Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Installation

As I previously mentioned I have been installing a Windows Home Server so as to test and evaluate it. I believe it is a product that is going to be very useful to a number of our clients.

I ordered the 120 day evaluation kit from Microsoft and it arrived about 10 days after ordering.

The Kit comes with 2CDs and a DVD in a cardboard sleeve and has a full licence key enclosed.

The DVD is an installation disk, and the two CDs are the client connector disk and the restore disk.

I had read the instructions first and also done a fair amount of research online so I was prepared. The machine I planned to install it on is a Pentium 4 Dual Core with 2GB RAM and 4 250GB Hard drives. It was running Vista, and was sitting in my server room. Its main use was to hold a large amount of Games, TV and Movies - about 600GB worth.

MS Office Outlook Team Blog - Managing Automatic Meeting Responses. This is a good article on keeping your inbox free from meeting responses - great for cubicle warriors.

How to Search your PSTs with Vista's built-in Search. I have a large amount (several Gigabytes) of archived email stored in PSTs. This tip means that content is now searched by Vista without me having to have these PST files open in Outlook. - tip to Sarah from Channel 10.

EqualsSolved - putting me out of business! Microsoft Excel and web queries for the non IT pro.

Following a is a list of cool stuff I didn't have time to write individual posts about.

Random Web stuff

MyOpenID - If you don't know what OpenID is, think of it this way, one sign in authentication process for every website that supports it. Drupal 6 has it, Yahoo has it, lots of places have it - learn more about OpenID and get your own.

Tagurself - enter a feed link or a url and it generates a tag cloud for you.

TeamViewer - excellent remote desktop sharing software - and its free!

Microsoft SharedView - remote connection - sharing applications - great for training people how to do things remotely.

We have been reviewing a number of online storage solutions for file sharing. So far we have looked at Eat Lime (see our review), Box.net and Windows Sky drive, and in recent days the Windows Live Office option. However We have found a varying degree of success for each of these.

Today I want to ask you to try and connect to each of my public areas and see which is the easiest to use from your perspective. I have the same file in each place. Let me know in the comments.

I have also added some commentary here on each of the main functions of the systems.

Uploading files