Updates on Services and news from the IT and publishing industries
Services
Just a reminder, D Revolution has rolled out several new services over the course the last 9 months.
We now offer the following;
cPanel and Plesk webhost administration
Migration services to Google Apps
iPhone setup, integration and training
Online HelpDesk with growing FAQ section
Netgear ReadyNAS installation, support and maintenance
OpenSource installation, support and maintenance.
VPN support and configuration for remote workers
Professional Windows PC Support
Of course, we also continue to provide support and training for people involved in the publishing/creative industries.
If you need equipment, training, support, workflow support we can organise it!
Our preferred supplier Proton Digital, has spawned a new website – I Need Storage.
If you need to purchase storage, the new website is easy to use and has great pricing.
This week, we picked up 2 1TB hard drives for $125 each!
Please note: Whilst D Revolution has no affiliation with Proton Digital, we do use them most for our quotes as the owner Ross Pappas has been the most reliable and honest reseller we have dealt with in 11 years of operation.
News
Apple releases OS X 10.6 – Snow Leopard.
Last Friday, Apple released their latest Operating System – OS X 10.6.
Whilst there are a lot of “under the hood improvements, it looks essentially like OS X 10.5 – Leopard did.
The new system takes up less space and is faster on the same hardware – take that large software developers (I’m looking at you Adobe!)
Please note: As with ANY major system release, don’t go out and install it on a machine which you use to earn a living (especially if it’s your only machine).
Whilst most programs work – thing WILL BREAK.
A wiki has been setup listing compatibility of programs. Please check here before installing and give us a call!
D Revolution is starting testing of OS X 10.6 this week on the publishing tools and workflows used by the creative industry. We will update you on the progress soon…
Google Apps continues to receive updates.
When Google Calendar CalDAV launched, there was no provision for delegation and no setup tools.
Since then, Google created Calaboration (which has since been depreciated) to help setup of CalDAV accounts into iCal and now they have quietly introduced delegation.
This means you can have one calendar of your own and can have delegated access to other peoples calendars.
Also, the calendar colours assigned in Google Apps are now automatically synced with iCal and the iPhone. This makes it much easier to find events when switching for the website to iCal to iPhone.
Adobe CS5 to be Intel only.
With Adobe on a 18 month release cycle for the Creative Suite, the next version which is due around March next year WILL not run on PowerPC macs – ie: G5’s
Read the FAQ.
This ties into Apple’s new Operating System 10.6 which was released last Friday as Intel only.
If you have any equipment that is not Intel, now is the time to start thinking about upgrading.
Microsoft finally releases Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition.
If you use Entourage 2008 connected to an Exchange Server, this update should greatly enhance the functionality of Entourage and almost bring it on par with Outlook.
The update brings speed, ease of setup, extra synchronisation, decent logging (for troubleshooting), out of office assistant among other things.
For setup instructions, follow Microsoft’s guidelines – or call us!
It was also announced that Entourage is to be scrapped and replaced with a ground up rewrite that will switch back to the name Outlook.
People with long memories might remember that Microsoft ditched Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2001 in the move to OS X. Since that time, the Mac version has not had the parity of features of it’s PC cousin.
With today’s announcement, the next version of Office (2010) will include a all new Oulook.
More minor malware threats for Mac OS X.
Whilst OS X has NOT had a single virus in 8 years, there are threats.
These mostly take the form of security threats and malware.
Security threats are vulnerabilities that allow things like escalation of privileges, crashing of programs etc…
These are taken care of by Apple Software Update. Make sure you keep up to date using “Software Update” located under the Apple Menu.
Malware is are usually in the form of software you install and type in your administrator’s password.
These have been things like a tampered version of Photoshop and IWorks that were floating around on peer to peer download sites.
There have also been websites that trick people into downloading a supposed “Quicktime codec” that was actually malware that adjusted the DNS network setup on your machine.
Whilst this class of malware has a fairly minor threat, it does redirect ALL your website requests through DNS servers in Eastern Europe. This means they will know the address every website you visit and can potentially redirect you a bogus site to try to fool you into handing over credit card details etc…
If you ever get asked to install a codec to view a website – DON’T install it!
See the following blog for details.
Microsoft has released an update for Office 2008.
This update restores the ability to open office files created on Windows. NOTE: This was a large bug introduced in the 12.2 update that did NOT affect all users.
Funny look at the upgrade path from previous versions of Windows to Windows 7.
see – Cult Of Mac.
Mozy breaks network Time Machine.
If you are a user of the Mozy for online backup, they silently pushed out an update 2 weeks ago which broke Time Machine backups over the network.
An update has now been released that fixes the problem.