It seems what was left of Microsoft’s diminishing lead in market capitalisation has finally been eaten up by Apple (or at least by one measure of market capitalization). While this probably will not come as a surprise to those who are interested in such things; when looking at the history of both companies it does mark an important milestone.

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

Share

Save

Thought this was an interesting little change of events. Google offers email services world wide and has done for sometime now. It’s called gmail everywhere bar here in the UK where it’s called googlemail. Some other UK company was using the name gmail in something and stopped Google from being able to use it.

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.

Share

Save

So Office 2010 has just been released and with the lovely Outlook 2010 we just have to get stuck in to using it of course. We really like the People Pane and the cleaner calander views for starters.

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.

Share

Save

There are many ways to receive email to your devices with POP3 being about the most basic one. It’s also one of the oldest internet protocols and is perfect for just getting emails off a server to your PC.

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 !

Share

Save

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!

Share

Save

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.

Share

Save

For ages I’ve been running Office 2007 on Vista x64 and now Windows 7 x64. Both suffer from Outlook not being able to preview PDF files. Providing the following error -

This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer:

PDF Preview Handler for Vista

To open this file in it’s own program, double-click it.

People have been installing other 3rd party tools to fix this problem, however here’s the perfect fix (it doesn’t even need a reboot).

To enable the preview of PDF files in 64-bit OSs, do the following:
1. Start the Registry Editor (Start – Run – Regedit.exe).
2. Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}.
3. Change the AppID value to {534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}.

Or create a Registry file -

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}]
“AppID”=”{534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}”

Share

Save

Spotted this on Engadget the other day. Using your macBook’s large mouse pad (trackpad) as a tablet ! Looks like a great idea though is it really big enough and more than just a gimic ?

Made by Ten1Design.

Share

Save

Google have finally released Chrome for Mac OSX. It is now out for OSX 10.5 or above and for intel Mac’s only.

You can download it here it is only Beta at the moment so use it with caution but if the windows version is anything to go buy its quite stable.

It doesn’t look like some features are quite ready yet, for example there is no sign of bookmark syncing that is in the latest beta of Google Chrome on Windows.

Share

Save

VMWare are releasing a new version of Fusion, The software that enables you to run Windows virtually on your mac. The latest version is promising a few nice features.

Once of the most important being ‘Optimized for Snow Leopard’ which adds 64-bit core engine and native support for 64-bit kernel, the current version of Fusion does not support having a 64-bit kernel.

They have also made improvements to 3D graphics with support OpenGL2.1 and DirectX 9.0c and new Windows 7 experience.

VMWare Fusion 3.0 will be available on the 27th Oct. world wide, there will be a charge for the new version though upgrades will be around £30 and £60 for the full version.

Share

Save