UPPER CASE or lower case?

I get asked this one on a fairly regular basis, so let's cover it off here.

Email addresses
These can be upper or lower or mixed case. Your email system does not care, and in fact will convert it to lower case. So, if it makes it easier to read on business cards etc, use mixed case like JohnSmith@MyCompany.com

Website addresses (aka "URLs")

• Your basic domain name can be mixed case - so www.MyCompany.com and www.mycompany.com and www.MYCOMPANY.com will all get to the right place
• After the basic domain name you need to match the correct case or a browser may not find the right page. So http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cart/view.html is not the same as http://www.amazon.co.uk/GP/cart/view.html for example. This is because some websites are hosted on an operating system called Unix which does care about UPPER and lower case.

Passwords are usually case sensitive and I would encourage you to use upper and lower case letters and digits in any password - this makes it much more tamper-proof.

Cloud Computing

"What on earth?", I hear you say! A good start (if you like lots of detail) is the Wikipedia definition, but I'm planning a short update here to give an overview.

The simple approach is that Cloud Computing is where you are storing information on the web, rather than on your hard drive or a memory stick, and you do not necessarily know or care exactly where it is stored. So examples would be

• GMail but not Outlook
• Google Documents but not MS Word or Excel
• Facebook
• Flickr and other photo storage sites
• etc

Benefits - you can work from anywhere and know that you have all the information available at your fingertips. a personal "Paperless Office" - hence the title of this blog. And yes, I do operate a paperless office! Those of you who have seen my desk will laugh, but any hard copy here would have arrived by post and will ultimately be destined for my bin or my shredder.

Word of caution. If you are storing business information in this way, you ought to find out where the data is physically stored as any legal issues with the data could need to be handled under the laws of that country.