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When the sender of an email doesn’t sign their name, you have options beyond writing back with “Who is this?” or cursing internet anonymity. The Digital Inspiration blog points out four ways to look up your faceless email sender on the web. More »

Email – Web Design and Development – Windows – Marketing – Shareware

Dropbox just made sharing files, pictures, music, and video with your friends, or the public web, as easy as right-clicking a folder. Even better, the page you share from lets anyone preview your media files right in the browser. More »

Dropbox – Filesharing – Web Applications – Storage – File Management

Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.4 just over a week ago, and if you’ve been waiting to hear whether it works on systems built following our start-to-finish Hackintosh guide or the newer no-hacking-required guide, I’ve got good news: I finally got around to installing the update, and the Hackintosh upgraded without issue. More »

Apple – Mac OS X – Operating system – Mac OS – Macintosh

Apple has strict video encoding guidelines for its devices, and popular encoding tool Handbrake’s default presets are a little out-of-date. So we put together our own presets optimized for creating both iPad and iPhone 4-optimized video in Handbrake. More »

iPhone – Apple – IPad – Smartphone – Handhelds

Windows 7′s useful taskbar is great, but if you don’t like waiting for the thumbnails to show up when you hover your mouse over it a taskbar item, a simple registry hack will speed things up. More »

Windows 7 – Microsoft Windows – Windows – Operating system – Utilities

NathanRenich: Yeah! Just what the iPhone needed. http://phoneballs.com

There’s plenty of utilities to help you securely delete files so nobody can recover them, but did you know there’s a built-in command-line utility that can do just that? Here’s how to do it. More »

Microsoft Windows – Operating system – File Management – Hard disk drive – DOS

I have always been a bit of a sceptic. From business to life, one needs to be very careful about giving one’s word and accepting another’s.

In business, we have business relationships that have been built up over the years. Our longest standing client relationship is now running over 11 years!

In those business relationships, we have built up a strong trust between us and our client contacts and business owners.

As a result, we have an understanding with our ongoing clients that sometimes things do not work out quite the way we would expect them to. For the most part, when things don’t work, the problems tend to last hours instead of days and we do our best to make up for any lost time.

In our experience with Cloud vendors such as OWN (our primary Cloud partner), there have been a few service related issues causing slow downs, but so far we have not seen a complete service outage other than for server/cluster reboots.

• OWN Hosted Services – Network Operations Status RSS Feed

As we can see, most of the indicator’s in OWN’s NOC status has to do with ongoing maintenance.

Now, let’s have a look at Microsoft’s Cloud offering in the form of BPOS:

• Microsoft Online Service Notifications RSS Feed
• Microsoft Online Services Team Blog

The MOSN RSS link comes to us courtesy of Susan Bradley.

When we look at Microsoft’s RSS feed, we can see that there are a lot of service outage reports.

From here we look at Intuit’s latest:

• Intuit Web sites back online after outage – BusinessWeek

In Intuit’s case, this latest outage lasted around 2 days for most customers with some still dealing with issues after that.

The Cause for Pause when it comes to hype about the Cloud is to make sure that the Cloud services we choose on behalf of our clients, or that they choose, are indeed the best option for them.

Microsoft or OWN?

When we look strictly at hosted e-mail and SharePoint, we can see by the above two RSS feeds that OWN provides a far superior uptime and service quality to the Microsoft offering. Yes, OWN has been at it a lot longer than Microsoft . . . and it shows.

Only time will tell if Microsoft’s offering provides the same level of Cloud service performance and stability as OWN’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint solution does.

Intuit

Part of any evaluation is to look at the costs associated with being disconnected from those Cloud based services.

For folks needing to process payroll during that two day outage at Intuit Online, there was probably a lot of nail biting going on by both management and their employees.

On top of payroll, any inventory, sales, or other business related activities would have been impacted. Calculating the lost time and revenues for these business aspects can be very difficult.

Internet Connection

If a client’s Internet connection goes down and they are totally cut off from the Internet, the cost associated with this type of service outage needs to be considered. A USB modem via cellular or other wireless form of Internet connection for critical PCs may be an alternative backup plan.

Conclusion

Just as it is with any other new technology, we need to test and make sure that any Cloud based service will follow through on its promises.

We need to dig deep into a Cloud based vendor’s reputation or lack thereof and find out if they really follow through on their commitment to provide good value and trouble free services.

Since the Cloud is a relatively new push, we are seeing a rush of new vendors vying for a piece of the Cloud pie. These new vendors are essentially untested technologies and should be approached as such . . . with great scepticism and caution on behalf of our clients.

And finally, the question to ask any business owner is, “How long can your business be down before the possibility of closing the doors looms?”

Obviously this question must include _all_ aspects of a business’s processes to provide a thorough answer not just the usage of Cloud based technologies.

Some light reading:

• Bloomberg Businessweek: Intuit Web sites back online after outage (above link)
• Intuit Community Thread: Status of QBO?
• ComputerWorld: Twitter Update
• Service outages and other Twitter related news.
• ZDNet: Microsoft’s cloud is hiccuping (sic). Has anyone even noticed?
• Blog Category: Cloud

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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Skype calls toll-free numbers in the U.S. or Canada for free. Google’s GOOG-411 directory service is a toll-free number, and can connect you to any searchable business. Combine the two, and any business is accessible for free, from anywhere in the world. More »

Google – GOOG-411 – Canada – Business – Telecommunications