If you’re still skeptical about Google Apps and software as a service (SaaS), spend a day at Long Island’s Hofstra University. Roughly 13,000 Hofstra students have access to Google Apps Education Edition to collaborate online, according to Robert W. Juckiewicz, Hofstra’s VP of IT.

The university’s ongoing experience with Google and SaaS — and Hofstra’s future goals — provide some clear hints about how the corporate software market may evolve to increasingly include Google.

Nobody is predicting the death of Microsoft Office, but it’s clear that Google Apps and Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite are on a long-term collision course.

But Google's SaaS efforts go far beyond productivity applications. Online storage could also become a commodity within the Google Apps framework.

The challenge for investors is to understand how SaaS services from Google and others will eventually meld with so-called managed services.

Short term, keep an eye on Google's SaaS moves, and their potential impact on Microsoft. Longer term, it's logical to expect some of those smaller managed services firms to launch IPOs or seek acquisitions within the next two to three years.

Source:seekingalpha.com/article/66405-is-google-apps-the-next-microsoft-office

Ergonomic keyboards seem to be all the rage these days. For us it is probably too late, our claw like fingers already gnarled and twisted by years of gruelling late nights in the test centre. However, for many of you there is probably still hope and Microsoft believes that hope may come in the form of its latest ergonomic keyboard and mouse combo, the Natural Desktop 7000.

Sporting a curved keyboard split straight down the middle and a mouse that bears more than a passing resemblance to an egg, this package takes some getting used to, but if you find your fingers regularly feeling strained after a long day at the office then this may be the package for you.

One of the most difficult things to adjust to is having half the keys on one side and half on the other. Many self taught typists won't always use the correct finger for each key, and as a result you may find yourself automatically tapping in no-man's-land between the two sections and wondering why you keep getting the word 'rilliant'. We actually found this keyboard corrected our typing a little as we went along, which will appeal to some users.

As with most ergonomic models the keys are slightly slanted. This is to capitalise on the fact that different fingers are different lengths and fall naturally in different places, meaning a standard flat key layout isn't the most comfortable or efficient setup. While the strange, curved design takes some getting used to, it definitely puts less strain on your fingers and the impact can be felt at the end of a long day in front of the monitor. Some keys have been resized to fit the new layout and while we appreciate the larger Alt, Ctrl and space keys, some very commonly used ones such as Enter have been shrunk which we found a little troublesome. We should also point out that while the layout is great for desktop publishing, gamers will want to look elsewhere as this keyboard really isn't conducive to a standard WASD control scheme.

The keyboard comes with a soft, padded wrist rest which is comfortable. By default it is raised quite high off the desk, but the base can be removed if you'd prefer a lower angle. There is a reasonable smattering of function keys including mail, search and Web links as well as favourites, back/forward keys and some media controls (volume, mute and play/pause). We would have liked to see track skip options, but aside from that the shortcuts are fairly robust.

While we were impressed with the keyboard's design, the mouse could use a little work. It has a dome like shape that is built to be held in the centre of the hand, rather than by the fingertips or palm. Perhaps it is just a lifetime of gripping the mouse using our fingers, but we struggled to maintain perfect accuracy with this unit. We also found the acceleration of the cursor a little hard to handle when using this mouse, but that can be adjusted in settings.

Source:pcworld.idg.com.au

On Tuesday, software giant Microsoft released version 11.4 of its Office 2004 for Mac productivity suite. The new version, a 12.3 megabyte download, repairs a vulnerability in which an attacker could overwrite the contents of a computer's memory with malicious code.

The update can be downloaded directly from Microsoft's web site as well as through the Microsoft AutoUpdate application, which is typically found in Mac OS X's Applications folder after the software has been installed.

Microsoft Office 2004 requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later to run and varies in price depending on the version purchased.

Continuation of Part 6

The other type of products deals with your hard drive directly instead of scanning the file system, but such products are slow and expensive. I also found them extremely complex to use because they don't show the names of the deleted documents, let alone their content. These tools don't have access to the file system, and are unaware of the files' names, showing documents as "document_001.doc" at best, but more likely you'll see something like "~ocume1" instead of a proper name.

to be continued...

Continuation of Part 5

These products, as I discovered from my own experience, fail to do their job if you have a complex case or if you are recovering a failed hard drive, or if the file system is damaged. If your document has been deleted some time ago or overwritten with another file, chances of successful recovery using these tools are slim.

to be continued...

Continuation of Part 4

I quickly discovered that there are many data recovery offers on the market. Most products mention recovering deleted or corrupted files and documents, and some tools promise recovery of files even from crashed or damaged hard drives. There are basically two types of data recovery products. They are different in how they find the lost files, and what they do to recover them. Simpler products, such as those free undelete utilities that I tried in my quest, deal with the file system. They simply scan the file system looking for records of files that are marked "deleted", and clear the mark. This is a fast and easy way to recover lost files, and it works sometimes, especially if you deleted a file just a minute ago.

to be continued.

Continuation of Part 3

This story did have a happy ending, as my wife's supervisor discovered the latest version of the document on her computer. But one thing that I learned from this story was never to rely on the Recycle Bin and free data recovery tools. To prevent this kind of things from happening, I decided to look for commercial alternatives.

to be continued...

Continuation of Part 2

Here's what happened to my wife a couple of weeks ago. She was working on a chapter for her Ph.D. thesis, and sent it to a professor for review. Usually, she gets back a document with embedded comments by email. She saves an attachment from the email, overwriting the old one, and deletes it from her Hotmail account. But this time, things went the wrong way. She received her chapter by email and replaced the old document with the new one, only to find out that her supervisor got a copy of the old one! She opened the Recycle Bin and found out that the document was never deleted but instead, it was replaced, so it wasn't even in the Recycle Bin. She tried to find an email that she had sent earlier, but Hotmail does not store sent messages. She asked me to do something to recover the document, and I downloaded a couple of free undelete programs, only to find that there were several dozens of deleted documents with that same name. So, I failed to recover the most recent revisions.

to be continued...

Continuation of Part 1

But what if the document you've spent so much time on just disappears? What can happen to it? First and most possible, you can simply delete it yourself by an accident. You might think that this would never happen to you because there is the Windows Recycle Bin, and even if it's accidentally emptied, you'll just go to the Internet and get a free undelete utility. Well, it does not work this way...

to be continued....

If you type a lot and are using Microsoft Word as your text processor, you've made the right choice. Microsoft Word is arguably the most powerful, feature-rich and handy to use by complete beginners and advanced professionals altogether. It has unparalleled strengths in creating, formatting and modifying all types of documents, from simple memos to complex reports. When you save a document in one version of Microsoft Word, it can usually be opened in a different version without problems.

to be continued...

Source: Article Blotter