I’m supporting several businesses using Microsoft Online Services to host their Outlook mailboxes. It’s been very satisfying in almost every way. For a small monthly subscription fee, small businesses can get the full value of Exchange Server:

MULTIPLE COMPUTERS  The same Outlook folders can be displayed on multiple computers at multiple locations. You can use your Outlook folders seamlessly from a desktop computer at the office, a desktop computer at home, and a notebook computer on the road, and Outlook is always up to date at all locations.

MULTIPLE LOCATIONS  Office workers can be linked together and share Outlook folders even if they are in different offices.

WEBMAIL  Outlook folders can be accessed online through Outlook Web Access - full access to all Outlook folders presented in Internet Explorer, like other webmail services.

PHONE  Windows Mobile 6 devices can sync email, calendar, and contacts over the air continuously.

SHARING  Calendars and address lists can be shared with other people in the office.

SECURITY  Microsoft provides virus and spam filtering.

REDUCED COSTS  Microsoft is responsible for backups, database maintenance, security updates, and upgrades.

Recently the system was upgraded to support Outlook 2003 as well as Outlook 2007. Each mailbox has a default size of 5Gb (and can be expanded), and MOS now supports file attachments up to 30Mb. Service for my clients has been smooth and uneventful.

With one exception.

Access to a mailbox on Microsoft Online Services is controlled by a password. Microsoft provides a slick utility to memorize the password on each computer so it doesn’t have to be manually entered each day. After a few days or a week, most people forget that there’s a password at all. (The password has to be entered to use Outlook Web Access but many users never open their mailbox outside the office.)

And that’s where the problem comes from. Microsoft has an inflexible security requirement: passwords have to be changed every 90 days. The passwords have to be complex (lower case, upper case, numbers) and no portion of the old password can be reused for a long time.

It’s driving people nuts! The process to change the password has been a bit confusing for some people but the real problem is just the concept – many people just don’t want to think about passwords and they resent having to deal with it. They procrastinate when the reminder comes up until one day their mailbox won’t open.

I’m not going to present the reasons that I think this is a reasonable security requirement. You can guess what I’d say. But I can tell you that I’ve got a calendar entry for most of my MOS clients every 85 days to help them get through password changes before they have a chance to get frustrated.

Just a reminder: I am a Microsoft partner authorized to sell and support Microsoft Online Services. If you're interested, please call me or drop me a note! I do not need to be in your geographic area to assist you with this.

Labels: mail, Microsoft, Outlook, web_services

posted by Bruce Berls at 7/02/2009 12:53:00 AM | permalink

If you have a subscription to Windows Live OneCare, you are covered until the choices for security software are more clear towards the end of 2009. Keep using OneCare.

Your OneCare subscription will not expire. Starting last month, Microsoft began extending OneCare subscriptions automatically for six months for free. You’ll get an email to confirm that before your subscription expires. Here are the details of the free extension.

You are not obligated to continue using OneCare. You can switch to another program whenever you choose. Here is information about the security software on the market now.

I’ve been testing Microsoft Security Essentials, the free antivirus/spyware program released briefly to a small pool of beta testers. It is exactly what many of us need. It installs nearly instantly and runs invisibly, with virtually no impact on system resources. It will be available to all Windows users by late 2009 or early 2010. I love it. The beta test is now closed. Here is more info about MSE.

New computer, ready to switch from OneCare, or unhappy with your current software? If you are one of my clients and you want to try Microsoft Security Essentials, drop me a note.

Labels: OneCare, security, software

posted by Bruce Berls at 7/01/2009 12:05:00 AM | permalink

Starting now, you can buy a new computer with Vista and get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it’s released in late October. Here are the details of Dell’s offer, for example. It will not apply to every new computer but similar deals will be widely available. Shop carefully!

If you want a new computer now, you should buy a new computer. There’s no compelling reason to wait. Follow the suggestions in my shopping guide and you’ll have a computer that runs Vista like a champ. You’ll like it. Click here to start shopping in Dell’s Small Business division.

But add more weight to one of my recommendations: if you’re considering upgrading a few months later to Windows 7, then make sure you buy Vista Business, not Vista Home Premium.

When the Windows 7 upgrade disk arrives for your new computer, you’ll do two things.

1. Read the feedback online about how upgrades are going. Every attempt to upgrade a working computer from one operating system to another (Windows XP –> Vista, Windows 98 –> XP) has been more or less disastrous, despite promises that it would go smoothly. We’ll know pretty quickly how Vista –> Windows 7 goes. As I said yesterday, there are reasons to think the Windows 7 upgrade will be easy and painless – but if the news is bad, you might decide to reformat and do a clean install of Windows 7 instead of an in-place upgrade.

2. Do a Complete PC Backup (only possible in Vista Business or Ultimate) and create an image of the hard drive before you start the Windows 7 upgrade. If the upgrade goes badly, you can restore your computer to its pre-upgrade state in minutes with no fuss and no worries.

Two more things:

Paul Thurrott did his usual thorough work to identify the details of what is known and unknown about Windows 7 pricing. (Examples of unknowns: the price to upgrade from one Windows 7 version to the next version – Home Premium to Professional, for example; the licensing rights for virtual Windows 7 computers; the details of doing a clean install using an upgrade license.) Here are some questions and answers about Windows 7 prices and upgrades.

If you subscribe to bruceb news by email, you didn’t get the link yesterday to order Windows 7 from Amazon. Click here to pre-order Windows 7 at a discount.

Labels: Windows7

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/30/2009 12:15:00 AM | permalink

Pretty tempting, eh? For the next ten days or so, you can pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium upgrades for fifty bucks, or Windows 7 Professional for a hundred bucks. It’s a really truly cheap sale, a limited offer from Microsoft scheduled to end July 11, and only continuing “while supplies last.” No one knows how many units are being sold by Amazon and a host of other retailers but a report came in from Japan tonight that the discounted upgrades were sold out in that country in less than two days.

The sale prices are about half of what Windows 7 will cost when it’s released in October. The final prices for Windows 7 will be about 10-15% less than they’ve been for Vista.

Should you buy some upgrade copies of Windows 7? Slow down. Which group do you fit into?

TECHNICALLY PROFICIENT – you can save your data, reformat your hard drive, and install Windows 7 from scratch without breaking a sweat. Maybe you’ll throw a new hard drive into your computer so you don’t have to worry about backing up your data, you can just copy it later. You’ve got a computer or two running Vista that are ready to be wiped and reloaded. Order the upgrades! Click on that banner and get the cheap price while it’s available.

TECHNICALLY PROFICIENT WITH OLD HARDWARE – you know your way around a reformat, but the only computer nearby is a 5-year old clunker running Windows XP. Don’t wipe it and install Windows 7 – the hardware requirements are too hefty for old XP systems. Yeah, it might run, but really, why bother? It will still be an old computer with cruddy video.

UPGRADING FROM WINDOWS XP – you’re a regular person with a Windows XP computer. Plan to buy a new computer with Windows 7. You will not be upgrading your Windows XP computer. There is no way to directly upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. The Windows 7 disc will refuse to upgrade Windows XP, and for the same reason as above, it’s a losing battle to do a clean install of Windows 7 on an old computer.

UPGRADING FROM VISTA – you’re a regular person with a Vista computer. Theoretically you can buy the Win7 upgrade, insert the disc, and be up and running with Windows 7 a few minutes later. It might even work that way. Windows 7 is a relatively modest change from Vista, more like an ambitious service pack than a brand new operating system.

But I’m not going to let people pay me to do upgrades, and I’m going to gently discourage you from doing it yourself unless you’re willing to deal with glitches. Over and over we’ve learned that clean installs work better than upgrades of an operating system.

Some of you should click on that banner and order some copies of Windows 7 in the next few days. It’s a really good price. Two reassuring details about the upgrade sale:

• Although you are buying a license for an upgrade, the media can be used for a clean install.
• The disc includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7.

Most of you, though, should look forward to Windows 7 on your next computer. Talk to me in October!

Labels: business, Microsoft, Windows7

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/29/2009 01:49:00 AM | permalink

Windows 7 is coming. It’s been almost eight years since Windows XP was released, and we’ve spent more than 2 1/2 years with Vista already. New details are appearing daily about Windows 7 – its development status, availability, pricing, versions, promotions, and much more. It’s the beginning of a huge wave of coverage in the months ahead.

Microsoft wants and needs this buzz about Windows 7 to create excitement and try to put the Vista debacle behind it. Vista will be remembered as a failure; you’ll see that repeated so many times it will come to be the accepted wisdom. It’s not fair, it’s not true, but that will be the perception.

I have long believed that Vista got a poor reception in part because Microsoft misjudged the path for computer hardware. When development of Vista started in 2001, there was every reason to expect processor power to continue skyrocketing forever, for hard drives to get bigger and faster and cheaper, and for computer video to continue developing in power and sophistication faster than anyone could write programs to take advantage of it. All of that had been going on for years and it looked like it would keep going indefinitely.

At some point in the next few years, computer hardware stopped being interesting. Did you notice? Intel has introduced new processors, each slightly more powerful than the previous generation, but all of them are built on more or less the same processor design that has powered PCs for ten years or more and the differences from year to year are modest. Hard drives are certainly bigger and cheaper, but they’re not all that much faster than they were at the beginning of the decade.

And video development just seemed to stall. Sure, Nvidia and ATI still develop new generations of ever more powerful video cards for gamers but Vista was built on the assumption that every consumer and business computer would have a smoking video system that could easily handle Vista’s Aero visual effects.

It didn’t happen that way. Cheap underpowered video began to be folded into motherboards and consumers flocked to the cheapest systems at Best Buy, until finally Microsoft made the fatal mistake of agreeing to allow Vista to be installed on computers that could not handle it, as I wrote up last year. Add the problems with poor marketing, lack of support from manufacturers and developers, unrelenting attacks from Apple fans and skeptical (bored) journalists and bloggers, and Vista was doomed.

Windows 7 is a dressed up version of Vista but it’s likely to be greeted as a success. What has changed?

• Your Windows XP computers are three years older than when Vista was introduced. You’re much more likely to consider replacing them.
• Windows 7 has been tweaked to run far better than Vista on underpowered video systems and less powerful processors.
• Compatibility issues are over. Everything works.
• Microsoft has made enough changes that it can plausibly present Windows 7 as something new, and the journalists and bloggers seem willing (so far) to go along.

There is, however, one thing that should not be misunderstood, with some important consequences. Windows 7 has virtually identical hardware requirements to Vista. If you install Windows 7 on your 5-year-old computer, you’re not going to have a very good time. I’ll write more about upgrades next week!

Labels: computers, hardware, Microsoft, Vista, Windows7, WinXP

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/26/2009 02:19:00 AM | permalink

Thank you for your patience! I’m back at my desk now. I won’t desert you again, I promise.

Labels: bruceb

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/25/2009 10:26:00 PM | permalink

There will be some new experiments with subscription fees for online services, after the last few years when it seemed everything online would always be free or could be financed by online advertising. Adobe has just turned on “premium” subscriptions for Acrobat.com, its portal for file sharing and collaboration. Here’s what I wrote about Acrobat.com when it first appeared last year.

It’s still possible to use basic Acrobat.com services for free – store PDF and Office files online and share them, convert a limited number of files each month to PDF format, and use Adobe ConnectNow for online meetings. Premium subscriptions (for a hefty $14.99 or $39/month) increase the number of files that can be converted and the number of meeting participants, plus a few other things. There are a few more details about the subscription plans and the reasoning behind them in this article.

At the moment the idea seems slightly daft. Who would pay for this? Free alternatives are easy to come by, and Acrobat.com’s interface continues to be a bit baffling. It’s obviously elegant and streamlined and very attractive. It’s only when you try to use it that it becomes clear that the way it’s organized doesn’t really make much sense.

In particular, it’s not as important as before to have a way to create PDFs if Acrobat isn’t installed. Office 2007 users have the built-in ability to create a PDF from any Office document after installing Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

Perhaps the real importance of Adobe’s move is that it begins to soften us up for the big move to subscription-based online file services that will happen when Microsoft releases the next version of Office. When Office 2010 arrives in the first half of next year, it will include deep hooks into files stored online to make them as accessible as local files, plus web-based versions of Word, Excel, and some of the other programs, with monthly subscriptions to turn off advertising and turn on all the features. Here’s more information about what to expect from the next version of Office.

Labels: Acrobat, file_sharing, Office, software, web_services

posted by bruceb at 6/22/2009 12:08:00 AM | permalink

There’s nothing more exciting than finding out how someone else’s vacation is going, right?

Quite nicely, thank you! (Family and friends can find more photos here.)

Labels: bruceb

posted by bruceb at 6/21/2009 01:44:00 PM | permalink

On June 23, Microsoft will release a beta version of Microsoft Security Essentials, the free antivirus program that is replacing Windows Live OneCare.

Microsoft is now allowing journalists to write about the new program so a flurry of stories appeared today from people who have been testing it for the last month. All the news is good. Microsoft Security Essentials is a small download (4-5Mb for Vista), it provides excellent protection, and it has virtually no impact on system performance, even on underpowered computers. It is reportedly designed to disappear completely (not even an icon in Windows 7), with no notices or interaction required unless there is a problem. Updates are provided overnight through the Automatic Updates system, plus three times a day for virus definitions, plus additional updates essentially in real time if new threats are detected.

Think of MSE as the antivirus part of OneCare but none of the other things. It doesn’t take over the firewall or do backups or push out shared printers, all things that Vista can do without help. It also doesn’t have any management capabilities at all – no “circle” of computers like OneCare and no central management for businesses running servers.

The beta will be available to 75,000 testers initially, with full availability before the end of the year. There will be no personal information required to download the software – no Windows Live ID, no email address, just a licensed copy of Windows.

Since the antivirus protection is based on the same engine as OneCare (as well as Microsoft’s corporate Forefront security suite), people will squabble about how effective it is. Here are Ed Bott’s comments:

How good is the coverage? Microsoft scored dismal test results in the early days of OneCare, hitting a nadir in 2007, but its record has improved dramatically since. A new study (May 2009) by the independent AV-Comparatives group gave Microsoft OneCare (which shares the same engine and signatures as MSE) its highest (Advanced+) rating. Only 3 of the 16 products in the test earned that rating. Microsoft’s technology scored second in the accuracy ratings, behind AVIRA but ahead of AVG, Symantec, McAfee, and a dozen other products. And on the crucial measure of delivering the fewest false positives, Microsoft stood far ahead of the pack, delivering the fewest false positives of any program tested.

I want to avoid confusing anyone. You don’t have to install this software. You don’t have to stop using Windows Live OneCare or any other software that you currently have installed. Microsoft Security Essentials is a new  product being tested. We’ll talk more about it when it is a finished product. If you don’t have antivirus software or you have a subscription coming up for renewal, we should talk about this. Otherwise, rest easy and wait for more information!

Labels: Microsoft, OneCare, security, Vista, Windows7, WinXP

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/19/2009 01:47:00 AM | permalink

I love occasional glimpses behind the scenes. In The Wizard of Oz, I would have been Toto, pulling back the curtain to figure out what was running the big head. The New York Times gives us a fascinating look at the data centers powering the online services that drive our world – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and more. Most of us have only the vaguest idea that somewhere there must be a lot of computers indexing the web and showing us Google search results. Not only are there a lot of computers, the scale of it probably exceeds anything you would guess.

A data center will have servers in racks. There are Google data centers that each have as many as 45,000 servers humming quietly, using electricity and generating heat. In fact, electricity and heat are some of the biggest considerations for the buildings chosen or built as data centers.

Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.

Much of this is due simply to growth in the number of servers and the Internet itself. A Google search is not without environmental consequence — 0.2 grams of CO2 per search, the company claims — but based on E.P.A. assumptions, an average car trip to the library consumes some 4,500 times the energy of a Google search while a page of newsprint uses some 350 times more energy. Data centers, however, are loaded with inefficiencies, including loss of power as it is distributed through the system. It has historically taken nearly as much wattage to cool the servers as it does to run them.

As our world grows in complexity and speeds up, one issue is the length of time it takes for a server to transmit data back and forth to you. If the server is closer, the information gets to you faster – the bits are limited to the speed of light. Financial companies will build their data centers near the stock exchanges to reduce the lag by a few milliseconds. According to the article, “it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.”

Amazon has built data centers all over the world. A few years ago, the company realized it had set up such a robust and redundant system that it began to set up methods for outside developers to write programs that could use Amazon’s storage space and processing power. The result, Amazon Web Services, has become a huge resource for third parties, yet it’s virtually unknown to the outside world. One of the AWS divisions, Amazon Simple Storage Service (“Amazon S3”), can be used for online file storage and backups; in March, it was holding 52 billion objects.

One of my favorite statistics: at the beginning of 2008, Amazon Web Services was using more bandwidth than all of Amazon’s web sites put together, including all of their retailing operations.

It all puts the single server in your small business’ utility closet into perspective, doesn’t it?

Labels: business, Google, hardware, Microsoft, web_services

posted by bruceb at 6/17/2009 09:54:00 AM | permalink

Have you noticed the collapse in the market for boxed software? We used to go to Best Buy or Staples or Costco and buy the latest programs in boxes. The only time we do that now is for Quicken and Quickbooks. Just about everything else is either preinstalled on our computers or downloaded.

The latest sign of a changing time came in the announcement that Microsoft is dropping Microsoft Money, the competitor to Quicken that never quite found a place in the market. It’s only the most recent of Microsoft’s cost-cutting decisions and its movement to online services. A few months ago, Microsoft dropped the Encarta encyclopedia; Windows Live OneCare will be off the market completely in a couple of weeks; and it’s already been two years since we lost Digital Image Pro.

Even Microsoft Office may turn into a downloadable product if you buy a new computer and discover it’s not included, or want to add Powerpoint or upgrade your copy of Outlook. Dell just announced that it will be the first place to buy Office online (other than Microsoft, which has had a little-known online store for a while selling its products at full retail prices). The Dell Download Store has an interesting selection of downloadable software at prices that are reasonable – perhaps not the best deal around but certainly the most convenient at times. It seems like a natural fit for Amazon, which launched a software download utility more than a year ago; so far it has never moved past a limited selection of tax software but I wouldn’t expect it to leave the market alone for long.

Labels: business, Microsoft, Office, software

posted by bruceb at 6/16/2009 03:05:00 AM | permalink

Windows Live OneCare will be completely off the market at the end of June (although Microsoft will continue to issue virus definition updates for another year). When Microsoft announced that it was killing OneCare, the company added that it would be releasing free antivirus software in 2009 based on its enterprise-level Forefront security engine. No further information has been forthcoming.

Last week, Reuters leaked a small bit of information: Microsoft is testing an early version of the product with its own employees and it will "soon" make a trial version available.

This will be a very lightweight focused product, not a suite comparable to Trend Micro or Norton’s products, which include everything from an enhanced firewall to parental controls and backup software. I’m picturing something more like AVG’s free antivirus program, but distributed and updated through the Automatic Update system. The idea is to create something so easy that it will be installed on computers in third world and developing countries, which frequently are not updated and do not run security software. A disproportionate number of the computers taken down by malware or hijacked into botnets are in parts of the world where the population is too poor and technically unsophisticated to install paid antivirus software; Microsoft is stepping up to provide an extra layer of protection for computers worldwide. A lightweight antivirus program will also be better suited to the small, lower-powered netbooks and notebooks that are taking over the PC market.

Microsoft’s free software may be the right choice for many of us but it’s still a little while before we get a look at it. I’ll keep you posted!

Labels: Microsoft, OneCare, security

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/15/2009 12:05:00 AM | permalink

I’ll be out of the state from June 13 through June 25.

I’ll be answering the phone, responding to emails, and working with you remotely, just like always. But I’ll be slow to respond some days, and you won’t want to ask leading questions like “How are you?” or “What can you see from your window?”

If you have an emergency or something needs hands-on attention, call my friend and colleague Mike Cook at (707) 827-1524. He may be able to lend a hand.

If you talk to me in the next two weeks, forgive me if I seem to take your problems lightly or laugh inappropriately at odd moments. Don’t click on this link if you are prone to fits of crippling jealousy.

Don’t let your computers know that I’m out of town. I hope everything stays quiet until I get back!

Labels: bruceb

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/12/2009 12:02:00 AM | permalink

I wonder sometimes if the relentless onslaughts by the bad guys will ever be beaten back so we can use our tools in peace. This group of news items caught my eye today in an email newsletter – yeah, it was a busy day, but this is the interesting updates for just one day. Who can keep track of this stuff?

Labels: Acrobat, Apple, Microsoft, security

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/11/2009 12:05:00 AM | permalink

There are a lot of 3-5 year old Windows XP computers out there. They are due for a replacement; the time to do that will be after October 22, when Windows 7 will be on the market.

Many of you are finding that your Windows XP computers are insufferably slow. You can make the next six months a lot easier to bear if you take a few minutes to add memory. In most cases it will cost under fifty dollars and take only a moment to install – and if you’ve currently got 512Mb or less, you’ll notice enough of a difference to make it worthwhile. Here are some notes about how to check the currently installed memory and order an upgrade. Don’t put it off! Staring at an hourglass on an underpowered computer will drain your will to live.

Labels: hardware, Windows7, WinXP

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/10/2009 12:05:00 AM | permalink

Microsoft will release ten updates for Windows and Microsoft Office tonight, following its usual monthly schedule. Leave your computer on and expect it to restart overnight.

In addition, Adobe will release updates on Tuesday, the first quarterly security updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Those won’t be automatically installed. If you’re not prompted to install them on Wednesday from an Acrobat icon in the lower right corner, then open Adobe Reader or Acrobat and click on Help / Check for Updates.

Most of my clients are up to date but if you’re not sure, then check on Wednesday to see if you’ve gotten the latest Windows updates and service packs.

• Windows XP: visit Microsoft Update and click on “Custom”
• Vista: open Windows Update from the Start menu and click on “Check for updates”

Don’t forget some of the updates will take a while to download and install. These recent releases are all worthwhile but time-consuming:

• Internet Explorer 8
• Vista Service Pack 2
• Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Be prepared to start any or all of those and walk away from your computer for a while.

Note to my SBS clients: I’ll be installing updates and restarting your servers in the next few nights. Save your work in progress and log off when you leave for the day. (You do that anyway, right?)

Labels: Microsoft, security, Vista, WinXP

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/09/2009 12:05:00 AM | permalink

Here’s an updated list of ways to be safe and secure with your computer.

Install updates from Microsoft promptly. Look in the lower right corner for the gold shield (WinXP) or update icon (Vista).

Install updates to Acrobat, Flash, Java, and Quicktime promptly. Each will alert you from the lower right corner.

• An easy and safe way to keep up with updates: visit Secunia Online Inspector once a month and follow its suggestions.

Do not install any updates if prompted by a random web page. Example: you’re on a dodgy web site and a window appears: “You must download a new version of Flash player to play this video file.” Close the window and check for an update separately.

Keep Vista’s User Account Control turned on. It adds a valuable, effective layer of protection.

Install antivirus software and keep it up to date.

Antivirus software & UAC will not always protect you against malware if you click OK at the wrong time. The bad guys are liars. They will say anything to get past your defenses, without conscience or remorse. Use your common sense. Read and think before you click OK.

Don't click on links to web sites unless you know exactly where you’re going.

• Follow links with carefree abandon to and from legitimate sites, but don't click on links that arrive in spam e-mail, instant messages, web forums, or IRC chats, or that start from an untrustworthy web site.
• Don’t click on links in email messages unless you deeply trust the judgment of the person who sent the message.
• Don’t click on links in forwarded messages.
• Shortened links are becoming popular in Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and social networking sites. You can’t tell where they lead by looking at them. Don’t follow them unless you trust the person who created the link.

Never, never, never open email attachments unless you know with 100% certainty that the attachment is something you expected and want to receive.

If a web site brings something up on your screen that might be malware, do not click on anything. If you click “NO” or “CANCEL,” there is a good chance that they lied and you actually gave permission to install the malware.

• If there is any chance that a dodgy web site is on the verge of installing a bad thing on your computer, start Task Manager and kill Internet Explorer from the list of applications there. 
• If that’s not sufficient to close the possible malware window, see if you can identify it in the longer list of “Processes” in Task Manager.
• If neither of those work and you still have a window onscreen that might be dangerous, turn your computer off with the power button.

Back up your computers. Choose a backup strategy, understand how it works, and keep your backups up to date.

Labels: Acrobat, Apple, backup, IE, Microsoft, security, Vista, WinXP

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/08/2009 12:05:00 AM | permalink

This is for my clients whose mail is protected by Exchange Defender.

Some background for the rest of you: Exchange Defender is an inexpensive service that filters and archives all the mail sent to a business. It strips all virus attachments, drops all misaddressed messages, and holds onto the spam. Only legitimate messages are delivered to the server at the business. The effect is to drastically reduce the load on the server and the business’ Internet connection. In addition, Exchange Defender keeps a searchable archive of all messages sent and received by the business for as long as a year, providing an additional layer of protection in a crisis. It has a very, very low rate of false positives - legitimate messages are rarely caught by mistake.

(It’s well suited for any business running Small Business Server; almost all my clients with SBS rely on Exchange Defender. You need a partner to set it up for your business. If you’re interested, drop me a note or give me a call.)

Until now, the best method to review spam messages was a daily email report listing all the messages. Now those are becoming impractical; the daily messages aren’t timely enough for some people and they’re only getting longer (and easier to ignore) as the volume of spam grows.

If your mail is filtered by Exchange Defender and you use Outlook 2007, consider installing an Outlook add-in that will give you tools for checking your spam and reacting to it in Outlook. You can download the “Exchange Defender Outlook 2007 Agent” from this page. To install it:

• Exit Outlook by clicking on File / Exit. (If you just click the X in the upper right, several Outlook processes will probably continue running. If you click on File / Exit, it closes completely.)
• You’ll download and save a Zip file. After it’s downloaded, click on it and click on “Extract files.” Save them somewhere you can find them.
• Find the extracted files and click on setup.exe to install the agent.

When Outlook starts, you’ll have to log in with your email address and your Exchange Defender password.

The result is a new toolbar with buttons to view quarantined messages in real time and react if necessary to add senders to your white list or release messages trapped by mistake. There’s also an interesting statistics window. Mine is particularly egregious because I’ve been using my email address freely for a long time.

Yup, that’s 1800-2400 messages each day. It makes me feel kind of proud. Exchange Defender filters it and I only see the little tiny bar on the right each day.

The Outlook agent does not work in Outlook 2003. If you want some increased access to information about your spam but you don’t have Outlook 2007, you can download a desktop agent from the same page that sits down by the clock, alerting you every hour to new spam messages. Or you can follow these brief instructions to create a desktop shortcut that takes you automatically to the Exchange Defender portal for reviewing spam and changing settings.

The company that runs Exchange Defender believes strongly that this software should replace the daily reports. If you want help installing it, please give me a call – it only takes a moment!

Labels: mail, Outlook, SBS, web_services

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/04/2009 01:06:00 AM | permalink

One of the most important things you can do to keep your Windows computer running smoothly is to be conservative about what gets installed on it. Do custom installs of all new software, look at all the choices, and turn down the ones that don’t fit your needs.

I ran across a good example of the kind of bloated software that slows down our computers and causes conflicts. A good friend asked for advice about installing Nero software for working with video and burning CDs and DVDs. The Nero suite is one of the best-known commercial products on the market for those tasks, sold at the big stores and marketed aggressively.

Let me emphasize that I’m using Nero as an example. It’s not much different than a lot of other software out there. The Nero suite is quirky – hoo, boy, is it quirky - but it does some things very well. I use it myself.

Still, it’s hard not to be frightened when you realize that turning the Nero installer loose would put all these programs on your computer:

Isn’t that extraordinary? Each one of those is a separate program with its own purpose and its own learning curve and its own quirks. Many of them overlap other programs on your computer; there’s a good chance the Nero programs will steal file associations and become the default program when you click on certain kinds of files, whether you want that or not.

The lesson is not to avoid the Nero suite. Rather, I want you to take responsibility for your computer. Learn something about software before you install it. Take it seriously and learn how to use what you install. Remember one of the central tenets of computing in 2009: if you install it, you have to update it. That’s what it means to stay secure.

Oh, and I’ll give you an idea of how I approach the Nero suite for my own purposes:

• The core functions are: SmartStart; Express; Vision; Recode; Burning ROM; and ControlCenter.
• The fairly useless ones are Live; Discspeed/Drivespeed; Rescue Agent; InfoTool; PhotoSnap; and BackItUp.
• The one to actively avoid is: InCD.

Labels: software, video

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/03/2009 01:09:00 AM | permalink

Adobe Acrobat has been the target for some very nasty attacks by the bad guys this year. In March, all versions of Acrobat got a major update to close a hole that theoretically allowed a computer to be possessed just by hovering over a link to an evil PDF file.

It was one of the scariest bugs in recent memory but it didn’t stop there. New exploits emerged and new patches for Acrobat and Acrobat Reader were released a couple of weeks ago. (Here’s an article with more details.) If you are prompted to update your copy of Acrobat, you should get the update; if you’re not sure, you can manually check for updates by opening Acrobat and clicking on Help / Check for updates.

Adobe has also had to deal with a security hole in Flash Media Server – not a consumer product but still not the publicity it needed.

Lots of people got excited recently when a representative of security vendor F-Secure said that almost half of the targeted attacks in 2009 were directed at Acrobat Reader. Nasty stuff, if true. (Security vendors have occasionally shown the teensiest inclination to exaggerate security problems.)

Acrobat/Acrobat Reader is installed on almost every computer, especially office computers. Adobe is facing the same dilemma that Microsoft dealt with years ago – its products have to be updated on an ongoing basis or Adobe will take the blame when the bad guys take advantage of unforeseen bugs. Many people do not understand that the Acrobat updates are directed to security issues.

Adobe is going to adopt Microsoft’s strategy of releasing updates on a regular basis, starting with quarterly updates that will coincide with Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday” updates on the second Tuesday of the month. Here’s an article with the details. Adobe products alert you from the lower right corner of the screen when updates are ready. Pay attention and install the Adobe updates!

Incidentally, the F-Secure rep suggested using a different PDF reader. I don’t have strong feelings about that although I don’t quite see why it’s necessary; I have good experiences with Acrobat for the most part. Security attacks against Windows and Acrobat can almost always be defeated by being careful, using common sense, and keeping things up to date.

But lots of people prefer the FoxIt reader, and I’m sure it’s swell. There are many more. For what it’s worth, here’s an overview of many of the best-known alternative PDF readers by an author who reluctantly finds that each of them has some problems or is less than a perfect substitute. FoxIt is singled out because it has had several security problems in the last year, including some that Symantec said were circulating in the wild. FoxIt is perfectly safe – if you install updates regularly. (Sigh.)

Labels: Acrobat, security, software

posted by Bruce Berls at 6/01/2009 12:56:00 AM | permalink