While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail  lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as “clients.” They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more.

Outlook, Thunderbird Rule

The old bulls of the client world are Microsoft’s Outlook, the free Windows Live Mail successor to Outlook Express, and the free Thunderbird software from the Mozilla Foundation , which is also available for Linux and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)  users.

Windows Live Mail runs under Vista and Windows XP. It collects not only e-mail messages from Microsoft’s E-mail Live service, bur can also work with the POP3 and IMAP protocols to link up with popular services such as Gmail and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) . A spam filter sorts out unwanted e-mail messages. A phishing filter is also in place to help guard against the theft of sensitive user data and passwords. Feeds in RSS and Atom formats are provided directly in the Live Mail inbox.

Thunderbird aims to make it easier to work with e-mail messages. Thunderbird 2 offers options for organizing and displaying folders, including favorite folders, last visited folders or folders with unread mail, the Mozilla Foundation reports. One practical feature is the preview function: move the mouse arrow over the respective folder symbol and a pop-up with an excerpt of the latest messages is shown, without having to leave the current folder. A notification popup for new messages includes sender, subject line and a snippet of the message text.

Distinguishing Itself

E-mail messages can be sorted in Thunderbird into more than just the standard “Business,” “Personal” or “Important” color tags. Tags can also be individually created and named. Thunderbird has also long provided support for RSS (really simple syndication), newsgroups and IMAP support. That also applies for phishing and the self-learning spam filter.

“We recommend always using the built-in filter,” Holger Bleich says.

One major advantage of Thunderbird is the client’s expandability. This includes language dictionaries or free add-on modules like Enigmail to sign and encrypt e-mail messages and their attachments. One area where the program lags behind Outlook is synchronization with mobile devices — not least because many device makers only support Outlook.

A virus designed to swipe passwords from online gamers has inexplicably popped up in some laptop computers aboard the International Space Station.

According to a NASA planning document obtained by SPACE.com, the worm was identified as W32.Gammima.AG. The California-based retail anti-virus software manufacturer Symantec describes it as a Windows-based worm which spreads by copying itself onto removable media. It is capable of stealing passwords for online games and is classified as a very low risk, according to Symantec’s Web site.

Humphries said that while NASA security protocols prohibit discussing details of the virus and efforts to combat it, a search is under way to find out how it got on board the space station more than 200 miles above Earth.

“We’ll do our best to track down how it got there and close that gateway,” Humphries said. “This is not a frequent occurrence but we have had viruses that have made their way on board before.”

New flash memory cards due to launch to the station aboard a Russian cargo ship next month have been screened for the virus, the NASA document stated. Not all of the 71 laptop computers currently aboard the station run Windows, and those that do and are vulnerable to viruses could be updated, it went on.

The space station is currently home to three astronauts: Russian cosmonaut commander Sergei Volkov, cosmonaut flight engineer Oleg Kononenko and NASA flight engineer Greg Chamitoff. Volkov and Kononenko are due to return to Earth in October, while Chamitoff is slated to stay until his replacement arrives during NASA’s planned November space shuttle mission.

Source: Fox News

Aircell, the company that provides the new Gogo Internet service on some American Airlines flights, will soon announce that another airline has signed on for its service, said CEO Jack Blumenstein in an interview Monday.

American Airlines has installed Gogo on 15 airplanes for flights between New York and Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco, and Delta says it’ll have Gogo available across its domestic fleet of 330 commercial jets within a year. Delta is expected to expand that service to Northwest Airlines flights if the merger of those two companies goes through as planned, Blumenstein said, and Virgin America is also outfitting flights with Gogo.

Yet there’s another airline that has just signed with Gogo, Blumenstein said, and the companies plan to make the announcement within days. All told, the CEO expects there will be some 2,000 commercial airplanes offering Gogo by the end of next year, adding that “we’re very confident about that number.” If Blumenstein is correct, Aircell will emerge as the dominant player in in-flight Internet services.

But what is Aircell, and where did it come from? The company is privately owned and backed by venture capital; Blumenstein did hint that it’s open to considering a public offering of stock at some point. But you can’t call it a startup: Aircell began providing analog-based voice communications on private business aircraft in the early 1990s, by partnering with cellular providers that primarily served rural areas. In the late ’90s it shifted to satellite-based systems to support voice communications on overseas flights. (Unlike commercial jets, the FCC allows cell-phone use on private aircraft).

In 2006, Verizon began to get out of its failing Airfone business, since commercial airline passengers never warmed up to the idea of spending $20 to make a brief call from seat-back phones. That freed up a 4 Mhz slice of publicly owned spectrum, which the FCC decided to put up for auction. “It was great spectrum that had been set aside only for aviation use,” Blumenstein said. The FCC split the spectrum into two licenses; one for broadband use at 3 Mhz, and another for a narrower use at 1 Mhz.

Then Aircell got lucky. Verizon was expected to bid on the 3 Mhz spectrum, but suddenly and unexpectedly bowed out, citing other corporate priorities. Aircell — called AC BidCo LLC at the time — got the spectrum at what Blumenstein considered a bargain: $31 million. Had Verizon been serious, it could have easily bid to a price level that would have been out of reach for Aircell. JetBlue Airline’s LiveTV subsidiary won the 1 Mhz spectrum license with a bid of $7 million.

Aircell spent the next year building out its cellular network across the U.S., setting up 92 cell towers. Blumenstein said each tower covers 350 square miles, including 350 miles extending out across the ocean on all three sides of the U.S., and the company plans to double the size of the network next year to support growing usage.

The company is looking into available spectrum in other “large land mass” areas, including China and India. Aircell also is looking at satellite technology to support commercial travel overseas (you can’t erect cell towers in the middle of the ocean), but he said it’s currently too expensive. That’s not good news for Gogo users hoping for in-flight Internet access between the U.S. and Europe. However, Blumenstein predicts a premium-priced satellite service may emerge, available from his company or another, designed for overseas travelers within the next few years.

Gogo is proving it can perform well, delivering up content with no delays, with more than 30 passengers simultaneously using it on some flights, Blumenstein said. Aircell uses technology developed by Meru Networks to provide each passenger with a discreet Wi-Fi stream. Aircell’s cellular network uses compression technology to allow speedier transmission of data between the plane and the ground.

As part of the Gogo service, Aircell installs a 800-gigabyte server on each plane — soon to be upgraded to a 1+ TB server — that caches content from recently accessed Internet addresses. Since the server doesn’t have to keep calling on the network to retrieve Web content already in its cache, passengers get the content all that much faster. You can also expect the airlines to offer content to passengers, such as movies and television shows that reside on the plane’s server he said.

Aircell “watches for bandwidth hogs, both applications and individuals,” through its network monitoring service. And there will be consequences for pigging out at the bandwidth trough.

“We don’t know what you’re doing, or how much of what you’re doing, but if you’re doing a lot more than what you should for fair distribution on the aircraft, we’ll put you at the back of the line,” Blumenstein said. That means those using too much bandwidth may see their service slow, while responsible Internet citizens shouldn’t have a problem.

Airlines are able to get up and running with Aircell’s Gogo for as little as $100,000, sometimes less, Blumenstein said. He added that airlines have many opportunities to recoup the costs beyond charging the $12.95 Internet service to interested passengers. That includes improved operations via the Aircell technology platform that can support Web-based cockpit applications for maintenance, crew scheduling, and weather information.

Source: Information Week

Okay, it’s not perfect. But Windows Vista on a new PC is perfectly serviceable for many users. In some ways, in fact, Vista is a better operating system than Windows XP. Unfortunately, XP’s heir apparent is also the most derided and discounted Microsoft operating system since Windows Me.

With all of the negative press about slower than expected adoption rates and the push for vendors to continue offering an XP option on new PCs, users may be left with the impression that anything is better than opting for Vista, including paying a premium to downgrade to Windows XP when buying a new PC.

That’s a bit extreme. Granted, the operating system has its share of glitches and issues. Higher-end versions are pricey, and Vista requires state-of-the-art hardware for optimum performance. But more than a year after its release, Vista with SP1 is reasonably stable and probably more secure than XP. It’s also technically more advanced than its seven-year-old predecessor.

As developers bring products to market that exploit unique Vista capabilities, such as the Presentation Graphics subsystem and support for Sidebar gadgets, users will want them. But those who buy XP with that new PC won’t have access to those applications because they will be working through an operating system designed in the late’90s to run on millennium-era hardware. What’s more, general support for that ‘new’ XP operating system will end next April, even though many consumers will keep those machines for five years.

If users buying new PCs are going to stick with Windows, they should get machines with Vista preloaded. Sure, the incessant barking of security warnings is annoying, but those can be muzzled. Windows is the platform on which users run the applications that do the real work. Those applications will increasingly exploit and rely on Vista’s capabilities.

In a market that watches shipments as if they were movie box-office grosses, Vista has fallen short of very public expectations. But although Vista hasn’t been a blockbuster on par with Windows 95, general penetration rates for the operating system are following the same slow, steady trajectory as those for Windows XP, according to a June report by Bernstein Research.

For business, the Vista adoption calculation has many more variables. And there’s no need to rush. Enterprises can continue to install their own XP system images onto new hardware, and the security updates that businesses need will be available until 2014. By then, Vista’s successor should be established.

But there is also something to be said for staying current with your users. Vista is shipping on most new Windows PCs in the retail channel. Microsoft claims to have shipped 140 million copies as of March 2008, and it’s a sure bet that most of those licenses aren’t being downgraded to XP. That means users will increasingly be running Vista at home.

At least one wavering CIO sees this as a political issue. He worries that if users accept Vista at home and businesses wait for Windows 7, IT may look lethargic in its efforts to deploy the latest technology to meet business needs. By the time Windows 7 is ready for enterprise use, XP will be at least 10 years old. At that point, being on the trailing edge with XP could hurt IT’s credibility and make kicking off more-ambitious projects difficult, he says.

In the end, the Vista decision involves striking a delicate balance between political, technical and business issues. Wait or migrate? Both choices involve some risks.

Source: PC Advisor

Technology vastly simplifies keeping track of your finances, especially if you’re a small business owner. But sometimes you need those figures at your fingertips when you’re not in front of your computer. Now Intuit has made available a new web-based QuickBooks Online iPhone interface via its Intuit Labs site, so your financial information can go everywhere that your iPhone does.

QuickBooks Online for the iPhone gives you the ability to view all of your financial information from QuickBooks Online in the iPhone’s Safari web browser. QuickBooks Online is Intuit’s web-based service for tracking expenses, paying bills, and creating invoices. It lets you store information about your bank accounts, employee information, customers, vendors, and more.

With QuickBooks Online for iPhone, you can easily access and view all of your information, such as bank account balances, who owes you money, and whom you owe. A Profit & Loss section lets you view all your income and expenses for multiple time periods, such as the last month, quarter, year, or month-, quarter-, and year-to-date.

The web interface also integrates with several of the iPhone’s other applications, so you can, for example, tap on an address to have it open in the Maps application, or an email addresses to send a message, or a phone numbers to place a call.

As of the moment, you can’t edit any of your information via the iPhone interface and while Intuit says that such functionality is not currently planned, that could change based on user feedback.

One potential hiccup for Mac users is that QuickBooks Online requires a Windows-based machine running Internet Explorer, but an Intuit spokesperson assured me that the company is working on making the service Mac-friendly. In the meantime, the service is limited to those Mac users who also have PCs, or use Windows on solutions such as Boot Camp and virtualization products like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion.

QuickBooks Online costs $9.95 per month, but the company also offers a free 30-day trial.

Source: Macworld

The release of the Citrix Systems XenApp 5 product, formally called Presentation Server, is designed to allow IT to create virtual desktops. Citrix XenApp 5 can work with the Citrix XenDesktop virtualization suite or Citrix XenApp can work alone. The Citrix XenApp 5 allows for the virtualization of Microsoft Windows and Office applications in an enterprise’s virtual desktop infrastructure.

Citrix Systems is releasing the latest version of its XenApp product as part of the company’s larger push into data center and desktop virtualization with offerings such as its Delivery Center virtualization suite.

The latest version of XenApp 5 will allow applications, especially Microsoft Windows and Office applications, to start faster than previous versions of the product. The new XenApp product also works with Citrix XenDesktop for enterprises interested in creating a virtual desktop infrastructure.

Citrix XenApp is the new name for the company’s stalwart Presentation Server product. The updated name reflects Citrix’s $500 million acquisition of XenSource in 2007, and its desire to reach deeper into both data center and desktop virtualization. (The products are based on the open-source Xen hypervisor.)

While virtualization companies such as VMware, Citrix and now Microsoft with Hyper-V, have touted the benefits of virtualization in the data center to help with a myriad of concerns from consolidation to power savings to disaster recovery, the virtual desktop infrastructure is developing as the next area where virtualization technology is about to be tested.

At a forum earlier this year, IDC researchers found that interest in virtual desktops infrastructures was growing among departments as a way to better secure data and have more control of the desktop images and the corporate fleet. However, concerns about the complexity and cost involved in this undertaking, including problems with operating system licensing, are forcing many enterprises to watch from the sidelines for now.

“We have seen a surge in interest and there a lot of people that are interested in application virtualization and they are evaluating what is out there,” said Bill Hartwick, senior director of product marketing for Citrix.

The latest version of XenApp will work within Citrix’s broad suite of virtualization technologies called Delivery Center. Since April, Citrix has been talking up Delivery Center as way to deliver desktop images and application for the data center to individual clients in an enterprise. In May, Citrix detailed another product in the suite called Branch Repeater, a software appliance that sits between the data center and branch or remote offices and helps transmit applications from the main data center facility to these locations.

The key to the suite remains Citrix XenDesktop, which allows the IT department to host a virtual machine in the data center and then allows an enterprises to virtualize Windows desktops and deliver them on-demand via the high-speed Web interconnect to office workers in any location.

Besides allowing Microsoft applications to start faster, the latest version of XenApp allows individual applications packaged and maintained separately within the data center. At that same time, the applications are linked together.

While XenApp allows the different applications to be isolated, it also allows for them to communicate with one another. In an enterprise, a user can then call up what ever application is needed, while IT is allowed to patch and upgrade from a central location.

The newer version of XenApp is also integrated with the Citrix Branch Repeater. In this case, the most frequently used applications are stored closer to the remote or branch office and this allows for the application to be called up faster by users in that location.

XenApp 5 is also integrated to with Windows Server 2008 and 2003.

The cost of Citrix XenApp 5 is priced at $350 per concurrent user for the Advanced Edition, $450 for the Enterprise Edition, and $600 for the Platinum Edition.
Source: eWeek.com

Most companies without IT departments and many companies with IT departments manage their IT assets following the “Firefighters method”, but what is the Firefighters method?

The Firefighters method is action by crisis, and is one of the least productive possibilities both for the IT department and the company as a whole. It refers to the practice of leaving things alone until they fail, and with the level at which technology is integrated in today’s business world causes major issues.

Percento, through our Proactive Support Agreements, utilizes our Outsourcing Division to develop routine system maintenance to help keep your IT systems running smoothly. Just as you shouldn’t wait until your check engine light is on to change your oil, your IT system maintenance shouldn’t wait until after problems have presented themselves.

The Percento proactive approach is easy to rationalize for clients who utilize our Outsourcing Division as their IT department; however, this is not the only way we can assist firms in utilizing a Proactive methodology.

Our Professional Services division teams are well versed in the methods and IT processes which lead to adopting a Firefighters method, which in turn allows our teams to know what to do before the Firefighters method becomes your only option. Our audits can help your IT department determine what is needed to stop managing by crisis, and even help identify if additional resources, even part-time resources, are necessary to process Proactive preventative system maintenance.

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