Month: October 2009

Microsoft has seriously embarrassed themselves and brought huge doubt to the viability of their Office Live incentive from their server failure this week, impacting all Sidekick phone users. Although they are saying that Office Live is built with server redundancy as a key part of their infrastructure, the fact that they have completely failed to offer redundancy for their Danger Sidekick phone users is obviously a major blow for Microsoft’s credibility to run any online/cloud-based service.

Quite how they allowed themselves to get into an unrecoverable position losing all their users data is quite unimaginable.

Here’s the harsh reality of what can happen when you rely on data storage ‘in the cloud’. Microsoft recently bough Danger, the company behind the Sidekick phone devices, in a possible move to offering a Microsoft branded similar device at some point.

Over the past few days, Danger users started reporting being unable to access any of their phone data from their phones (address books etc). Apparently due to a server failure, all user’s data has been lost. This weekend, Microsoft announced that the chances of recovering their user’s data ‘doesn’t look good’. According to a post on the T-Mobile forums, user’s data has ‘almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger’

Hmm. Aren’t Microsoft getting ready to launch Microsoft Office online? Based on this stellar success record, I’d avoid any service hosted by Microsoft online like the plague. Stay away, stay very away.

Doesn’t look too good for Microsoft. Will be very interested to see how they put a positive spin on this one.

I was slightly cautious with what to expect with the new Exchange integration in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but was surprised to see how easy it was to set up. Added a new Email account, and just from my corporate email address it found my Exchange server and all the correct settings and started syncing all my email, calendar entries and address book. Incredibly simple and no issues. Amazing that Apple makes it this simple, knowing how much hassle I’ve had with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Mobile devices in the past.

One other feature I’m very pleased to see since I don’t have an iPhone (which enables this feature in 10.5, but it’s now enabled by default in 10.6) – iCal now also syncs with my Google contacts.

All in all, so far very pleased with Snow Leopard – $25 for the Exchange integration was worth this much alone, and I haven’t even started to look at the other changes.

If you’ve been around for a while you’ve most likely come across Dion Almaer’s name, from either his involvement with TheServerSide.com and The Middleware Company (the founders of TheServerSide.com), and more recently one of the co-founders of Ajaxian.com

A few days back Dion announced that he’s joining Palm to work on their WebOS platform for the Pre, along with ajaxian.com co-founder Ben Galbraith. This is an interesting move, and I wish these guys all the best, and I hope to see some great things coming from Palm with WebOS in the near future!

Incidentally, I’ve read a few things about Dion’s work at Mozilla with the Bespin collaborative development platform and I’ve been meaning to take a look, so while this is fresh in my mind I think I’ll head over there to take a look.