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Almost every business has a person in-house who is the “go-to” person to solve IT issues. You may even be that person in your business? What OJ Networks often seen though is that if the issue is a complex one or if there more than just a couple of staff to support, then this person spends a lot of time trying to solve these issues, at the expense of the work they are paid to complete.
In cases like this, two of your staff are now not working on core tasks. This can also cause unwanted stress as they try to catch up on their paid work. Make no mistake – having an IT savvy person in-house can be fantastic for solving small issues, but if they need help with something that is over their skill level, then having a trustworthy IT professional to call makes sense. IT Professionals have either seen the problems before or can intuitively find the solution to new problems quickly. This allows your business to get on with what it does best and keeps your staff happy and productive.
Some other benefits of getting an IT Professional to look at your issues are that they might have a solution that you did not know about to an ongoing issue. Things like using DropBox to share documents between offices or with employees who are out in the field. Or installing an Exchange Server or Exchange Online Solution to benefit from the power of having your email, contacts and calendar that stays in sync with you everywhere.
If you are looking for a IT company to look after your business on the Sunshine Coast then give OJ Networks a call!
This is an interesting one. Word documents in Microsoft Word 2007 appear fine on the screen but when you go to print the document it comes out as garbled text where each character on a line is printed over the top of the first character. These overlapping characters make for a totally unreadable document and is very frustrating to the end user. Here is an example of how the text looks when it is printed.
Not very user friendly is it? The text appears to be hieroglyphics. Sometimes the screen updates quickly to show the characters like this on the screen when it is printing.
Well the solution to this problem is simple if you know where to look.
1) Press the “Office” button in the top left.
2) Click “Word Options” at the bottom
3) Click the “Advanced” button on the left
4) Scroll down to the “Print” section
5) Untick “Print in Background”
6) Click “OK”
Now open your word document and you should be able to print without the garbled hieroglyphic text appearing and you can get on with your work day!
So you’ve downloaded a webpage, an email or a PDF document from the internet on your iPad or iPhone and you want to print it out on your work or home 
printer. Of course it isn’t that easy and the printer usually doesn’t automatically appear when you hit print. At this point you may email it to your work or home pc or even put it in a DropBox (www.dropbox.com) . Wouldn’t it be better to be able to just print it directly.
Well now you can.
For only a few dollars you can purchase FingerPrint – a new tool for Windows and Mac computers that allows you to share via AirPrint your existing printers. Just install it on the computer that has the printer connected and as long as your Apple device is on the same network it will now be able to print to it. Some printers may be incompatible so FingerPrint offer a free trial where you can check it is going to work.
We tested it on a network and the local printers that were connected via USB worked fine but network printers shared by SMB did not appear in the program as an option. In this case you would want to run FingerPrint from the computer that was acting as the Print Server. FingerPrint also offers the added functionality of being able to send files directly to a dropbox account that you configure on your mac or pc or open the file directly on your mac or pc. Give it a try and see if it fits your needs.
FingerPrint is created by Collobos Software. Click here to download a Free Trial for Mac or Windows.
Got a great idea for a website? Here are some key points to take on board when filtering through the hundreds of choices in web designers.
(1) Are they local? Having a great designer in another state or country might seem feasible but in the back and forth of design and implementation – nothing beats a face-to-face meeting. Being on the coast means they will understand your business.
(2) Are they actually performing the work? Many Australian companies have a sales front and send the coding and/or design work offshore. Usually cheaper but you’re not supporting Aussie Jobs and when things go wrong the locals may not have the technical skills to fix it.
(3) Are they willing to help you with goals and strategies as part of their quote? You may have a plan for your site but a good web designer can give you a great site plan and focus on “calls to action” – getting your customers to act on your goals.
(4) Have they built a number of high traffic sites before? Nothing substitutes for experience. Having some high profile or high traffic sites under their belt means a web designer has seen and solved the many issues a more complex site involves.
(5) Are they providing a complete solution for social media and marketing? Facebook, Twitter, Analytics, SEO, Google Adwords – you will want to utilise these tools and more to market your brand to the full spectrum of opportunities available.
Answers
OJ Networks answers ‘YES‘ to all of these questions for businesses looking to bring their Sunshine Coast business online or create a website on the Sunshine Coast.
We are local – based in the heart of Coolum Beach – our offices are easy to find (across from Tickle Park) and we are always ready to meet face-to-face with you to discuss your online ideas. We know what makes Sunshine Coast businesses tick. We understand the tourist economy and how to market to it online.
We have highly skilled designers and coders on our staff. We can design custom templates from scratch. If you want a cheaper option we can utilize a pre-designed template and modify it to your needs. If something isn’t right with your site coding we will fix it.
Too many sites on the net are simple brochure sites. They have no call to action and no reason for people to interact with them. For example – if you are selling a product or service your goal should be to get people to enquire or purchase from you. We are experts in funnelling your visitors to these goals which results in more revenue for your business and really makes your site worthwhile.
Sites we have built attract thousands of visitors a day. They are fast and responsive. They are functional and easy to navigate. Whatever your requirements we can deliver an online product to make your ideas a reality.
We believe in empowering our customers. As part of our packages we integrate with tools such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster to allow our customers to track how their site is performing. We integrate with Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter to begin social interactions for our customers. We can help setup AdWords and facebook advert campaigns to boost your traffic overnight.
If you are getting EventID 210 on your SBS 2011 server – with a message like…
[message_box title=”Event ID 210″ color=”red”]One or more of the messages (message number) were left in the ‘[accountname]’ account on the POP3 Server ‘[servername]’ because they are larger than the maximum acceptable message size (the largest message is [messagesize] bytes). You can either connect to the POP3 account and retrieve or delete the messages manually, or increase the maximum acceptable message size in Exchange Server.[/message_box]
Then you can fix it by opening the Exchange Powershell Management Tool…
And performing these commands which will change the maxmessage size up from the default 10mb to something more realistic (50mb/message).
set-receiveconnector “Windows SBS Fax Sharepoint Receive [servername]” -maxmessagesize 50mb
Crazy I know – but you need to change this one too for the change on the Pop3 connector to work!
set-receiveconnector “Windows SBS Internet Receive [servername]” -maxmessagesize 50mb
set-receiveconnector “Default [servername]” -maxmessagesize 50mb
After that the messages will happily roll in and the errors will stop. Unless someone decides that a 50mb attachment to your client is achievable…
This is an interesting issue where we created a custom template for Stonehenge Consulting – Building Certifiers using the popular Mailchimp newsletter mailing service. Everything looked fine in the Mailchimp preview, however when the test message arrived in my gmail inbox it seemed to have extra padding around certain images in the template.
I looked over the code and removed css trying to work out what the issue was. It looked fine in the source code. Then I realised that Mailchimp was exhibiting the same issues as GMail was when Mailchimp was not in preview mode. This would make debugging the issue a lot easier. After uploading several changes I realised that there was an issue with the way GMail was handling images. If an image was alone inside a <TD> table tag, it seemed to get the padding.
I fixed it by creating a new “display:block” css style that would be applied to the offending images causing them to stop padding in Mailchimp, Hotmail and Gmail.
[css]
.fixImage {
display:block;
}[/css]
Then apply it to your images
[html]
[/html]
Or if you want all images to be display :block then you could use this style. This could break some layouts though
[css]img {
display:block;
}[/css]
Bear in mind that if you apply this to images that need to sit next to each other they will be pushed to the next line down.
Now one of the best things about MailChimp is that if you apply a style in the header of your template, Mailchimp will produce a final template with all the styles included in-line too. That means that with mail clients like Gmail that tend to strip the header css out then your template will work just fine.
For the example above, Mailchimp would produce something like this…
[crayon][/crayon]
If you don’t have the time or skills to make your own template remember that OJ Networks can create a custom Mailchimp newsletter template for your business. Contact us today!
Dropbox may be the answer
Clients are frequently asking us how they can access their important documents on their mobile devices. Case in point – a Building Inspector client of OJ Networks wanted to have the Australian Standards on his phone for reference whilst on-site performing inspections. Well with the application Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) you are provided with a folder on your computer where you can copy and paste files that you want to have access to from another location or device. The files automatically sync to the Dropbox server on the Internet and then with the FREE Dropbox App for iPhone or iPad you can access those files. Not only that but there is also a public folder where you can share with anyone those large files that are hard to email. With 2gb of FREE storage this is a great solution for small businesses.
Setting up a Dropbox account
Go to www.dropbox.com and download the client for your computer – it is available for mac and windows. When it runs you will see this screen. Click next and create and account with your details. If you download the iPhone app first then you will see the screen on the right.
Choose the FREE option which is 2gb. If you need more you can upgrade in the future.
Once you are signed up you will see the little dropbox tray icon in the bottom right near the date/time. Click that to get all the Dropbox options including Open Dropbox folder. By default the Dropbox folder is create inside your Documents/My Documents folder. On the mobile app, simply click the Dropbox icon to launch the app. Any files you add from your desktop computer will automatically appear in mobile or tablet device when it syncs.
Here you can see I have created a folder called “Important Docs”. You careate folders just like you would on the file system e.g. in your “documents” folder. There is a file in there that is not synced yet. It shows the blue syncing icon when it is still syncing with your dropbox and the green tick when it is synced with your dropbox.
Sharing files with another Dropbox User
Now let’s share this folder with another Dropbox user. You can do this with any of your created Dropbox folders. See the next section if you want to share with people who do not have a Dropbox account.
Right-click and choose – Dropbox -> Share this folder.
This will then take you online to your dropbox account and you can share this file with the email address of the person you are sharing with.
If you are on the mobile version of the application then you click the link button at the bottom of the screen when viewing the document. Then you can email the link to someone.
Sharing files with non-Dropbox Users
The great thing with Dropbox is that you can share your files with people who don’t have a Dropbox account too. Many of you may have used “yousendit” in the past to send files that were too large to email. Well now you can just put files in the special “public” folder and share them with a hyperlink in an email.
Go into the public folder and paste in the files you want to share. Then right-click and choose “dropbox” -> “Copy public link”.
You then simply “paste” this link into an email and the person at the other end can download the file. Of course if there are several files, you don’t want to separate public links for them so I suggest creating a zip file with all the files bundled up – makes it faster for the person at the other end to download too.
This is a great service for small businesses on the move and on a tight budget. Try Dropbox today!
Don’t you just love it when a client’s exchange server decides to lockup and then fail to mount when it comes back up. Even better when it happens 1 hour before knockoff time…
Well this one had me stumped for a while. It is quite a large database (for SBS 2003) edb+stm = around 60Gb
Here are the steps that I looked at to get it working again.
First things first – check in the event logs…
Heaps of
[message_box title=”MSExchangeSA Event ID: 9175″ color=”red”]The MAPI call ‘OpenMsgStore’ failed with the following error: The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance. The MAPI provider failed. Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store[/message_box]
and for every user that uses activesync to sync iPads/iPhones etc…
[message_box title=”Server ActiveSync Event ID: 3005″ icon=”alert.png”]Unexpected Exchange mailbox Server error: Server: [server.fqdn] User: [user@fqdn] HTTP status code: [503]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly. [/message_box]
I tried to Mount the Private store and this error appears…
[message_box title=”MSExchangeIS Event ID: 9518″ icon=”alert.png”]Error Out of memory starting Storage Group /DC=local/DC=dcname/CN=Configuration/CN=Services/CN=Microsoft Exchange/CN=domain/CN=Administrative Groups/CN=first administrative group/CN=Servers/CN=dcname/CN=InformationStore/CN=First Storage Group on the Microsoft Exchange Information Store. Storage Group – Initialization of Jet failed. [/message_box]
I check the consistency of theexchange databases using…
“ESEUTIL /mh priv1.edb”
Dirty Shutdown – OK. There were some un-played log files so I performed a soft recovery which was successful.
An example of this would be “eseutil /r e00 /l [log_path] /d [database_path]”
In this example the logs start with e00. If your logs and database are in different locations you can use the /l and /d parameters.
Clean Shutdown being reported now – great! Still getting 9518 on attempting to mount store. By this stage I knew I had ShadowProtect Backups of the entire server so I decided to recover the exchange from a short while before it locked up.
I stopped the Information Store service. Moved the existing store to another folder and recovered the entire exchange (which sits on a second drive – not the system drive) folder with .stm, .edb, .chk and .log files. If your checkpoint (.chk) files are still located on the C:\ drive you may need to recover those too.
Tried to mount store – failed. Removed checkpoint files, replayed log files. Tried to mount store – same Event ID 9518. Back to the drawing board.
Time to try a defrag on the databases.
eseutil /ms “priv1.edb”
eseutil /ms “pub1.edb”
Both successful. Attempt mount again – failed event ID: 9518. OK – something else going on here. I don’t really want to perform a hard recovery if I don’t have to. The databases actually seem to have pretty good integrity.
This server was running exchange 2003 SP2. So I downloaded the Service Pack again and ran it over the existing install. If your server is only running SP1 then probably run that. It asked for a reboot.
Upon reboot – guess what. Log files replayed and Stores are mounted!
The Moral of the Story…
Never give up.
Even if you can’t find a solution on Google (which I couldn’t in this case) try to think outside the box.
Remember – There is always Microsoft PSS if you are really stuck.
I get a call from my dad… [quote]A person saying they are a representative from Microsoft just called and said my computer has viruses on it and needs to be fixed.[/quote] Luckily he told them to ring back and got my opinion on it before proceeding. I had seen this issue several times before – they had rung some personal clients, my neighbours and even me! The calls originate from overseas but as many call centres are located overseas now, it may be hard to differentiate truth from fiction. 
What the scammers do, if you are unfortunately duped into proceeding, is get you to install remote access software on your computer. They then show you some error messages to back up their claims, install fake security software and make you pay for it. Of course – once they have remote access they can install anything, meaning this threat could be constantly changing. Not only that but they are now apparently ringing proporting to represent Telstra or Bigpond. They know that if they pretend to be a big enough company that a large proportion of the people they call will be using services from that company and will at least listen to what they have to say.
Please be aware that this is a worldwide scam and the Australian Do Not Call register will not protect you from receiving these calls. They are finding the numbers through various means and pay no attention to the Australian laws regarding marketing calls.
Scammers are always looking for avenues to make money. Always be wary of people contacting you out of the blue. And remember that if it seems too good to be true then it probably is (even if it seems legitimate!). The recent eBay scam is a case in point where a scammer hired the services of high feedback rating eBay sellers to sell high value goods such as LCD TVs on their behalf. The scammers then delivered empty boxes to the purchasers who were duped into a false sense of security due to the high feedback rating. The poor sellers and buyers would not be feeling the Christmas spirit right now!
The Australian Government ScamWatch website has some great advice on how to protect yourself in situations such as this…
- NEVER give an unsolicited caller remote access to your computer.
- If you have given remote access to your computer, or you fear that your computer has been hacked, seek out help or advice from a qualified and reputable computer technician.
- Never give your personal, credit card or online account details over the phone unless you made the call and the phone number came from a trusted source.
- Make sure your computer is protected with regularly updated anti-virus and anti-spyware software, and a good firewall – research first and only purchase software from a source that you know and trust.
- If you have fallen victim to a scam or you receive a lot of unsolicited emails and phone calls consider changing your email address and phone numbers.
- If you think you have provided your account details to a scammer, contact your bank or financial institution immediately.
http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/862103
The internet wires have been buzzing recently with some high profile news that may affect the future of Adobe’s long surviving Flash Plugin.
Most recently ZDNet has reported that Flash will not be included with the new “Metro” version of IE 10 that will be included with the new Windows 8. If you haven’t heard about Windows 8 yet – there are some preview videos. TheMetro interface is an enhanced overlay interface (that to me has roots in the Media Center overlay interface – shoot me down!) and will work great if you are using windows 8 on a touch device. It has a lot in common with the new Windows Phone Interfaces that many of you would have experience with too.
Because the interface is coded in HTML 5 and Javascript it will be extensible by web developers. The specialised version of IE 10 in this “Metro” interface will not include the Flash Plugin – however apparently you will be able to switch to the standard desktop version of the browser to view that content. The desktop interface will still be familiar to current Windows 7 users. Microsoft would not have invested so much time and money into the new “Metro” interface if they didn’t expect it to be the way forward for Windows operating systems. As such this seems to be a message that Flash may play a smaller role in browsers of the future.
Adobe too has actually weighed in with some Flash news of their own. They are no longer developing new Flash Players for mobile devices. They realise that HTML 5 is the way forward on mobile devices and they are putting their money behind making HTML 5 all it can be. Of course anyone with a iOS device – iPhone, iPad etc. has never enjoyed flash content anyway, but now that Flash content may begin to disappear from other phones and tablet device browsers too. Adobe will still allow flash developers to package their Flash content within applications that run on mobile devices through the Adobe AIR platform.
Adobe has years of experience in Flash Player refinements and in creating the tools that allow pixel perfect animations and interactive web interfaces. They realise that by being part of the group pushing HTML5 as the future, they will be there to provide web designers with the vanguard of tools available to fill the gap that Flash leaves behind. In fact it looks like the transition will be gradual – where Adobe products may push out a HTML5 (Maybe through AIR?) and Flash version of the same content.
[quote]we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged[/quote] Danny Winokur – VP & GM – Interactive Development Adobe.
Watch this space! HTML 5 has a way to go to fill the gap that will be created by losing the advanced animation, gaming and video interface that flash provides. But it is being helped up on the shoulders of the big players like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Adobe.
There is no doubt that the future of interactive, eye popping content lies here…
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