OK, perhaps it is asking a little bit much when the purchase price is 5p less than £100, but Microsoft Office 2008 Home and Student edition has no Microsoft Exchange support.

Now undoubtedly you’ll be able to get and send your email via IMAP or POP (as long as the IT Staff have allowed this) but as for the collaborative features? Forget it.

The people who this really messes about with is education professionals - or more importantly, their budgets in situations where Exchange is the central mail system. Rather than paying £100, they’ll now need to pay £349 (£219 on upgrade) for the required functionality. Ouch.

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microsoft, office 2008

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

According to those nice people at O2 today, there is no need to extend your existing contract if you buy a new 16Gb iPhone - and that’s good news.

They suggest that all you need to do is replace the sim in your new phone with the sim from your existing phone. I’m guessing that this might not be right - in the US, a different process is reported as needed. Be aware of that, I think it actually may be the same here.

Either way, if you need to have more storage for stuff, at least you’re not going to need to extend your contract by several months.

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16Gb, iphone, O2

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

We like internal IT. We think it’s vital from a company management and legal point of view. We also strongly believe in giving your users the tools they need to do their job. So while we see a need for Google Apps Team Edition for very small and small companies, we think that as soon as you have your IT infrastructure in your own control, it should be banned in-house.

What is it? It’s a simple to set up version of Googles’ existing web-based applications - word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, instant messaging and Start page. It doesn’t contain Gmail for the moment. It allows users sharing the same email domain to easily collaborate with each other, sharing documents and calendars.

It’s free for the moment, and does allow for upgrading to the other Google Apps products.

However, I’d still have my corporate data in my server, thanks.

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google, google apps

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

This may help you more than it helps us - we’re regular travellers to the US, not Europe. However, the EU Commission have called for price reductions for roaming SMS and data traffic by the 1st July, or they will intervene and regulate.

We’ll see how this develops. The mobile companies found ways to wiggle around last years’ voice cost cuts - by requiring you to sign up to them, or to require a contract extension. The UK Government was actively against the cuts too.

We don’t hold out much hope of these proposed cuts coming to much, but any price drop is better than none.

Technorati Tags:
tariff, eu, mobile data, sms, regulation, mobile

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

I’ve had one spam today. That’s a 99.5% reduction. I’m impressed. The system is a pretty serious pain in the neck to set up for small users: once you understand their model then it’s fine, but it’s not one for unsophisticated admins to set up.

A full review will appear later, but if the per-user costs of Google Apps Message Security Services gives you cause for concern, Mail-scanning.com, a uk-based service propose to charge by the domain. Their prices are not yet fixed (as they’re in free beta) but they are looking to charge around £10 or less per domain per year. That’s good value.

Technorati Tags:
antispam, antivirus, google, postini, mail-scanning

Posted: February 7th, 2008 under News, Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

Boundary-filtering your incoming email can be an expensive business. Software can be in the region of $200 for 10 users for a year, with next year’s upgrade around 20% off - say $160. Signature updates are often around $70 per annum for the same ten users. That gives a ballpark cost of $25 per user per year.

How does $3 per user per year sound?

We think it sounds pretty amazing, frankly. But that’s the price that Google are charging for their Google Apps Message Security Services. This is a re-badging of Postini’s services, whom Google acquired last year. Setup is pretty simple, requiring no changes on your mail server - you point your MX records in DNS to Google, who accept mail for you, scan the mail and forward it if it’s clean.

As well as the basic $3/user/month service, there are two addition levels with additional features - particularly outbound checking and email retention. You can check the features and their costs here. Also worth noting is that schools and non-profit organisations get a 66% discount.

We bet companies like Cloudmark and especially Messagelabs are worried about this. They’ve had this market space pretty much clear for a long time now, and Google’s entrance to this market is going to give them cause for concern. That’s a good thing, as they both fail our standard test - never trust a company that doesn’t put its prices clearly on its web site.

We’re definitely signing up for this here, and giving it a run for it’s money. We’ll report back in a month or so.

Technorati Tags:
cloudmark, messagelabs, postini, google, antispam, antivirus, message security, scanning

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under News.
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It seems as if my first guess was right - it was merely a delay in updating the UK store. 16GB iPhones are now on sale at £329.

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16Gb, iPhone

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

Our Mac Backup toolkit is full again - we’ve been users of Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper for a long as we’ve been using Macs recently, and it’s the thing we’ve missed most whilst using Leopard. There’s nothing quite as good as knowing you have a bootable image of your Mac’s hard disk lying around in case of emergency.

The update has been a while coming, but the guys at Shirt Pocket are perfectionists. However, it’s been released today and it’s a free upgrade to existing users, $27.95 to new users.

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software, SuperDuper

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under News, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

Take a look at the US Apple Store iPhone page.. Then compare it to the UK page.

Spot the difference? The new 16Gb iPhone - but only if you’re in the US. Undoubtedly this will be coming to the UK fairly soon, it may even be that the UK store hasn’t been updated yet. However, it may be that inventory issues in the UK and Europe - they’ve not been selling as well as predicted - means we’ll need to wait until the warehouses clear a bit. Of course, knowing there’s a better product in the wings is hardly going to clear that inventory faster, is it?

While you’re on the UK store page - have a look a the O2 tariffs. They’ve recently been vastly improved across the range, making them much more competitive than before. What you might not have noticed on the O2 website is that there’s now a set of tariff bolt-ons - ranging from cheaper international calls to a chosen country to unlimited text or fixed-line calls. If you’re a heavy user of your phone in a particular manner, these are well worth investigating.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, O2, bolt-on, tariff, bolton, 16Gb

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

We’ve been away for a short while - other matters caught up with us for a bit after MacWorld, and it’s taken until now to get back into the swing of things. We promise not to take so long a time out next time. Sorry!

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none