What is Office 365?

You may have heard those two words quite often recently and you want to know exactly what they mean without to much marketing between the lines.

Office 365 is a set of productivity tools offered by Microsoft as a subscription. You pay per user, per month or per year and get the following for your organization:

• spam free e-mail with access from a web browser, Office Outlook, a smartphone like iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian or any e-mail client. You also get personal and shared Contacts and Calendars - this is called Exchange Online
• documents stored in a central web location securely accessible from a PC, a MAC or a web browser (IE, Firefox and Safari officially suported, others work too). You can attach workflows to those documents so people interact with them in a predefined manner - you get this from SharePoint Online
• lists (for example an Asset Inventory, an Issues Tracking mini-app) - also from SharePoint Online
• intranet (you can publish internal know-how, documents, links, pictures or any kind of files) - from SharePoint Online
• public website - also from SharePoint online
• instant messaging and web conferencing - offered through Lync Online

If you want to take them for a spin, it takes 30 seconds to set up a trial.
More info from the vendor here.

Install Canon EOS Utility Updater without the original CD

As you might have found out, you canot just download the original Canon CD that came with your camera from the Canon website nor can you download any individual piece of software like the EOS Utility or Digital Photo Professional on  their own as the full application - only "Updater" versions exist that require you to have an existing version already installed.

It might happen that you lost the CD that came with the camera or it's just late in the night and you don't want to wake everybody while searching through old boxes with stuff after you just moved.

Guess what, that's only a trick, actually you get the full installer by downloading the updater, all you have to do is add some registry keys to make the updater think you have it already installed.

I'll only post the keys required for Windows 7 x64, but you cand find the rest here.

Just paste the following in a text file, add a ".reg" extension, then right click -> Merge with an admin user and after that you'll be able to install the complete product from the "Updater" file you can download from Canon.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\EOS Utility]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\DPP]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\ZoomBrowser EX]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\ZoomBrowser EX\Settings]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\ZoomBrowser EX\Install]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\PhotoStitch
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\EOS Capture]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\EOSViewerUtility]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Canon\ODSK]

Collaborating with external users in Office 365's SharePoint Online

If you're not sure what Office 365 is, take a quick look.

To be able to share a Office 365 SharePoint site with external users:
1. Go to portal.microsoftonline.com -> Admin -> Manage SharePoint -> Manage Site Collections -> Settings -> Manage External Users -> Allow -> Save
2. Go to the site collection that will host the site to be shared -> Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site collection features -> External user invitations -> Activate (if not already active)
3. Go to the site you want to share (this doesn't have to be the root site of the site collection, can be a subsite) -> Site Settings -> Share Site. You can type what e-mail addresses you want, they do not have to be Live IDs or be on the hotmail.com, live.com etc. domains. A message confirming that the invitation has been sent will show up. Access the invitation link in the e-mail and you'll be redirected to a login page giving the option to login with either a Live ID or a Microsoft Online Services ID. You can logon with any Windows Live ID that you might have, it doesn't need to have the same e-mail address that the invitation was sent to.

You can even give an external user contribute rights to a site, which I think is a very interesting feature for collaboration with customers / partners.

I'm watching this ability to collaborate with others  in Google Docs and Skydrive for a long time now, and I consider Microsoft's approach more balanced from the security vs. usability point of view than Google's, which enables editing without requiring a valid account.

Hope this helps.

MKV transcoding on the fly with Synology NAS

Have a Playstation 3 or DLNA enabled Sony TV and also happen to have some kind of networked storage / NAS in your home?
If so, you might have wondered when will there be an easy way to play MKV files on PS3 directly from the NAS. If it happens that your NAS is branded Synology, you're just in luck! The latest firmware release (3.2) supports on-the-fly transcoding of MKV stored on the NAS to Playstation 3 and DLNA enabled Sony TV's.

This means that the full workflow for having a movie ready to watch is:
1. find a torrent (~2 mins)
2. login to the NAS's web interface and submit the torrent to be downloaded (~1 min)
3. some time later, depending on your bandwidth and torrent # of seeds, you receive an e-mail that your movie is ready to be watched (0 mins)
4. turn on PS3, browse to the title, and play (~2 mins).

Steps 1-3 do not require you to be home, you can do it anywhere you have an internet connection, like at a traffic light, so that when you get home, the download is ready.

Except for the actual downloading time, which varies with your internet connection and which can be as low as 7 minutes for a 5GB title over a 100Mbps link, I think the ~5 minutes required to begin watching a movie are pretty close to the iTunes / Netflix experience, which are not available worldwide anyway.

The latest firmware can be found here: http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php

Are your Google+ circles's members known only to you?

According to the definition of Circles in Profile and Privacy:

Circles are groups of people you share content with. The names of your circles and who you add to them are visible only to you, though you can set whether the list of people in all of your circles is visible in your public profile.

BUT when someone posts something to one or more of his/her circles, any member of those circles can see up to 21 other members that received the post and the total number of recipients. 

That means that for circles less than 21 members, all of them can see the other members in your circle once you post something only to that particular circle!

By me, that's contradictory. At least!

See who a post was shared with in the stream

When someone posts something in the stream, you can tell if it was shared publicly, to extended circles, or to a limited group. When you comment on or +1 something in the stream, everyone who can see the original content will be able to see your contribution.
If a post was shared with a limited group of people, you can click Limited at the top of the post to see the profile pics of up to 21 other people who can also see that content, as well as the total number of people on the post. If you hover over a photo, you'll see that person's name and can click over to their profile, or add them to a circle.
If you initiated a post in the stream, clicking Limited at the top of that post will show you the profile pictures of everyone you shared with. Only the person who started the post can see this information. If you chose to share with your extended circles in addition to other people, clicking Limited will only show that you shared with your extended circles--specific people won't be identified.
(http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/static.py?hlrm=ro&page=guide.cs&guide=1358057&answer=1283790&rd=1)

Digital photography workflow - how to import pictures from multiple cameras

I searched this topic before writing about it, but I didn't find a satisfying solution.

The requirement is like this: I need to have all my pictures and videos organized by date taken into folders (like 2011\2011-06-02\[pics]). That's not so hard to achieve with traditional tools with default settings for importing pictures from camera or from flash cards.The problem with the default settings is that if you are importing pictures shot with different cameras you won't end up with a stream of chronologicaly ordered shots and also you might happen to have duplicate filenames - that's rare but it can happen. If the file duplicates can be solved in many ways, I didn't find a solution for having files chronologicaly sorted by default when opening the folder. Sure, you can use software that's able to sort by EXIF Date_Taken, but why not have them naturaly sorted, to be able to enjoy the stream of photos from a DLNA enabled TV for example?

The solution is to import all photos and videos with Adobe Lightroom (version 3.4.1 as of this writing). Lightroom enables you to import into subfolders by date and also rename the files after a

[date]-[time]-[original_filename]-[camera_model] pattern

You'll end up with folders by date:

My Pictures\2011-06-01

My Pictures\2011-06-02

and in each folder the pictures will be named:

20110602-094300-IMG_2342-iPhone4.MOV

20110602-094510-IMG_5574-EOS 5d Mark II.JPG

Sure, that's not the perfect solution, I would've preferred to be able to add keywords to the name of the folder (like 2011-06-02 Summer Holiday), so when later browsing the folders from a TV that cannot search by EXIF info you can quickly find the photos you're looking for. But that can be easily done manually.

I think this workflow is suited both for enthusiasts and for professionals. Correct me if you think otherwise.

Corrupted XML when trying to import data in CRM Online

Scenario: You try to import data into Dynamics CRM Online (2011) and you choose the option to download a XML Template - "Download Template for Import".
An error pops up in Excel saying that the file is corrupt: "The file is corrupt and cannot be opened"

There's no problem with the file itself, but with a security setting in Excel.

The solution is to save the file in a specific location (for example Desktop\crm) and add this location to the Trusted Locations in Excel:
- Excel -> File -> Options -> Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings ... -> Trusted Locations