The Letter 'X' - Issue 1 [May 2009]
To all of our customers and friends:
Welcome to the premier issue of our newsletter. Our intent is to provide you with informative articles on technology and business, let you know what XSolutions is up to, and provide you with free and useful programs to make your computing more pleasurable. We hope you enjoy our newsletter and pass it on to your colleagues as well.
To kick off our newsletter, we have two feature articles,"Boost Productivity with the Right Intrane" and "Do you Google?" And please, don’t forget to download the useful and free screen capture utility that we found (and use ourselves on a daily basis)
by Joseph Imperato Sr.
Businesses have used intranets for many years. Since an intranet is essentially an internal website only accessible by company employees, it seems to be the ideal way to share information. The problem is that this is exactly what most companies have done; using it only as an information-sharing vehicle. A properly designed intranet can boost productivity by giving employees tools to collaborate with each other no matter where they are located.
The key word in the last sentence is collaborate – the give and take interaction so essential in today’s fast-paced business world. Unfortunately, traditional intranets fall far short of this goal since they are usually not very user friendly, need the IT department to make changes, have little functionality beyond simple file sharing, and lack integration with the company’s existing architecture. Don’t despair! There is hope.
Microsoft’s SharePoint is a wonderful intranet technology that is fast becoming the standard in online collaboration. It corrects the deficiencies of traditional intranets and gives robust tools to users that help them stay connected across organizational and geographical boundaries. This will undoubtedly increase the efficiency of your business processes and team productivity.
With a properly designed SharePoint system you can:
- Create workspaces for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents and participate in discussions.
- Stay on task with automatic alerts on document changes, announcements, surveys, and discussion boards.
- Brainstorm ideas and build internal knowledge bases through the use of wikis and blogs.
- Manage important documents within your organization by requiring that they be checked out first before making revisions and then automatically alerting interested users that revisions have been made.
- View and track document changes and restore previous versions if necessary.
- Set security down to the folder and document level.
SharePoint uses common web navigation techniques that are already familiar to most employees, so training is minimal. If you are still not convinced then you should know that SharePoint integrates with the Microsoft Office system.
The final benefit to SharePoint is that users manage their own content while your IT department maintains overall control of the system. Your IT department will not be burdened with administrative duties, such as adding additional sites, content, or making site changes since these actions can all be done at the department level.
Microsoft SharePoint is a technology that will become an enabler within your organization not a bottleneck as traditional intranets can sometimes become.
by Joseph Imperato Sr.
Using Google effectively is a skill few business owners and corporate executives can afford to ignore. There is much more to searching the web using Google than just entering a few key words. Learning the correct way to structure your phrases will help you to perform sophisticated searches and get the information you desire more quickly.
Conducting a Basic Search
Almost everyone who surfs the web knows how to use Google to perform basic searches. Let’s face it, what is there to really know? Google’s interface is simple to use; just enter what you’re looking for into the search box and click the Google Search button.
What could be simpler? However, if this is all you do, you are missing out on some powerful techniques to make your experience a successful one. Google’s search box, although simple, is a powerful tool that all business people should learn to master.
Conducting Effective Searches
To search Google effectively, you need to know the general rules:
- When entering more than one word into the search box, Google assumes you are looking for all of these words and returns results based on it finding relevant pages containing all of them. In short, the word “and” is assumed between all of the words you type into Google’s search box.
- Google ignores common words called Stop Words, such as: I, a, an, are, be, by, for, how, in, is, the, this, what, where, who, will, and with. For a more comprehensive list of Google Stop Words, just enter “Google stop words” into the Google search box. Then click on the relevant sites. Therefore, enter only the keywords you are looking for.
- Word order is important. Google considers the importance of the words in your search phrase according to the order they are listed and will show results accordingly.
- Google automatically includes variations of the words you are looking for including tenses, as well as singular and plural forms of the entered key words.
Advanced Search Techniques
What many Google users do not know is how to use special operators within their search phrases that will limit the results they receive to the most relevant sites that contain the data they are looking for. You can accomplish the same thing by using Google’s Advanced Search Page. Although easy to use, the Advanced Search page is, in my opinion, cumbersome and too slow when time is of the essence.
Following is an easy to use table of important Google Operators that you can use to become an efficient internet researcher. Learning to use these special operators will help you conduct your searches more quickly.
Important Google Search Operators
| TYPE OF SEARCH | OPERATOR | EXAMPLE | COMMENT |
| Exact Phrase | Quotation Marks (“”) | “Microsoft Office 2007” | Google will return results based on all of the words within the quotations appearing in the results, including Stop Words. |
| Excluding a Word | Minus Sign (-) | instruments –musical | Google will show pages about instruments EXCEPT musical instruments. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign but no space after the minus sign. |
| Search Within a Specific Domain | site: | IRA deduction site:.gov | Google will show only results within the .gov domain. |
| Search for terms Within URLs | intitle: | intitle:free | Google will show web sites with the word free in their URLs |
| Find sites with expressions similar to your search term | Tilde (~) | ~auto | Google will return sites for cars, autos, automobiles, etc. |
| Search for specific file types | filetype: | auto filetype:pdf | Google will return sites that contain PDF versions of documents about automobiles |
| Search for words only within the body of web pages | For single words - intext: For multiple words - allintext |
intext:auto allintext:red auto |
Google will show those pages that contain the search words in the body of the text |
| Find pages that link to a target site | link: | Link:www.xsolutions.com | Google will show a list of sites that have links to the target site. |
| Find pages similar to a target site | related: | related:www.xsolutions.com | Google will find web pages that are similar to the target site |
There is no doubt about it. Google is the premier search engine on the net today. Learning to use Google power will enhance your surfing experience and provide you with the means of gathering important information from all over the world.
This article should serve as a good starting point to using Google more productively in your business related searches. For more detail, enter “Google Search Operators” into the Google search box. As of the date this article was written, there were 15,700 results. Plenty of reading material to absorb on your way to becoming a Google search expert!
One of our passions at XSolutions is to scour the internet and print media for FREE and useful programs that will enhance our computing experience and help us do various tasks easier, better, and quicker. This month, we are featuring PrintKey, a small utility that we use here in the office on a daily basis.
How many times during your day do you want to send someone a screenshot? How do you do that? Perhaps you fire up Photoshop or some other large program, wait for it t load, and then capture and crop your screen image. After all that, you need to copy it onto your email or Word document.
How about having, at the click of the mouse, a small, easy to use utility to quickly capture and copy screen images? Save this small utility to your desktop or copy it into your start up folder so that it is always available. PrintKey is one of the most useful utilities you can have, and it is FREE!
Thoughts, Comments, Concerns?
Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm:
Phone: 845.362.9675
Fax: 845.818.3676
Web: http://www.xsolutions.com
Email: Online Contact Form
XSolutions Consulting Services, LLC
PO Box 76
Thiells, NY 10970