Tired of Acrobat licensing expenses? Replace Acrobat with LibreOffice Draw and edit PDFs for free

Are you tired of your software budget evaporating on questionable licensing expenses like Acrobat Standard?  Do you wish you could recover that cost or redirect it into something more useful?  In that case, have you considered the freely available LibreOffice Draw ?

For the unacquainted, LibreOffice is an open source office productivity platform first released under the LGPL in January 2011 by The Document Foundation.  You may recall, that Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, and along with that they inherited OpenOffice, and abruptly killed commercial support for it (trivia - Sun released it as an OpenSource project after acquiring StarOffice in 1999).  The net result, is that LibreOffice (which is actively being developed) is actually quite a a mature, open source office productivity platform - and is similar to Microsoft Office in many respects.  Notably, LibreOffice Draw (akin to Visio) has the ability to edit PDFs.  No, not like Microsoft Office, which let's you create in Office and then do a Save As to PDF.  LibreOffice Draw literally lets you do a File>Open... browse  to your PDF...  then modify the content.  And it works... when you're finished, go to File>Export as PDF>Export.  And boom... you're finished.  You can even install the portableapps.com package - which I use for editing PDFs.

This isn't to say that you can just blindly replace every instance of Acrobat Standard, or Professional across your organization.  That would be unwise.  But if you think about your user or client base, and thelicensing expense line items in your budget, how many of your resources just need a simple PDF editor?  How many  couldn't care less about all of the other features of Acrobat Standard and Professional? 

Given the actual need and your budget, give LibreOffice Draw a try, and see if you really need all of those Acrobat Standard licenses.

Portable undelete tool for NTFS volumes (quick and free)

It's been a while since I've had to do deleted file recovery from a machine, so I thought I'd post a short note based a recent conversation that I had with a friend of mine.  Incidentally, the last time I looked into this I  ended up using a Knoppix Linux Live CD.  But a quick search suggests... that the undelete business is alive and well.  So after trying a few disappointing tools, I found that Recuva met the need (it worked, it was portable, and it was free).  It did a fine job of quickly recovering most of the recently deleted files, but as expected - struggled on the ones that had been deleted a while ago (several weeks old).

Exchange Message Tracking Center or findstr?

If you need to track down messages in Exchange, using the Message Tracking Center in ESM is probably the first place to go for information.; and for the most part that works just fine. But if you need some more detail, or need to be able to search for wildcards or other strings, you might want to consider using findstr against the log folder

Open a command prompt, browse to Exchange log folder and do a search for you’re looking for.

findstr /s /i "StringToSearch" “c:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\servername.log\*.*”

In the example, /s seraches on the current directory and subdirectories and /I indicates that the search is not case-sensitive. If you’ve not used findstr before, take a look as there are plenty of parameters you can use.

As an aside, I usually copy off the *.log files that I'm interested to a separate folder before running findstr - just so as to not get bogged down searching irrelevant logs.

How does your bandwidth utilization look?

For most of us in the SMB segment, clients predominantly use either DSL or cable connections to the internet. Why? It’s inexpensive for one… and in general it seems to meet or exceed their needs. But how do you know when it ceases to meet those needs? Do you know how much bandwidth they’re utilizing on a daily (or hourly) basis? What about traffic spikes- how often do they occur? Have you considered the upstream limitations?

All of these things require data. As IT service providers, we make data-based recommendations to our clients – we use measurements, and performance metrics to justify these recommendations – and we proactively notify clients when things change about their network. We don't talk about how fast or slow things subjectively feel.

Great… so how do you go about getting this data?

Well, they are lots of different ways to approach this… We like to use ntop. Why? It’s pretty straightforward to install, configure, and get working – even for those new to Linux (apparently W32 binaries do exist). It’s also open-source, and free. Most importantly though, it produces graphs depicting bandwidth utilization over time. And graphs are great for visualizing problems. It does lots of other things too… it eanbles you to track down the biggest bandwidth users at a client site, it helps identify broadcast traffic where it shouldn’t be, and it enables you track down things like unexpected p2p traffic.

Of course, there are lots of other options to getting at bandwidth data… MRTG comes to mind, as does GFI Web Monitor for those looking for an ISA-based solution. You can even do some neat stuff with LogParser, ISA, and IIS. All that being said, ntop is convenient, free, and it produces results that your clients can clearly envision when you discuss utilization with them.

Reloading Vista: Apps, tools, and utilities of interest

After dozens of installs/uninstalls, playing with beta apps, and in general just thoroughly abusing Vista on my laptop for the past 6 months, it’s come time to reload the machine. By and large the issues are of my own doing, so by no means is this a “Vista problem”.

So why am I telling you this?

I’ve spent the past few days finding all of the apps that aren’t part of my base-image, and thought it would be something light to post. So without further delay, listed below is my list of apps and tools (with comments when relevant) that I had to track down for this load. You’ll notice that many of these are open source, though some obviously are not. I’m sure I’ve missed a few things – if you see anything that should be here, let me know.

ThinkVantage System Update - Beats tracking down every driver individually. Though you’ll need to grab the appropriate driver for the wireless chip set (preferably first), if you’ve got a T60.
Visual Studio 2005, IIS 7, SQL Server 2005
Symantec Antivirus 10.2
Office 2007 Professional, Visio 2007.
Quickbooks 2007
Camtasia Studio – Great tool for creating webcasts and training materials.
Virtual PC 2007, Windows XP, Windows 2003, SBS 2003 guest machines
Knoppix – Not actually installed. Just haven’t grabbed a recent ISO.
Netstumbler – Doesn't hurt to have on hand.
Sysinternals Tools – Microsoft bought these guys somewhat recently. I use ProcessExplorer mostly, but a great suite a command line tools.
MBSA – For update scanning.
del.icio.us web-browser extensions for managing del.icio.us booksmarks and tags.
Deamon Tools – for mounting ISO images. I know Microsoft released an unsupported tool that does the same, but I’ve been using this for a couple of years and like it. Just make certain to uncheck the Search tools on install to avoid adware.
7Zip – Unzip tool with a GUI. It’s free, it works - and is similar to WinZip.
Adobe Acrobat Reader - Read PDFs.
KeePass Password Safe - Open Source tool for managing account information and passwords to web-sites and other resources.
GreatNews RSS reader – I used to use RSS Bandit, but Vista compatibility was a bit slow in coming so I switched. As I have more feeds that I can read daily, I’ve started using the NewsWatch feature almost exclusively for finding content of interest.
VMRCPlus – Great console GUI tool for managing Virtual Server 2005 R2 machines without having to bounce through the web-based interface. Which, as an aside, who thinks it was a good idea to release Virtual Server 2005 and have the only management tools be the web-console? I mean, maybe, just maybe if it was AJAX-based, but even still… anyway, VMRCPlus solves that problem, and has apparently been floating around internally at Microsoft for some time.
AngryIP Scanner – quickly probe subnets for hosts. I use it frequently – note that SAV 10.2 detects it has a security threat.
ISO Recorder – Burn ISO images.
2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS – Save As PDF from Office 2007 apps. No need for
PDF Creator – In case you don’t have Office 2007 and want to create PDF’s without Acrobat Professional.
Google Earth, or Microsoft Virtual Earth – Either, or, or both.
AD-COIT – My inventory script for scanning networks.
Citrix ICA Client – ICA client.
FileZilla – FTP client of choice.
JRE - Java runtime environment
TightVNC – One of many VNC clients
WinPcap – I don’t always install this on my main machine – but , it’s a packet capture library, and a requirement if you’re going to be using Wireshark.
WireShark – Previously known as Etheral - packet sniffing tool.
Paint.NET – You need some tools for manipulating graphics. I used to use The GIMP, but have been following PAINT.NET since the first beta a couple of years back. I like it, it works for me.
PowerShell – Think BASH for Windows kinda. If you haven’t heard of it yet, get familiar with it. Its how were managing Exchange 2007.
FireFox - An after thought.

Utilities: ISO burner for Vista

Apparantly I don't burn ISO images very often from my Vista machine... so when I needed a copy of Suse on DVD this afternoon, I had to go out and find ISO Recorder (again)... downloaded it, burned my disc, and it worked - free too.

Office: Office 2007 Save As PDF

Save as PDF in Office 2007... I installed this add-on a while back and have been using it constantly. So now, instead of using only PDFCreator, Microsoft Office 2007 has an Add-In that will let you save directly to either PDF or XPS. Nice.

Tools: Spiceworks Desktop Goes 1.0

Have you checked out the Spiceworks Desktop yet (backed by Austin Ventures)? It just went 1.0 today and is basically an asset inventory app with a slick web interface and some community integration targeted at the SMB sector. The community part looks new to me, but I skipped the last few beta releases and am only now revisiting.

In case you haven’t heard, the buzz around these guys is the business model... Google Adwords inserted in a web app. Spice and Goldcoins blogged about this a while back. My take...

It's worth checking out.

But if you're looking for a basic command-line inventory tool, that will output to CSV, check out my AD-COIT project on Sourceforge.

Utilities: BGInfo to display system information

I received a good question recently about how I manage my virtual machines.

How do you keep track of which virtual machine you're working in?

So between RDP, VMRC, ICA, VNC, and KVM connections it’s easy to get the machine you’re connected to confused with another machine in a different window. What I like to use, and what seems to be pretty popular is BGInfo from sysinternals.com. (Sysinternals has a bunch of other useful tools worth checking out). It drops system-specific information onto the desktop background; stuff like host name, IP address, OS, boot time... and lots more stuff than you'll probably use.

Anyway, it’s easy to use, just customize the config file and put it in your startup folder.