Up till now, Google Doc’s has been a free service that gives the user an ability to create, maintain and store various documents online. It had functionality to allow the user to upload and read Microsoft Office documents as well.

Microsoft has now struck back by releasing free online versions of its Office Suite and giving the users an alternative to Google Docs.

Called Office Web Apps, this suite is a cut down version of the desktop applications and allows for document viewing, sharing and light editing.

The consumer version of the tools are free and store the documents on Live SkyDrive. The corporate versions can get self hosted versions of the applications using Sharepoint.

Being online applications means that the applications will work regardless of the operating system and have been tested in Windows, Mac’s and Linux based machines through various internet browsers.

If you have Office 2010 installed, then Office Web Apps takes advantage of offline and online editing and can present a richer experience for users.

Office Web Apps are also supported via mobile browsers and allows the user to view documents saved onto their Live SkyDrive account directly on their mobiles.

Read below on how to use Office Web Apps.

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The newest version of one of the more popular blogging applications, Windows Live Writer  is now out.

Version 14.0.8117.416 is part of the new Wave 3 suite of the Live Essentials package.

Most Windows platforms are supported, however the installer still complains when trying to run via Windows 2003 Server.

I’ve extracted the MSI package for Writer and placed it on my Live SkyDrive in case you need to install it for Windows Server 2003. Read below for instructions and download links.

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In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

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I don’t know about you, but I find the mouse over ad’s on Windows Live Messenger extremely annoying. Every time I accidently move the mouse over the ad, it keeps popping up forcing me to move my mouse all the way to the top to close it.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

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From time to time, all bloggers like to tune their blog via a new theme or style sheet etc. Windows Live Writer has an excellent functionality to allow a blogger to preview what their post will look like before they publish their article. This is done by clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer.

When a blog is set up first in Windows Live Writer, the theme and style sheet is automatically downloaded from the blog to provide this preview functionality.

If the theme or style sheet is changed, you will need to manually refresh in Windows Live Writer to get the latest version to ensure that the preview remains accurate. Its a few simple steps to do this…

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Windows Live Writer is currently one of the most popular applications for blogging. It is an easy to use application that allows anyone to quickly post articles to their blogs in a WYSIWYG fashion. With live previews, its possible to see exactly how your post will look like before you publish the article.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

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Recently I created a post (turned out to be one of the most popular on this site) to show how to install Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive using Gladinet.

At that time, Gladinet was still a Beta Program. Recently, they released Version 1 and there has been some significant changes to the instructions. I’ve now updated the post to properly reflect these changes.

I’m now using the free edition of Gladinet to connect to my SkyDrive, Google Apps and Google Picasa albums all via My Computer

You can find the article here: Set Up Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet

Hope this helps everyone!

Microsoft Translator is a free translation service to allow you as the user to get the most out of on the fly translation of web pages and excerpts and provides tools to users and webmasters alike to deliver these types of services to the web user.

It is API based and there are several applications that use this API that would be useful to both webmasters as well as developers in addition to IE8 users.

Today, we’ll look at 4 ways to use Microsoft Translation services:

1. Translation Accelerator for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0
2. Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger
3. Windows Live Toolbar Translator Button
4. Webmaster uses for Microsoft Translator (via Widgets)

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This post has now been superceded with an updated one. Please go below to see the new post:

Updated Article – Setting up Live SkyDrive with Gladinet 2.1

Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. It means doing things online, like talking to friends on social networking sites or playing in a virtual casino, are that much easier to do. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.

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I’m now starting to use offline blogging software to write some of my posts. I had a look at a couple of offline blogger applications to see which one suited my needs best. The two that looked most promising were Windows Live Writer and Zoundry Raven. Both has had an excellent feedback recently especially when blogging to engines such as Blogger and Wordpress.

While I had the latest version of both installed at home, I had a major issue installing Windows Live Writer at work. I run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop at work and the installer for Windows Live simply refused to work on it.

After a bit of research, i found that it was only the installer that had the issue and I could install Windows Live Writer via the .msi. In the end, I found the .msi file in my temp folder on my Vista machine at home. (I also found an .msi on the net, but that was for either Dutch or an older version). This one is for Windows Live Writer 2009

For others who are running Windows Server 2003 and the installer complaining, I’ve uploaded the .msi file to my Skydrive. You can download it from here:

http://tinyurl.com/gimmeWindowsLiveWriterMSI

NOTE: This is the 32 bit version!

If you need any other MSI’s (eg, Live Messenger, etc), please leave a comment or send me an email.

I’d appreciate a comment if this helps you in any way :)

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