Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

A date has been set for the release of the latest edition of Microsoft’s Office productivity suite. According to Paul Thurrott in his WinInfo blog, Office 2010 will be generally available from the 15^th of June 2010. This has since been backed up by an MS spokesman who has stated  “we expect Office 2010 and related products to be generally available in June 2010″.

The product has been in development since 2006  and the beta has been around for a while. The release candidate (RC) version was made available to MSDN testers on the 5^th of February.

Microsoft have also announced that customers purchasing copies Microsoft Office 2007 (from authorised resellers) between between 5^th of March and the 30^th of September will be able to download Office 2010 at no extra cost when available. So anyone who is looking to purchase the productivity suite software now need not worry about having an old version. For full details see here.

We have, of course, been testing out Microsoft Office 2010 for ourselves here at Glo (in fact this blog post was drafted in Word 2010). Keep an eye for out for a blog on our thoughts sometime soon!

Posted by James in General, Software | No Comments »

Faxing from user desktops is an IT solution Glo Networks have been able to provide to several customers but a short while ago we were asked about something new to us: sending SMS from user desktops.

After some investigation we found our chosen faxing software, GFI Faxmaker, could also be configured to send SMS. This is done via a third party SMS gateway, namely Clickatell.

SMS credits are purchased from 3rd Party supplier and Faxmaker is then setup to forward outgoing SMS to the online gateway. Now all the user has to do is send an email to mobileno@specifieddomain.com and the body of the email will be sent to the mobile as SMS.

We’ve already set this up for one customer and would be more than happy to discuss/answer any queries regards the solution.  Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Posted by James in Mobile, Software | No Comments »

So there’s now quite an uptake of SSDs in all manor of devices. And a few of us in the office have them in our devices. Every now and then the SSDs need firmware updating and the OS / image re-applying. More interesting though is the Windows 7 TRIM support offered by most current SSDs. TRIM support is needed to keep your SSD running as it’s optimum performance (which of course is why you bought it in the first place), however does anyone actualy know if it’s working ? Apparently running this from a command prompt will tell you -

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

If it returns 0 then it is on in Windows.

However that test really isn’t any use as run it on any Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2 server and you get 0 returned. So apparently it’s on and working on standard HDs also ? ! ? Also spotted this on the internet -

1. Right click on a disk drive, go to properties.
2. Select the Tools tab and click on Defragment now…
3. Click on Configure schedule…
4. Click on Select disks…
5. The SSD should not show up in the list of disks if Windows recognizes it as an SSD.

Amazes me that there’s obviously a lot of money being invested into SSD and rightly so as they do have obvious benifits. However if having TRIM support on your SSD is really that important then there should be some real way to check it’s working. Or is TRIM support just marketing hype and doing nothing ?

Anyone have the real answer ?

PS. Could all end user devices be exclusively SSD powered in the next few years with all bulk storage only done in the cloud or on your corperate servers ?

Posted by Chris in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops | No Comments »

According to this link on an Microsoft blog they are about to upset a lot of Windows 7 users. In the next few days a Windows Activation Technologies Update will be released and it’s sole purpose is to detect 70 known activation exploits. So if you’ve hacked / crack Windows to keep it working you may fid it’s about to break.

Of course those that have paid for a legit copy of Windows 7 need worry about nothing but if you have a problem in the next few days give us a shout and we’ll get you sorted (the right way).

Posted by Chris in Desktops and Laptops, Operating Systems | No Comments »

Anyone that does work on networks will at least a little but understand subnets. In days gone by people would work out subnets on scientific calculators. Now there are a multitude of websites offering different ways to do it.

The website we use is subnet-calculator.com, not very pretty by does exactly what you want in a clear interface.

Posted by Chris in Operating Systems, Operating Systems | No Comments »