I purchased Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate this week and when I went to print, I noticed a publish option. I clicked on it and saw that I could publish a blog post. So I decided to try it out. If you’re seeing this post, I must have been successful.

UPDATE: In order for Word 2007 to be able to upload to a Wordpress blog, you must have the XML RPC setting in your blog enabled. Otherwise, Word will not be able to connect to your site.

Since I have a hosting plan with GoDaddy, I had been using their email service, that gives me a gig of email storage. I had been forwarding all of the emails to another account. Earlier this week, I felt I needed to improve the usability of Rychannel.com and switch all of its email to Google Apps. Google Apps is a great website that lets people add services like email, site creation, and web based office suites to their domain. For standard users, the service is free and each email account gets up to 7 GB of storage. You are limited to 50 mailboxes, but for non commercial users that shouldn’t be a big deal. I will still be using wordpress as my homepage.

Check out Google Apps at http://www.google.com/a

Bing is Microsoft’s latest rendition of a search engine. I thought I would like it at first but it seems that it still doesn’t compare to google. In fact, it seems that a Bing search result could do some damage due to its extremely summarized descriptions. For example, I was search for Club Am Iowa, a dance club in Des Moines and here is what I saw. Club Am is NOT a gay club, however Bing misleads the searcher into thinking it is.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been extremely busy lately due to work.

Speaking of work, I have spent some time trying out some software and online services in an attempt to improve the network systems. First I’d like to start with Spiceworks. Spiceworks scans your network for devices and attempts to give you information about each devices, such as whether it is a workstation, server, router etc… and it will give you important information such as the applications that are installed and what OS each workstation and server is running. As far as I know, the free version of spice works is ideal for those who have less than 250 devices. It also doubles as a helpdesk portal. I haven’t really messed with the helpdesk portal too much so I can’t say much about it.

Finally, content filtering seems to be an important part of network security and employee productivity. We found that lots of people were spending more time on Facebook than actually working. To solve the problem we implemented openDNS. You can read more about how openDNS at http://www.opendns.com .