Last week I was trying to verify whether one of my Windows client servers had been rebooted in order to take care of a check disk task I had set up to run on the servers next reboot. While a simple check for a winint task in my event viewer could have sufficed, I thought it would be fun to find another way around the problem (you can't just do things the easy way? - ed.). So being ever the overachiever I came across three other methods to check the last reboot time/uptime of my server in question:

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When sitting in the cubicle today looking for a good way to script a rather monotonous task, I was presented with a lovely melody springing from my laptop speakers. "Greetings!" it chimed in rather overzealously for a Monday. "you may already be a winner of $100,000 dollars." As I scrambled to stop the traitorous noise I realized I had no way of knowing which tab it was coming from. Quickly I shut down Internet Explorer completely and slunk down in my desk hoping no one would peep over my cubicle wall to give me the evil eye. My next course of action was to go against office best practices and install my go to browser, Google Chrome.

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When I was working in my last position we ran an Office 365 environment. It had all the features you could ever ask for and very few of the complications one is faced with in a local Exchange environment. Failover was taken care of for us, High Availability didn't involve 6 in house/colocation servers and when an outage did occur I didn't have to wade ankle deep into the shit storm that was an office without email. One slight annoyance, however, was when Gates and Co.  decided to roll out new services. More often than not such new features were like a surprise birthday party. You were absolutely elated to see everyone there, but then you realized they invited Gary the office cynic (the views of this writer do not reflect those of all other staff, many of us love Gary and would be more than happy to invite him to our next party - ed.).  One such example of this was Microsoft's implementation of "OWA for devices"

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When working on transferring our old out of office request system to the new Sharepoint workflow, created by yours truly (He's so modest - ed), I came across a really neat Microsoft Office "feature". This feature will prevent some versions of Office products from opening when certain sharepoint actions are clicked. For me it was the "Open with Access" button found in my Calendar Tools bar. 

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One thing that has been a god send since I started working in the IT field has been the discovery of windows quick keys. These simple button press combinations have sped up my ability to access programs, features and services that in the past would have taken me several seconds of jogging through sub menus. To hopefully help you speed up your work flow here are some of my favorites:

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