YWAM Information Technology

IBM just released the final (no longer Beta) version of Symphony as a free download for Linux and Windows. It is available in 24 languages already!!!

A month ago I wrote a story about how I got a new laptop. That was the nice part but the fact that my old one died was not a too good thing. I guess the CPU played Steak-on-a-BBQ. The hard drive is still OK, this is the good news. But so far I haven't been able to recover the Firefox bookmarks and the Thunderbird address book.

Just noticed that Sun have produced their plugin for MS Office for the Open Document standard that OpenOffice uses as its file format and is now ratified as an official ISO standard too. As MS are not very interested in supporting this Sun and the community have produced their own plugin. You can find it here here.

If you are looking for a hosted solution similar to Microsoft Exchange Web Access then BlueTie might be the thing for you. BlueTie allows you to share callendars, contacts and up to 5GB of files per user. It also includes Spam & Virus protection on each mailbox.

Google has just announced that organisations can deliver mail, chat (written & voice), calendar and page creator on your own domain! This is worth evaluating for YWAM bases!  See https://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/overview.html

CutePDF is a useful and free PDF Creator. Use it to create PDFs from any windows application.

I subscribe to a very cool RSS feed called WorkHappy.net. It checks out different products and then posts reviews for things that have a 3 out of 5 star rating or higher.

Today they reviewed a product called Zimba Open-Source Collaboration Suite and gave it 3 out of 5 stars. I took a closer look at the product and I think that it looks amazing! Here is a quote from their review:

"It's like someone put Gmail, Outlook, Mail.app, iCalendar in a blender, and whipped up an application that runs in the browser. If you need a calendaring, mail, and contact management system and don't want to drop the cash on Outlook, give Zimbra a try for free."

You can read the whole review here:
Zimbra Open-Source Collaboration Suite

WorkHappies only recommendation for improvement that they listed was that it be a hosted service, as right now you have to install it on a local server.

Hopefully in the coming months I can have a closer look at it, but I think that the potential for the product is pretty good...

I just finished installing the new Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2003.  I have not had a chance to look at what it includes too much, but I did read an article that explains some of the new security features in Outlook.  They look pretty good.

Outlook's new phishing filters

For those of you who don't know, phishing (yes it is spelt with a ph) is when you get an e-mail from what appears to be a legitimate company asking you to click on a link to update your information.  They will then take that information and try to steal anything that you have in that account.  The new filter should help out a lot with helping people to determine if an e-mail is a legitimate one, or a phishing attempt.