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SharePoint is a content sharing and collaboration platform. It provides document sharing, team discussion and document-based workflow. SharePoint is highly customizable and each customization depends on the business environment. Although, there are loads of free templates from Microsoft that add further functionality to SharePoint, businesses can write their own code to add specific functionality related to their business needs. In addition, there are whole products that can be installed on top of SharePoint such as, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project Server 2007.

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Cloud computing can be anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service. While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical documents. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a pay-per-use service where a cloud-computing provider offers storage space, network equipment, and virtual servers as consumable resources. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a platform for the development, deployment and hosting of applications where the final product is delivered to the users via the Web. Software as a Service (SaaS) is when providers provide applications to customers via the Internet as Web services.
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One of the major players in cloud computing – Amazon, are SAS 70 compliant. A small step forward towards safer environments as many commented but I see it as an important move – well done Amazon! As I stated in previous articles, cloud computing has to proof that that it is getting safer and safer. Ernst & Young carried out Amazon’s SAS 70 Type II audit, quite an assurance that the job was done to high standards. This means that remote online backup providers that use Amazon as their backend have one important layer SAS 70 certified, however, the backup service provider remains responsible and should implement the necessary security measure to protect their customers’ data.

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A few days ago I received a phone call from a person asking for my services to help him recover data from a failed hard disk. I asked the caller whether he had internet access—sometimes the failed disk takes with it the only available computer. The caller explained that he had internet access and that the patient was a removable disk. I pointed the client to our online questionnaire and asked him to fill in the form. A few minutes later the form arrived.

In a nut shell, the disk was a 120GB 3.5” 7200rpm IDE Maxtor drive, two years old. It was housed within an aluminium external drive case. It was hooked up to a standalone Windows XP computer. It was spinning, no unusual noises such as clicks or retry access sounds. The file directory could be read. The client had last successfully placed data on the medium less than 15 days before.

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There are many sites with free, ad sponsored or paid for advice on how to design a pretty site. Many of these sites either directly host or have a link to web template sites. These templates carry a cost ranging from 0 dollars going all the way into the hundreds of dollars. A custom made site can bring up the cost of a solution into the thousands of dollars.

Yet Google a company with assets running into the billions and a profit and loss sheet with no traces of red on it has a simple white background with one 8Kb picture and less than twenty clickable items. For the record, Google does provide a hi-tech version consisting of practically the items described above on top of a picture of the user’s choice.

Why is it that a company that owns the absolute majority of all searches that take place can’t come up with a nicer interface? Lack of technical expertise? Can’t afford a good designer? I don’t want to waste your time asking other silly questions. The answer is that Google have based their computing model on three words: simplicity, functionality and focus.

All of Google’s solutions have no cluttering or confusing interface that came out of some study by some experts costing God knows how many millions. Google solutions have no weird options most of which came out of the necessity to make a new version available to paying customers. And Google solutions make what they do seem so simple that many of us may be mistakenly led to believe that what Google does can be done by pre-school kids.

Can the same be said about your backup solution? You do have a backup solution? For your own sake I’ll assume that you do. Does your solution make you wonder how you will go about retrieving your data if your working version becomes corrupted? Does your solution make you feel that you must get certified in order to use the product?

The next time you are out looking for a backup product, make sure that it has three basic ingredients: simplicity, functionality and focus.

Last 3 posts by chribonn

• When Green Is Bad - July 5th, 2010
• Securing your online backup archives - May 12th, 2010
• Backing up, Restoring and Tweaking Sage Pastel Evolution - April 5th, 2010

How important are your saved favorite sites, cookies, or feeds? I am quite sure that everyone repeats visits to same sites or adds certain sites to his/her favorite bunch! What happens if you lose all these links or need to work from another computer while having the same shortcuts? All you need to do is a simple backup of these settings and you can restore them to a new machine and have all your favorites with you! The technical term used is export and import your Internet browser settings and the following steps will show you how to perform such steps using Internet explorer and Mozilla Firefox:

Saving your Internet Explorer favorites, cookies, and feeds:

1. Open Internet Explorer and press the keyboard key ALT to display the menu bar
2. Click Import and Export… from the File menu item
3. Select Export to a file and click Next
4. Select all three options, that is, Favorites, Feeds and Cookies and click Next
5. Select the top folder Favorites or any sub-folder if you just need one and click Next
6. Click Next to the file location screen while taking a note of the location
7. Again, click Next to the feeds file location and click Export while leaving the default location for the cookies file

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I have heard of people losing long word documents during power failures or could not recover documents due the lack of knowledge about Office auto recovery options. Personally, I had one or two incidents with older versions of Microsoft’s Word. This can happen to you and no matter how keen you are on data backups if your Office Word or Excel settings are incorrect or you have no idea how these are configured!

In my opinion, Word and Excel general parameters are somewhat tricky to find in the new versions of Microsoft’s Office. The tricky part is that you normally miss the tab Word options when clicking the Office button as your attention is on other parts of the menu window! I would not consider this location for such an important feature during an application usability exercise!

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Stand-alone systems such as, home and mobile users’ machines are prone to data loss too and hence, their owners should take advantage of the inbuilt tools that are available with their respective systems. If users are not so confident and happy with these tools then they should go for a third-party backup solution. There are various cheap but reliable solutions out there!

Mobile users – Today’s laptops are all equipped with a DVD burner and the most basic means of data backups would be using writable DVDs as the destination location. Additionally, a small factor external USB hard drive would be a step forward towards a superior backup job. That is, you can set full and incremental backup jobs since external USB drives have larger capacities than DVD media! Given that mobile users quite often connect to wireless networks, they might attempt a remote online backup service. However, due to bandwidth limitations over most wireless networks this solution would not be possible. On the other hand, one time or another mobile users dock their machines at home or at their offices where they can synchronize their backups to a remote storage location for additional safety.

Home users – the first line of backup devices should be removable media such as, DVD disks and external USB drives while, if the bandwidth is sufficient they should participate in remote online backups. A good practice is to enable automatic backups on regular basis and store any external drives away from the computer while not in use. This will protect your drive from damages caused by electrical surges and lightning induced voltages that normally pass through from the computer systems to all attached peripherals. In this case, it is safer to use write-once media such as CD/DVD media.

Last 3 posts by George

• Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint - July 26th, 2010
• What is Cloud Computing? - July 19th, 2010
• Is Cloud computing getting safer? - July 13th, 2010