Takeaway: Outlook seems to lend itself to worst practices. Luckily, a little education can help prevent a lot of user-induced headaches.

Outlook users probably generate the most annoying calls for support personnel. Word and Excel users want to know how to “do stuff,” but Outlook users usually need something fixed. They’re not malicious mistakes by any means, but Outlook is a complex tool and users are preoccupied with getting their work done — things just happen. Training goes a long way in many cases. If you can teach your users not to do these 10 things, you and your users will all be happier.

1: Clicking Reply All

When someone sends a message to multiple accounts, the recipients can respond to everyone by choosing Reply All instead of Reply. That means some of your users will get responses they don’t need to see. It’s a waste of their time. It’s probably the most annoying thing Outlook users do. There’s no cure for this one except to tell them not to. Some will ignore you, and some will do it accidentally anyway.

2: Using the all list

Many organizations have distribution lists so employees can send the same message to everyone on their team, everyone in the editorial department, all the managers, and so on. But one list usually goes to everyone in the organization. Users rejoice to learn that they can let everyone know when their daughters are selling cookies, when they’re going on vacation, when they’ve moved their office, when they’re collecting for a good cause… you see where this is going. This breach of good manners annoys everyone.

Tell your users to use the list judiciously — seldom, if at all. If it becomes a problem, restrict who can use the list.

3: Opening attachments from strangers

Some users see an attachment as a gift — surprise! They just can’t help themselves. You can tell users not to open attachments, but good virus protection will usually protect the system, just in case. That’s the good news. The bad news is, users still open attachments from strangers.

4: Clicking links

Clicking links is fun. They take you to cool sites with all kinds of offers and fun stuff — and embedded controls and scripts that do all kinds of evil things to the system. Most links are harmless, but most users can’t discern a legitimate link from one that leads to a phishing site, hard drive failure, or worse.

Consistent training helps, but experience is the best teacher. Making this mistake carries a heavy fine: The user can’t work until someone fixes the system. It’s also humiliating and can be a bit scary for them. Implement the best software defenses you can, consistently remind users not to click links in unsolicited emails, and hope for the best.

5: Sharing stuff

I can’t help wondering how much bandwidth and storage users waste spreading gossip and sharing angels will save the world chain letters, pictures of their offspring doing adorable things, and so on. Most organizations tolerate this misuse to promote harmony, even if it is annoying and wasteful. It’s hard to put a price on good will.

6: Forgetting passwords

Long heavy mournful sigh, followed by a bit of gentle head banging.

Most users don’t have to password-protect Outlook, but occasionally, you run into a setup where multiple users access their email via the same machine. To access their account, they have to remember their password. Good luck with that.

7: Ignoring messages

Some users just don’t want to communicate via email. They don’t like it and they don’t want it. But in most organizations, email is no longer a convenience; it’s how co-workers interact. Unfortunately, there’s always one or two users who refuse to play nicely, who ignore emails or claim, “I never got that message.” You can try to correct this behavior through training, but it usually turns into a management issue.

8: Sending email to everyone in their address book

Sending an email to everyone in the address book isn’t easy to do — I mean, it’s not easy to do by accident. Yet users still manage to do it. This is especially annoying if Outlook adds every sender to the address book as emails arrive. What a wasteful, annoying mess, especially if you have to get the administrator involved to try to recall them. (Just thinking about calling an admin makes me genuflect uncontrollably.) Training won’t help here. Just say, “Don’t ever do that again.”

9: Deleting necessary items

One of the great support mysteries is why Outlook users delete contacts, only to discover they need them after all. This happens with all Outlook items, in fact: emails, tasks, appointments, and so on. You might encourage users not to be so quick to delete items. Let old items hang around for a while until they’re truly obsolete. The exception is email; no one benefits from a neglected Inbox.

10: Deleting a profile

Outlook profiles relate accounts and settings to specific users. Most users will have only one, but having more than one is an efficient way to keep things separate. For instance, users might want a profile for work and another for home. You can also accommodate multiple users on the same machine  by creating a profile for each user. Unfortunately, they sometimes delete profiles. I’m not sure how or why they do it, but they do.

Can you use the QWERTY keyboard to find out the extension of the person that you are calling ?

Well, if you are unsure if this will work or not, I challenge you to try before reading this post.

Maybe it happened to you as it happens to other “frustrated” users that I know or you heard something like “I tried to call you but I could not get through because your name is not listed under the directory” .

In these technological days we forget that most of the phone that we have out there are still using the 12 buttons phones and the phone systems are based on that technology. The answer to both of the question is YES!!! but ….

For question number 1 – if you have a QWERTY phone and you want to dial 1 800 OCANADA you have to make sure that you hold the ALT key, this will translate the letters to the proper numbers.

For question number 2 – here it gets a little more complicated you really have to think or visualize the 12 button phones, with the exception of the latest touch screen blackberry where you can see on the display the standard keyboard.

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It happened to me twice before and at that time I  just hanged up the phone. Today got  me into a good mood and I said to myself,  let me play with them and see what they want me to do.

So, this is how it started.

“Hi sir my name is and I am calling from the Department of windows technical support. I am calling to let you know that we are receiving a lot of errors from your computers and we are here to help you”

I said…really, what happened? The guy: “Don’t worry sir we will fix it.

Then I asked him again, what the company  you are calling from ? same answer. and right after… What is the operating that  I am using ?

He says, ” Sir, i will be able to tell you as soon as you will type a few commands on your computer”

I said, ok, let’s do it.

So, he gave me a bunch of stupid commands, just to get information with regards to my computer and for him to come up with some bogus processes that are running on my pc, processes which in his opinion were malware.

Bottom line, the guy was interested in fact to sell me their registry cleaner and to sign a new year technical support with him (the windows dept…)  for the sum of 279$.

So my friends, DON’T allow anyone to take your for a ride like this, even if they say that they will send the cyber police after you. There is no way that someone will call you out of the bloom and tell you that your pc is screwed up. Probably you know  this before them (and that is when you call Briatech   ) because you can’t use the PC . Oh yeah, and if really somebody will call you for this issues, that will be your ISP and at that time if your PC is really broadcasting to the entire world is just to let you know that your internet connection has been deactivated.

For the reference, here is Microsoft article

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Takeaway: Take advantage of the top benefits that mobile computing has to offer with this list of 20 highly useful iPhone apps.

15. Pano

Pano makes it easy to take excellent panoramas with the iPhone. It helps you line up your shots and it automatically corrects many of the imperfections. My wife is a photographer with a big, expensive Nikon camera and she’s regularly jealous of some of the shots I can get with the iPhone and Pano. (By the way, Android is looking to take panoramas to the next level with the new continuous panorama mode in Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich.”)

16. Twitter

The official Twitter app is still the best Twitter client on iPhone (although Osfoora is catching up). Twitter itself is an amazing instant-intelligence engine. Two other great social media apps for iPhone are Google+ and Foursquare.

17. Navigon Mobile Navigator

I used to carry a separate Garmin GPS unit for turn-by-turn directions but I eventually got rid of it and decided to just use the iPhone instead. In researching the various apps, I eventually decided on NAVIGON, which is a company that makes a lot of the built-in navigation systems for many cars. Tip: Make sure your iPhone is plugged in to power when you run a GPS navigation program like this because otherwise it will quickly drain your battery.

18. Where To?

A great companion to a GPS system is the app “Where To?” which lets you quickly look up various types of shops and services, from Cuban restaurants to medical specialists to animal hospitals to local museums and much more. Two other great resources are Google’s Places app and iExit, which shows you the restaurants, gas stations, and stores at upcoming exits when you’re driving on an interstate highway (in the U.S.).

19. GroceryGadget

This is an app plus a website and you can quickly sync between the two. The way it usually works for me is that my wife makes a grocery list, enters it into grocerygadgets.com, and then it syncs to my iPhone so that I can swing by the grocery store and pick up the stuff.

20. RedLaser

This is a great app for shoppers. It turns the iPhone camera into a barcode scanner and it’s pretty accurate. You simply scan a product’s UPC code and let the app go to work to find it in Google Product Search and TheFind. For food it will even look up allergen information and for books it will scan to see if you can get it in a local library. You’ll be amazed at how fast it works. A similar product is SnapTell, which not only scans barcordes but you can also take a picture of the cover of a book or DVD and it can look them up that way. These apps are great when you’re shopping at a retail store and want to check the prices of products online before buying. It also reads QR codes.

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Google has been making a big deal about wanting to be more transparent about its search algorithm lately (without revealing the secret sauce too much of course). And so far, I have to say they’re making good on that promise fairly well.

We’ve seen plenty of algorithmic announcements made from the company over the course of the year. In November, they discussed ten recent changes they had made. Here’s a recap of those:

• Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.

• Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
• Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Now, they’ve put out a similar post on the Inside Search Blog, revealing ten more that have been made since than post.
Google lists them as follows:

• Related query results refinements: Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search you type. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “red widgets.”
• More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.
• New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.
• More autocomplete predictions: With autocomplete, we try to strike a balance between coming up with flexible predictions and remaining true to your intentions. This change makes our prediction algorithm a little more flexible for certain queries, without losing your original intention.
• Fresher and more complete blog search results: We made a change to our blog search index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.
• Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.

• Live results for Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League: This change displays the latest scores & schedules from these leagues along with quick access to game recaps and box scores.
• Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.
• Layout on tablets: We made some minor color and layout changes to improve usability on tablet devices.
• Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.

Seeing just these 20 tweaks listed all together, as changes that have just been made in the past month or so, really puts it into perspective just how much Google is adjusting the algorithm. That doesn’t even include the integration of Flight Search results announced after these updates.

Google also points to the recently launched Verbatim tool, the updated search app for the iPad and the new Google bar as other recent changes to be aware of regarding Google search.

Google says all the time that it makes over 500 changes to its algorithm each year, and that it has over 200 signals it uses to rank results. There is always a possibility that one of these changes or signals can have a major impact on your site, as many have found out this past year with the Panda update.

Even a huge company like Yahoo is at the mercy of Google’s algorithm when it comes to search visibility, and they just finally made some big adjustments with Associate Content, not unlike what Demand Media has done this year. Last month, Google also indicated that it is testing algorithm changes that will look more what appears above the fold of a webpage.

We’re getting close to a new year, and there’s no reason to expect Google’s changes to slow down. Google has been clear, however, that it aims to be more transparent about when these changes occur, and what those changes are. Granted, this transparency will only go so far, because Google will not make all of its signals known, and leave their results too open for gaming. That wouldn’t be good for anybody (except maybe Google’s competitors).

Google does say that these lists of algorithm changes are now a monthly series.

Courtesy of http://www.WebProNews.com