MGR IT

Microsoft Office 2010 has been released to manufacture and is available for download for those with licences to do so.  As with any upgrade, there are new features that may make the upgrade worthwhile, at the cost of the time required to get up to speed with the changes in the software.  If you are currently running Office 2007 or 2003, here is a list of resources that may help you in deciding whether or not to take the plunge and upgrade.

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Adobe have released security updates for Adobe Reader 9.3 and Adobe Acrobat 8.2 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX.  These security updates fix several bugs that could potentially result in your computer being attacked and allowing criminals to access your personal or business information.  I certainly recommend installing the update.

If you have automatic updates turned on in Adobe Reader or Acrobat you should be prompted next time you run those products to update with the security patch.  If you are not prompted, then I would suggest first attempting the update by selecting Help – Check for Updates from the menu and if that does not work, downloading the update manually from the Adobe web site.

As announced on the Windows Essential Business Server blog and confirmed on the EBS web site, Microsoft is discontinuing further development of Essential Business Server and will stop selling it from the end of June.  The announcement talks about the changing market landscape behind the decision, which sounds like a roundabout way of saying the thing didn’t sell.  That’s a pity, because it is actually quite an impressive product.

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Various versions of Microsoft Windows have support end dates coming up that may impact on you if you use these versions.

Support for Windows Vista with no service packs will end on 13th April, 2010 and support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 will end on 13th July, 2010.  This means that to receive security updates, hotfixes and assisted support from Microsoft, you will need to upgrade these versions to a supported service pack.  The current service pack for Windows Vista is SP2 and the current service pack for Windows XP is SP3.

Also coming to the end of its supported life is Windows 2000, in all of its versions.  In this case, the Windows 200 product will end its Extended Support phase on 13th July, 2010.  This is pretty much the end of the support line for Windows 2000; Microsoft will no longer offer free or paid support for the product after this date and will provide no further security updates or hotfixes.  The only support remaining after this date will be self-help support such as online Knowledge Base articles and FAQs, which are guaranteed to remain available for at least twelve months after the end of Extended Support.  If you are running Windows 2000 on servers or PCs, then I strongly recommend that you upgrade to a more recent version of Windows.

You can find more information on the end of support for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista with no service packs here.  You can find more information on the end of support for Windows 2000 and some information about Windows Server 2003 support changes here.

Google is going to begin phasing out support for the Internet Explorer 6 browser as of the 1st of March.  Google Docs and Google Sites will not support “older browsers” after that date, which means anything before Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.  Presumably other Google services will follow suit.

For anyone who keeps their systems up to date, this will have no impact, as Internet Explorer 6 is old (and seriously flawed) technology.  However, there are plenty of unpatched systems out there still using IE6 – over 10% according to the w3schools browser statistics site.

If yours is one of those systems, then you should make the switch now, either by upgrading to Internet Explorer 8, or by changing to another browser, such as Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

While many people will first experience Windows 7 through buying a new computer with the operating system pre-installed, it will also make sense for many to upgrade existing computers to the new version, for some of the reasons I have touched on in a previous post.  For users of Windows Vista, there are potentially two ways of going about the upgrade.

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Windows 7 has been officially out for almost a month now and the reviews have been almost uniformly glowing.  Certainly, my own experience, starting from the beta several months ago, through the release candidate and now the final release version, has been very positive.

The benefits of Windows 7 have been discussed widely, though some of them are fairly intangible and not terribly compelling.  What I want to look at here are some cold, hard, real world reasons why businesses would upgrade from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7.

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Microsoft recently debuted a technical preview of its Office Web Apps suite, its response to online applications such as Google Apps and Zoho.  There is plenty of information on the web about the features that are and are not included in this initial preview version (which is not a finished system by any means).  For the Microsoft pitch, click on the Office Web Apps at the Office 2010 Technical Preview site.  The most interesting thing for me is the support for Firefox and the opportunity that raises for running Microsoft Office applications on various Linux flavours.

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