Real World Computing

One of the less obvious trends of the last five years has been the race to own people's "digital identities". It started in earnest with Facebook and Gmail and it soon spread to Apple and LinkedIn. More recently, we've seen Microsoft and IBM jumping on the bandwagon and I think that's when I started to realise that there was much more to this than simply "targeted advertising". Quiet Beginnings  At this point, I'm not sure that all of the founding companies in this revolution fully understand what is going on - and indeed, there are many companies out there today who are still using digital identities simply as a means of easily logging people onto their systems, storing user preferences and targeting advertising. Certainly that was the original plan on our own systems. Taking it to the next level  Digital identity is the cornerstone in any form of electronic ledger system. It's one of the key foundations of commerce. People don...

We have a lot of documents and they go back several decades. Many of them  are still relevant today, even if they're only background to current projects. The problem is that Word doesn't like its own file formats. It won't open documents created with versions of Word earlier than 1997 and it crashes with anything saved as .DOC which contains macros.  There's some solutions to these problems though; Opening Older Documents It's possible to change Word 2016's settings to allow you to open old documents; Click File,  Then Options Then Trust Center Click on the button marked Trust Center Settings Click on File Block settings. UN Tick the document types that you want to be able to open and click Ok Of course, just because you CAN, doesn't mean that you should. Word is less stable with these settings turned on, and it's able to open documents which could be potentially dangerous.  If you're looking at your company's archives t...

When I first started this blog, my aim was to stay with mainly IBM (Lotus) Notes and Domino, hence the URL of DominoGavin.  Things changed over the years and I've found myself wanting to talk about all manner of technology brands from Symantec to Blackberry, Google, Windows and Linux. (Hence the renaming of the blog to "Real World Computing'.  Many of my most recent posts were on IBM connections. I've also tried to cover a few business IT concepts. Things are changing again and we've reached the point where it makes sense to swap out some of our IBM technology solutions for Microsoft ones. We're not leaving Domino, it's still an important part of our strategy but we are planning to move our mail from Verse to Outlook and our collaboration from Connections to the Microsoft jumble of OneDrive, Yammer, SharePoint and Delve. All of this while rebranding and moving office in a typical “office-politics” hands-tied scenario. It's going to be a fun ri...