital Inspiration. I will be trialing this with a set of copied documents to test the results.

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office

I am constantly running  a lot of applications, and am using the quad core and 2GB RAM that Vista will let me use (out of the 4GB installed) pretty heavily. I frequently see the cores drop into 80-90% use. RAM usage is often over 90%.

Right now I have running:

File Management

CuteFTP

Windows Explorer (2 instances)

Browsers

Internet Explorer 2 open tabs

Firefox 89 open tabs

Java game Settlers of Catan (playing a game with Judith and Miranda while eating lunch and working and writing this)

Particls - newsticker scrolling

Communications

Outlook

MSN MEssenger - 2 conversation windows open

Yahoo Messenger

Skype

8hands