Microsoft is to make a significant portion of the next version of its Office productivity suite available over the web. Cut-down versions of Excel, Onenote, Powerpoint, and Word has been released to more than 400 million Windows Live account users.

Office 2010 and Office Web applications are due to be available in the first half of next year. The major objective is to deliver the best productivity experience across the PC, mobile phone and browser.

New Office features that could appeal to businesses include broadcast and video editing in Powerpoint, new data visualisation capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word. A tool called Office Backstage will give greater control over the behind the scenes options for documents.

The Outlook email client will have a new "conversion view" to thread related conversions to help with the growing volumes of email and other communications such as voice-mails. A conversion Cleanup tool looks across all email threads and reduces duplicated information (SPAM).

There will be also fewer product versions for Office 2010. It will be delivered in 32-bit and 64-bit formats, installable on Windows XP with service pack 3, as well as Vista and Windows 7.

Two of the five versions are for corporate customers - Microsoft Professional Plus 2010 and Microsoft Office Standard 2010 - which look likely to be available only via volume licensing. Both include usage rights for on-premises web applications.

Cheers Mark Bower

Director, NextWave.IT Ltd

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Microsoft has shown an early version of Windows 7 - the follow up to Vista. Under the hood the new Windows reports itself as Version 6.1 (Vista is 6.0). The core architecture is the same, and microsoft claims evething that runs on Vista will also run on Windows 7.

There are nevertheless numerous new features. The most obvious is the revamped taskbar, which has larger icons, full-screen preview and a new quick menu for each application, called a jump list, which gives immediate access to commonly used features. The sidebar has now gone and gadgets now appear on the desktop.

Multitouch support, similiar to Apple's iPhone lets you drive Windows PC's with your fingers, moving objects with gestures.

A new sensor programming interface (API) offers standardised support for devices that report location, movement, sound, light and other inputs, paving the way for PC's that respond to their environment. Microsoft has also created a Device Stage window, which allows makers of phones, cameras and other devices to create custom screens that appear automatically on connection.

Home networking has been streamlined, media sharing easier, and Windows is smarter about supporting both work and home networks on a single laptop. Wordpad, Paint , Calculator acquire numerous new statistical and scientific features.

Microsoft has also worked on the system tray, which gets overcrowed. In Window 7 users can cutomise this with a single click and suppress unwanted messages.

The new Windows 7 is meant to deliver better performance on the same hardware. Users are likely to enjoy this release, even though it is low-key in terms of features. The date of release is October 22, 2209, from £49.99.

Minimum PC requirements are: 1GHz 32-bit processor; 1GB RAM; 16GB available for hard drive; Direct X9 graphics card.

It's not possible to upgrade from Windows XP and keep programs and files in place, so these will have to be stored elsewhere while you reformat the computer's hard disk and install Windows 7. Upgrade from Windows Vesta is straight forward.

Find out all you need to know before installing Windows 7. Video workshop training guides to Windows 7. All 16 video's are less than 5 minutes.

www.computeractive.co.uk/windows7

Cheers Mark Bower

Director, NextWave.IT Ltd

www.nextwaveit.biz

enquiry@nextwaveit.biz

 

 

Despite discussion over whether WiMax or LTE technology would win out as the basis for faster 4G wireless networks, Motorola Inc. is now convinced that both protocols will flourish.

That recognition means Motorola is working to sell equipment to provision both WiMax and LTE networks when carriers commit to one or the other.

Currently, WiMax is the technology of choice for the new wireless carriers that predominate in emerging markets mainly outside the U.S. The notable exception is Clearwire Inc., which has financial backing from Sprint Nextel Inc. and others, in the U.S.

Meanwhile, LTE was chosen by Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. in the U.S. Verizon is expecting to begin deployments of LTE next year with full rollouts in 2012. 

Motorola is already provisioning WiMax networks for Clearwire in 18 U.S. markets, with base station equipment, antennas and client equipment, such as laptop USB's and customer premise equipment that can distribute a WiMax signal from outside throughout a home or office.

As part of its WiMax effort, Motorola is already running an interoperability laboratory in Taiwan to test third-party WiMax devices. These devices include USB's, wireless mobiles, smartphones and even machine-to-machine devices that can be used, for example, to monitor thousands of utility meters, replacing the need for meter reader crews.

Motorola wouldn't say which manufacturer's smartphones are being tested for WiMax, but said some are Asia-based device makers and some are more recognizable vendors in the U.S. Samsung is considered the most interested in developing WiMax smartphones, according to several analysts. It's too early for LTE interoperability testing on devices.

Motorola's consumer handsets division is committed to launching many new Android smartphones in the next year, and plans to build handsets in 2010 that will run Windows Mobile 7 when it becomes available.

Cheers Mark Bower

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Google yesterday took direct aim at Microsoft, unveiling plans for a PC operating system (OS) that will compete head-on with the software giant's Windows and form the final element of its strategy to reshape the computing landscape.

Google said a number of low-priced laptops known as netbooks, based on its new OS, would go on sale in the second half of 2010. It is predicted that the software would bring benefits to PC users from greatly cutting the time it takes for a PC to start up to reducing the complexity of managing PC's.

Coming in the wake of its Android OS for smartphones and Chrome browser for accessing the Internet, Google's planned OS, to be called Chrome OS, will complete the range of software that the company produces for internet-connected devices. PC users will not have to rely on Microsoft's dominant Windows. Microsoft's second big money-spinner, the Office suite of applications, is tied to Windows. As an open-source system based on freely available Linux software, Chrome OS takes aim at that.

More than 70% of the software applications used by the typical company run on the Windows OS, making it expensive and time-consuming for companies to consider changing to a new OS.

Microsoft has already proved adept at fending off a series of attacks on its Windows PC business, leaving it with a market share of 97%. It has countered this news with a statement that the new Windows7 OS due out in October 2009 will not be bundled with Internet Explorer, but will give PC users the choice of what browser to install.

Cheers Mark Bower

Director, NextWave.IT Ltd

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enquiry@nextwaveit.biz

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Organizations are increasingly looking to Cloud Computing to improve operational efficiency, reduce headcounts, and help reduce costs. But security and privacy concerns present a strong barrier-to-entry. In an age when the consequences and potential costs of mistakes are rising fast for companies that handle confidential and private customer data, IT security professionals must develop better ways of evaluating the security and privacy practices of Cloud Services.

Cloud Computing comes in many forms: There are Software-as-a-Service  providers like Salesforce.com; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) like Amazon's SimpleDB; Web services that offer application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, such as Yahoo! Maps and Flickr; and infrastructure services  like those offered by Rackspace, Terramark, and Savvis.

Different from traditional outsourcing where it is still very much standalone computing, Cloud decouples data from infrastructure and obscures low-level operational details, such as where your data is and how it's replicated. Multitenancy, while it is rarely used in traditional IT outsourcing, is almost a given in Cloud Computing services. These differences give rise to a unique set of security and privacy issues that not only impact your risk management practices, but have also stimulated a fresh evaluation of legal issues in areas such as compliance, auditing, and eDiscovery.

Also see Cisco CEO: Cloud Computing "A Security Nightmare"

Based on close to a dozen interviews with vendors and IT users about the security issues surrounding Cloud Computing services, Forrester has synthesized three main areas companies should consider:

1. Security and privacy. Concerns such as data protection, operational integrity, vulnerability management, business continuity (BC), disaster recovery (DR), and identity management (IAM) top the list of security issues for Cloud Computing. Privacy is another key concern—data that the service collects about the user (e.g., event logs) gives the provider valuable marketing information, but can also lead to misuse and violation of privacy. One way for customers to evaluate a provider's security and privacy practices is through auditing, which can help to lend some visibility into the vendor's internal operations. However, auditing goes against the very grain of Cloud Computing, which attempts to abstract away the operational details by providing easy-to-use interfaces and APIs. A Cloud provider may not allow internal audits, but they should offer provisions for some form of external audits on their infrastructure and network.
2. Compliance. Users who have compliance requirements need to understand whether, and how, utilizing the Cloud Services might impact your compliance goals. Data privacy and business continuity are two big items for compliance. A number of privacy laws and government regulations have specific stipulation on data handling and BC planning. For instance, EU and Japan privacy laws demand that private data—email is a form of private data recognized by the EU—must be stored and handled in a data center located in EU (or Japan) territories. Government regulations that explicitly demand BC planning include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Basel II, Payment Card Industry (PCI), and the UK Contingency's Act.
3. Legal and contractual issues. Liability and intellectual property are just a few of the legal issues that you must consider. Liability is not always clear-cut when it comes to Cloud Services. The same goes for intellectual property (IP). For some services, the IP issue is well understood—the Cloud provider owns the infrastructure and the applications, while the user owns her data and computational results. In other cases, the division is not quite so clear. In software mashups, or software components-as-a-service, it can be difficult to delineate who owns what and what rights the customer has over the provider. It is therefore imperative that liability and IP issues are settled before the service commences. Other contractual issues include end-of-service support—when the provider-customer relationship ends, customer data and applications should be packaged and delivered to the customer, and any remaining copies of customer data should be erased from the provider's infrastructure.

Internet Explorer 8 addresses just about all of the major concerns that users and critics have had with the world's most used browser. Whether they get answered in a way you like is another matter.

There are several new and interesting features. Web Slices lets you save predefined sections of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing. Instead of going to a traffic Web site for updates, the latest commuting news comes to you. Similarly, Accelerators make repetitive tasks one-click behaviors, for instance finding directions or blogging. InPrivate browsing introduces a cache and history on-off switch, while related tabs are color-coded and automatically reorganized as you open them. There's also tab sandboxing, which means that when a tab crashes, IE itself won't, and it even tries to resurrect the page that crashed.

There's a greater emphasis on Web standards and security than before. The SmartScreen and cross-site scripting filters throw up a red warning page when you're about to visit an unsafe site. There's also domain highlighting, which grays out the name of the URL you're looking at except for the domain itself. This sounds simple, but effectively draws attention to spoofed site URLs. There's also a compatibility button so that sites designed specifically for IE 7 and earlier can still be viewed.

IE 8 lacks a default "smart" location bar that many other browsers have, but you can search your history and most visited pages from there. Also, the installation process still requires a reboot--unimpressive, to say the least. Drawbacks aside, there's no reason to not upgrade if you're an old fan of IE, and there's even a few things in IE 8 for new users.

Cheers Mark Bower

Director

NextWave.IT Ltd

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In Silicon Valley the next great evolution is called "Cloud Computing" and it signifies the migration of all information technology to the web browser(download www.google.com/chrome), where everything will become a "Web Service" distributed from the Internet.

Cloud computing is to turn all computer servers, storage and network resources in a datacentre into one big pool to deliver the applications and service levels required by customers.

Part of the plan involves virtual desktops - virtualised client machines that reside in the datacentre and are accessed remotely by users. Travelling workers will be able to download a virtual machine to a laptop or even to a USB memory stick and take their computing on the road.

Microsoft released its Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows Server 2008 and recently added a standalone version that can host guest virtual machines without an underlying version of Windows. Microsoft expects to build market share by targeting small-to-medium sized enterprises.

Microsoft will have a product aimed at Cloud Computing in the near future (2009). It will soon unveil a platform to run applications in the Internet which is called "Windows Azure".

The Windows Azure Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform, hosted in Microsoft data centres, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure's flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities.

Citrix gained the hypervisor technology needed to consolidate virtual machines on servers, and is also looking to become a major player in Cloud Computing and software-as-a-service.

The ultimate aim is to create a flexible service pool supporting independent operating systems that actually run the software applications. Currently, Cloud Computing services are included on Web 2.0 sites with the aid of "Ruby on Rails software".

Cheers Mark Bower

Director, NextWave.IT Ltd

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WiMax stands for worldwide interoperability for microwave access, a term describing a wireless broadband technology which is derived from the industry led organisation the WiMax Forum and is based on the IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area network (maximum range of 50kms) and HiperMAN standards.

Certified WiMax hardware is available now, but mass WiMax adoption is expected to follow the WiFi model, whereby embedded client hardware, especially in laptops, drove adoption.

The cost and benefit implications is that rolling out WiMax networks is significantly less than today's cellular networks. Another benefit would be the potential for faster uplink and downlink speeds than those available with current 3G mobile phone networks.

Problems include availability of radio spectrum, mast sites and client devices. The important radio spectrum auction, which should make countrywide WiMax frequencies available, will take place before the end of this year. Intel will embed WiMax hardware in variants of its upcoming Centrino 2 platform, but the UK is not the primary market.

WiMax suppliers include Alvarion, AirSpan, Intel and Nortel. Current WiMax trials include: Urban WiMax in London, UK Broadband in the Thames Valley, Freedom4 in Manchester, Milton Keynes and Warwick, and the Mobile WiMax Acceleration Group in Maidstone.

Cheers Mark Bower

Director, NextWave.IT Ltd

www.nextwaveit.biz

enquiry@nextwaveit.biz

 

 

 

For almost ten years now, we have been witnessing a decisive shift from client-server software to software as a service.  The mobile Web 2.0 global market will be worth £11.5 bn by 2013, according to Juniper Research, rising from the current £2.8 bn and spearheaded by the rise in user-generated content and social networks. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service.

Web 1.0: Anyone Can Transact

Web 1.0 was about the emergence of the innovative applications from companies like eBay, Amazon.com, and Google. Although we thought of them as Web sites at the time, they were really amazing applications with a level of functionality, ease of use, and scale that had rarely been seen before by the average consumer. Transactions, not just of goods but of knowledge, became ubiquitous and instant. The efficiency and transparency that was once the domain of global financial markets was now at the command of individual consumers and businesses. Web 1.0 remains a huge driving force today and will continue to be for some time.

Web 2.0: Anyone Can Participate

Web 2.0 is about the next generation of applications on the Internet, featuring user-generated content, collaboration, and community. Anyone can participate in content creation. Posting a viral video on YouTube, tagging photos from a party on Flickr, or writing about sport on Blogspot requires no technical skill, just an Internet connection. Participation changes our idea of content itself: content isn’t fixed at the point of publication—it comes alive. Google’s AdSense became an instant business model in particular for bloggers, and video-sharing sites have rewritten the rules of popular culture and viral content.

Whether you are creating a business around Web 1.0 or 2.0, building massively scalable data centers that are secure, reliable, and highly available is not a job for the faint of heart or shallow of pocket. For companies like Salesforce.com entering the emerging software as a service (SaaS) industry, the massive time and capital requirements remain a substantial barrier to entry. Moreover, traditional client-server software development is still mired in painful complexity. And the “rewards” for creating a successful application are arduous deployments and maintenance.

Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate

Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely innovating the technology of the traditional software industry. The novelty of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the software development "cloud". When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.

For businesses, Web 3.0 means that "SaaS" applications can be developed, deployed, and evolved far more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional software of the client-server era. For developers, Web 3.0 means that all they need to create their dream application is an idea, a browser, and a few Pocket USB's. Because every developer around the world can access the same powerful cloud infrastructures, Web 3.0 will empower small business enterprises.

Web 3.0 means that you can spend more time focusing on core business values being offerd to customers, not the infrastructure to support it. Because code lives in the cloud, global and local talent pools can contribute to it. Because it runs in the cloud, a truly global market can subscribe to it as a service.

Cheers Mark Bower

Director, NextWave.IT Ltd

www.nextwaveit.biz

enquiry@nextwaveit.biz