Saturday 10 February 2007

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft is providing a similar service to 'Google apps for you domain'. You get an online presence using your domain with the usual services like e-mail, calendar, contacts and website.

Microsoft goes a step further by providing advanced features with their essential and premium version of Office Live.

View a list of features here Try the free or basic version which also includes a free domain.

Google Apps for Your Domain

Google Apps for your domain gives you the Google services (Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Page Creator) under your domain name.

With Google Apps for your domain all the users within your domain can have an e-mail account with 2GB each. You can access your e-mails on the web or via an e-mail client like Outlook.

Google Contacts & Calendar allows you to share contacts and calendars between users making collaborative working easier. Google page creator allows you to create your web site with ease. If you do not have a domain you could register the same via Google.

Its a great service and the best feature is that its free. Read more about Google Apps for your Domain here.

If you have trouble setting up these services send us an e-mail and we will try to help

Microsoft Vista and Office 2007

30th January 2007 saw the release of Microsoft's new operating system Vista this is an upgrade to Microsoft XP and also Office 2007 an upgrade to Office 2003. The release was very low key and there are a lot of questions about upgrades which are answered on Microsoft's website.

We have had the opportunity to install and work with both Visa and Office 2007. The layout of both these products is very different from their predecessors and required a little retraining.

Vista - The operating system comes in various flavours Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. We bought a PC during the holiday season (2006) and it had a sticker saying 'Windows Vista Capable'.

We upgraded to the Vista Business Edition, the installation took about 30 minutes and it moved over all our programs and files over from XP without much trouble. There were some driver compatible issues, Vista downloaded the latest versions from the net. Some of our programs did not work and had to be re-installed like our anti-virus (AVG) software.

In our experience the upgrade versions of Vista are not the best to go for because a system failure will mean you need to first re-install the OS the PC came with install Vista again. In our opinion it is far better to buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed as this would also eliminate any program or driver issues. If you do want to upgrade you existing PC, uninstall all the software and re-install them after upgrading to Vista to avoid compitability issues with these softwares.

Office 2007 - This is a great piece of software and we would definitely suggest anyone to upgrade to this version if they are still running Office 2000 or XP. Office 2003 users might not be able to justify the upgrade.

The traditional menus and toolbars have been replaced by Ribbon. A new layout that gives you access to all the usual command quickly. There are trial versions Office 2007 you can tryout before you decide to buy or upgrade.

Another great piece of CRM software, Business Contact Manager which integrates with Outlook is also included in Office 2007 Professional , Small Business and Ultimate Editions.