Currently they have imposed a deadline of 2014 for zero internal emails. The reason for the delay in implementing the ban is to ensure they have other methods of tackling the internal tasks normally associated with email programs (communications, calendars, document sharing etc.).

While Atos aren’t revealing exactly what tools they will be using to replace internal emails, Atos chief executive Thierry Breton mentions “a cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, micro blogging, document sharing, knowledge community” in an interview with the BBC.

The announcement has incited mixed responses. Some seem to be lauding them as harbingers of the future, showing businesses the benefits of internal social networks and cloud computing. Others deride the plan as ‘stupid’ for merely shifting the problem of ‘interruptions’ and ‘unproductive communications’ from email to other sources.

Glo Networks have followed this news, and the responses from the technology and business worlds with a particular interest, not however, as you may imagine, because we think that Atos are being bold and innovative, rather for the opposite reason. We feel this isn’t a particularly new approach.

In fact here at Glo we already use internal emails minimally and have done so for years. Instead we rely on other tools which we find much more suited for our work. For example:

• We all sign in to an IRC chat channel which is used to keep in constant communication with colleagues in different offices.
• We use an internal wiki and knowledge base to share information between the team.
• We use VOIP services like Skype for when we need to talk to one and other.

While we understand that Atos intend to create their own all-in-one, integrated solution for their some 80,000 employees (as may be appropriate for a business of that size) we feel obliged to point out that alternatives to internal emails already exist and have for some time. While we’re sure that internal emails will continue to be used by many companies for the foreseeable future we also want to let any companies who want to break free from internal emails for whatever reason know that it can be done, right now!

Smartcode VNC Manager
In the words of the creators: SmartCode VNC Manager is a powerful yet easy to use remote administration, network management and monitoring software.

Our thoughts: This is a very handy way to manage several remote sessions at once, as well as store connection details for ease of access.

TeamViewer
In the words of the creators: Teamviewer – the All-In-One Solution for Remote Access and Support over the Internet

Our thoughts: Sometimes getting access to a remote session can be tricky if not already configured; TeamViewer makes it simple. With this small program it becomes easy, just run a small program from both ends and enter the numbers from one into the other. This is what powers our GloRemote software.

WinRAR archiver
In the words of the creators: WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.

Our thoughts: Very handy compression/decompression tool. Can be very effective at reducing the size of certain files for transferring or storage. Also useful for splitting and joining large files.

Skype
In the words of the creators: Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype on their PCs to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users.
Our thoughts: Perfect communications tool for keeping in touch for free over the internet, whether by video, voice or text chat. Also able to call phones over the internet with purchasable credit.
Ultra Edit
In the words of the creators: Replacing Notepad or looking for a powerful text editor? UltraEdit is what you’re looking for. Versatile and easy to use, UltraEdit is the ideal text, hex, XML, HTML, PHP, Java, Javascript, Perl, and programmer’s editor.

Our thoughts: Very nice text editor, good macro functions for changing formatting. Put simply can do pretty much anything you may need to a text based file.

mIRC
In the words of the creators: mIRC is a popular Internet Relay Chat client used by millions of people, and thousands of organizations, to communicate, share, play and work with each other on IRC networks around the world.

Our thoughts: IRC has been a great simple way to keep in real time communication with a group of people over the internet since 1988. mIRC is one of the most popular IRC clients and not without good reason. Simple and incredibly versatile and extensible, we use this software extensively at Glo.

Filezilla Client:
In the words of the creators: FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Our thoughts: The FileZilla FTP client is great for transferring files to and from FTP sites, the GUI is simple but has good range of features behind it.

DokuWiki
In the words of the creators: DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required.

Our thoughts: Dokuwiki is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A wiki. Nothing more nothing less. We love that. We use it for documenting our own and our customer’s systems. It’s uses flat files, which allows us to do some funky templating. In addition it provides the concept of namespacing. For those who aren’t programmers the best way to describe it is in comparison to folders in a file system, or if you want it in terms of wiki; a wiki within a wiki. The cherry on top is the fact that it allows you to use LDAP authentication, allowing us to link it in with our Active Directory. Sprinkle on a few custom and open source plugins and we have our documentation system.

Dropbox
In the words of the creators: Dropbox – Secure backup, sharing and sync made easy.

Our thoughts: Great for keeping your important files synced between several machines. Simply pop the file into the Dropbox folder on one machine and Dropbox will automatically sync the file to any other machines you have set it up on. Also provides a history for backup purposes and sharing functionality with which you can share files or folders over the internet.

Mac Software

Parallels Desktop
In the words of the creators: Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac is the #1 choice of customers worldwide to seamlessly run Windows applications on a Mac — without rebooting. Graphics intensive programs are a breeze with new and enhanced DirectX functionality.

Our thoughts: We like Macs, they’re powerful, quality built machines, but the biggest downside is not being able to use any Windows software. Parallels allows you to do both without feeling like a compromise. Whether you prefer the look and feel of OSX or Windows, Parallels will give you the experience you prefer with access to the software for both OS’s.

VMWare Fusion

In the words of the creators: Run the most demanding Mac and Windows applications side-by-side at maximum speeds without rebooting. With more than 80 new features in VMware Fusion 3, including 5X better 3D graphics performance and 35% faster end-to-end performance in version 3.1, it’s never been easier to run Windows on your Mac.

Our thoughts: As with Parallels above, VMWare Fusion is great for allowing you to run Windows applications on your Mac. As both are great products with lots of features shared between them choosing one over the over really comes down to preference (unless you’re looking for a specific feature only offered by one or the other product,  see this side-by-side feature list from Wikipedia)

Colloquy

In the words of the creators: Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Our thoughts:  Colloquy is a user friendly IRC client for Macs with a great interface.

Cyberduck

In the words of the creators:  Open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac & Windows.

Our thoughts:  A nice feature rich, open source browser for remote files;  Cyberduck  integrates well with the OSX operating system. One cautionary note: we’ve found SFTP performance to be slow out of the box.

• the majority still use fax machines more than smart phones
• a large percentage expose themselves to security risks by using personal laptops and mobile devices for work and are unaware of the data protection rules they’re potentially breaking by doing so
• most did not know what ‘the cloud’ is, even those that were using it already (e.g via Gmail)

There were several other worrying facts relating to investment in IT equipment (a third do not intend to buy new laptops or tablets for at least a year) and security (two thirds spend under 10% of their IT budget on protecting against attacks).

It’s disappointing that in this digital age many small businesses still do not appreciate the efficiency improvements that can be attained by updating IT infrastructure or the importance of maintaining IT security. At Glo Networks we are proud that none of our customers fall into this group (and those that may have previously have had our help to make the required improvements). Don’t let your business your business be one of those stuck in the IT ‘dark age’!

One would assume that Apple, who are surely aware of the business application of their product, would ensure that its default settings are the most secure, with the option to lower the security for convinience sake if the owner should wish.

Alas this is not the case. In iOS5 at least (this is the only OS we’ve tested on) the setting which allows the new Smart Cover to unlock the iPad 2, which is enabled by default, can be exploited to enable access to the last app left open without entering the password!

The exploit is incredibly simple too:

• Lock the iPad 2 (make sure it’s passcode protected);
• Hold down the power button for 2 seconds until the “turn off” slider appears;
• Close the Smart Cover;
• Open the Smart Cover;
• Press Cancel.

This will open the app that was open when the device was locked! You are unable to use the home button to access the home screen and switch to other apps but this is quite a big security issue none the less. If you were to lock the device with the Mail app open then someone using this exploit could access all your emails,send emails as you etc.

We’ve done a bit of testing, if you lock when on the home screen and then use the exploit you are presented with the home screen and are able to scroll between pages of apps, and use the search function, but are unable to open any apps.

Disabling the Smart Cover unlocking setting (under General Settings) will prevent this exploit, at the cost of a small amount of convenience (adds another step to unlocking the device after opening the Smart Cover). This is not a stand alone incident however; the iPhone 4S, by default, has a setting enabled which allows access to Siri without unlocking the device. This in turn allows access to many security sensitive apps (Mail, Calendar, even sending texts and making calls)!

Although the 4S may not be what was expected the device is not without its improvements compared to the iPhone 4. Much attention has been given to the dual-core A5 chip, and just a much to the 8 megapixel, f/2.4 aperture camera.

The real show stealer was Siri, which, while still in the Beta stage, has been all over the media. Fans have claimed the voice controlled personal assistant application is a ‘smart and saucy pal’, while some (notably the Android boss Andy Rubin) seem to feel we shouldn’t be talking to our phones, rather we should be using them to talk to people, and that the novelty may wear off.

Although there has been so much talk in the media regards the new iPhone version there is one feature which the 4S can be proud of that hasn’t had a great deal of attention: the inclusion of Bluetooth 4 capabilities. While other smartphones have had just as powerful processors, better resolution camera’s and voice control the iPhone 4S can claim to be the first smartphone to use the new Bluetooth version.

The Bluetooth 4 specification was completed back in June 2010 and includes the Classic (regular) Bluetooth, Bluetooth High Speed and the new Bluetooth Low Energy protocols. The low energy protocol can use as little 0.01w and run on a single coin cell (watch style) battery. This allows it to be integrated into much smaller, low power devices. Although it’s not in many products at the moment there has been lots of speculation on various devices that could benefit from this, including medical monitoring and home automation and control devices.

Perhaps the lack of fanfare is due to the current lack of compatible devices, but it seems quite likely that Bluetooth 4 will soon become the standard, with other smart phone manufacturers playing catch up with Apple in that department at least. We’re keeping our eyes peeled for new and interesting uses of the technology and will be sure to share the news when we spot it!

To this end some anti-virus providers offer their own tools for removing, but recently we found we were having difficulties in removing a deployment of E-Trust anti-virus from our customers machines, the customer was locked out of the admin consoles, and we couldn’t see any suitable tools. So rather than walk up to each machine and manually remove, we did what us IT geeks love best and created a script to fit our needs:

@echo off
REM Stopping Services
net stop "eTrust Antivirus Realtime Service"
net stop "eTrust ITM Job Service"
net stop "eTrust ITM RPC Service"
net stop "iTechnology iGateway 4.2"
REM ITM Server
msiexec.exe /qn /X{4A2635AD-91E0-4758-BD1E-CA57C9294F1F}
REM ITM Agent
msiexec.exe /qn /X{85F88F9C-6EB2-426B-88AB-28DA4A3526B9}
REM iTechnology iGateway
msiexec.exe /qn /X{847501DF-07C0-4691-B04A-893929F108AE}

Bear in mind that this works for our customers specific version of E-Trust, and for different versions the Product Codes (those bits in parenthesis after “msiexec /qn /X”) may differ.

We ran this on all computers in the Active Directory using PSExec, DSQuery.

cmd.exe /v:on /c "for /F "delims=, tokens=1" %i in ('dsquery computer -limit 0') do set name=%i & set name=!name:~4! & psexec -u Administrator -p AdministratorPassword \\!name! \\server\share\path\to\script.bat"

Be aware that the result set for DSQuery is by default limited to 1000 rows. In the example above we’ve explicitly set it to 0, which is unlimited, and generally speaking a bad idea. We’ve included the limit argument just incase you try and use this verbatim and get confused.

This won’t be executed in parallel, so the more machines you have the longer it will take.

DSQuery is part of the RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools), installed by default on Domain Controllers, and optionally on other machines. PSExec is available from Sysinternals.

We would recommend creating a one time special administrator account, or you could pass in the administrator password via an environment variable, or read in from a file. Not providing the account may result in funny results depending on the target.

We also found one at least one or two machines there was a problem with UAC, however there did not seem to be a pattern, and we didn’t take the time to investigate the cause.

Oh, and just one more thing. Alternatively you could assign the removal script as a start up script.

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?

If you don’t fancy reading through the all the posts on there then allow us here at Glo Networks to summarise a few of the features we’ve found interesting just for you.

Improved file management: File copy jobs (copy, move, rename and delete) make up a large percentage of Windows 7 command use. As such Windows 8 looks to improve these functions. There’s a new centralised copy interface (no longer one dialogue per copy job, all will appear in the same) which has new monitoring and control tools, including the ability to pause individual jobs and a real-time throughput graph.

Improved “File Name Collision”: This is the situation that arises when copying a file to a location which already contains a file with the same name. The new conflict resolution dialogue displays the files from the source on the left and the files in the destination on the right. There’s a thumbnail image for each file, as well as information (modified date, size etc.) to help you make the decision on which file to keep.

ISO and VHD Access: ISO’s (virtual DVDs) and VHD’s (virtual hard disks) are now mountable natively in Windows 8. Simply double click the file and it will appear under Computer as either a DVD drive or hard disk, allowing easy access to the contents.

Hyper-V: Formally the domain of Windows Server editions, Hyper-V will be enabled in Windows 8. Hyper-V is a machine virtualization technology that will let you run more than one operating system at the same time on the same computer. One new Hyper-V feature developed specially for Windows 8 is the ability to use a wireless connection for your virtual machines to connect to the network.

Metro: This one’s a biggy. Windows 8 will have two user interfaces (UIs) available. Firstly the Windows Desktop UI that we know and love from previous versions of Windows makes a comeback, with improvements and new features aplenty. But available alongside this, or even instead of this should you prefer, is the new ‘Metro’, app based, touch friendly, UI. If you’ve seen the UI on the Zune devices, or the new Windows Phone (both interfaces are also called Metro) then you’ll already have an idea of the look and feel of this new UI. The idea is to bring together the power user capabilities of the PC and the more casual, app centric focus of tablets into a single device, with no compromise of the capabilities of either.

This is just a small selection of what has been discussed on the Building Windows 8 blog, there’s much more information on there and it also offers a way to give your feedback (via the comments section and the forum).

We’re excited to see what other new features and improvements will be present in the new OS, and will certainly be taking part in the open beta when the time comes. Keep an eye out for our thoughts and opinions in the future!

And we can understand why. The basic gist of the change is a cap on the RAM you can apply to your virtual machines per license. Formally licenses were required on a per processor basis alone, now, if you reach the virtual RAM cap for the number of processor’s you have licensed, you will require extra licenses to cover any additional RAM. This increase caused the change to be dubbed the ‘Memory vTax’.

When VMWare first announced this pricing change the memory allowance per license were rather low, meaning (obviously depending on the configuration of the virtual machines) some VMWare customers were looking at their licensing costs being several times what the old pricing structure would have cost. Reacting to the complaints of their customers VMWare have now raised the cap, which should keep the license costs to a more reasonable level for most customers.

Here at GloNetworks we’ve always tended towards the Microsoft Virtualization software ‘Hyper-V’ over the VMWare options, and right now we’re more confident than ever in our choice. It could be argued that WMWares virtualisation software is more ‘feature-full’ however we feel that Hyper-V’s pricing has always been more appropriate for us and our customers’ requirements. And since Microsoft have appeared to confirm they have no plans to use a similar ‘Memory Tax’ in its next Hyper-V product (Windows Server ‘8’ Hyper-V) we’re sure this will continue to be the case.