Microsoft gets more than 25 million spam submissions a day. Makes sense I guess, they’re a big company. I discovered this staggering stat going through their Microsoft IT* Showcase write-up on moving to Exchange Hosted Services. I’m not an IT Pro so the article probably isn’t aimed at me – but I still found it an interesting article to scan through. Microsoft basically transitioned the...
Benchmarks are like statistics – they are only relevant in context. Take this new TPC-E benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) as an example. If you were to read the gushing Microsoft Press Release you’d be forgiven for thinking that SQL Server 2008 topped out the list of all major database vendors in terms of price/performance. Here’s the quote: Of course what...
There’s a new Outlook Connector released, and this one improves the sync features with Windows Live Calendar. Supposedly. I had a play with Windows Live Calendar and I quite liked it. Having the connector would make it seamless to share calendar items. So I downloaded and installed it. Ran up Outlook and it crashed. Try again. Crash. Uninstalled the Outlook Connector and it still crashes...
If I were a software company producing productivity enhancing tools I’d love to have a tag line of: Use ‘X’ – it’ll save you at least a minute a day! I think this would be interesting for a number of reasons: It’s believable People would be able to easily verify the claim (much better than that ‘improves performance by 39.8%’ tosh we get bombarded with) The claim is so tiny it...
Product good. Marketing… not so good It’s been an interesting exercise thinking about marketing at Elcom over the last few months. In my opinion (biased as I am) I think we have an excellent product. However, something we haven’t been very good at is the marketing side of things. Often people have heard of us, but they don’t really know what we do. We mention that we have a content...
I can’t believe I didn’t know this – you can easily switch between the different functions in Outlook (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc) using Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3, etc. Yet another reason why you should be reading the Outlook Team Blog. See their other keyboard shortcuts here. Here’s the full list: Mail Ctrl + 1 Calendar Ctrl + 2 Contacts Ctrl + 3 Tasks Ctrl + 4 Notes Ctrl + 5...
I love the weather in September. Warm, breezy and the days are getting longer. The cold and dark of winter is gone and it’s time to come out and party a bit. Which is why its a perfect time to start attending all the great User Groups around Sydney again. Here’s a quick rundown of the main groups around town this month: This week Tue 16 September: Sydney SharePoint User Group – covering how...
Next Wed 24 Sep (ie in 9 days time) we have a special night at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG). The amazing August de los Reyes is flying in to present on Creating Emotion in Software. August is an acclaimed presenter, coming to Sydney to keynote at the world famous Web Directions South. And we’ve got him at SBTUG! Don’t miss this. (A big shout out to Michael Kordahi...
This is a follow on from my overview of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). If you are interested in learning more then here’s a list of resources. General VSTO resources MSDN VSTO Developer Portal Start here. This is the best place to start in terms of getting up to speed with what is happening in the VSTO world. See also the MSDN Intro to VSTO. MSDN Forums This is where I learn most of the...
I get a few emails each week from people asking about various VSTO related scenarios. I can usually point them to a related MSDN forum entry or blog post, or even (on a good day!) solve it for them myself. Interestingly the question of Access add-ins has come up a few times lately, so I thought I’d make mention of it here. Basically, the official position is that building Access Add-ins is NOT...