Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

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.

Posted by Chris in Desktops and Laptops, Software | 1 Comment »

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.

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

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 !

Posted by Chris in Applications, Desktops and Laptops, Servers, Software | No Comments »

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 | 1 Comment »

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 »