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

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If you have one of the new macBook Pros from Apple. The ones with the dual nvidia GT 330M cards in then you really should pop this great bit of software onto your mac. Without this software on there you don’t know which card is currently running your mac. The fancy nvidia one isn’t needed for most tasks as it warms the macbook up and sucks the battery. But interestingly it appears that Parallels and VLC both switch it on ! Parallels does even with 3D turned off on it’s VMs.

Not any more they don’t !

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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.

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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.

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We’ve found that a recent Microsoft Security Bulletin which affects quite a few operating systems, can, in some cases, wipe IIS SMTP Server settings. In our case this caused problems for the server faxing software, which needed the correct settings applying once again after this update.

The bulletin is MS10-024, follow the link to be taken to the Microsoft site with full details. If you are affected by the problem and need a hand to resolve please don’t hesitate to contact us here at Glo Networks

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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 !

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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!

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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.

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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 ?

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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).

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