As social media becomes a part of all our lives, we’re exposing many of our innermost thoughts to a vast audience. Remember the teacher who was sacked for holding two alcoholic drinks? Or the doctors and nurses suspended for lying down on the job?

After widespread press coverage, many of us are a little more careful about the things we publish online. But now employers have new tactics to figure out what’s behind the layers of security and passwords on our social media accounts.

In the US, employers have started asking for Facebook login information to check a person’s suitability for the job. This gives them access to everything in the Facebook account: personal data, private posts on your wall and even your messages. There are reports that employers in New Zealand and the UK are following suit.

Of course, you can’t prevent this (although you could refuse to give your password), but assuming your employer hasn’t gone to those extremes, it’s still wise to check your Facebook settings. Make sure that the information you’re publicly displaying is information you’re happy for a prospective boss to see. That way, unless they actually ask for your password, you have control over your Facebook profile.

Go to the Privacy Settings page in Facebook and check your Default Privacy level. If it’s set to Public, you probably want to take it down a notch to Friends, or create a Custom level of access. This will prevent people you don’t know reading your wall and posts.
When you post something on your wall, click the blue drop-down arrow and choose who should see that post. You can create groups (e.g. ‘Close friends’) and only show them what you’re writing.
Friends with your workmates? Check what your profile looks like to your boss. Click the cog icon on the right hand side of your profile (under your Timeline banner) and click View As…. When you type in the name of your colleague, the page will reload and show you exactly what they see.
Practice good housekeeping. If someone posts something you’d rather not be made public, it’s OK to delete that post. Hover over the item and a cross will appear: click it to delete the item from your wall.

Remember that even the most locked-down Facebook account isn’t foolproof. If your employer asks for your password, you might end up revealing more about yourself than you intended. If it’s really personal, don’t post it on Facebook: send it via email.

Ali...Our newest team member

The newest member of the Soho IT team is Ali, an 18 year old helpdesk technician who has recently completed his apprenticeship. As we expand our services and develop our team, we hope you’ll join us in welcoming him to Soho IT!

Ali (full name Muhammad Ali Yaqoob) already has qualifications from CompTia, Microsoft and HP, as well as two BTEC Level 3 diplomas. Ali’s currently working as a trainee, manning the support desk and our new online support portal. If you telephone Soho IT for assistance, he’ll probably be your first port of call! He’s the ideal person to join the team and we can’t wait to get him up to speed with all our products and services.

Ali will be fixing problems remotely and visiting clients on-site where necessary. He’s also adept at building PCs, configuring Windows and OS X machines and working on laptops, so if you have any hardware problems, he’ll be able to help. And when it comes to monitoring your network and ensuring everything is running smoothly, Ali will be on top of the stats and proactively looking after your systems. We’ll all be working together to configure VoIP telephony, backups, Hosted Exchange email accounts and other cloud services for Soho IT clients.

Do you use Twitter and Facebook? You might speak to Ali on our sales line or social networking sites too. Follow us on Twitter, or Like us on Facebook, to stay up to date with news from Soho IT as we welcome Ali to the team.

We’re looking forward to strengthening our support services, enhancing our social media presence and improving on the reputation we’ve built. We hope you’ll enjoy an even better support response time in conjunction with our brand new support portal at http://support.sohoit.co.uk.

Microsoft Exchange has set the standard for corporate email, largely since Windows XP set the standard for interoperability in the office. In the past, having your own internal email system meant setting up a large, expensive, power-hungry server on your own premises, and handling the maintenance of that server yourself. Small companies are often looking for an easier way, and that’s where cloud computing can help.

Having your own Exchange server is still possible, but for smaller organisations, Hosted Exchange is the sensible choice. Hosting your Exchange mailboxes with a shared provider is normally provided on a subscription basis, and it takes the hassle out of Exchange for small businesses.

What’s the difference between Exchange and Hosted Exchange?

Not a lot, in terms of functionality. The software is essentially the same, and the way you connect to your mailbox is the same. Whether you connect to your Exchange mailbox on your company’s server or in a data centre, it’s not going to make any real difference.

Of course, your data is held off your own premises, but any provider worth considering will have a robust back-up plan in place, and they’ll have the capacity to provide redundancy cover, so you’ll probably find there’s less downtime on a shared service than there would be on a small office server.

What’s in it for us?

There are three main benefits of Hosted Exchange. One is cost. Small companies are often relieved to hear that Hosted Exchange is simply charged on a subscription basis, and usually you pay a fee per user (or per mailbox, if you share mailboxes among teams). The only set-up fee is the cost of buying Microsoft Office or Outlook for each user, but you can sometimes rent the software license as well (Soho IT offer a free copy of Microsoft Outlook with our mailboxes).

Secondly, you’ll save time (which is also a cost-saver for many people). Maintenance, support and security concerns are largely taken out of your hands. You can configure your services on the client side, but patching servers and updating anti-virus definitions need not be a concern.

The third benefit is a decrease in your carbon footprint – and again, this will save you money. If you’ve only got five employees, for example, you would be better off using Hosted Exchange to save power and share resources. This, and the money you’ll save on support and troubleshooting, make it a worthwhile consideration.

There’s been a lot of fuss this week about Google Drive, a long-rumoured new product from one of the world’s biggest technology companies. But what is it, and what does it mean to business?

Google Drive is a cloud storage service. In essence, the service allocates a proportion of server space for your own files and documents, allowing you to access them on the web.

Many cloud storage providers, such as Dropbox, also provide a desktop application. This allows you to drag and drop files into a folder on your hard drive to upload them. If you install the application on multiple devices, all the devices will stay in sync.

Google Drive goes one stage further with the integration of apps and services, such as face recognition for photos.

So what makes Google Drive a big deal?

The impact of the Google launch was felt long before any details were actually confirmed. Rivals started battening down the hatches. The file storage on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service was slashed for new users, although it’s still more than Drive will give you. Also, Dropbox rounded off their sharing features.

But the real competition will be on price: Google are offering 100GB for $4.99 per month, whereas Dropbox charge $19.99. A Drive storage vault measuring a whopping 1TB costs $49.99 per month: the unlimited plan on Dropbox costs $66.25 (paid annually).

Of course, Drive is tied in with Docs, so if you already work in the cloud, you might find that’s another reason to switch everything over. Remember that there are certain laws in the US that permit the authorities to root through your data if they suspect something fishy. For most people, this won’t be an issue, but be aware of it anyway.

Test drive Google Drive

If you own a Google Apps domain, you can try Drive now, but you’d be forgiven for not knowing how to. First, you’ll need to log in to your domain control panel on the Google Apps website and check you’re set up to get new services as soon as they’re available. In Domain Settings, select the General tab, then scroll down and set New Services to Automatic. Under New User Features, set the radio button to Rapid Release and save your changes.

Head tohttp://drive.google.com/start and see whether Drive is enabled. If it isn’t, hang in there: Google are temporarily slowing access to Drive, but the option should appear within a few days. You can then download the desktop applications to get syncing.

Google Drive completely replaces Google Docs once it’s live, so you might need to warn others in your company that their interface will change permanently once Drive is switched on.

Please do let us know how you get on!

So you’ve had a go at mastering Excel and Word and you’ve not succeeded. Try as we might, we’ve not managed to convince you that Microsoft Office has its perks. OK, you’re by no means alone. Many people are now turning to cloud working – in other words, using applications through a web browser – and if you have a reliable internet connection, it is definitely a viable alternative to using standard office applications. Here are a few alternative cloud tools you could try.

The big daddy of cloud word processing software used to be Writely – at least, it was until Google snapped it up six years ago. The online alternative to Word benefitted from some investment from Google, and they have continued to improve the features, look and feel of the application. Since Writely was gobbled up, Google purchased two other companies and bundled spreadsheets and presentation editing into its Docs product suite, taking on Microsoft Office head on. Although it’s inevitably less sophisticated than Office, it’s available on any computer and (best of all) it’s free of charge.

If you work with people and projects, go one stage further: try a cloud project management system. Gone are the days of arduously blocking out cells in Excel to create a project plan, or emailing round the organisation trying to find someone who knows how to use Microsoft Project. Project management suites such as Basecamp and Teamwork provide friendly browser-based collaboration tools, calendars, tasks and milestones: the kinds of things that make any nerdy project manager dribble with glee. If you need a super powerful solution, take it up a notch with Huddle, a comprehensive package that includes a fantastically innovative data syncing service.

Finally, let’s talk about all those files on your hard drive. The ones you’re supposed to back up but never do. The data you really need on a daily basis, but you can never get to unless you’re at your office PC because your VPN login is… yep, saved on your office PC. Fear not. Providing your employer doesn’t object, cloud storage allows you to mirror a given folder on more than one computer, and your files are also accessible through a web browser if you’re caught short without your own PC. Think of it like a memory stick you can access on-the-go. The best known and prettiest provider is Dropbox, but you’ll get more space from Box, and Microsoft have their own product called Azure (but beware: Azure suffered a massive outage on February 29th because programmers forgot to account for leap years in their code. Owch). If you’re looking to part with cash for this kind of thing, hold out for Google Drive and see what it has to offer before signing up to anything pricey.

Almost everyone who has used corporate email will have used a version of Outlook at some point. There are lots of useful little tricks and tips in the software which you may not have noticed, and they can make a big difference to productivity.

Here’s a quick run-down of our favourite features in Office 2010.

Open up your screen

The new toolbar at the top of the Office window represents a major change for many users. It also takes up quite a bit of space. If your work computer is a netbook, this ‘ribbon’ area is likely to swallow up a fair chunk of your monitor real estate.

To hide the ribbon, simply open Outlook and press CTRL and F1 together. This will show a text-only menu, giving you valuable extra space for message composition.

A picture vs a thousand words?

Sometimes it’s easier to show people what you’re talking about, rather than writing a lengthy message. This is normally the case if you work in IT support or you need to show people something like a web page. But taking screenshots, saving them and inserting them into emails can be a pain. Not any more!

Tucked away in the Insert menu, you’ll see a Screenshot link – it’s in the Illustration icon group. By clicking this, you can send a screenshot of your email message, which is fairly useless, but you can also send a screenshot of any other window or application that’s open. It’s much quicker than pressing the Print Screen key on your keyboard, as you don’t need to minimise applications or switch back and forth.

Automate your admin tasks

Sometimes we need to perform the same task over and over again, but setting up a rule isn’t suitable, as we may need to review a message before we act upon its contents. If you regularly shift incoming messages into folders or forward them on to other people, you need to set up a Quick Step. The investment of time in setting this up will more than pay for itself later.

The Quick Steps menu can be found under the Home tab. You’ll see some pre-set tasks here that you can customise and use, but you can also define your own from scratch. By defining a series of actions, you can partially automate the dreary admin tasks you perform every day. Copy or move messages, flag them, forward them to others or even create new team appointments with the click of an icon. If you want to make it even easier, assign your own special keyboard shortcut.

Creating Excel spreadsheets is something of a work of art, and lots of people have made a career from grappling with complex spreadsheets on a daily basis. But you don’t need a degree in maths to make spreadsheets work for you. Here are a few tips for absolute beginners.

Fumbling with formulae?

The most basic equations can save you a lot of time, and once you’ve mastered them, you’ll find yourself creating spreadsheets for all kinds of things: work expenses, household budgets and weighing up the cost of suppliers.

To create a simple formula, click cell A1 in an Excel sheet, type =1+2 and press enter. You should get the answer 3 in the cell.

This looks exactly like a normal maths problem, with the equals sign at the beginning. The equals sign tells Excel you want a calculation from the figures that follow.

It’s really easy to use the results of other cells too: try writing a new calculation using the result of the first one. In cell A2, type =2*A1 and press enter. In cell A3, try =(A2+A1)*2 to add together your first two results and double them.

That’s all there is to it!

Shortcuts

Sick of manually typing dates and times when you update things in a sheet? There’s an easier way: typing =NOW() displays the current date and time, and =TODAY() displays the date. Every time you open your spreadsheet, those fields will be updated.

Want to convert a bunch of text to capital letters? That’s easy too: use =UPPER(A1) to convert text in the A1 cell to uppercase. Use =LOWER(A1) to convert any sentence or capitalised text in A1 to lowercase in an instant. You can then hide the original column to make your sheet look tidy.

Beautify your spreadsheet

Yes, OK, Excel can be fairly dull. If you want people to actually use your spreadsheets, you might have to jazz them up a bit with colours and backgrounds in the cells. You can also right-click on a worksheet name and set a colour for each tab to make navigation a little more pleasant. If you have lots of comments on your cells, select one, then click Draw (bottom left of the screen), Change AutoShape and experiment with more interesting comment bubbles.

Word is a fantastically complicated tool, and some would argue it’s outgrown its original purpose considerably. Here are a few things about recent versions of Word that you may not know. Hopefully these tips will score you a few brownie points next time you need to use Word for a quick task.

Don’t have Word? Need it urgently?

Word is a powerful tool with lots of features other Office-type word processors don’t have. You may experience some compatibility issues between Word and other products, even though the vendors of alternative tools go to great lengths to avoid problems. So what do you do if you need Word quickly and can’t afford to buy it?

While most people buy Word (or Office), there is another way. Microsoft released Word 2010 as an ad-supported edition of the Office suite called Starter; this is often pre-installed on new PCs. If you think you don’t have Word on your computer, check again: you probably do. It’ll just be an ad-supported version.

2. Need a quick chart or graphic to tart up your document?

Smart Art is the hidden secret weapon of report-writers everywhere, and you can find it on the Insert tab, in the Illustrations group of icons. With a couple of clicks, you can turn a simple list or chart into an attractive flowchart or pretty diagram, and Word does the hard work for yout. You just need to format your list correctly and use the Smart Art feature, which has been in Office since the 2007 version, to create a chart that makes sense for the type of data you’re using. You can choose between a Process chart, a Hierarchy, a Cycle or a Relationship (the differences become a little clearer when you see them in the app). Once your chart has been created you can tweak it as you wish, then apply a Smart Art Style: it’ll turn that bulleted list into an attractive graphic that could buy you serious time!

3. Need to reformat the entire document?

We’ve all written multi-page documents, sweated for hours over them, then been asked to shift chapters and pages around at the last minute. Some PCs simply aren’t able to cope with cutting and pasting large amounts of text, and this is where Outline View comes in. With Outline View, you can hide all the content in your document and display only the headings: you might choose to only show Heading 1, or you might show Heading 1, 2, 3 and 4. Once just your headings are visible, use the plus marker in the left margin to drag that heading into a new position. And voila: dragging the heading not only moves the heading, it takes all of the content under that heading with it. This allows you to reorganise massive documents in a matter of seconds.

If you’ve been looking for a cloud provider, you might have come across something called the Patriot Act. You may wonder why the Patriot Act has anything at all to do with you, assuming you’re not American of course. The answer? It doesn’t – unless you pick a US cloud provider.

The Patriot Act is a US law which was passed in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Designed to give the FBI access to more data, it could result in the kind of dramatic arrests that Megaupload’s founders are only too aware of. To put it very bluntly, if your cloud provider puts your data within sniffing distance of the FBI, you can expect the FBI to have a root around in your personal files if they feel like it. The Patriot Act gives them that right. That’s not to say you only need worry if you’re doing something naughty: the government in the Netherlands considered banning any interaction with US cloud providers because of the Patriot Act.

The only way to ensure privacy – at least for now – is to keep all your cloud data with a provider the EU. At no point can it even tickle a US border, or flirt with a company which may have an office on US soil. The service provider should ideally limit just how much detail they pass on to the absolute minimum, but not all of them will.

As we all move more data into the cloud, three things become ever more certain. One, you need to be careful where your data is and who can see it; if in doubt, choose a provider close to home. Two, you need to back up your files as often as you ever have – if not more – because a huge storage site like Megaupload could go down at any time, and it could take all your family photos with it. And three, someone at the FBI really wants another pink Cadillac, so be careful where you leave your car keys.

As web browsers evolved and developed, IE6 was quickly overtaken. It was obvious that the software didn’t comply with standards and was horribly insecure and unstable. Regardless, plenty of web designers are still asked to create alternate versions of their websites purely to satisfy the people who are still using IE6. Why are they using this ten year old software? Either through ignorance or because they have no other choice. Large organisations, such as healthcare providers and governments, tend to be the worst offenders when it comes to running old software.

The people who use those computers normally don’t have permissions to install anything else. Fast forward to 2012. Microsoft have just celebrated (or perhaps bemoaned) the tenth birthday of IE6, but their grip on the browser market is slipping. According to StatCounter, Google Chrome took the lead in the browser market for the first time last weekend. Officially, Internet Explorer (that means all versions of Internet Explorer) was used for 32.5% of all web browsing worldwide, and Chrome was used for 32.7%. It’s a miniscule difference, but a significant moment in browser evolution. If this was ever going to happen, it was going to be on a weekend when users of Windows XP – and those stuck on IE6 because of work policies – were not online.

As long as employers favour Windows, it’s likely that Internet Explorer will be the leading web browser, but Chrome has already nudged Firefox into third place and it’s certainly gaining ground. Could we soon be using Chrome in the office too? If you’re not convinced about switching away from IE6, consider the fact that Microsoft themselves have campaigned against it. And a study by AptiQuant suggests that Internet Explorer users have a lower IQ than users of other browsers. (OK – we admit it – Mashable discovered this one’s a hoax.)