At SIAX Computing Solutions our philosophy is to provide the best possible service to our clients. To improve on this service and support we’ve been investigating the next evolution in Technical Support services.

That evolution is SImon – Smarter Monitoring

We’ve known about the benefits of preventive maintenance for many years at SIAX, but the current service is currently limited to weekly or monthly server checks / fixes and six monthly PC checks.

This system is manual, systems are only serviced at the time of the maintenance call and in the case of on-site visits – a necessary but  inconvenient hold up on your staff’s time and productivity.

What is SImon – Smarter Monitoring?

SImon will allow us to provide the following benefits to our clients:

• Reduce downtime on your Servers and PC’s.
• Improve our ability to resolve your issues quickly and efficiently.
• Give you the peace of mind that your network is being managed proactively.
• One fixed month fee (depending on the model chosen) allowing up to budget your IT expenses.
• Allow us to provide an accountable service and deliver measurable results.

We achieve this by delivering live support to your network.  This new service will allow us to monitor every server and every pc on your network – in real time. We will have the ability to often know about a problem before you do and fix it.

We can react quickly and manage potential problems before they can become real issues. We can automate routine tasks and manage software upgrades or roll outs on your behalf.

Break-Fix vs SImon

Our current support works as a Break-Fix model. As the description implies – you have an issue, you call us, we fix it. Even with our current maintenance options most issues are resolved under this method. As already outlined Simon reverses this where prevention and maintenance is the key.

The following shows the benefits of SImon over the Break-Fix:

Break-Fix Support:

• Reactive service
• Fix problems when they occur
• Focus – fixing IT systems when they fail
• Response – traffic hold-ups can slow down engineer response time for on-site support
• Unpredictable / sudden costs
• No automation of routine tasks
• IT people consumed by routine / mundane IT tasks and fire-fighting
• Irregular on-site visits when urgently needed
• Transaction-oriented
• Unpredictable per incident fee for a specific fix

SImon – Smarter Monitoring:

• Proactive service
• Prevent problems occurring
• Focus – ensuring that IT systems don’t fail
• Response – is both system automated and faster
• Predictable costs for managed IT services (depending on chosen model)
• Automation of routine tasks
• Frees up IT professionals for more strategic projects
• Regular proactive relationship meetings
• Relationship-oriented
• Predictable monthly fee for a range of proactive services

Why SImon Is Important to SIAX Computing Solutions

We see SImon as the future of our company. We are making a significant investment in SImon because it is the best and only way forward.

At SIAX Computing Solutions we want to not only be a provider of services but be a partner in your business.  We want to have the ability to support and advise you in your efforts to grow your company through your IT and not be held back by it.

SImon is the facilitator that will allow this is happen.

Where to From Here

Over the next few months will be calling our existing clients to discuss how we can implement SImon on your network. If you would like to discuss this important change to your business earlier please call the office to book in an appointment.

If you are a potential new client please call us at the Hallam office – 1300 799 928 and ask to speak to David or Adam to see how SImon may benefit your business and be an improvement on your current IT services.

If you have automatic updates on you should have this patch available and may have even installed it already.

If you have any questions please call the office.

From Microsoft’s Security Bulletin:

This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Windows Shell. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if the icon of a specially crafted shortcut is displayed. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

This security update is rated Critical for all supported editions of Microsoft Windows. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.

If you would like further information please follow this link: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-046 – Critical

Windows Phone 7

Windows Mobile has long been left behind in the smart phone race. Once the standard in PDA’s, Microsoft have been left in the dust of the iPhone and more recently Google’s Android platform. But is all that about the change?

After failing to keep up with the advancements from Apple with the stop gap Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft began again. They gave the platform a new name – Windows Phone 7 and redesigned the interface from the ground up. To Microsoft’s credit they could have come up with an iPhone knock off, but they have chosen to do something totally different.

To start it has a main page consisting of tiles constantly updating with Email, SMS and Facebook updates. Other horizontally scrolling panels allow easy access to music, pictures, video, email, Office 2010 and Xbox Live. Throw in Zune integration (Microsoft little known iPod competitor that in many respects is better) could allow Microsoft to get back in the game.

A great example of how it works is pictures. If you link your Facebook account and post pictures – they’re on your phone, in the Pictures panel automatically. On other platforms if you want to see the images – you open your Facebook App, find the images and then open them. In Windows Phone 7 – just go to the Picture panel and they’re there – no need to start an App or remember when they were posted, or on what site.

* Video is linked from the Engadget review below

Setup and Configuration

Setup of the phone is easy – configure your Windows Live account, login on the phone and everything linked in your account is setup. Any purchased Apps and configuration settings are also installed automatically when either re-installing the phone or upgrading to other Windows Phone 7 unit.

With development tools based on Microsoft’s own Silverlight platform (Flash like programming language) – designing Apps will be far easier than for either the iPhone or the Android. In the future Microsoft envisage begin able to develop for the PC, XBox 360 and Windows Phone 7 using the same code thus allowing fast development time and cross platform applications.

It is expected that Windows Phone 7 will be much like the first iPhone. It will do a number of things well, but will take a number of revisions to evolve into a more featured and rounded platform. In these fast moving times and for the sake of a competitive marketplace lets hope Microsoft can pull it off.

Review Links

If you would like to read some in depth reviews follow these links below.

Paul Thurrott’s Supersite For Windows – Hands on with Windows Phone 7

Paul is currently writing a new book based around the new phone called Windows Phone 7 Secrets. His review has some great insights into the phone that other’s can’t provide and is well worth reading.

Engadget – Windows Phone 7 in-depth review

From the respected gadget and IT news website, Engadget provides a balanced review of the good and bad points of the phone in what is the most competitive and fastest growing segment currently in the IT world.

This week the new iPhone 4 was been announced at Apples WWDC conference in San Francisco. Bringing many new features it’s sure to sell by the truck load like all previous iPhone versions. Amongst the many new features are the following highlights: Video calling using the new front facing camera, the 3.5″ display with a resolution of 960 x 460, the long awaited multitasking and HD video recording.

iOS 4

iPhone 4 will be powered by iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) which brings 1500 new features. iOS 4 will also be available for iPhone 3GS and 3G, along with iPod touch 2G and 3G for free. Some features however will not work on iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G. iOS 4 will be available publicly via a new version of iTunes on June 21st.

Features

The iPhone 4 is a phone which without any doubt has many new features over the iPhone 3GS.  The phone is packed with loads of updates  inside and out.

• Glass front and back
• Front facing cam for video conferencing
• 5 megapixel camera with LED flash
• 720p HD video recording
• 960 x 640 resolution with 800:1 contrast ratio (4 times better than the previous iPhones)
• Gyroscope (3-axis)
• Gyro + accelerometer provide 6-axis motion sensing
• Rotation about gravity
• Apple A4 chip
• 32 GB of Storage
• Dual mic suppression
• 802.11n WiFi
• 300 hours of standby battery time (3G talk time: 7 hours, 3G web browsing: 6 hours, WiFi browsing: 10 hours, Video playback: 10 hours, Music playback: 40 hours)
• 3.5-inch screen
• 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS
• 3.5 inch mm headset jack
• Micro SIM tray

Apps

Since the iPhone 4 is running the iOS 4, therefore all the apps available on the iTunes App Store will run without any problem. But since the screen resolution is far more than any of the previous iPhones, therefore the present apps will look even more visually stunning!

New Apple apps that will be available for iOS 4:

• iBooks
• iMovie
• Keynote (unconfirmed)

The new iPhone 4 will be available in Australia – July 30.

To see more information about the new iPhone 4 click here

Facebook Privacy Concerns

In the face of mounting criticism about user privacy since recent changes announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced further changes to Facebook’s privacy options.

Have the concerns from every day users, politicians and special interest groups like the those organizing the ‘Quit Facebook Day‘ on May 31st forced Facebook into a backflip or just a temporary submission?

Issues with privacy have dogged Facebook in recent years, but people continue to join by the millions. At this stage just over 23000 users have pledged to quit Facebook on the 31st, but it is suggested that more people will sign up in an single hour or two on that day and simply replace them. With a user base of 400 million – is Facebook really that concerned?

Facebook – A Great Way To Catch Up

No doubt that Facebook is a great tool to catchup with family and friends, past and present – but with Facebook’s seemingly endless pursuit to ingrain themselves into every facet on the internet – does privacy matter to them or you anymore?

Recent tools that share your current location to advertising based on suggestions of friends are all possible due to the information users share on Facebook. Facebook want to be at the center of providing this information to maintain it’s revenues and with sharing API’s that allow anyone to add things like the ‘like’ button to their own sites facilitates this.

The new controls

The new controls have been announced to simplify who has access to your information and how it’s linked to 3rd party sites and applications. In a significant simplification, Facebook have reduced the number of options from 170 to something that is easy to manage and understand. Once these controls are set they will also act retrospectively to your previous posts and application settings removing the need to go back adjust each individually.

The new controls will be rolled out over the next few weeks. Until they are available to you, see an independent view of how the new controls work by reading Mashable’s ‘How Facebook’s New Privacy Controls Work‘ blog.

Zuckerberg’s Response to Users Concerns

The following is taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Blog which details what was behind the changes at f8 and what they are doing to address their users concerns. If you are concerned about your data being available to 3rd parties without your knowledge or understanding, I’d suggest reading the whole blog.

When we started Facebook, we built it around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. When you have control over what you share, you want to share more. When you share more, the world becomes more open and connected.

Today, I want to share some thoughts on how we’ve evolved to this point, what we’re doing now to give you more control, and what you can expect from us going forward.

Looking back, the first version of Facebook was very simple. There were almost no features. There were no status updates, photo albums or messages. There was no News Feed or Platform. The only people who could use it were college students in the United States.

The way the site worked was that everyone could see some basic information about you and the rest of your information was only visible to people in your networks and your friends by default.

As the site grew and as we rolled out new features, Facebook became less about colleges and more about sharing lots of content with different groups of people. So a little more than a year ago, we started working on a new privacy model to reflect how the site had evolved.

As News Feed became more central to your experience, we added privacy settings so you could control who could see each individual status update, photo album, video and everything else you share into the stream.

As Platform became more popular, we restricted the way applications could access your personal information. Now all applications and websites can only see content that is already visible to everyone. They must get permission to access anything else.

As regional networks grew to include more and more people, we decided to phase them outsince they were too big for you to effectively control your information. While this was not a big issue in the United States, more than 50 percent of you worldwide were in networks that spanned whole countries like India and Turkey.

Replacing regional networks meant we needed a new model for control. In general, we recommended that you share basic info like status updates and posts with everyone, content like photos and videos of you with friends of your friends, and sensitive items like contact information with only your real friends. We asked each of you to look at your settings and choose what you wanted.

More recently, we also launched community pages and other ways to give you personalized and social experiences on other sites you use.

Since then, you have sent us lots of feedback. We’ve listened carefully in order to figure out the best next steps. We recognize that we made a lot of changes, so we really wanted to take the time to understand your feedback and make sure we address your concerns.

The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.

Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.

To see the whole post with a detailed explanation of each option click here

These new tools certainly make it easier to control who see’s you’re information but is it enough to stop the groundswell of concern and mistrust?

Read Mashable’s CEO and Founder Pete Cashman’s story at CNN.com where he thinks Facebook’s privacy concerns will continue.

Treat All Information As Public Information

It may be simply safer to treat all the information you share on Facebook as being publicly available, regardless of your settings. This way any information you share won’t potentially come back to embarrass you and harm your future work prospects or relationships.

The following is an excerpt from Paul Thurrott’s ‘Supersite for Windows‘ website. Paul is a well known Microsoft commentator and has written a number of books including Windows 7 Secrets and the upcoming Windows Phone Secrets.

Paul can be heard on TWIT’s Windows Weekly Podcast (subscribe here in iTunes) discussing all of the lastest news in the world of Microsoft.

For a full review of not just Office 2010, but the forthcoming Office Web Apps (a cloud based version of some of the Office programs including Word and Excel) and Office Mobile for Windows Mobile phones go to Paul’s ‘Supersite for Windows’ website.

Update: Pricing is now available on our ‘latest prices‘ page.

An the excerpt of Paul’s review:

What’s new in Office 2010

Looking broadly at the suite of applications that comprises Office 2010, Microsoft has made a number of changes that affect all or many of those applications. The first and most obvious change is that Microsoft has finally implemented the desirable and innovative ribbon user interface across all of the Office applications, whereas in Office 2007 only a subset of applications included this interface, while others used the older and less useful menu and toolbar-based UI.

The Word 2010 ribbon UI.

Simply implementing the ribbon across the various Office applications would have been a big deal. But in Office 2010, the ribbon is better than ever and it benefits from three years of feedback and the resulting improvements. There’s a new color scheme, which is much nicer than the weird soft blue from Office 2007, but the big deal is that the ribbon is now completely customizable. So if you find yourself moving off of, say, the Home tab in Word in order to just access a single command, or a small number of commands on the Review tab, you can customize the ribbon so that those commands are right up front and center. You can create your own ribbon tabs and your own tab groups, and you can even hide tabs you don’t want. Nice!

Office 2010 offers an amazing level of ribbon customization, which puts this UI over the top.

Another huge change in Office 2010 is that the Office button from Office 2007 is gone, replaced by a more logical and obvious File button that works like the old File menu from older Office versions. But instead of opening a traditional File menu, you’re greeted with the new Backstage view, which combines the functions from the old File menu–Open, Save, Print, and so on–with a wide range of useful application-wide options, including sharing options (for saving documents to SkyDrive or SharePoint, publishing a blog post, changing file types, or creating XPS or PDF documents) and traditional application options.

The Backstage view provides a single place for application- and document-specific options.

I wish I could praise the Backstage view further, but like the ribbon in Office 2007, it’s unfinished in Office 2010. Microsoft confirmed to me that it had intended to go much further with Backstage view but simply ran out of time. So what we get in this first version is a strange UI that sometimes occupies the entire application window (hiding the underlying document or other content), whereas clicking on certain options actually closes Backstage view and jarringly opens a floating pop-up window. This is going to change so that all of these items simply render onto the full application window, but not until the next Office version.

Sadly, some Backstage items actually close the UI and open a separate, old-school window.

Most Office 2010 applications now support a handy Paste with Live Preview feature that takes the guesswork out of how content copied from one application will look when pasted into an Office 2010 application. It works via the Paste Options pop-up that debuted in Office 2007, or through the Paste button in the Clipboard tab group in the Home tab. As you move across the various paste options–like Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting, and Keep Text Only for textual data–the content will appear in the current document styled appropriately. And as you mouse over each paste option in turn, the content will change to match the effect. When you click one of the options, the content will be pasted in the manner you selected.

Live Paste Preview lets you determine how content will look before you paste it into a document.

Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher pick up some amazing photo editing capabilities in this release, part of a trend in Office 2010 around dramatically better support for rich media. So if you need to work with photos or other images in Office 2010, you’ll get a number of interesting borders, effects, layouts, and styles. You can do things like remove the background, make color corrections, apply artistic effects, and more. It’s all very powerful, but the point here is that it all works in Office, so you don’t need to find, acquire and learn a third party application to make these changes, or switch in and out of Office while you’re working.

Office 2010 picks up some amazing picture editing functionality.

And of course there is the aforementioned 64-bit compatibility. Again, this isn’t something that comes with any particular benefit beyond Excel, but if you do need to work with massive, memory-intensive datasets and gigabyte-sized spreadsheets, Office 2010 can handle it.

Changes in specific Office 2010 applications

Word replaces the old Document Map with a new Navigation pane, which has proven quite useful for the longer documents I create, especially for books. It provides three tabbed views, Headings (where the document is organized by the various sections as denoted by headings), Pages (with miniature thumbnails of each page in the document), and Search Results. That last bit is an exciting change: Finally, the old Find dialog box is gone, and when you search for information in a document, the Find dialog doesn’t cover it up. The search results pane is particularly nice because it lists each instance of your search results, letting you click around and go quickly to each one. This is a wonderful change to Word, and something I’ve been asking for for years.

Word’s new Navigation pane is excellent for navigating through large, complex documents.

Goodbye Find dialog: Word finally searches documents in a more elegant fashion.

Outlook has been significantly reworked in this version and if you use Outlook at all, the changes to this application will be reason enough to upgrade. Outlook picks up the ribbon, of course, something that was sorely missed in Outlook 2007, but it has also been upgraded in other major ways. Key among these changes is the new Conversation View, which is now turned off by default (it was enabled in the beta). It provides a way to bundle all of the messages in an email thread into a single collapsible and expandable entry in the inbox (or other mail folder), helping to de-clutter your email. It also works in tandem with other new Outlook features like Clean Up (remove repeated sections of an email thread) and Ignore Conversation (stop receiving updates to unwanted email threads), giving you further control over email craziness.

My favorite Outlook feature, however, is Quick Steps. This is essentially a way to perform multiple actions on an email message using a single click, and you can modify the existing Quick Steps, or create your own, fairly easily. For example, Outlook comes with Quick Steps like Move To, Team Email, Reply and Delete, and others. And I’ve created my own Quick Step, called Archive It, which marks the current email as read and moves it to an Archived folder on the server. There is one major limitation to Quick Steps, however, and I’m surprised no one else has latched onto this yet: Their email accounts specific if what you want to do (as I do with “Archive It”) is move messages to a specific server folder. So if you are managing multiple email accounts in Outlook 2010, you may have to duplicate some Quick Steps buttons, even if the accounts all use the same server folder structure.

Quick Steps let you perform multiple actions to an email message using a single click.

Outlook 2010 supports multiple Exchange accounts–a common request–MailTips for helping to ensure that certain impertinent emails aren’t sent by mistake (this one requires Exchange 2010) and a new Social Connector that lets you view and contribute to social network services like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Windows Live, all from the familiar and always-open Outlook interface.

Excel picks up some interesting new visualizations in this release, including sparklines, which are essentially single-cell mini graphs. They’re particularly good for showing trends graphically. Excel 2010 also supports conditional, rules-based cell formatting. This formatting is graphical, too, so you can very easily highlight negative values or other information using gradient background fills, borders, data bars, or icons. The biggest change in Excel, however, may be the addition of interactivity to PivotCharts, which lets you filter the information used to create charts in real-time.

PowerPoint gains stunning video capabilities in this release, making the application a viable video editing package in addition to its other skills. The depth of this functionality is astonishing, and if you’re working with video at all, you’ll appreciate that, as with the photo and pictures capabilities mentioned above, it can all happen directly in Office, without having to buy, learn and use a third party solution. And this is full-featured video editing, folks: You can trim video, add effects, change the poster frame (the image that represents the video when it’s not playing), play video in the background, compress the video, and more. And for all you people using PowerPoint to share photos with others (you know you’re out there), PowerPoint can now export to video, so you can turn a PowerPoint-based photo slideshow into a high-quality video that can be shared via YouTube or wherever. This is powerful, exciting stuff.

PowerPoint’s video editing features are exceptional.

Even better is a new feature called PowerPoint Broadcast that should be of interest to all PowerPoint jockeys: Now you can broadcast your presentations over the web to remote viewers, for free, using a Windows Live (or, within a corporation, with SharePoint).

For you OneNote fans out there, you’re about to be joined by a much bigger crowd of people: Microsoft expects OneNote to join the ranks of Word and Excel atop the Office usage chart, and to make that happen, it’s ensured that OneNote now has as much visibility as possible. So it’s available in every single mainstream Office edition (i.e. not Starter) and is one of only four Office applications that have been ported to the web as part of Office Web Apps. As such, OneNote users can now share notebooks via the web, and that should prove hugely popular with school classes and other groups.

iPad Coming To Australia on May 28

After selling over 1,000,000 iPads in the first month in the US, the iPad is finally coming to Australia. Pre-orders can be made with Apple from the 10th of May and will available to purchase on May 28.

Expected Australian pricing (including GST) for the Wi-Fi only iPad is $629 for 16GB, $759 (32GB) $879 (64GB). Prices for the 3G model is $799 (16GB) $928 (32GB) and $1049 (64GB).

After bringing PDA’s to the masses, it looks like Apple will finally be the first company to make a tablet device a success. Bringing a mix of style, latest display and touch screen technology and an easy to use operating system, Apple appear to have brought the tablet form factor to the mainstream.

If you already have an iPhone, your apps will also run on the iPad with many app developers bringing redesigned or updated versions to take advantage of the bigger screen resolution. There also a host of iPad specific apps available and a new iBookstore which has already sold over 1.5m books!

Competing Tablets Coming Soon…

Fortunately for consumers, Apple won’t have in all their own way.

Microsoft have their new Windows Phone 7 coming soon and will develop a tablet OS based on this. For those that have used traditional Windows Mobile phones, Windows Phone 7 is a complete departure for Microsoft. The operating system has been re-designed from the ground up and should translate into a exceptional tablet type device. To see what a Windows 7 Phone will look like click here

Microsoft are also building their own network and development tools that will integrate Windows based PC’s, the Xbox 360 and the Windows Phone 7 and have the ability to share apps and data seamlessly. Imagine playing a game on your PC or Xbox, getting in the car and continuing the game on your phone – at the point you left it! This is the some of the things Microsoft are envisaging for the future.

Google have the Android phones, that although are not largely available in Australia yet (HTC do have models available from Telstra), are already big in the US and Europe that will translate into excellent tablet devices. They are also building an operating system based on the Chrome browser. The benefits Google can bring to their devices are being able to direct link into their cloud based programs like Gmail, Google Docs, Buzz and they already have a 50,000 program app store up and running.

You can also expect plenty of 3rd parties developing Android based devices as the OS is open source and there is expected to be hundreds of Android based devices in the next 12 months alone.

And just last week, HP purchased the Palm company which will bring Palm’s WebOS to a tablet as well as new phones. Palm based WebOS phones are apparently exceptional but lacked the market presence due to Palm’s financial troubles of recent years. Being the worlds largest PC maker HP have buckets of money to back their new addition, which could turn around Palm’s fortunes. HP were to deliver a Windows 7 based tablet in the next few months, but have already scrapped this to focus on bringing out a WebOS tablet.

Why A Phone OS?

Although it seemed liked a strange decision to use the iPhone OS when the iPad was announced it is probably the primary reason it works. Tablets have been around for years, but have always run an over bloated OS in devices that were not designed to run a mainstream PC operating system. Throw in a minimum battery life of 10 hours, the ability to show full screen video and an app library of 200,000 programs and it works. HP with their ‘Slate’ device running Windows 7 were looking at around 3-4 hour battery life, so you can already see why PC based tablets aren’t going to work.

Is It Too Late?

Apple have a massive head start and have an exceptional product, even though it’s missing things like a front facing camera amongst others. For the other companies to compete they are going to have to do things as well as or better than Apple. Traditionally Apple do develop exceptional and easy to use products and in the last few years have transformed the MP3 and PDA categories into mainstream use. The way things are looking they look like adding Tablets to this list.

Microsoft have announced some big news via its Office 2010 Engineering Blog:

Earlier today we reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!

RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone. It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products. Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version – that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads! The feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we’re excited about, and that I’m sure will delight our customers.

Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.

Earlier this year we announced that we will officially launch Office 2010 to our business customers on May 12 with Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division, delivering a keynote as part of our virtual launch. Our virtual launch will allow people from around the globe to participate in our launch. The virtual launch site will showcase product demos, customer and partner testimonials, and interviews with product managers and executives, and we hope this will give you another great way to explore, learn, and get excited about the 2010 releases.

We’ve been testing the beta version of Office 2010 and it’s been very stable and has some excellent new features – particularly Outlook. As soon as we have availability and pricing we’ll let you know.

Update: Pricing is now available on our ‘latest prices‘ page.

In an effort to give our clients as much access to the services and information provided by SIAX Computing Solutions and Crossbow Computers we now have sister sites available on Twitter, Buzz and Facebook.

Being a new medium of communication Twitter, Buzz and Facebook can provide an easier port of call for some than traditional websites, particularly from portable devices, mobile phones, PDA’s and even PC’s. We recognize that today’s information needs to be available in different ways and that our clients will use these tools today and into the future.

Twitter

Our Twitter site will provide the latest information on all the happenings in the IT world that are particularly relevant to our clients. If its the latest news from the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Trend Micro (just to name a few) our Twitter site is the place to be. If your not a user of Twitter, but want access to the latest news you can see all our latest ‘Tweets’ in the sidebar of our website.

You can find our Twitter page here. When at the site just click the ‘Follow’ button to join

Facebook

Our Facebook site will host similar content to our website, but will contain the obvious benefits of being linked directly into your Facebook page and provide you automatically with the latest information on the happenings at SIAX and Crossbow.

You can find our Facebook page here. When at the site just click the ‘Become a Fan’ button to join.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz is a new social network that crosses the best of Twitter and Facebook into a live email and instant messaging stream. Has the potential to be better than Twitter and Facebook. Our Buzz site will contain both information from the site and Twitter.

You can find our Google Buzz page here. When at the site just click the ‘Follow SIAX’ button to join.

Worry-Free Business Security is safer because it stops viruses, spyware, spam, and other email, file and web threats before they reach your business. It’s smarter because it detects threats faster and constantly updates your protection without slowing PC performance. And it’s simpler because it is easy to install and maintain—you have zero administration.

It’s Safer, Smarter, Simpler.

Worry Free Is Available In Two Versions

Worry Free 6 is available in the following versions:

Worry-Free Business Security Advanced
Comprehensive antispam and antivirus solution for businesses that need multiple layers of email protection. With included Hosted Email Security-Inbound Filtering you’ll stop spam and other email-based threats, including email containing malicious urls, before they reach your business.

Worry-Free Business Security Standard
Antivirus and antispyware for businesses that need to protect their servers and PCs from web threats and traditional threats such as viruses, spyware, bots, and rootkits.

See How It Works

Learn why your traditional antivirus is putting your business at risk from web threats, viruses, spam and more. Discover how Worry-Free Business Security can help.

Watch videos »

Key Features

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Global Neighborhood Watch: Automatically identifies new threats and feeds back security-related issues or events to Trend Micro using Smart Feedback technology, speeding resolution of threats for all users.

USB Device Threat Prevention: Prevents viruses on USB devices from infecting users’ computers.

For More Information: View PDF Datasheet

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