Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

My apologies for no Excel tips in here lately. I have been asked to write some specific things that will take some time to put together as they involve explaining complex conceptual approaches to solving the problem as well as the specific excel solution. However they are coming – thanks Nicola and Traci. Anybody else want to send me ideas for posts or requests for help feel free.

Today I am just emptying my browser from a whole bunch of other peoples Excel posts I had found interesting and wanted to share.

This one actually answers one of Nicolas questions – kind of – what are the differences between Excel 2003 and 2007. While not specifically answering this question, Allen explains how to find the differences in VBA. Excel 2007 VBA differences

One of the most common problems we have in Excel is using dates and times in relation to calendar years and financial years. In Australia the financial year ends June 20 so financial years cross two calendar years. This also causes issues with the financial year quarters. DataPig Technologies has a post on the BaconBits Blog about Choosing Quarters in Excel.

Jan Karel Pieterse, a long time Excel MVP I have read for a long time, has a extensive Excel website. His comprehensive series on Using Range Names is very useful.

While working on a major coding project we needed to remove sensitivity to case. This article from OzGrid provided the answers we needed. Stop Excel VBA Macro Code Being Case Sensitive & Compare Text. Excel VBA Case Sensitive.

Smith: Unum's two million dollar man

Recently I found that Unum, a Fortune 500 company that provides long term and short term disability, group life and long term care insurance for more than 100,000 companies, uses OneNote 2007!  Looks like they save over $2 million by switching to OneNote by going to a paperless system.

Creating, Saving, Sharing Themes in Windows 7. An in depth how to from the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

From Sarah Arnold: Opportunity to win a Windows 7 Laptop if you are a Microsoft Partner

The Worldwide Windows Marketing Team has launched a Windows 7 partner video contest and I would love to see Australian Partners involved.

To get involved all you need to do is be a Microsoft Partner, create one or many 2-3 minutes video(s) and post it to DigitalForumTV.comfor voting by anyone with a Live ID.

Microsoft Mapping Roadshow – Melb, Syd, Brisbane - 9-12 June

Places are limited so if you do wish to register please do so ASAP at https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=324573&linvitation

• Office 2010, Hello World
• Green IT is good for your bottom line
• iheart OneNote You Tube video
• HOWTO: Virtual Desktop Pools by Using Remote Desktop Web Access
• User Account Control Step-by-Step Guide
• Microsoft Online Partner Roadshow – all cities - enrol now!
• New EBS 2008 and SBS 2008 Click-through Demos Available For Partners!
• Most popular Windows Home Server Add-ins
• Publishing problem - HTML brackets stripped from post? – a live writer issue – caused by PHP5 settings on the host – we experienced this problem last week and made the changes below on the server to make it work.

For reference, the fix for cPanel servers is to create a file called all_php5 under /var/cpanel/easy/apache/rawopts/ and add the following two lines then recompile Apache:

• -with-expat=builtin
  -with-libexpat-dir=/usr/lib

For those who are not using cPanel but instead manually compile PHP, the fix is to add the following line after the other ./configuration options then build as usual:

• --with-expat=builtin --with-libexpat-dir=/usr/lib

SBS2008

We have our new server commissioned and running.

Hardware Specs

• ASUS TS700-E4/RX8 Intel Core Xeon Server
• 2 x Intel Quad Core Xeon 5405 1.6GHz CPU
• ASUS Server Mainboard
• 32GB of ECC Fully Buffered DDRII RAM (4 x 8GB)
• 12 DIMM slots support Quad channel DDR2 533/667 FBD up to 48GB
• ASUS Pedestal Server Chassis with 730W Power Supply
• 2 x 300GB Seagate SAS Hard Drives
• 2 x 1TB Seagate Drives 24/7
• up to 8 hot-swap SAS or SATAII HDDs
• Onboard RAID 0, 1, 1E
• Hardware RAID 5 via optional ZCR RAID card
• 2 PCI-X 133/100 MHz (one support ZCR RAID card)
• 2 PCI-E x 8 slots
• 1 PCI-E x 16 (x8 link)
• ASUS 16x DVD-RW Drive
• Dual Intel Gigabit LAN
• ASUS ASWM 2.0 & Server Anti-virus License
• 3 Years Hardware Warranty
• Powerware 5110/1500VA UPS

We are running SBS2008 which works very nicely. We found that there is a dearth of how to’s out there on the web in relation to a number of specific configuration issues we came across but we seem to have solved most of them now. We did use Philip’s excellent SBS 2008 setup list as a starting point. We also found lots of good helpful stuff on his website. we were both doing similar migrations from SBS 2003. In our case we didn't use any migration tools but manually moved data and mail. I actually copied every users mail out of exchange into a PST file, and then re-imported them into the new box from the PST file. The main reason for this was to avoid bringing over corrupted profiles and other bits and pieces from the old server. The value of this paying off already with quick profile load times and no errors.

Here are some useful SBS2008 articles from Philip: