Printing is an age old technology that has revolutionized industry over the ages. From the old press printers that were used a couple of centurys ago, to the modern day laser printer: using such technology has allowed us to create and distribute books, newspapers, posters and photographs to the masses. However, the main limitation of printing is that it can only be done in 2D, which limits it to only printing images and text onto thin materials i.e. paper, card etc. This is where 3D printers come in. 3D printing is a relatively new technology that allows you to create 3D objects from the comfort of your desk chair. How It Works There are different techniques of creating an item using a 3D printer, but they all follow the same basic principle: using a liquid material, you build up layers into the created model. So what will happen is the 3D model that has been created on your computer will be broken down into different thickness layers. The printer, using the chosen material, will start from the bottom and will gradually build upon layer after layer until you get your model. This mean’s you can create a model, albeit a small one, of anything. Uses In Industry This technology is currently in use in the industry and is used in many areas. Architects, designers and engineers can use it to create scale models of products, from homes to toys, in very quick time. However the hope is to use 3D printers for mass production. The 3D printer could, theoretically, create components for products in quick time to be taken away for assembly. All you would need to do is create the schematics for the product on a computer, choose what material you wish to create it with and then click print. This can revolutionize any manufacturing, or even repairing, industry out there. For example, a customers car is broken due to a faulty part that needs replacing. Conventionally, you will have to either stock or order in the part that needs replacing. However, with a 3D printer you can easily create the part and have the car fixed in less time. Uses In The Home Even with its advances in technology, 3D printers are still rather expensive pieces of kit. However they are still available for people to buy and use at home. Currently they are used by hobbyists to create whatever they can think of but scientists are thinking of ways they can intergrate 3D printers in the home. Scientists are currently working on a 3D printer that can create food. What you do is put in the canisters of the ingredients to wish to use, like ink catridges in a printer, and then tell the printer what you want it to make. You can decide how hot the food is, how crispy it is and even the texture of the food. This could potentially change our health habits with what we eat. For example, today you buy a ready meal, put it in either the microwave or the oven and then eat it once its cooked, which involves minimal input to what the food contains nutrionally. However, with a 3D printer you can, potentially, decide on the the nutrient, salt and fat content the food has which could essentially affect our health for the better. What is so interesting about a 3D printer is the possibilities for creation. From a scientific point of view, everything is made of layers of particles. So in that sense, with the correct building materials in the printer you can create anything that can come to mind in less time than it would to create with your hands.

Hello everyone. Today I will be talking about how to turn off Add-Ins in Microsoft Office. Add-ins are software that is added into Microsoft Office applications to, usually, allow them to work in conjunction with other applications. An example of this would be a database application that contains customer details and has letter templates. When you click on the letter template the template will open up as a document in Word. This is due to the add-in that would have been automatically installed on Office when the application has been installed. This allows for better integration amongst numerous applications.

However, sometimes these add-ins from 3rd party software can cause issue’s with office. On occasion I have seen them have effects on Office applications that cause Office to either not work the way it should or not work at all. in these instances, you should disable the add-ins one at a time to determine if any of them are causing the issues. To do this you need to:

1. In the affected Office application, go to File and then click on Options. This located on the left hand side between Help and Exit
2. Once in the options control panel, click on the add-In’s tab. This is located on the lower left hand side of the control panel
3. The Add-in’s Panel will display all the Add-ins that are active, inactive, document related and disabled. At the bottom is a drop down list of Add-ins to manage. Choose “COM Add-Ins” and then click “Go…”.
4. You should now has a list of all the COM add-ins. If they have a tick next to them then they are active. If they don’t then they are inactive. To deactivate the ad-in just un-tick the box next to a particular add-ins and press ok. You can also remove or add add-ins in this panel.

If you can’t even do that (I have had an instance when an add-in had not allowed access to file tab to I couldn’t access the options) then you should start up the Office application in safe mode. To do this click on start and type in the search bar the name of the application followed by “/safe”. This will start up the application with all add-ins disabled and will allow to try try and (hopefully) find what is wrong with Office and fix it.

I hop ethis has helped you. Thanks for reading!

Cloud Security can be complex to understand. The best way to think about it is as you would about a safe. There are varying different products which range from something that will open if you drop it, up to a bank vault. There are many different types of cloud services. For example these range from consumer services such as Google Drive/Apps and Dropbox, to business solutions such as hosted desktops and infrastructure as a service. A large risk companies have at the moment is if staff starts to use the consumer services for businesses purposes as the company will then lose all control over the data held in these services and it will become a huge security risk. This is normally caused by companies failing to keep up with the new technologies available which allow members of staff to work in the most efficient way. In order to discuss Cloud security I will talk about the general areas which affect cloud services and some ways to mitigate the risk. The Wikipedia article on Cloud security (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_security) breaks down the risks of Cloud Security into the following sections which I will discuss. Identity management: The first issue that arises from cloud services is Identity management. This will normally entail how usernames and passwords are controlled. There are many options on how to implement this between your organization and a cloud service. A good cloud provider should work with you on implementing how this will work. However they should only ever implement something as secure, if not more secure than what is currently being used. A simple thing to look out for will be what their password requirements are. If they allow you to have password of password1 it is unlikely the rest of their system will be very secure. Physical and personnel security: The next issue of security is how secure their hardware is where your data will be stored. The best way to find this out is to ask for a visit to see the provider’s system where your data will be held. You should look for things like a secure fence around the building. Expect to have to go through security checkpoints provide ID and be escorted around the building at all times. Ask yourself the question how easy would it be for someone to break in and access the systems if they had malicious intent. On top of this the people who have access to the systems should be limited and documented so it is known who has access and when they have. It is also important to know where your data is being held to be compliant with things such as the data protection act. There are many companies which will store your data all over the world in order to reduce costs. Availability: Any cloud provider should be able to guarantee a certain level of availability to your systems in a secure way. The best way to ensure this is to make sure you have an approved SLA (Service Level Agreement) in your contract with the provider and ensure that if it is not met there are penalties for the provider. A service level agreement is a document used to define the level of uptime, how long support requests should take to be answered/completed and various other things which define the quality of service expected. Application security: Application security is very important in a cloud environment. A cloud provider should work with you on rolling out any software that is required to your environment. This should go through testing and be approved by the provider before being rolled out. A cloud provider should work with you on application deployment and should in some situations tell you no this application cannot be deployed. Of course they should then work with you on finding an alternative piece of software which is secure. Privacy: This involves how access to your private data is controlled. This can be credit card details or passwords. The best way I have found to test this is to say you have forgotten your password. If they are able to tell you what your password is then their system is not secure. A forgotten password should always be reset to a new one. This is because there should never be a way to find out what someone’s password is. Passwords should always be stored with one way encryption so should not be able to be found out. Another warning sign is if they ask you for your password when providing support. A good provider will never ask for your password, but reset it to something while they need access and get you to change it as soon as they are finished. Business continuity and data recovery: This is the process which a cloud provider should have in place in the event that a disaster happens. The process should be documented with times until the system is back up and running documented. It should be tested regularly, a minimum of once every 6 months or after any change to the infrastructure. Ask to see a provider’s disaster recovery plan and when it was last tested. Logs and audit trails: The final thing to check is to ensure there is adequate logging and audit trails of access are kept for as long as needed and secured properly. A cloud provider should work with you to define these. There are many different aspects of cloud security but hopefully this has given you some tips of what to look out for.

Hello everyone. Today I will be talking about how to fix word toolbar options not being saved. This fix can also be applied to toolbar options that are permanently grayed out as well. Word is a very easy tool to personalize. The options tab gives you the ability to change the toolbar to the way you want it. However, sometimes Word won’t save your option changes. This can be caused by the toolbar cache being corrupted.

To fix this issue you need to go onto the Registry Editor. Registry editor tool that gives you access to all the registry caches. To access it you need to go to start > Run and then type in “regedit”. This will bring up the registry edit tool. Using this you’ll need to Software > Microsoft > Office > 14.0 (this depends on what version of office you have. i.e., you could be using 8.0) > Word > Data.

Once you are in the data folder you need to look for a cache named “Toolbars”. Once located you can either delete the cache or (if you want to play it safe) rename to cache to “toolbar_old”. This way you can revert to the cache should you need too. If you really want to play safe then you can also backup the original cache.

Once that is done close down RegEdit and restart word. You should now be able to save your options. Test this by changing some options, restarting word and then check if the options remain. Then try restarting your PC and checking the options remain the same after that. If they do then it should be working.

Thanks for reading!

Hello, today i will be showing you how to recover a deleted office 365 mailbox using powershell. From time to time mistakes happen and, at least with Microsoft technology, there are ways of recovering data that has been deleted. Now, usually with Office 365 it’s a simple case of going to the Exchange server, viewing the deleted mailbox’s and clicking the recover button. However, if you are unlucky this method won’t work and you’ll have to fall back on to using powershell. If you have used Powershell before then you can skip to step 4, if not then start from the top: 1) Check the Execution policy The first thing you need to do is to check what execution policy you are using. The execution policy you use determines what scripts you can use. to do this you need to use the get command, like so: Get-ExecutionPolicy This will then display the your current execution policy. If it is set to strict then you’ll need to change the policy to remotesigned as you won’t be able to run any scripts. by setting it to remotesigned you can run any downloaded script that has been signed by a trusted publisher. To change the execution policy to need to type in the following: Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned You will be asked to confirm that you want to change the execution policy, just press “Y” and it should be changed. Once you’ve done that then you can move on to the next step. 2) Get Credentials This step is so that you can access your office 365 account that you are the administrator of. To do this you need to type in the following code: = Get-Credential A pop up box will appear asking for your email address and password. Type in the the email address that you use to access the office 365 of which you are an administrator. Note: it is important that you make sure you type in the correct information. If you don’t type it in correctly then when you do the next step you will get back an error and will have do do it all over again 3) Set up your session and importing it the next thing you need to do is configure your session. Essentially what this step is doing is connecting to the exchange server. to do this you need to type in the following code: = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Once you’ve entered that powershell will attempt to go and check the connection to your exchange server. Once that is done you can move on to importing the session. To import your session you need to type in the following: Import-PSSession Once that is done powershell will go about importing your session so that you are fully connected up to the exchange server. Once it has finished importing you can move on to the next step. 4) Recovering the mailbox This is the script that you’ve probably been waiting for. This script will create a new account, find the deleted account and then recover all the data to the new account. To do this you need to type in the following code: New-Mailbox -Name “John Contoso” -RemovedMailbox “John Contoso” -MicrosoftOnlineServicesID [email protected] -Password (ConvertTo-SecureString -String ‘Pa$’ -AsPlainText -Force) Just replace the “John Contoso” with the details of the user mailbox that you are trying to recover. Once all the correct details are filled in press enter and get a message saying that it is trying to recover the mailbox. Note: it can take up to 8 hours for the mailbox to be recovered so it’s best to just leave it recovering for the day. In this time you won’t be able to access Outlook with the email address but you will be able to see it in the users section of Office 365. Just log in as the users every so often and check that you can get access to Outlook.

UPDATE: A tool has been published which will let you get the key to unencrypt your files for free. https://www.decryptcryptolocker.com/ This week one of our clients has been infected by Cryptowall. This attack occurred on a laptop protected by McAfee and fully up to date at the time of the attack. In space of 5 hours Cryptowall managed to encrypt users data and data on network shares across 4 different servers. Over 8000 files were encrypted. In each encrypted folder were following files: DECRYPT_INSTRUCTION.TXT DECRYPT_INSTRUCTION.HTML DECRYPT_INSTRUCTION.URL What is inside these files: What happened to your files ? All of your files were protected by a strong encryption with RSA-2048 using CryptoWall. More information about the encryption keys using RSA-2048 can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem) What does this mean ? This means that the structure and data within your files have been irrevocably changed, you will not be able to work with them, read them or see them, it is the same thing as losing them forever, but with our help, you can restore them. How did this happen ? Especially for you, on our server was generated the secret key pair RSA-2048 – public and private. All your files were encrypted with the public key, which has been transferred to your computer via the Internet. Decrypting of your files is only possible with the help of the private key and decrypt program, which is on our secret server. What do I do ? Alas, if you do not take the necessary measures for the specified time then the conditions for obtaining the private key will be changed. If you really value your data, then we suggest you do not waste valuable time searching for other solutions because they do not exist. For more specific instructions, please visit your personal home page, there are a few different addresses pointing to your page below: 1.https://xxxxxxxxxxx.torexplorer.com/xxxx 2.https://xxxxxxxxxxx.tor2web.org/xxxx 3.https://xxxxxxxxxxx.onion.to/xxxx If for some reasons the addresses are not available, follow these steps: 1.Download and install tor-browser: http://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en 2.After a successful installation, run the browser and wait for initialization. 3.Type in the address bar: kpai7ycr7jxqkilp.onion/5L1m 4.Follow the instructions on the site. IMPORTANT INFORMATION: Your personal page: https://xxxxxxxxxxx.torexplorer.com/xxxx Your personal page (using TOR): xxxxxxxxxxx.onion/xxxx Your personal identification number (if you open the site (or TOR ‘s) directly): xxxx What to do if you get infected: – look at the owner of these files to track the infected machine(s) – disconnect the infected machine from the network – disconnect all shares

Hello everyone. Today I will be talking you through how to fix the search function for Alfresco 4.0d. Out of the box, Alfresco’s search function runs on solr. However, solr doesn’t work properly on Alfresco 4.0d so when you try to search a document Alfresco will come back with no results. To fix this you will need to switch from solr to Lucene which will require a bit of script altering. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Stop Alfresco
   Before we start editing alfresco’s we first need to turn it off. This will then allow you to edit the files required to setup Lucene. To do this go to your alfresco server and start up the alfresco manager tool. Once in go to the “Manage Application” tab and click the “Stop All” button. This will shutdown alfresco completely.
2. Edit the file Alfresco-global.properties
   Once alfresco has been stop you’ll need to edit the alfresco-global.properties file. This will be located at: alfresco\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco-global.properties. This file is responsible for all the base setting for alfresco, including the database. The segment of code that you are looking for is:

   ### Solr indexing ###
index.subsystem.name=solr
dir.keystore=/keystore
solr.port.ssl=8444

   You will need the edit some of this to setup Lucene. You’ll need to replace solr with lucene in the line index.subsystem.name=solr, hash tag out the lines dir.keystore=$(dir.root)/keystroke and solr.port.ssl=8444. You will also need to add in index.recovery.mode=FULL. This will re-build the index so that lucene will work. This is what you’ll need to change it to:

   ### Solr/lucene indexing ###
index.subsystem.name=lucene
index.recovery.mode=FULL
#dir.keystore=/keystore
#solr.port.ssl=8443


   Once that is done, save the file and start up alfresco so that the index can be re-built.

3. Stop Alfresco, edit alfresco-global and delete some folders and files
   Once the index has been re-built you’ll need to stop alfresco to do more editing. First things first, get alfresco-global.properties open and go to the section we edited in the last step. You’ll need to change the index.recovery.mode to the following:

   index.recovery.mode=AUTO

   Once that is done you need to delete the following folders and files:

   • Alfresco\ald_data\solr
   • Alfresco\tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\solr.xml
   • Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\solr

   Once those folders and file have been deleted you can start up Alfresco again with Lucene in place of solr. The search function should now work.
   Thank you for reading.

Hello, today I will be talking to you about Intel’s Thunderbolt technology. Thunderbolt technology is a dual protocol I/O that utilizes PCI Express and DisplayPort over a cable that can transmit data and video bi-directionally. The cable has a bandwidth on 10Gbps and is used with the thunderbolt controller. The controller controls the processing, sending and receiving of data. In a device that is daisy chained to other devices the controller passes data packets up and down stream. The cable itself is made from copper, although it was originally supposed to be fiber optic, due to cheaper cost. In the future it is planned to release a fiber optic cable Your device can be daisy chained, using the thunderbolt cable, between 7 devices (6 thunderbolt devices and 1 DisplayPort Monitor) and can utilize each devices hardware (as long as they have a thunderbolt controller). This means that if you have a cheap, not very powerful laptop, with a thunderbolt controller built inside, then you can link it up to a monitor and 6 other devices and, theoretically speaking, use their memory, graphics card etc. and turn your cheap laptop into a relatively powerful computer. Considering that apple are the main users of thunderbolt, with it being used in their MacBook Pro, and with technology shifting away from PC’s and more towards tablets (this is shown with Microsoft’s Windows 8 and the unveiling of the surface tablet) I can imagine this technology being used to complement the technology inside a tablet. When unplugged, your tablet can be a portable device that you can use for basic tasks (like browsing the web, reading emails, listening to music etc.). But when you get it all plugged in then you can use your tablet to run the latest games or run applications that are too demanding for the technology your tablet fields. ASUS have recently released a new motherboard, the P8Z77-V Premium, which has thunderbolt integrated into it. This is an option to take, if you want to use thunderbolt, without having to buy a Mac. However, I would recommend waiting a bit until you decide to invest in Thunderbolt. Current purchase of a thunderbolt cable is priced around £40 and the technology itself is rather buggy so some time should be allowed for the bugs to be ironed out and the prices to drop.

In this blog I am going to talk about cloud computing and explain exactly what it is.

What is the Cloud?

The Cloud, much like Web 2.0 is a term that has been given to many different technologies all grouped together. It’s a term which managers and marketing people like to use as it is the current buzzword of IT. In reality it is a shift back towards mainframe/centralised computing. The main driving force of this has been the start of computer virtualisation. We have got to a point where server hardware is far more powerful than you need to run the majority of systems. This resulted in servers sitting idle and not doing any work. Virtualisation is the process where you can slice up a physical server into multiple virtual servers. These can be running multiple different operating systems all at the same time on the same physical server. This means instead of having servers using 15% of their resources on average you can up this to 80-90%. In one company we managed to reduce 70+ physical servers down to 6 physical servers using virtualisation. This technology is being heavily used by people such as Amazon to provide their Web Services. Services such as Amazon let customers quickly provision additional servers as required. For example, if a company has a new launch happening which will mean they will be having a far greater demand on their website than the normal servers can cope with, additional servers can be started on the Amazon servers and the load spread across them all. Once the demand has dropped off these servers can be removed.

The next side of cloud computing is providing software as a service. This is where instead of installing software on your local computer, programs are run through a web browser and delivered over the internet. The best example of this is Google Docs which allows you to have a fully functional replacement to Microsoft Office run from inside your web browser.

Essentially cloud computing is the process of utilising other peoples hardware to run your systems or shifting the management of your software to another company to run for you.  

Why is it important?

The best way I have heard the importance of cloud computing described was at an Ubuntu Cloud event. They started out by talking about the early years of electricity. In these early years people who wanted electricity would have to have their own generators at home if they wanted electricity. As time went by the national grid was setup and electricity was turned into a commodity. At this point rather than producing their own energy people just paid for it as a service. This process has been repeated for many different innovations in the past such as telephones.

This relates to computing as up until now the computer industry has been an extremely new one and has still been in the innovation phase of its existence. At this point in time we are finally at a switch over point where computing is going to evolve into a commodity. There is no longer any need for people to constantly update hardware and software where this can now all be maintained at the supplier end. All people will need is a simple machine and monitor and all the hard work will be performed on the servers of suppliers rather than on people’s local computers. These can be upgraded constantly without ever affecting customers.

The other main reason for the switch is to save money. As suppliers can run huge datacentres to provide software they can benefit from huge economies of scale and thus the price of running a system will drop. Also without the need to run servers locally huge amounts of money are saved on energy and hardware costs. You also get the resilience of being able to run your servers from multiple data centres around the world, or have your files backed up to multiple locations in different continents.

What will it mean in the future?

So what will your system look like in the future? At the moment the main innovation that is coming out soon is Google’s Chrome OS. This is essentially an entire operating system wrapped around Google’s Chrome Web Browser . This will automatically store all of your files on Google’s servers and whenever you login to any computer running Chrome OS you will get your own interface and files.

This video made by Google explains it nicely:

Another example of Cloud computing innovation is a company called OnLive. They allow you to stream computer games over the internet. This means you don’t have to have a cutting edge PC to play all the latest games. They spend all the time setting up their systems to get the best graphics and then just stream all the images to your local computer over the internet.

This link has a video which explains how it works: http://www.onlive.com/service/cloudgaming?autoplay=force

Thanks for reading this blog and feel free to contact us if you would like to find out how we can help you with Cloud Computing.

Author: Luke Whitelock

Hello everyone, today I will talking about recovering deleted emails and item using PowerShell. Occasionally accidents happen and important emails or things like calendar events get deleted. If you are unlucky you won’t be able to recover the deleted items the easy way over Microsoft Exchange server and will have to use PowerShell. Below are the steps to take to do this:

1. Make Sure you are a member of the Discover Management Role Group Before you can recover the deleted item, you need to be a member of the Discover Management Role Group (DMRG). This will allow you to search for messages across multiple mailboxes in your organization. If you are not a member of the DMRG then follow this link that will show you steps to assign yourself that role: Link
2. Startup PowerShell and put in your credentials, where you’re getting the sessions from and importing The next thing to do is start up PowerShell. Type in the code below: $cred = Get-Credential This get the credentials for the exchange server.$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection This sets up a connections with the exchange server Import-PSSession $session This will import the sessions.
3. Search for and recover the email Now that PowerShell is setup we can move onto recovering the deleted item. Note: items in square brackets [example] are to be replaced by your requirements.To retrieve a single item follow these steps: First you need to search for the email: search-Mailbox [user] -SearchDumpsterOnly -SearchQuery [search query] -TargetMailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -TargetFolder [search name] -LogLevel Full Once you’ve found the item you can recover it: Search-Mailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -SearchQuery [search query] -TargetMailbox [user] -TargetFolder inbox If you wish to recover all permantely deleted items from the purged items folder run this line of code: Search-Mailbox [email protected] -SearchDumpsterOnly -TargetMailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -TargetFolder RecoveredItems -LogLevel Full
4. I hope this blog post has helped you. Thank you for reading!