In a prepared statement Ballmer said that “There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,”
Bill Gates said that “As a member of the succession planning committee, I’ll work closely with the other members of the board to identify a great new CEO,” he added that  “We’re fortunate to have Steve in his role until the new CEO assumes these duties.”

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by ehavir

One of the critical vulnerabilities include Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft customers will have the opportunity to ask questions on the security bulletins in a web-cast  that will be held by Microsoft on July 11, 2012, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada).

As always, you should install the security updates as soon as they are available.

Launched in 2008, Yammer now has more than 5 million corporate users, including employees at 85 percent of the Fortune 500. The service allows employees to join a secure, private social network for free and then makes it easy for companies to convert a grassroots movement into companywide strategic initiative. The basic version of Yammer is free, and customers can pay to upgrade their network to receive advanced administrative and security controls, integrations with enterprise applications, priority customer service and a designated customer success manager.

Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene, and the team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks.

Communication is a key factor when you want to achieve a goal. It is nice that Bill Gates shares his thoughts and interests and that he is open for conversation. The site has good content. What will be the next step?

1. Skype

Skype is a great application for free Skype-to-Skype calls. It has also the subscription option that lets you call to landlines and sometimes mobile phone for a monthly fee. I heavily use Skype everyday. It has the option to share your desktop and you can send files easily by dragging and dropping them into the message area. With Skype you can keep a log with all your text messages and conversations. I have used Skype customer support and my experience was not a very positive one. I hope in the future to fix that.

2. Microsoft Live

With Microsoft Office Live you can share the documents you want with your peers. It is a free service from Microsoft. It comes with 5GB of space. Each individual file can be up to 25MB. You can give access to the users you want with right to view or edit the files. You can organize your files into folders, create lists and add notes. If you are on the move it is a convenient place to store your files.

3. Google Docs

Google Docs is a free service offered by Google. With Google Docs you can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. Google Docs accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc. You can share and edit simultaneously the files with other users that you invite.

4. Dimdim

Dimdim is a browser-based web conferencing service. It has both free and paid options. You can show presentations, collaborate via whiteboards, chat, talk and broadcast via web cam with absolutely no download required to host. I have used the free edition of Dimdim to host an online meeting. The results were satisfactory but you must know that in the free version you cannot save what you write on the whiteboard. The good thing is that with the free option you can have up to 20 participants to the meeting.  Dimdim has also an open source edition.

5. Vyew

Vyew is a free web conferencing tool. It has also paid options that adds new features. The good thing is that you can save your online collaborations. You can host unlimited meetings and the free option allows for 10 concurrent users. It has voip, video and chat options. You can upload files or your desktop image. If you have an online business they have also an affiliate program (commission based). I signed to their affiliate program after evaluating their service.

6. Twiddla

Twiddla is a web conference tool with a grate whiteboard. They offer voice chat for the free edition. All feature are free for educational purposes. I have used Twiddla and I found it very easy to use, no downloads and works with all browsers.

7. Dabbleboard

Dabbleboard is an online collaboration application that’s centered around the whiteboard. It has both free and paid plans. It is a fantastic whiteboard tool, ideal for sharing your ideas with your team or explaining concepts to remote team members.

There are a lot more very good collaboration tools. I added only those that I have used.Most of the tools I mentioned here I have used in conjunction with Skype. If you know any real good collaboration tool that I have not tried yet please leave a comment.

 
So lets begin.
Domain Name

It is highly recommended that you get your own domain name. You must think well about it to be descriptive of what you want to blog about. The domain name should be in the form “myblogname.com”. Since I have a web hosting company I recommend buying a domain name from www.123easysites.eu
Of course any other domain name registration company will be OK for this.
My recommendations for the domain name are:

1. Prefer to use private domain registration. This way you will avoid junk mail, no strangers getting your address from your whois info. Many years ago I didn’t use a private domain registration and now one of my old email account receive more than 150 junk emails every day. And yes www.123easysites.eu offer private domain registration!
2. It is recommended that you choose more than one extension for you blog. Do not only register “yourblogname.com” but also try to register “yourblogname.org”, “yourblogname.net”, “yourblogname.eu”. You can redirect the other extensions to “yourblogname.com” usung 301 redirections. It is easy!

Hosting

I recommend , you guess it -almost, www.123easysites.com.* Of course you can choose any other company but I recommend my own and not only that I can give you a coupon to get a reduction! You can use the coupon TALESFROMTHEBITS to get 15% off. The coupon is only valid for www.123easysites.com

Install WordPress

After you have your hosting ready you can install WordPress from your hosting control panel using fantastico delux. The whole process of installing WordPress from fantastico takes less than 5 minutes.

Now that the basics are in place the fun starts.
First thinks first you must create a feed for your new blog and you guess it correct you need to go to FeedBurner.
Then, login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address. This will help redirect your subscribers.

Before transferring the post and comments from Blogger you must prepare WordPress. Log to the administration page of your blog and go to Settings > Permalinks. Select “Custom” and add /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html . This is to match the post structure of your Blogger blog.

You are ready for the transfer. Go to Tools>Import and select Blogger from the list. Enter your Blogger login information. This should automatically transfer all your posts and comments for you.

You must change your old feed from FeedBurner so go into the feed and click on “Edit Feed Details.” Change your Original Feed to http://YourNewBlog.com/feed/ .

There are two very important steps and we are done!

You must redirect visitors from your old blog to your new one. To do that go to Blogger, select Settings for the blog you want to transfer. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” Type in your new domain, www.yournewblog.com. Save. Now your links will transfer automatically to your own domain.

You must do the same for search engines because you do not want to get penalized fro duplicate content. To do that you must go to Blogger  Layout>Edit HTML. Place the following code anywhere after <head>:  <meta content=’0; url=http://YOURNEWBLOGURL.com/’ http-equiv=’refresh’/> . You can read more about this redirection here.

Now you are done! You have to review your blog to see that every link works OK and that your pictures are transferred correctly. You may need to add some pictures manually.

When I did the transition I found out that the tags that I had for my posts on Blogger became categories in WordPress. I did a manual change to correct this.

Please feel free to contact me if you need help or more information.

Good luck and Happy Blogging!

*Why two hosting addresses? The answer is simple. One is for unlimited hosting but with kernel access restrictions and the other is for limited space and bandwidth hosting but with great add-ons such as Fantastico De Lux, cpanel and many more features.

In my opinion the tool offers good examples and covers most of the areas of modern database design. It has a good explanations of topics like transactions Concurrency, store procedure and functions, triggers.

My comment is that this is a good security lesson to those that believe that unprotected data will be difficult to be discovered or that it is difficult to steal sensitive data which is transmitted without encryption.