Since that post there’s been an update for the software, and this update has brought something a bit fishy to our attention.

First let’s discuss what this update has changed. Directly from the product page on the App Store:

What’s New in Version 2.1

Some SSD’s use hidden compression when writing data to make their benchmarked speeds appear faster. Disk Speed Test will now measure the true speed of these SSD’s so you know if they are suitable for high quality uncompressed video capture.

The people that produce the software say the new update takes account for the ‘hidden compression’ used by SSD manufacturers, and measures the  ‘true speed’. So what difference does it actually make?  Here are some results we came up with:

Before Update	After Update

As you can see there’s a HUGE drop in the speeds the software reports! The SSD in question, a Corsair Force 3 240Gb SSD, is sold with the following specs listed:

Read Performance (max)             550 MB/s

Write Performance (max)            520 MB/s

The two logical conclusions that can come from this are:

SSD Manufacturers are artificially inflating the Read/Write speeds in order to put better looking specs on their SSDs

OR

The software, post update, is reporting things wrong or in an unorthodox manner.

There’s a few bells ringing here, this reminds us of the old hard drive capacity description discrepancy argument that went on for some time or possibly of the IPS broadband ‘up to’ speed claims issue.  Could we be seeing a similar overstatement from SSD manufacturers regards typical speeds?

Because of this here at Glo Networks we receive a large amount of screen shots saved inside Microsoft Word files. While this isn’t exactly a problem it does make the files slightly larger than necessary and also increases the time it takes for us to open them (as we don’t always have Word loaded). This is where the Windows Snipping Tool can be very useful

The Snipping tool was introduced in Windows Vista and is also present in Windows 7 (though not the Home Basic edition) and Windows Server 2008 R2. Its function is to take screen shots, and it offers some handy tools to do so. You can chose to take Free-form, Rectangular, Window, or Full-screen screen shots, or Snips as it calls them, and then you can immediately either Save the Snip to file as a PNG, JPG, GIF or MHT file, or insert the file to into a new email (either as an embedded image or a attachment). It also includes a pen tool to make simple annotations to the snip and a highlighter.

The Snipping Tool is incredibly simple to use and perfect for its purpose. Spend a little time checking it out and you’ll get to grips with it in no time at all, or you can check out instructions on its use here

If you’ve still got Vista devices deployed on your network we highly recommend that they are patched to SP2.

As always, if your devices are managed by a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server, you can enforce SP2 from there. If your WSUS server is running on Windows 2003 be aware that you may need to install another KB article in order for it to be picked up correctly. Full details over on Technet.

A lot of digging around and finding everyone offering fixes was just doing the usual Windows file associations I found this.

Was rather concerned about running an exe from an unknown site but after some exhaustive scans I took the plunge. Fixed the problem first time on my Windows 7 x64 box. Big thank you to winhelponline.com, would love to know what it does though .

With both companies founded in 1975 this has been no short journey for either. However since that time Microsoft has maintained its dominance pretty much consistently, and it has only really been in the last 10 years (which has seen the release of such iconic Apple products as the iPod, iPhone and the Macbook) that Apple providing a challenge to Microsoft’s market supremacy.

Through out the ’00′s Apple  created several iconic, genre leading products with which Microsoft have seemed to struggled to compete . Business products aside, we would challenge you to offer a Microsoft product in the last 5 years that rivals Apples innovation. One possible exception worth considering is the Xbox 360, which was  ground breaking in terms of online connectivity when released in 2005. That said Apple have yet to enter the console gaming market!

More information and figures can be found in the following articles: Engadget, Financial Times, TGDaily

Well that’s about to change according to Google.

I wonder if the UK company using gmail has gone under or if they just let Google have their way ? It’s only good news in our eyes.

We’ve tried clean installs and inplace upgrade, all without a hitch. So do take the plunge when you have time.

Not really supprisingly but Outlook 2010 and Dynamics CRM 4 only work together in 32 bit mode. It completely falls appart if you install Outlook in 64 bit mode ! A 64bit version of the CRM Outlook client doesn’t appear to be on the way either . Mind you the 32bit version of Outlook runs exactly the same as the 64but one as you’d expect.

And interestingly we managed to find a new CRM 4 error that didn’t happen when running with Outlook 2007. When trying to ‘Track in CRM’ an email you get an error ‘The text entered exceeds the maximum length.’. Luckly there’s a simple fix -

–> Load Outlook with the fulling patched and configured CRM client.
–> Settings > Customization >  Customize Entities >  E-mail > Attributes > messageid
–> Update the Maximum Length field from 100 (default) to 200
–> Save and Close
–> Actions > Publish
–> Save and Close

That should be it.

Its problems come from the fact that its about all you can do with it. So when you use your email client to receive you emails they pull them off the server onto your desktop or laptop. That’s then their only location, inside your chosen email client. So how many people bother to backup that local email store ? How many people know where it is ? How many people have even thought about that ? Even when you do think about backups and carry them out it’s a laborious task that gets more complex the more users you have.

Another thought is that all of POP3 is done in plain text. What that means is that if someone (say a college) wants to, they can load a simple network tool to gather information from the network. Not only will they see the content of your emails they’ll also see the username and password you use to connect to it ! (Yes there’s an SSL’ed version of POP3 but it’s very rarely used).

Now consider that you can now get fully hosted Exchange services from £3.36 per month per mailbox. So for your 5 user business you can get arguably the industry standard email platform with 25GB of hosted storage for only £201.60 per year ! That’s fully managed servers with no need to buy a server, no need to worry about backups, no need to think about DR (Disaster Recovery). And of course you get all the benefits of the an Exchange server like shared calenders, Outlook Web Access (Outlook Anywhere), Exchange Active Sync (for iPhone and mobile devices) and many more.

Or there’s the likes of a gmail service for your business. When we last put it in for a customer it was about £33 per user per year for the Google Apps Premier Edition. Of course there’s also the free gmail account that you could use !

Surely knowing all that you’d say that there’s no place in business for POP3. If you’re still using POP3 for your business emails we’ll happily help you change to something that’s more suited. Ask nicely we may even do it for free !

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!

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.