After a long silence good ol' Techno Babble is back with a vengeance. Quite a bit happening on the small office / home office ( SO/HO ) front. Let's skip the pleasantries and get into it.
The biggest item to hit this summer is, in my humble opinion, Microsoft Small Business Server 4.5. After going on and on about the last version ( 4.0 ) this one is even better. What's so special? Small Business Server ( SBS ) packages everything a small business could want into one package, adds wizards to do just about everything, and sells it for a reasonable price. Drawbacks? The total number of seats for this package is limited to 50, but if your business is bigger than that hire an IS guy like me to keep things running. This package is aimed squarely at the business owner who is trying to keep his business and his network operating, and doesn't have time to read the manual. What's included? Check out www.microsoft.com/smallbusinessserver for full details. In the box you'll get everything you need to get a Windows NT network running with email, website design and hosting, fax and modem sharing and the kitchen sink. The sweetest thing is that the upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5 is free, so anyone who took my advice before can bask in the wisdom of their purchasing prowess. I'm in the process of getting my own home network up and running, and have spent quite a bit of time with it. The big lesson I've learned is follow the system requirements and installation instructions to the letter: any straying from the path Microsoft lays out will end in disaster. Once I did this, SBS 4.5 was running smoothly. Client setup went quick and easy, and the network was humming along. I've only been working with it a week, but I am very impressed. Just posted on the web site is a patch to allow one external email address to receive and sort email for a group using the Exchange Server included. Basically everyone gives out [email protected] with their name, and Exchange Server sorts it by the name in the TO or CC box. Very slick.
Microsoft has also released Office 2000 onto the planet, and I must say my excitement has waned since the beta I looked at. Don't get me wrong, this is a fine product and a worthy successor, but there's no wow factor in this release. The best feature is the ability to save any document into HTML and have it look as good as its native format. I've been using it for two weeks now and haven't found anything outstanding, yet. I plan on converting some documents into HTML for my web site, so I'll let you know how that goes. The nice thing about Office 2000 is the inclusion of Publisher into most of the versions, including the Professional and Small Business editions. This program gets better with each revision, and cane be summed up as the best desktop publishing package for non-professionals. Check out www.microsoft.com/office for full details.
Imsi is probably not a company you're familiar with; yet their line of products is quite varied. I recently received a copy of CD Copier Pro; a program that copies and entire CD onto your hard drive and runs it through a phantom drive letter. Let me explain: during installation the program asks how many drives you want, and what letters they should be. Upon reboot you will see that you now have x number of CD-ROM drives in the system. Go into CD Copier Pro and then create a virtual CD; a wizard prompts you for all information and makes it quite painless. Once you've got the image ready, pick a drive and click the load icon; look in Windows Explorer and you'll see that CD-ROM listed under that drive. The program works great: every CD I tried worked save one: TA Kingdoms. CD Copier Pro works under Windows 95, 98 and NT; I tried them all just to see. The only drawback is the space required on your hard drive; even with compression the virtual CD's were about 500 MB each. Don't take my word for it; check out www.imsisoft.com for full details. I'm trying to get a copy of Norton Virtual Drive, CD Copier Pro's only competitor. More next time. Don't be afraid to check out www.iprimus.ca/~tbabble and read my online shenanigans, along with past articles and other goodies.
by Scott VanderPloeg
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