Recession to fuel Open Source?

With the world economies in a bit of a downward spiral, the demand for Open Source techologies should increase dramatically. Business should soon start to see the value in migrating certain systems to opensource. I have a hard tim justifying Microsoft Office licences when there are freely available alternatives. The only cost a business may incure is some training costs to migrate the users over to the new package. This however should quite easily be justified as it means a lifetime of free and open source as opposed to the pain of being forced to upgrade systems at huge expense every couple of years.

I still think that most businesses will however need to stick with Windows as an OS, but office applications and others can be migrated to Open Office.

Bulk Modify Active Directory Users Accounts

Basically my friend upgraded his old server and migrated active directory to the new server. Active directory pointed their profile paths to the server name or IP address of the old server. So he needed to be able to modify all his users profile paths so that they pointed to the new server. He could do it one at a time, but after doing a couple of hundred I am sure he would have gone insane!

I found this tool: ADModify.net

Snippet from their website:

"ADModify.NET is a tool primarily utilized by Exchange and Active Directory administrators to facilitate bulk user attribute modifications."

This tool is awesome! It does exactly what is says it does! It allows you to bulk edit active directory user accounts. You can bulk modify almost any setting in an AD user account using this tool! I am definitely going to keep this one for future, it makes life so much easier!

Google Forms

I recently noticed that Google Docs has a new feature called Google Forms. It seems to be a pretty cool feature that allows you to create online forms that can be emended in just about any blog, web page or emailed. When a person fills out the form the information gets saved into your Google Docs account. This lets you go through the results in a nice simple spreadsheet.

This is a very useful tool. Give it a try.

A Brief History of the Internet

I found this cool video on digg. It is a nice introduction to the history of the Internet.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.