Along with some games, opera mobile browser, gmail, nimbuzz (or skype) what I always need is a good mobile wallet application which will store my banking details, credit card details, ATM pins, some secret notes, etc.

Previously I use to store all this information into password protected notes, but recently when my friend from South Africa become victim of some spyware and lost his PayPal balance, I got more serious about the security of my data in my PC and in my mobile. I realized that I need some tool which will store my sensitive information in an encrypted format which is not easy to break.

So I started my journey to search a tool which will keep my data secure in my mobile. After trying around 5-6 products, I came across a wallet application which promised all. I said “promised” because many tools promise a lot and perform much lesser. The promises were high, so I decided if this tool is able to keep it words then I’ll surely recommend it to my readers.

Now when I’m using this tool on my mobile and PC (yes PC too) from last 6 months and I’m completely satisfied with it, its time I should introduce it to you guys.

The tool is SPB Wallet from SPB Software

Using SPB Wallet, I can not only store my banking/credit card details, i can store them in a categorized fashion. All the information is encrypted using Strong 256-bit AES encryption.  All the data is password protected and they have their own click keyboard which keeps key Loggers (viruses which steal your data by logging your keys) guessing what you are typing. So this satisfied my purpose of having a tool which will keep my data extremely secure. More over if you forget to close the application, it locks up automatically. Man, this is amaaaazing…

The best part is it also has a desktop tool which comes in the same package, which installs on your desktop and you can synchronize the data between your mobile and desktop. It also integrates with browser and then you can choose to store your email/website passwords into the wallet so that when next time you forget them, you can check them into the wallet.

Another security feature I love the most is, it doesn’t show the pins/passwords directly on the screen instead it shows **** and when you click on the stars, it reveals your password to you.

Icing on the cake:
Above all, it has a very nice UI which gives a very rich experience. See some screen shots below

Things I didn’t like about SPB Wallet:

1. While using the desktop application, and when you have connected your mobile using Bluetooth, you need to click on the Sync button twice or thrice. But being a programmer I can understand that this must be a phone-PC connectivity issue so we cannot blame the coders of this application
2. ‘Search’ is the feature which is used less, so instead of giving ’search’ button, if they would have had ‘Exit’ then it would have saved time. Now you always need to choose ‘Exit’ from the menu. But this may be my personal view.

Bad news: This is not for those who believe that best things in life are free. It has some moderate price. But I think it is worth than becoming a victim of viruses and loosing your bank balance and getting huge credit card bills. My purpose of buying SPB Wallet was – being a user of online banking, I wanted to protect my financial information.

You may find more information about the feature here
http://www.spb.com/symbian-software/wallet/

But think again, does taking surveys really waste our time? I do not agree. They pay us back. They pay us back so well than we ever realize. Imagine a service oriented company providing service but not listening to customer feedback! What will happen to their business? It will go lost and customers will go running to competitors. But what if all of them go deaf and no one is actually listening to the customer? Obviously we customers suffer! Same thing happens when we refuse to take surveys.

Why does it matter?

Few of us do take the surveys but most of us don’t.  Those few people who are answering the surveys actually decide how the future products or services will look and function. If more and more people come forward and take surveys, the companies will be in a better position to know what to deliver. This will save their time and ours too.

Economical cause: When companies will be in a better position to deliver better products in fewer time frames, it will save their money and will reduce the product price too. Now it is only us who will benefit if the cost reduces. Imagine next morning you are able to buy iPhone 3G in a price of other less featured mobile phone models.

power of taking surveys

Take one better example. After releasing Windows-XP, few years later the software giant came to know that people have a relatively higher priority to the battery life of the laptop. So with their next product Windows Vista, they come up with software changes which now enables laptops to long 30% more with the same battery. Intel too supported this and came up with energy efficient processors. Now if we would have been successful to give this feedback in the year 2002 itself, all the world’s laptops that run Windows-XP would have consumed 30% less power for more than 5 years! Imagine the kind of electricity saved. Every day we cut down 214000 acres (yes, 214,000 acres) of rainforest land most of which goes for generating electricity.

A survey is a 2 way sword. The lesser people answer it, the more deep cuts it will give. There are many social, economical benefits of taking surveys.

Now days some companies even pay you for answering surveys. Answering a survey is a kind of self help. Please do a favor to yourself and spend at least 1 hour per month answering surveys. I think we can do this much for our and upcoming generation’s better future.

There is much to write about surveys and how they can be better and efficient. How to build a survey which takes lesser time and yields maximum information and how they should be analyzed correctly. But before writing more, I would like to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks!

Steps to getting rid of “Outlook Integration Error” which stops saving your communication history into your outlook.

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
3. Locate and then right-click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator
4.Point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5.Type DisableEmailComparisonCheck as the name of new registry entry, and then press ENTER.
6.Double-click DisableEmailComparisonCheck, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
7.Exit Registry Editor.

And we end up receiving lot of spam mails into our inbox.

After few days we come to know that we are getting more useless mails than the required one.

Gmail provides a great way to stay protected from such spamming.

You can alter your email id before you submit it to any fictitious site.

Here is how to do it.

Your email id:

first.last@gmail.com

While submitting submit it as

first.last+somekeyword@gmail.com

So even if you submit this kind of mail id, it works and GMail delivers theses emails into your inbox.

Only advantage you have is if you recognize those emails as spam, then you can set a filter to send them directly to trash as soon as they arrive.

Happy surfing.

We often need to configure Office Server Search while working on MOSS 2007 infrastructure projects. Microsoft Filter Pack is efficient as long as it only comes to indexing the metadata documents or metadata and content of file types.

As a large volume of documentation often exist in PDF format and there is always a requirement to index those .pdf files. As you know for every other file type, a so called iFilter indexing is needed. In case of .pdf files, you need to aquire third party iFilters.

The most common iFilters available for .pdf files are:

Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms

Foxit PDF IFilter

PDFlib TET PDF IFilter

Here, most common are Adobe PDF iFilter and Foxit PDF iFilter. While Adobe iFilter is available free of charge, for the other two you will need to pay license fees.

With respect to the performance, these two IFilters differ. Microsoft bloggers have already done various testings on Adobe PDF iFilter and Foxit PDF iFilter. As a result of various testings done by Microsoft bloggers, Foxit iFilter (32 bit) is around 4 times as fast as the Adobe Filter. And Foxit iFilter (64 bit) is about 5 times, as fast as the Adobe Filter.

In addition we found PDFlib TET PDF IFilter, for which there were no performance records found.

This was a enough reason to test all these three iFilters for their performance.

The Test Setup:

All three iFilters were tested on same hardware environment.

We used a virtual Hyper-V with two virtual processors and 4 GB RAM. OS used was Windows Server 2008 (Standard Edition) with Service Pack 1.

MOSS 2007 SP 1 (Cumulative update Feb 2009)

Here we indexed 1022 documents (both German and English) of volume of 1.8GB.

The default settings of the current IFilter were used. The duration of indexing was collected in two runs and considered the best result.

The Test Result:

Sharepoint ifilter comparison

License costs compared

Sharepoint ifilter comparisons

Status: 11.05.2009, all data without guarantee.

Rating:

Alrough the Adobe iFilter comes free, its indexing performance has lot of scope for improvement. While the performance of  iFilter Foxit and PDFlib are at par. Initial review cannot comment on difference in the quality of indexing. You can therefore reduce the decision criteria for an iFilter on other factors like volume, cost and personal preferences.

If a large volume of PDF documents are to be indexed the one of the paid options are recommended.
If the index server is not a dedicated server, then this task is preferably preformed by a Web Frontend Server. Because the indexing requires much CPU time, it should be exploited as efficiently as possible.

In case of multi-core the PDFlib IFilter is more cost effective than other peers.

Resources:

Original blog post

Download:

2007 Office System Converter: Microsoft Filter Pack

Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms

Foxit PDF IFilter

PDFlib TET PDF IFilter

Learn:

How to register Microsoft Filter Pack with SharePoint Server 2007 and with Search Server 2008

While doing so I recognized that on my machine the datasheet view doesn’t work. Then I started blaming my IE6 and upgraded to IE7 which didn’t helped and finally I landed up with IE8 which also didn’t worked.

It gives following error.
“The Standard View of your list is being displayed because your browser does not support running ActiveX controls.”

While I tried to search for some solution, I found that lot of people are facing this problem.

There are many solutions that worked for them and there are many of them for who nothing worked actually.

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See Also: MCTS: MOSS 2007 Configuration (70-630) all you need to know to clear this exam

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So I came to a conclusion that there is no perfect solution available.

Here are some possible solutions that work.

All of these are not found by me. I’m just trying to put them at one place.

1.
Microsoft says:
A datasheet component that is compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed.
AND/OR
A Microsoft Office 2003 Professional edition is not installed on the computer.
AND/OR
The Web browser does not support ActiveX controls.
AND/OR
Support for ActiveX controls is disabled

If you are using Office 2003, then try the first solution first. Install Office 2003 web components.

Make sure that you have installed Office 2003 or higher on your client machine.

Unfortunately there are no Office 2007 web components available and I am using Office 2007. Still I tried to install those which didn’t worked too.

I also tried my ActiveX settings for IE8 but that didn’t helped.

As I tried all of them. Still it didn’t worked. Then I carried on my R&D.

2.
On your client machine run, “Microsoft Office Diagnostics”.

This one worked for me. And datasheet view started working normally.

But this too doesn’t work for everyone.

3.
Try putting the site in the trusted sites list. This may solve the problem if it is related to activeX.

4.
Based on my exprience, this kind of problems (a ActiveX component doesn’t work on a particualr client) mostly is caused by a corrupted registry entry or file. So, a complete reinstallation may be the most prompt way to resolve such an issue. While this is not a good advice.

5.
Open the file ows.js in your favorite editor. It can be found here.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033

Put following javascript code
function RenderActiveX(str)
{

document.write(str);
}

and reset your app pool.

while if the problem is only with a perticular client then I wont suggest this.

6.

If you are working on as WSS 2.0 site then this hotfix might help you.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948919/en-us

This is a post SP3 hotfix.

7.

The Office Service Pack team has announced that Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System due to ship April 28th. This is a good news and we hope they solve this problem for all users.

Even I found some people who has tried all of these and still the datasheet view doesn’t work for them.

So I said earlier, there isn’t a perfect solution for this.
If you know some more then please comment!

If you found the article useful, please re-tweet it and help others too.

This exam seems to be easy as compared to its sister exam 70-542.

I’ll suggest that you complete the study from e-book or hard copy and then before going to exam give 5-6 hours for revision.

Books I used:

Sybex publication: MCTS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Configuration Study Guide: Exam 70-630

by James Pyles

In the following book, you will also get sample questions for practice after each chapter.

After each chapter ends, there are also provided “Exam Essentials” which highlights vital things you should put more emphasis on.

The book also contains a “Assessment tests” which are helpful too.

If you are already working on MOSS 2007 and have gone through the initial setup stages at your workplace, then you can skip first 3 chapters as they are too basic. But from exam perspective do not skip the sample questions.

At end I’ll say enough work experience plays a vital role when you start answering exam.

These are few links you can refer to get some more info.
MCTS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Configuration
Preparation Guide for Exam 70-630

Some more books (recommended on Microsoft Learning site)

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Administrator’s Companion

Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Some more sample tests (from Microsoft Certified Test providers)
MeasureUp - they have practice tests, online courses and exam vouchers.
SelfTest Software – they have practice exams, study guides, online learning and virtual labs too.

If you have any queries then comment with your email id. I’ll try to reply.

He is constantly collecting updating Microsoft.NET tips and tracks on his blog.

These FAQs can also be considered as most likely interview questions.

You can also download a PDF version of it.

Find here: http://msmvps.com/blogs/laflour/pages/net-tips-amp-tricks.aspx

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See Also:

MCTS: MOSS 2007 Configuration (70-630) all you need to know to clear this exam

Most asked HR Interview Questions

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It often happens that you start building your virtual machine hard disk with something in mind and after few days or months you realise that the new technology that you want to give a try needs a bigger hard disk. The reasons can be different but the need for a bigger space is always there.

Solution 1: Using VHD Resize tool to increase size of Virtual Hard Drive

Solution 2: Using Norton ghost to increase size of a Virtual Hard Drive

Safety point: In both cases, do not delete the first VHD till you confirm that the new Virtual Hard Drive is working fine.

If you encounter any issues or have alternate solutions then let me know.