June 2004

This and past newsletters, and various articles are available on our web site. You can receive this newsletter via email.

If you are concerned about the security and confidentiality of your email, consider getting a personal digital certificate. Thwarte is offering free digital certificates for personal use under certain conditions.   http://www.thawte.com/email/index.html

Owners of Small Business Server 2003 Premium are entitled to a free copy of Biztalk server. Biztalk is a tool that allows companies to connect applications that were not designed to work together. It usually requires a significant investment in development to get it working, but is very powerful.  http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/

I continue to be impressed with Microsoft Small Business Server. We have installed quite a few of them now, and they work flawlessly, are full of features, and are easy to manage. They are an excellent value, offering server software, email, an intranet and more for less than the cost of Server 2003 alone.  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/default.mspx

VMWare and Virtual PC are software programs that allow you to run a ‘virtual’ pc on your computer. It fully emulates computer hardware, allowing you to install any operating system and software, and run it within your existing computer. This can be very useful for supporting older dos or window 98 programs from within windows xp, or for testing new applications without risking any changes to your production computer. It fully supports networking, even between multiple virtual computers running on the same computer.

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc            http://www.vmware.com

Enfish Find is a utility that searches all types of documents on your computer or network. This includes email, pdf’s, spreadsheets etc. They offer a 30 day trial, cost is $50.

http://www.enfish.com/Products_individual.asp

Lycos offers a similar product for free, with advertising. The hotbot plug in adds the ability to search both the web and your hard drive, blocks popups, and searches RSS content. http://www.hotbot.com/tools/desktop/

I have not used them -I will be trying out both this month.

Microsoft Software Update Services (SUS) allows larger companies to centralize patch management. You download Microsoft critical updates to the server, and deploy them after they have passed approval from your IT staff. Instead of automatically downloading from the Microsoft update site, you download from your own server.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sus/default.mspx

Windows Update Services is a recently released free add on to Server 2003 that manages workstation software updates. This new version replaces Software Update Services. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sus/wuscomparison.mspx

Tim Torian

Torian, Group, Inc.

http://www.toriangroup.com