rb|it : blog

Share your Outlook 2007 Calendar with anyone for free

I was asked recently by a client “I need to allow a third party to gain access to my diary. Is this easily set up without a major cost?”.  The advantages of this are obvious; Account Managers could let key clients see when they're free to make booking a meeting them easier; businesses who sell their services in time slots could let potential customers see when they're free, removing all the hassle from scheduling a visit.  Imagine my surprise when I looked into what was available and the answer was “Yes, you can do this, for free”! It’s very simple;

1. If you don’t already have one, create a ‘Windows Live ID’.  You don’t need to sign up to another email service like Hotmail or MSN, you just ‘associate’ your Windows Live ID with your existing email address (go to http://www.passport.net and select “Get Started Now” under the option “Use an e-mail address you already have”).
2. Go to http://office.microsoft.com and sign in with your new Windows Live ID, and it will take you through a brief registration process which takes about a minute to complete. Now you’re ready to publish your Calendar.
3. In Outlook 2007, right-click the calendar you want to publish in the navigation pane and select ‘Publish to Internet’ and ‘Publish to Office Online’.
4. As it’s the first time you’ve published your calendar it will ask you to sign in using your new Windows Live ID that you created above.
5. You can now select the time span that will be published (by default the previous 30 days and the next 60 days), the level of detail that will appear in the calendar (from just ‘Free’, ‘Busy’ etc up to full appointment details), and permissions (whether you restrict who can view the calendar, which would require them to use Windows Live ID, or whether anyone can view it).
6. At the end of the process, it will ask you whether you want to send an invite to people which contains a link they can click on to subscribe to the calendar so it appears in their Outlook 2007.

You can invite other people to view your calendar as required and send a URL to people who don’t use Outlook 2007 so they can view your calendar in a web browser (for example I have a test calendar published to https://calendars.office.microsoft.com/en-gb/pubcal/viewer.aspx?path=/pubcalstorage/qj1wnxmz721885/Richard_Bartlett_Calendar.ics).  For more information, see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA100809831033.aspx

28 October 2008

Richard Bartlett offers IT consultancy services to SMEs through his company RG Bartlett IT Services Ltd.  Contact him by email richard@rgbartlett.co.uk or visit his website at http://www.rgbartlett.co.uk

Directory sites to exclude using inurl

About 3 weeks ago I posted a blog about using the inurl switch to exclude unwanted sites from your search results, using the examples of searches for a product and a business.  As mentioned in that article here are the sites which I found trimmed the search results down to the most relevant and appropriate. 

The lists are too big to post in this posting including their classiciation so here are the full lists in PDF form; the product search list and the business search list.

The exact text to add after your search is also listed below, so you can copy and paste it straight into your Google search bar after the initial search text;

Product Search

-inurl:(consumersearch|epinions|recommendedbuys|reevoo|resellerratings|reviewcentre|unbeatable|which|gooshing|exchangeandmart|freeads|gumtree|vivastreet|ebay|appliances|bestwebbuys  |bizrate|electricalgoods|kelkoo|msn|nectar|nextag|onino|pricegrabber|pricerunner|pricewatch|shopgenie|shopping|ciao|comparestoreprices|dealtime|dooyoo|twenga|buy)

Business Search

-inurl:(192|accessplace|bizwiki|businessclassified|businessesforsale|cambridgedirectory|cambridgeonline|colc|computerrepairuk|directory|helpwithpcs|hotfroguk|icambridgeshire|pcproblemsolver|scoot|smilelocal|thebestof|thomsonlocal|ufindus|zettai|viewtopic|gumtree|allthetopbananas|clickajob|cvscreen|itjobswatch|jobs|recruitment|reed|ukworksearch|kellysearch|yahoo|yell)

The searches were initially based on the Givemebackmygoogle site, but I’ve set up two different lists, one for searching for a business service, and the other for searching for product.  You can maintain your own lists, and using the CustomizeGoogle Firefox Plugin you can permanently filter sites from your search results.

You should modify the lists for your own use, some of the business search excluded sites are specific to my region and the example I used (searching for PC Support in Cambridgeshire).  The sites also reflect my own personal preferences; for example I excluded free ad sites from the product search results (you might not want to).

If you use the CustomizeGoogle Addon in Firefox you can tweak your search results to filter out all the unwanted sites without having to use the inurl switch every time (the plugin will do it for you!).

Tuning your Google searches

Recently I blogged on using the "inurl" switch on Google searches to refine search results to useful web sites, not directories, advert sites and other unhelpful results.  At the time I realised some people may not be aware of the simpler methods you can employ to make your searches more successful, so here (in brief) they are.

I'll use the example of someone (it could be a business or a home user) looking for PC Support, and show how each change to the search phrase refines the results more and more.

1. PC Support.  Google comes up with 41,800,000 results for this phrase!  Not a particularly useful set of results.  The first way to reduce this is to make sure we're only searching for results that contain not either 'PC' or 'Support', but the phrase "PC Support".
2. "PC Support".  Now Google is showing 2,250,000 results, which is a step in the right direction, but it's still too many pages to possibly view. In this case, it's most likely affordable PC Support would be local, there's no point finding a PC Support company in Glasgow when you live in Cambridgeshire, so lets add that to the search.
3. "PC Support" Cambridgeshire. Google is now showing 34,000 results, so we're getting there.  But we're still seeing more results than you can view, so lets add a trick which changes a search for "PC Support" or Cambridgeshire to a search that contains both.
4. +"PC Support" +Cambridgeshire.  Down to 5,140 results, the plus sign in front of each word or phrase means 'my results MUST contain this', and as a result many of the sites on the first page are exactly what you looking for.  There are a couple of sites we didn't want though (recruitment sites), so lets add some new text to remove those.
5. +"PC Support" +cambridgeshire -recruitment -salary.  Now we're down to 2,730 sites, a more useful and managable set of results.

So, to summarise, put "" around phrases, put a + in front of something if it MUST be on the website, and put a - in front of anything if it MUSTN'T.  This only takes another second, but it will reduce the time you spend viewing the results by a huge margin, and could be the difference between success and failure in your search!

P.S. adding the inurl switch I referred in my last article, which removes a number of directory sites, narrows the results down to 314 results.

Free and open source software: not just for geeks

For years free software has had a huge impact on our world; Apache runs half of all web sites, 65% of email traffic is sent via Sendmail, and about 1 in 5 of us use Firefox as our web browser.  All of these solutions were developed by altruistic programmers whose focus was technological, not commercial; and once developed, they were distributed for all to use for free.  For many small and medium sized businesses though, free software seems to have passed them by, which means there may be significant savings to be made from deploying it in your organisation.

• Microsoft Office Standard 2007 (word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software) - alternative, OpenOffice  £300 saved
• Microsoft Outlook 2007 (email and calendar software) - alternative, Mozilla Thunderbird, Sunbird and Lightning £80 saved
• Adobe Acrobat Standard 9 (creates PDF’s) - alternative, CutePDF² £226 saved
• Long distance telephone calls - alternative, Skype² (variable savings but potentially high)
• Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional (FTP client for file transfer) - alternative, FileZilla £45 saved
• PGP Whole Disk Encryption (file and disk encryption software) - alternative, TrueCrypt £95 saved

Business people are wary of free software, (everyone knows ‘there's no such thing as a free lunch').  However, this is one case where the lunch really does seem to be free, as long as you make sure the software is legitimate and has undergone some scrutiny (either the source code is available or it has been tested through wide use).  The most commonly cited objection to deployment of free software is a lack of technical support, “Who do I call when I’ve got a problem?”.  A fair point, but the community based support on free and open source products is generally very good, and in practise the same can be asked of any commercial software.  Who would you call if you had a problem with Microsoft Word?  It’s very unlikely to be Microsoft.

When you get started you’re not on your own either, there’s extensive technical guidance available online for deployment, and IT Consultants provide services to deploy free and open source software. With these hurdles overcome, savings like those above, worth over £700 per user, are within your grasp.

1 Check the license agreement or terms of use, which should state that the software is free for ‘commercial use’.  Many applications are only free for ‘non-commercial use’, i.e. at home for personal and non business activities only.
2 Free for commercial and non-commercial use, but not ‘open source’