If you are trying to track down a particular program that owns a file or to try to kill a process for a particular application, then you might want to look at Sysinternals Process Explorer. This short screencast video explanation
shows you what it can do.
After some study and setup, Lumension Risk Manager can be a powerful tool for IT administrators needing to monitor an organization’s risk and regulatory compliance status. You can read my full review that was published this week in eWeek here.
When was the last time you actually hauled out a printed copy of your dictionary and looked up the meaning or spelling of a particular word? I am thinking for me it has been at least a decade, and indeed I don’t even own a printed copy anymore. Who needs all that paper when there are so many fine Web sites, such as M-W.com, dictionary.com, and even Google will give you a definition if you just precede your word of interest with the word define.
But looking stuff up on the Web is so last year; now we have an app for that. Several apps, of course: on the Apple AppStore, there are four free apps, including two from Dictionary.com for the iPad and the iPhone apiece. And Dictionary.com has apps for Blackberries and Android, as well as providing definitions on its Web site too.
The vendor has actually taken the time to analyze how people use their apps and Web site to look up words. And they found some very interesting trends that I will share with you here. For those of you that are word nerds, enjoy.
First, iPhone users are more utilitarian and just want to get a definition in the moment. They use them mostly during the workweek. Same with the Blackberry and Android app users. iPad users are looking for entertainment, if such a thing could be said about dictionary usage. They are more likely to play the audio files to hear pronunciation, getting the word of the day, and actually playing games with their dictionary apps. They use their app on weekends more too and spend about 25% more time on the app per session than the other users.
Second, the mobile apps are getting more usage than the Web site, about two or three times more often. It seems that people want to get definitions when they are in the moment. I am sure the Dictionary.com apps have settled quite a few bar arguments. But what is also apparent from the Dictionary.com usage data is that “people are just as interested in word discovery when there’s no immediate need,” says the press release from the company.
So when you think about developing the next great iPhone app, think about these analytics. Spend some time reviewing your user data to see trends and patterns, and think about ways that your mobile app can complement the content on your existing Web site. Satisfyingly, one of the most often searched-for words using the Dictionary.com app is erudite. You’ll have to look it up.
I was a guest this week on the Digital Nation nationally syndicated radio show, where I spoke for an hour about Windows 7 Migration options. There are six products that I have spent some time with for a series of reviews onITExpertVoice.com.
You can listen to the show here.
http://www.digitalnationradio.com/BroadCasts.aspx
With improvements to Windows 7 BitLocker and with USB drives getting bigger and cheaper (you can get a 64GB drive for not much more than $120), now is the time to take a closer look at whole disk encryption products. If you’ve employed whole disk encryption, then even if your laptop or USB drive falls into the wrong hands, no one besides you will be able to read any of the files stored on it; when you try to access these files you need to enter a password, otherwise the data in each file is scrambled.
I look at eight different whole disk encryption products for this article in eSecurityPlanet.com.
If you’re looking at better ways to automate your Windows 7 deployment, you might want to consider Prowess’ SmartDeploy Enterprise. This is one of numerous tools that enable collections of PCs to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. You can see other articles that I have written about this and other tools on my Windows 7 page here.
And you can read the full review that eWeek published here.
I am attending CAworld in Vegas this week and last night’s keynote was by James Cameron, the movie director of Avatar and Titanic. He spoke about the choices he made in his life along the way towards making blockbuster movies, and some of the ideas resonated with me. Here are a few points:
If you want to read another perspective, check out this story by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier on ITexpertVoice.com on the same subject.
In the past week, I have spent way too much time dealing with product pricing issues on a number of fronts. It shouldn’t be so hard to get a price – my motto is that the harder it takes to find out pricing, the less motivated customers are going to be to buy it.
Let’s give you some circumstances. I am back again reviewing products for eWeek (please, don’t all email me about your products, PR folks). For one review, it took four days, 10 emails and phone calls to get the actual price of the product. The PR person initially sent me something that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics that didn’t make any sense to either of us (why did she send it, you might reasonably ask). Of course, the vendor didn’t have any prices on their Web site, at least not that I could find.
As a journalist, this gets my goat. I often hear, “We don’t want our competitors to know about our pricing.” Or “We use multiple tiers so our VARs set their own prices.” Hogwash. What these vendors are really saying, “We don’t have a clue what to charge for our product/service.” Shame on them!
For a client, I was recently working with them on their plan for their new software release. One of my issues is its current pricing model, which has five degrees of freedom:
• Number of PCs supported
• Three different “levels” or overall pricing tiers
• Overall capacity
• Two different software versions
• Other surcharges for extra features
That works out to many thousand different prices. You need a spreadsheet to figure out what you are going to pay. Now, granted, there are some complex software products out there and you don’t want to leave money on the table and charge fairly for your product. But five different knobs to turn before you can calculate a price? Not good.
I was a judge in a local competition put on by our county economic development office to pick wining business plans that would receive a nice $50k cash prize. In the five semi-finalist plans that I reviewed, three of them were missing pricing information. The plans were well thought out, had plenty of detail about the company’s prospective businesses, and even had copious pages of spreadsheets showing how the business was going to make tons of money in year 4. But without the actual price of the product or service, this information is just a lot of hot air. How can you tell if your business is going to be competitive? What is the sensitivity of your price to your market? I asked these questions of my semi-finalists and you could see that they just didn’t make the connection. Uh-oh.
So folks, here’s my advice. Keep it simple. Better yet, make a free version available for a limited time or a limited number of users or PCs or whatever. And if you can’t put your prices online where your customers can see them, then you shouldn’t be in business.
One of the problems of using online services such as WordPress blogs, Facebook and Twitter is that you can’t easily save the information you accumulate in the cloud. If you have a WordPress blog, you need to run a regular backup that saves your blog content into an .XML file, for example.
Now a new service from Backupify can help. Using Amazon Web Services and cloud-based storage, Backupify provides backup agents to more than a dozen services, including Google Docs, Blogger and Gmail, Zoho, Delicious, Hotmail and Basecamp.
If you are still running XP on your desktop, like me, you may be thinking about upgrading to Windows 7. XP is getting long in the tooth, many newer programs (especially those from Microsoft) aren’t easy to run on it without a lot of effort, and you can’t upgrade Internet Explorer if you are interested in sticking with Microsoft for your Web browsing.
Of course, you may just want to stick with XP until your aging PC emits its last dying gasp and then just buy a new PC with Win7 already on it. That can be fine for some people.
But if you do want to upgrade, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy. The only way you can install Windows 7 is to wipe your disk clean and start with a fresh install. While this is appealing in a spring-cleaning sort of way, it may not be what you want to do. What they call an “in-place upgrade” – meaning that you can preserve your files, your applications, and your other customized settings – will only work if you are upgrading from Vista.
I have tested six different products that enable this migration directly from XP to Win7, and each has its good and bad points. Which product will work for you depend on a few different factors. Two of them are ideal for single PCs, or maybe up to ten individual PCs, but not for bulk migrations if you are planning on doing this across your entire corporation. These are Zinstall ($89) and Laplink’s PCmover ($20 to $60). I was initially attracted to Zinstall because it offers a very elegant solution: you create an XP virtual machine that can be summoned at the push of a button while running Win7 on your desktop. Inside this VM, you can add new apps or do anything that you would do with your regular XP PC. The only problem is that instead of running two operating systems I ended up running a useless piece of metal with no operating systems, because of something that was wrong with Zinstall’s install. Laplink’s software converts things as you would expect, so you can’t go back to XP once you have done the upgrade.
The other four tools are Microsoft’s Windows Automated Installation Kit (free), the Dell/Kace Kbox 2100 hardware appliance ($4500 for 100 PCs), Viewfinity User Migration (free while in beta), and Prowess’ SmartDeploy ($2000 per enterprise-wide license). Each of them has similar processes, because you aren’t really keeping XP around, just the hardware it is running on. The trick is preserving enough of your user’s footprints to make it feel like home. They work as follows:
• The tools start out with a fresh copy of Windows 7 as a master image.
• The entire machine is reimaged with Windows 7 — just without you having to sit in front of it while the bits are put on the machine from a standard install DVD.
• Next, they stir in the particular applications that you want to deploy across your enterprise. This gives you the opportunity to clean house and create a more managed environment, which may not be what your end users want to hear, but gets back to that spring cleaning sentiment mentioned earlier.
• Each tool has ways to deal with the variety of hardware configurations that you place the image onto, and some make it easier to copy the user application settings and data files over to the new world of Windows 7.
• Finally, you send forth the image to your desktops and have them reboot with the new copy of Windows 7.
Sounds complicated? Yes, it is harder than jamming a DVD into your drive and letting it do its thing for an hour or so. But if you get the tool working properly, you can do a massive upgrade in a matter of a few hours, no matter how many PCs you need to touch.
What do I recommend if you have dozens of PCs to upgrade? I would start with either SmartDeploy or the Kbox. Both handle things somewhat differently, and you are going to want to read and watch my reviews to understand some of the issues.
If you are in Chicago next Thursday evening May 20th, you are welcome to come by the Chicago Windows User Group meeting where I will be speaking about this topic and showing how to use each product in a little more detail. Email me privately if you would like to meet up.
If you want to read more, go to a page where I have links to the various articles and video reviews that I have done for sites such as ITexpertVoice.com, SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com and CIOupdate.com. You can go to links on each of the reviews on all six products here.
Don’t worry, the videos are just a couple of minutes long. Good luck with your own migration.