Microsoft Office 365 hits Australia but data to be hosted in Singapore!

Source: Australian IT

AUSTRALIAN businesses have been told they will need to make their own arrangements if they want to use Microsoft’s new cloud-delivered office software service, Office 365, but keep their data onshore.

Mr Trimboli said that Microsoft was working with the Australian Government Information Management Office and the privacy commissioner regarding jurisdictional issues for data storage behind Office 365.

In the interim, companies would need to carry out private risk assessments for using the offshore or locally hosted versions of the cloud service.

Compare – Office 365 and OzHosting.com Cloud Services

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Facebook Email – Is it Pure Brilliance or a Scam??

Article Source: SherWeb

Who needs another email address? Facebook thinks… We do. Facebook ‘Messages’ is a service the company is rolling out gradually, in which users can opt-in and receive their very own “@facebook.com” email address that matches their public username.

What they’re offering is not really email. It’s more like Chat, but better, because with one service, you can text message, IM or email. Facebook calls it the “next evolution of messaging”. Rather than having intermittent exchanges of content, as is the case with traditional email, this new messaging medium will support “ongoing conversations”. Entire conversation histories going back years will be saved into users’ accounts. No subject lines, no cc, no bcc, just long threads of individual conversations.

The three features that define Facebook’s new offering include:

• Seamless messaging: users can chat with people through whatever medium they choose, be it SMS, email, or IM
• Conversation history: see everything you’ve discussed with each friend as a single conversation
• Social inbox: for filtering exactly the messages you want to see and having a spam-free inbox (theoretically)

Hasta La Vista, Email?

Zuckerberg says “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of it.”
While Facebook may not be driving the knife into email, it is swinging its sharp edge at email service providers, particularly Google’s Gmail service. There’s a long standing issue with Facebook not letting people import their contacts into their Gmail account, even though Gmail lets Facebook do it.

Facebook’s system doesn’t play well with others, and a recent Gizmodo post went as far as to say that “[Facebook] wants to be Netflix, it wants to be your Xbox, it wants to be Foursquare, it wants to be Gmail—Facebook wants to be the internet.”

And yes, it certainly does impose its own proprietary system in favour of systems that work well and are widely-used.

But as much as I love a good conspiracy theory, (and I do believe that Facebook is trying hoard the web’s social space) email won’t die. Not at the hands of Facebook. After all, Facebook is a social utility and though email is a way of connecting with people, Facebook Messages is optimized for socializing and strips down many of the important functions that email offers. Functions which are indispensable in a business setting.

The CEO of a huge financial firm isn’t going to scroll through an entire conversation history to find a document that was sent 2 weeks ago. Being able to separate topics is a fundamental aspect of email. Plus, the Facebook Messages method of prioritizing messages is only useful in a social context.

Can We Trust Facebook With Our Email?

Naturally, because the company has taken the do-and-get-forgiven-later approach with its users, and has been flawed with privacy so often, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised that users’ chat content will not be used for advertisement positioning analytics.

However, Facebook will analyze who you send messages to most. As part of Facebook’s ‘smart filtering system’, it will automatically prioritize the messages sent from people who you’re already Facebook friends with. Emails from friends and friends of friends will go directly to your main messages folder- everything else to your “Other” folder. Basically, if you’re not Facebook friends with someone who sends you a message, it’s going to get a lower priority.

Facebook says that spam and bulk email will automatically go to the “Other” folder. How effective that will be, remains to be seen…

In the last year, Facebook has encountered major spam and malware problems.

Last summer, users were receiving messages from friends on their walls and in their inboxes saying “LOL is this you?” with a malicious link. Spammers have also infiltrated the Chat system posing as a friend wanting you to “Try this game”- even referencing a mutual friend of yours who beat them.

Sophos, a security software and hardware company, produced a FAQ guide to help users understand the security implications of having a Facebook email address before they sign up.

They say spammers will have more of an incentive to hack into Facebook accounts using phishing attacks and exploiting weak passwords.

Before signing up, users need to realize that these new features increase the attack surface on the Facebook platform. Cybercriminals are already compromising and using their accounts to spread spam messages. Spam sent via social networks can be more effective than traditional email spam, as users are more likely to open and trust a message which appears to have been sent by someone they know – one of their Facebook friends.

If your username is public, than anyone can find out your Facebook email address and send you a message. Allowing “Friends Only” to message you and choosing unique, hard-to-crack passwords will be essential.

All in all, I do think Facebook is offering its users a cool service and in many ways it will force other email providers to innovate. But I do have to agree with Jason Falls at social media explorer who sees this move by Facebook as yet another way to make Facebook a necessity for people.

Zuckerburg has always billed Facebook as a social utility. It now becomes much more of one as people will begin to rely on the network for unified communication. Facebook smart phone apps will become the mobile destination of choice (if they aren’t already) for many people, and not just young people. Like it or not, this will drive even more users and more interaction on the site and make Facebook more of a necessity for people, rather than an entertainment option.

For those interested, here is a video of Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit discussing Facebook Messages (while being interrogated by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle) as well as other aspects of the company and its future:

It’s Clouding over – do you know the cloud?

So why is there so much noise around the cloud?

What Is The Cloud?

At its simplest, cloud computing means that users are connecting to applications that run on a set of shared or pooled servers, rather than running on a single dedicated server.

This is a subtle but important change from the client-server computing that has dominated IT for the past 20 years, where each application was “assigned” to a particular piece of hardware in a data center. If that hardware was down, the user either had to connect to a backup (which had to be standing by and ready) or would suffer an interruption in service.

In the earliest instances, these shared resources were physically located away from the company’s premises, and users would connect to them over the public Internet. For instance, a user would connect to Salesforce.com or Rackspace to run business management apps or email, or a developer would tap into Amazon’s Web servers for storage and computing power.

So the “cloud” in cloud computing was the Internet, which is often represented with a physical cloud on software design and networking charts.

But in the last two or three years, vendors like Microsoft and IBM have been pushing the idea of “private clouds.” These are sets of servers run by large companies or government agencies for the exclusive use of their employees, who usually connect to them over a private area network.

Types Of Cloud Computing

In addition to public and private clouds, several types of services are often lumped together under the term.

• Software as a service (SaaS). These are end-user applications, like productivity or collaboration software, that run on a set of pooled hardware resources and are accessed over a network. Pioneers here include Salesforce.com’s CRM and business management services and Google Apps, as well as startups like Zoho, but other companies have recently gotten into the act — particularly Microsoft, with its hosted exchange and sharepoint offerings.
• Platform as a service. Here, service providers offer a set of application “components” which developers can put together into applications — a bit like building with Legos. Examples here include Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform and Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. 
  Organisations are regularly searching for access to computing resources without the need to be tied to purchasing expensive infrastructure or committing to long term agreements. Whilst this is the case, many businesses also have demands for availability and scalability of their IT platforms, in particular hosted infrastructure. Furthermore these needs are often for short term periods or events, campaigns or specialist hosting requirements, staging environments or test platforms.
• Infrastructure as a service. Sometimes called “utility computing,” in this case a developer builds an application from scratch — no building blocks are provided. when they hit the go button on the app, they run it in a virtual machine  rather than on a dedicated physical machine. That means that as more users need the application, the provider can quickly easily serve them by scaling  up with new virtual machines.

What Are The Benefits?

So why are so many businesses embracing cloud computing?

• Efficiency: lower hardware and IT costs. Instead of companies filling their own data centers with servers that need to be powered, cooled, and managed by IT staffers, companies effectively outsource their hardware needs to providers who already run huge data centers and know how to configure them for maximum efficiency. You can reduce the need for IT staff members

• Agility & Speed: scale up fast. Five years ago, if a small company had a large spike in traffic, the servers would almost certainly crash. But today, a company can simply buy more capacity from a cloud computing provider.
• Flexibility: pay for what you need. Most SaaS services are billed per user per month, and platform and infrastructure services are billed based on the capacity actually being used. So in other words no more licensing costs

A lot of people are looking at the cloud as term everyone’s jsut throwing around and calling their products, this is partly true, many individuals and businesses have their own perspective on what cloud actually is, what is clear to most businesses is that it’s here to stay!

The SaaS cloud is brewing

What is SaaS?

Saas stands for Software-as-a-service.  SaaS means that you access your software over the Internet instead of having to install and maintain the hardware and software yourself.

Why choose SaaS?

SaaS frees up valuable IT resources, eliminates the hassle of maintenance and upgrade projects, lowers your operating costs, and offers unlimited scalability.
With Software-as-a-Service you get more control over how you buy and use  software. Instead of paying for a whole bunch of licenses up front you simply pay-as-you-go model.

Benefits of SaaS

•  No Infrastructure Costs
•  No need to buy and maintain hardware to run the software yourself. No more up front licensed software or maintenance expenses.
•  Free Up IT Resources
•   No human capital expenses -  a SaaS provider will run and maintain the hardware, networks, and software for you so you can free up valuable IT resources for projects that drive your core business
•  Low or No-Costset-ups
•  Increased Security, Reliability and Scalability -  data is stored in a safe and secure environment, safe from hackers and viruses. Off site redundancy even eliminates potential data loss due to natural disasters.

SaaS and Cloud Computing are the future of the software industry. It’s already the norm in many areas of business including HR management, accounting , legal services, customer relationship management, billing, email, IT security and content management services.

In July 2010, Gartner estimated that the worldwide SaaS market would grow to over $8.5 billion in 2010 with particular growth in the enterprise application software market. This is an increase of 14.1% on the revenues seen in 2009. Likewise, the IDC forecasts that SaaS revenue will experience a growth of five times higher than traditional packaged software between 2010 and 2014. This would mean that the revenues from the SaaS market in 2014 would reach over $40 billion. These staggering figures show just how much reliance these respected market intelligence providers believe businesses will have on SaaS in the future.

By 2012, IDC forecasts that, of all new software brought to the market, 85% will be delivered as a service rather than as a product. Gartner further believes that the SaaS market is particularly well-suited to CRM software (customer relationship management), solutions that allow companies to manage the ongoing dialogue with their customers and clients and measure the results of their marketing campaigns. Gartner claim that CRM applications made up 24% of SaaS solutions in 2009, growing to 26% by the end of 2010. IDC have said that they believe that around 14.5% of worldwide spending on software will be spent on SaaS. This means that many businesses need to pay close attention to this market and see how it can help them grow and develop, while saving significant costs.

To find our more about SaaS products click here

4 Reasons a Virtual Server can help your online presence

Virtual servers work great for the web developer that is short in the pocket. There are different types of VPS’s available, the main ones being Linux virtual servers or windows virtual servers.

 Virtual servers work perfectly for web developers who require a virtual testing ground. For a host, the cost of dedicated server in each location is not practical. Virtual servers can be rented at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server but have all the characteristics of a dedicated server.

Website hosting is perhaps the most popular use for virtual hosting. Particularly with hosting companies starting out that can’t make the jump to a dedicated server. A VPS will have redundancy in the form of a raid array and memory and CPU as and when you need to upgrade. Virtual servers are also ideal if you are hosting only one or two websites. You are also isolated from other users on a VPS. Traditional web hosting simply does not offer this.

Social media apps are jumping on the virtual hosting bandwagon. If you use Facebook you will know exactly what I am talking about. Facebook applications are all the craze. You can do everything from manage a virtual cafe, to tend to virtual crops! Again virtual servers are a perfect stop gap rather than a dedicated server.

Databases make use of virtual hosting. Never have all your eggs in one basket. Using virtual servers keeps databases offsite and safe.

Virtual servers have many uses, and above weve identified the 4 main uses.

There’s a few other arangments suitable for Virtual Servers, if you have a website with high traffic, or perhaps you’re expecting large influx of traffic due to a marketing campaign or event you might want to prpare a virtual environment that will handle the cpacity and traffic required that a shared web hsoting environment may not.

To find out mroe about Virtual Servers click here

The Benefits of Email Archiving

The main motivations for implementing an Email archiving solution are to protect sensitive corporate data, much of which is transmitted electronically via email, to meet regulatory compliance and litigation requests, to control spiralling volumes of email and to address prodictivity issues.

Businesses of all shapes and sizes – large government and enterprise down to small start-ups and SMB’s face the above issues. Traditioanlly Email archiving targets the larger finance and legal companies due to their strict regulatory requirements. However SME’s face similar challenges as the larger counterparts, but also face the extra challenge of not being able to afford the licenses and infrastructure required to run an in-house system, or not having the resources available to set-up, run and maintain these new upgrades/systems.

Some of the main benefits of using Email Archiving & Compliance are:

1. Reduction of costs – Save the burden of upfront costs and in-house implementations with monly subscriptions.  You also save costs on purchasing servers and managementconcoles, so that you have no additional IT infrastructure costs to use the service.

2. Speed of set-up – is dramatically reduced if you outsource these services instead of completing an in-house installation of software and hardware and the added testing that’s involved.

3. Data storage and security – easily maintain a consistent archive of business communications for legal, HR, regulatory and business issues. easy access to retrieve evidence information incase of a dispute.

4. Reduced risk of failure – offloading tasks and sharing ownership with an third party provider

5. Stored in one location – great for geo graphically dispresed businesses with branches and offices all over the place, all the emails are stored in the one place

Given how important email is in todays society for communication, it’s vital for it to be keep as a record, email archiving is the obvious option

For more details on how Email archiving can benefit your business click here

Protect Yourself, Business & Employees – Email Archiving

Email archiving is a stand-alone IT application that integrates with an enterprise email server, such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus.
In addition to simply accumulating email messages, these applications index and provide quick, searchable access to archived messages independent of the users of the system using a couple of different technical methods of implementation. The reasons a company may opt to implement an email archiving solution include protection of mission critical data, record retention for regulatory requirements or litigation, and reducing production email server load.

 Email archiving helps store, manage and monitor email data in a more structured, and auditable way.

Federal and state courts increasingly require the production of relevant electronic documents in specific legal cases, including email with attachments. 
Email Archiving & Compliance services offer a corporate email compliance and archiving solution that protects you, your business and your employees.
Advanced Email Archiving and Compliance Services are made generally made up of a Message Archiver and Compliance Reviewer tool.

For more information on how you can protect yourself, business and employees click here

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Why outsource your services?

 

There are many reasons why outsourcing communication and collaboration services is a good idea. In particular, it cuts the capital expenditure associated with buying hardware and software, as well as the operational costs and resources needed to manage the solution.

The software-plus-services model of IT solution delivery enables IT decision makers to choose which services they have in-house, and which ones are delivered online. You can even choose a hybrid solution, which combines hosted services with capabilities that can only be achieved with software running in a corporate data center or locally on a powerful device. The wide range of options available gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to optimise productivity using enterprise-level applications.

There are four main benefits of Microsoft Communication Services:

Increased Productivity

Reducing complexity for both IT and end-users always has a positive impact on productivity – IT workers can devote their attention to projects that add value to the business, and end users can access the services they need quickly and easily.

Support Mobility

The productivity gains that can be made by enabling mobile workers are immense – they can communicate with colleagues, manage their schedules and make informed decisions whether at work, home, a customer’s premises or travelling between locations.

Hosted Exchange enables secure access to e-mail, calendar and contacts from virtually anywhere, at any time on a variety of different devices, through Outlook Web Access and via a mobile phone. Calendars and contacts can also be shared with colleagues to enable easy scheduling for meetings. Microsoft SharePoint provides access via any web browser to the key documents and information. Microsoft Office Communicator opens a wide range of communication options to users, enabling them to communicate easily with others in different locations or time zones using a range of communications options, all via a consistent and simple user experience.

Enhance Teamwork

Sharing information is vital to efficient teamwork and decision-making. Microsoft SharePoint lets employees share documents, contacts, calendars and tasks through a single cloud-based location with rich team collaboration capabilities to help teams work more effectively whether they’re in the same offices or at different locations.

Enable Collaboration

Meetings, training sessions and workshops are key to any business, but it can be difficult to get everybody together in the same place at the same time, and travelling to and from meetings and events can prove costly and time consuming. Office Live Meeting enables people to share rich visual content such as presentations, or work on documents together via real-time online meetings, workshops, training sessions and customer or partner events, using only a PC and an internet connection.

Keep Informed

As well as working more efficiently together, employees and customers can access real-time or recorded training content when they need it, giving them the resources and support to help them work at their best.

Connect with Colleagues

Hosted Office Communications Server lets colleagues and team members see each other’s presence status and instantly connect with each other through a secure and auditable internal company instant messaging system or through a PC-to-PC voice connection.

Reduced Costs

It is widely accepted that outsourcing services can significantly reduce the cost of IT. It is well known that hosted e-mail services can enable businesses to benefit from a secure, reliable e-mail system without having to invest time and capital on hardware, implementation and system management. Extending the hosted environment to other communication and collaboration applications can help to ensure both further cost reductions and greater predictability.

Travel and Telecoms

A key area of business expenditure that should not be ignored is travel – in an increasingly global business environment, many organizations have employees, customers and partners spread across multiple geographies and locations. It is crucial to such businesses that their people are able to communicate and collaborate with each other, wherever they are. But attending multiple meetings can be costly and time-consuming, not to mention its impact on the environment. As part of the Microsoft Communication Services, Office Live Meeting helps cut travel costs by enabling people to hold collaborative, real-time meetings wherever they are. In addition, using PC-to-PC voice communications and instant messaging can drastically lower both fixed line and mobile telephony costs.

The following savings are based upon Forrester Research, 2007 Total Economic Impact of Unified Communications:

• Reduce travel and training costs (20-40 percent): Replace internal meetings, in-person training, and customer/partner visits with Office Live Meeting
• Reduce real estate and facility costs (30-40 percent): Reduce office space per employee and improve space utilisation with tele and remote working
• Reduce telephony and audio-conferencing charges (10-40 percent): Replace long distance and audio conferencing call charges with PC-to-PC VoIP
• Reduce the cost of voicemail (20-60 percent): Replace and consolidate disparate voicemail and fax systems with unified messaging.
• Reduce IT infrastructure and administration cost (up to 50 percent): Extend existing investment while optimising IT infrastructure by consolidating servers and multiple vendor solutions.

No Upfront Expenditure

Now, more than ever, the upfront capital costs of in-house IT solutions can stand in the way of implementing the solutions you want to help your business. Budgets are tightening, and hardware costs are perceived by many to be an unwarranted expense. However, a ‘make-do-and-mend’ attitude to IT can also be costly, with staff lacking the support they need to deliver the best levels of service. By outsourcing your full suite of integrated communication and collaboration services, you can reduce these obstacles by removing the need for upfront capital expenditure.

Predictable Ongoing Costs

As well as removing upfront expenditure, a hosted model offers predicable ongoing costs because the entire suite of integrated services is delivered on a per-user, per month subscription basis. Hosted services enable servers, infrastructure and software to be updated by the service provider – a cost-effective way for businesses to ensure that their communication and collaboration technology is always up-to-date.

Protect Existing Investments

Existing investments are also protected through a new licensing model from Microsoft, which is available through a range of hosting providers. This enables businesses to use existing Microsoft licenses covered under Software Assurance with their hoster of choice.

Microsoft Communication Services is both an economical and easy to scale with business growth, as well as ensuring that there will be no unexpected bills for fixing broken hardware or systems. In addition, special bundled service pricing makes the full suite of Microsoft services economical as well as making communication and collaboration more efficient and productive.

Reduced Complexity

Any unified communication and collaboration system is going to involve a certain amount of complexity – and with that comes cost. Aside from the initial investment in hardware and software, resources are needed to configure, integrate and deploy the solutions, across the organization. Even for a relatively simple system, this can involve considerable complexity, and it doesn’t end there.

Following the implementation, the IT infrastructure will need ongoing management, and user identities may need to be managed for each application. Regulatory compliance is a growing concern across many industries, so information must be auditable as well as secure. In addition, end users may need training for different applications, and as newer versions are released, repeat training and refreshes might also be needed.

This complexity can be dramatically reduced by taking an integrated suite of services from one supplier. The services can be quickly deployed, and it is easy to manage and upgrade from one or more services to the full suite. In addition, a complete unified communication and collaboration suite removes the need for multiple user identities. Each user has a single identity, with only one password to remember, and users can be added and removed with ease. Training needs are also minimised because users can access the services through software and interfaces they are already familiar with.

With hosted services, the infrastructure and software is owned and licensed by the supplier. This means that all the services are controlled via a single, Web-based control panel that enables organizations to easily manage all their services from one location. For example, new users can be easily added with a few clicks rather than undergoing a cumbersome installation process. In addition, services will be supported by the hosting provider on a 24×7 basis, drastically reducing the maintenance resource burden on your company.

Hosted services can also offer an easy way to take care of regulatory compliance. [PARTNER] offers auditing and archiving solutions without the need for expensive internal solutions and infrastructure. Because the services are hosted elsewhere and offered on a subscription pricing model, they will not become obsolete, but will evolve with the changing regulatory and legislative requirements in your market.

Peace of Mind

A major threat facing many businesses with in-house IT systems is the prospect of downtime and, in the event of a system failure, data loss. Businesses are increasingly vulnerable to the risks of viruses, spam, phishing attacks, system crashes and security breaches. In addition to ensuring that services are consistently available to those who need them and that business-critical data is kept safe, businesses also need to make sure their business records are compliant with a growing number of regulations. This can cause a major headache for in-house IT teams, as well as impacting the business in terms of both costs and resources.