Current Topic: business
Posted by Michael Alfaro on February 6, 2012
Found this to expose some of our printers to the internet. Here’s the details (http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/):
Google Cloud Print
Print anywhere, from any device.
Google Cloud Print is a new technology that connects your printers to the web. Using Google Cloud Print, you can make your home and work printers available to you and anyone you choose, from the applications you use every day. Google Cloud Print works on your phone, tablet, Chromebook, PC, and any other web-connected device you want to print from.
Topics: Android, business, Google, internet, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on February 6, 2012
Would you like to know how much your meetings cost? If you know the number of attendees and the average rate per person, this meeting ticker could help you track the cost. You’d be surprised how expensive meetings get!
Source site: http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/
Topics: business, internet, project management, statistics
Posted by Michael Alfaro on December 21, 2011
Found this today, and I have to say it looks awesome! I’m going to be signing up for a course in the very near future, I’ll let you know how it goes. People sharing what they know instead of hoarding information for Job Security (you know who you are), nice!
What is Skillshare? from Skillshare on Vimeo.
Skillshare is a community marketplace to learn anything from anyone. We believe that everyone has valuable skills and knowledge to teach and the curiosity to keep learning new things. This means our neighborhoods, communities, and cities are really the world’s greatest universities. Our platform helps make the exchange of knowledge easy, enriching, and fun.
All of the classes happen in the real world. That means offline despite what we nerds may consider to be “real.” We believe that learning should happen in groups around shared interests and passions. When you bring together a variety of voices and hands-on instruction, truly spectacular things happen. This magic just can’t be replicated over a webcam and chatroom. We’re here to spread this magic and increase the gross happiness index around the world.
Topics: business, internet, life, technology, video
Posted by Shawn Venkat on December 13, 2011
The Local Wisdom team is thrilled to announce the launch of its second mobile app in 2011, Photomash.
This unique photo app gives iPhone and Android users the ability to take pictures and turn them into fun, creative images. Users simply take a picture with their phone, erase portions of the image with their finger and replace those portions with new pictures. Each time an area is erased, images available within view of their phone’s camera show in the erased portion, allowing the user to add a picture within a picture.
Our team here at LW has used Photomash at parties, weddings, and even internal meetings and the Photomash challenges and templates provide a jump start for those who might need a little extra help getting their creative juices flowing. For examples of some inspirational Photomashes, check out the creations we’ve received so far.
Once you’ve finished perfecting your Photomash, you can share your creation with friends, family, even coworkers via Facebook and Twitter. For more information about Photomash, visit photomashapp.com, or peruse our Facebook page at Facebook.com/Photomashapp. To download Photomash for $0.99, visit the Apple App store on iTunes or the Android Marketplace.
Special thanks go to our R&D team:
- Shawn Venkat, VP
- RJay Haluko, Creative Director
- Tim Jaeger, Sr. Information Architect & Mobile Developer,
- Chris Smith, Programmer
- Ryan Bailey, Programmer
- Patrick Pierson, Programmer
Topics: Android, business, iPhone app, mobile, photomash
Posted by Michael Alfaro on December 7, 2011
We switched to Office 365 about 90 days ago, and it’s been working great. Now we’re running into the 90 day default password policy from Microsoft which we want to avoid. We found how to turn off the policy for all current members of our 365 subscription. Here’s the original source: http://blog.atwork.at/post/2011/10/30/Passwordneverexpire-Kennwortrichtlinie-andern-in-BPOS-und-in-Office-365-mit-Hilfe-von-PowerShell.aspx
“Office 365 has a password policy, which is by default set to expire on a regular basis (90 days). There are some guidelines which help to make sure that the password is secure:
- Use 8 to 16 characters
- combination of upper- and lowercase letters
- at leat one numer or one symbol (be aware that the symbol is available in every language on every keyboard)
- Do not use spaces, tabs, line breaks, your user name
Each user is able to change his password at any time. If a user forgets his password it can be reset by an Office 365 administrator.
In some cases – for example for service accounts – it is useful to change the password expiration policy to never expire.
In this post I will show you how you can disable the password expiration for Office 365 and for BPOS as well.
Password Policy change to never expire in Office 365
In office 365 you need only two lines to disable the password policy. First open the Microsoft Online Services Modul for Windows Powershell. (Download: 32bit or 64bit).
Connect to Office 365
Connect-MsolService
In the dialog enter the credentials of an administrator:
To change a single user:
Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName <username> -PasswordNeverExpires $True
To change all users at once:
Get-MsolUser | Set-MsolUser -PasswordNeverExpires $True
That’s it. You can control the result with the following command:
Get-MsolUser | fl
“
Topics: business, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on September 25, 2011
Found the answer here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/gg271153.aspx#defaulttags
Example Here’s a command to increase the retention age limit for the Delete Items retention tag to 90 days:
Set-RetentionPolicyTag "Deleted Items" -AgeLimitForRetention 90
The article also shows how to set up and manage retention policies in exchange online
Topics: business, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on September 5, 2011
Ran into this problem after I created a shared mailbox, without specifying which email address I wanted to be the primary one. Original source here: http://www.bpossibility.com/2011/08/10/office-365-shared-mailbox-how-to-change-the-default-email-address/
“Office 365 brings Shared Mailboxes that allow users interact with a common Inbox and Calendar. The following site describes how these are made, licensing and other ins-and-outs such as setting Litigation Hold and delegating control to users:
http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/ee441202.aspx
Although following these steps will probably create the wrong primary SMTP address.
Other situations, such as multiple domains in the one Office 365 tenant, will more than likely raise the need for several Shared Mailboxes in different domains.
When creating the Shared Mailbox specify the -PrimarySmtpAddress, below is an example:
New-Mailbox -Name “Shared Mailbox” -Alias sharedmbx -Shared -PrimarySmtpAddress SharedMbx@DOMAIN.COM
“
Topics: business, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on September 5, 2011
Following up my previous post on Connecting powershell to Office 365, here’s why. I needed to create a shared mailbox for multiple people to have access to. Here’s how it’s done(Thumbs up to Microsoft for the great documentation):
“Create and configure a shared mailbox
After you create a shared mailbox, you have to assign permissions to all users who require access to the shared mailbox. Users can’t sign in to the shared mailbox. They have to sign in to their own mailbox and then open the shared mailbox to which they’ve been assigned permissions.
Here’s how to create and configure a shared mailbox for the Corporate Printing Services department at Contoso Corporation.
- Create a shared mailbox To create the shared mailbox for Corporate Printing Services, run one of the following commands:Office 365
New-Mailbox -Name "Corporate Printing Services" -Alias corpprint -Shared
Set-Mailbox corpprint -ProhibitSendReceiveQuota 5GB -ProhibitSendQuota 4.75GB -IssueWarningQuota 4.5GB
Microsoft Live@edu
New-Mailbox -Name "Corporate Printing Services" -Alias corpprint -Shared
The new shared mailbox is displayed in the Mailboxes list in the Exchange Control Panel.
- Create a security group for the users who need access to the shared mailbox In the Exchange Control Panel, create a security group for the staff who need access to the shared mailbox for Corporate Printing Services.
- Select My Organization > Users & Groups > Distribution Groups > New.
- Specify a display name, alias, and e-mail address. In this example, we’ll use Printing Services Staff, corpprintDG, and corpprintDG@contoso.com.
- Select the Make this group a security group check box.
- In the Ownership section, click Add to add an owner, if necessary.
- In the Membership section, click Add.
- In the Select Members page, select the users you want to add. When you are finished, click OK.
- On the New Group page, click Save.
Note After you create a security group, the membership is closed. When membership is closed, only group owners can add members to the security group, or owners have to approve requests to join the group. Additionally, only group owners can remove members from the security group.
- Assign the security group the FullAccess permission to access the shared mailbox To enable members of the Printing Services Staff security group to open the shared mailbox, read e-mail, and use the calendar, run the following command:
Add-MailboxPermission "Corporate Printing Services" -User corpprintDG -AccessRights FullAccess
- Assign the security group the SendAs permission to the shared mailbox To enable members of the Printing Services Staff security group to send e-mail from the shared mailbox, run the following command:
Add-RecipientPermission "Corporate Printing Services" -Trustee corpprintDG -AccessRights SendAs
Note It may take up to 60 minutes until users can access a new shared mailbox or until a new security group member can access a shared mailbox
Next steps
- Assign an Exchange Online (Plan 1) or Exchange Online (Plan 2) license to a shared mailbox if you need additional functionality. See Manage licenses in Office 365 for enterprises.
- Let users know how to open the shared mailbox using Outlook Web App. Point them to this topic: Open Another Mailbox
- Let users know they can view and use the calendar in the shared mailbox. Each user can schedule events or enter their vacation or out-of-office time.
- By default, security-enabled distribution groups are displayed in the shared address book. However, you may not want users to send e-mail to this type of group because its purpose is to assign permissions to a shared mailbox. To help prevent users from sending e-mail to a security-enabled distribution group, you can hide it from the shared address book.
To hide a group, just select it in the Groups list, click Details, and select the Hide this group from the shared address book check box.
Alternatively, you can restrict who can send messages to the group. For example, you can allow only members to send messages to the group. To do this, configure the Delivery Management section on the group’s properties page. See Change Distribution Group Properties.”
Original Source here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/ee441202.aspx
Topics: business, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on September 5, 2011
Found the need for this today as we’re switching over to Office 365 and I had to use the power shell to create a Shared Mailbox that multiple people can access. Step 1 was connecting the powershell to Office 365 as show below.
“Connect Windows PowerShell on your local computer to the cloud-based service
- Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Windows PowerShell > Windows PowerShell.
- Run the following command:
$LiveCred = Get-Credential
- In the Windows PowerShell Credential Request window that opens, type the credentials of an account in your cloud-based organization. When you are finished, click OK.
- Run the following command:
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Note The AllowRedirection parameter enables cloud-based organizations in datacenters all over the world to connect Windows PowerShell to the cloud-based service by using the same URL.
- Run the following command:
Import-PSSession $Session
A progress indicator appears that shows the importing of commands used in the cloud-based service into the client-side session of your local computer. When this process is complete, you can run these commands.
Disconnect Windows PowerShell from the cloud-based service
When you’re finished using the server-side session, always disconnect Windows PowerShell by running the following command:
Remove-PSSession <session variable>
For example, to disconnect from the server-side session that is defined by the $Session variable, run the following command:
Remove-PSSession $Session
Important If you close the Windows PowerShell window without disconnecting from the server-side session, your connection will remain open for 15 minutes. Your account can only have three connections to the server-side session at one time.”
Original Source here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc952755.aspx
Topics: business, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on August 24, 2011
The day was coming for a while now, and it’s finally here, Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO and Tim Cook the COO will take over. Looks like stocks took a bit of a hit as the news came out. Hopefully Apple won’t go the path of Microsoft after Bill Gates stepped away, but we really won’t know until he’s completely done with Apple. Steve will still be there as the Chairman of the Board so I’m sure his very necessary input will be taken 
Here’s the link to the text from his resignation letter:
http://news.yahoo.com/text-letter-steve-jobs-resigning-apple-ceo-225627625.html
Topics: business, design, information architecture, inspiration, interfaces, internet, technology
