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 »

Eventually I got round to reading the last PC Pro (Issue 186) that came through the door last week and spotted this sentence written on Jon Honeyball’s column (pg 130).

‘In fact the quality of the Zune UI makes me wonder why on earth Microsoft doesn’t just trash the entire Windows Phone platform and replace it with something based around the Zune UI.‘

Now either he’d seen the Windows 7 Phone Series UI before it was announced last week or we have a modern day Arthur C Clarke in the making .

Posted by Chris in General | No Comments »

One of our customers recently wanted to upgrade their 6 terminal server which they have hosted in a data centre, they were 5 years old and it was starting to show, with 60+ users across the 6 servers the system was starting to get slow and the costs were high for the out of date hardware they were running on. The backup of the servers was not ideal, with each of the servers backing up to each other.

Project goals –

• Upgrade the servers to new hardware
• Save money
• Better way to backup
• Faster system

We purposed to the customer that we could make their current 6 physical server in to virtual servers and host them over two powerful physical servers on a much faster connection than they currently had, back all the servers up to separate location and save them money.

The customer accepted our proposal and we recently carried out the migration over a weekend, by Monday morning the servers were all up and running as virtual server on the two new servers. The new system will save them just more than £6000 a year.

Using disk2VHD (found here) we converted the physical servers, then transferred them to the new host and set them up on Hyper-V.

As well as having backup now done to a separate space away from the host servers it also adds an extra level of disaster recovery to their system. Should they have a hardware failure, being virtual servers we can have their system up and running very quickly (less than a day) on new hardware. All users had the exact same setup as before, the only difference they noticed was that their server was much quicker.

All of this also makes future migration, upgrades or add additional servers much easier thanks to virtual servers.

Posted by Dave in General, Hardware, Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

In the last few days 2 fairly high profile companies have open sourced parts of their products; Facebook and Symbian. Why is this important? For the average person on the street they probably won’t care, but for other companies and individual nerds out there it can be a very good thing.

Facebook’s HipHop has the potential to lower infrastructure requirements for PHP based web applications, and Symbian being open sourced provides developers for mobile platforms the ability to more easily produce tools and improvements for Symbian. For Facebook and Symbian the benefit is that they can take these improvements and use them internally. There’s also the potential to find new hires from outsiders who may work on the project.

However, the thing that companies need to understand most is that you just can’t throw the source code over the metaphorical wall and wait for magical things to happen. Without building a community around the project it will never develop into anything other than a burden and potentially even a public relations nightmare.  If you don’t understand why a community is important then you may well be open sourcing your product for the completely wrong reasons and I’d suggest that you take a long hard look at why you’re thinking it’s a good idea.

So how do you build a community? Its a hard thing to do right and is precisely why various companies that produce Open and Free products employ Community Managers. However, if you’re starting off small and want others to contribute we can suggest that you follow these golden rules:

• Communication. Mailing lists. IRC. Development needs communication and these are still the popular choices.
• Make sure you have some documentation, or a group of people who understand the code so that it can be explained to new or potential contributors.
• Be friendly. If someone wants to help they’re going to be spending their own time to get a new feature into the software.

If you intend to do all these things then you already understand why you want to open source your product. Get all these things right then theres a good chance your company will benefit, both in terms of code and in terms of public relations. Hadoop or Lucene, originally from Yahoo, are particularly good examples of how to do it right. They both now have large communities and both Yahoo and others have benefited massively as a result of the contributions.

Posted by Karl in General | No Comments »

Another use for the iPad was brought to our attention here, why not use the tablet to access and control remote desktops?

Although it could well be fiddly and clunky to use, if the App was done right and had enough developement to really use the touch capabilities in a natrual feeling way then we feel the iPad may have potential as a new kind of portable thin client!

Posted by James in General, Mobile | No Comments »