Digital Samurai

TIMESLIPS 2010 UPDATE

Our apologies for not posting for some time. Both of us had deaths in the family, which required out-of-state travel. It’s always nice to get together with family, but we certainly wish it was for a different reason.

Timeslips is widely used in solo and small firm environments. We use it ourselves as do many of our clients. We suspect that Sage needs some quality control improvements and a better test plan for their products. We received our 2010 upgrade about a month ago, but haven’t installed it yet. Good thing too. Sage just released SR1 for Timeslips 2010. Now that was fast. We’re going to wait another month or so before upgrading our installation to see if there is a SR2 in our future. If you’ve already installed the 2010 version, be sure to install the update.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

YOU CAN SKIP VISTA UNTIL 2011

We really hope you are enjoying the trials and tribulations if you are currently using Vista, but the rest of us are glad we don’t have to share your pain. Microsoft did a little backpeddling and will offer the Windows XP Downgrade until 2011. This means that they will allow OEMs to ship Windows XP Professional past the original April 22, 2010 (6 months following Windows 7 release) date they previously announced.

What does this mean for us? You will be able to buy a new computer with a Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate license and have it delivered with Windows XP Professional installed. This change in plan is meant to allow organizations the ability to totally skip Vista and concentrate on migrating to Windows 7. This is great news. Perhaps Microsoft is finally listening to us.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

DON’T UPDATE OUTOOK – ESPECIALLY NOW

We really hope you didn’t click on that link that said there was a critical update for Outlook. If so, then quickly scan your machine and don’t do anything that involves any important information.

Yesterday, Trend Micro warned that there’s a new outbreak of spam that claims to be a critical update for Outlook. We had a few of the messages trapped in our spam filter and the text actually reads “This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.” The message is trying to infect your machine with the ZBot Trojan, which is a notorious information thief. The ZBot Trojan receives commands from the botnet master and targets sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Bank of America and Wachovia, among others. If a user visits any of the targeted sites, the Trojan will begin logging all of the keystrokes to obtain logon credentials along with any other personal information.

This is one time that you don’t want to install the latest and greatest version, because this one is an imposter.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

GOOGLE KILLS OUTLOOK SEARCH

Two years ago, Google went crying to the Department of Justice complaining that Microsoft’s Vista desktop search interfered with Google’s desktop search. According to a recent Information Week article, it is now Google’s turn to get even. Apparently, if you install Google’s Apps Sync (connects Outlook to Google Apps Premiere or Education Editions) it kills the connection between Windows Desktop Search and Outlook. This effectively prevents Outlook from searching any and all of your Outlook data. Perhaps this is just what Microsoft needs to repair its relationship with the DOJ.

A little more quality control is certainly needed. While Google made sure that Outlook plug-ins for SalesForce.com and WebEx continue to work, others like Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar, Outlook Change Notifier and PGP.com's encryption plug-in for Outlook don’t. Microsoft claims that uninstalling Google App Sync for Outlook may not fix the problem. You may have to change the registry key that was modified by the plug-in. Ouch!

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

SECURITY FIXES FOR FIREFOX

A total of nine security flaws for Firefox are fixed by the recent update released by Mozilla. They identified four of them as critical. Make sure you update your version of Firefox, which will leave you at the 3.0.11 version when you’re done.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

ADOBE QUARTERLY UPDATES

Frankly, we’re getting tired of writing about Adobe and their apparently endless trek to patching bugs and security vulnerabilities. Don’t get us wrong…we’re glad that they are responding to issues with their products and trying to keep the computing public safe from the bad guys. What cracks us up is the announcement that Adobe will now go to scheduled releases (quarterly) for fixes much like Microsoft does with Windows updates. The funny part is the notion that you are actually planning for your product to have bugs or security holes. What happens if there’s a sudden discovery of a major vulnerability? Do you wait until the next scheduled date or bite the bullet and go out of turn with a distribution?

Now that we’ve wasted a bunch of words griping about scheduled releases, Adobe has made their first “scheduled” release available for Adobe Acrobat and Reader. This update will leave you at versions 9.1.2, 8.1.6 or 7.1.3 for Macintosh and Windows environments. Notice that version 6 is no longer supported, but you can get an upgrade from 6.x standard to 9.x Pro for just $159 at the Adobe site.

- John and Mike
 
(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

BEST BUY BIG MOUTH

Well they did it again and you’ve got to love the Internet. Somehow a Best Buy memo about their plans for Windows 7 distribution was obtained by Engadget and subsequently was splattered all over the Internet. Bottom line…don’t buy a PC at Best Buy before June 26th. You can get a free upgrade copy to Windows 7 if you can wait until after that date.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

EXCHANGE 2010 IS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER

Microsoft has announced that Exchange 2010 will be made available sometime during the second half of this year, and will include a number of substantial upgrades and new features.

Microsoft has focused a lot of its effort in the development of Exchange 2010 to concentrate on integrating more e-Discovery-like features such as e-mail archiving and multi-mailbox searching. The new features aim to provide companies with a basic, low-cost method to comply with Court Orders and litigation hold requests when it comes to their e-mail infrastructure.

Some of the other new features in Exchange 2010 include instant messaging, a new Outlook Web Access interface, threaded e-mail conversations, e-mail delivery confirmation, external calendar sharing and voicemail-to-text transcription.

If your firm is still running Exchange 2003, holding off another 6 months or so to upgrade might be worth the wait. With Microsoft, it is always wise not to be the first to take the plunge.

More information regarding Exchange 2010 can be found on Microsoft’s website here.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

ADOBE ADDRESSES WINDOWS FIRST

According to the secuity bulletin from Adobe, a fix is available for the latest zero-day vulnerability in Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Just like the rest of the computer software development world, Adobe is providing the fix for Windows (and Unix) operating system(s) ahead of others. Adobe hopes to have a fix available for Macintosh users by the end of June. This is another example of what market dominance (right or wrong) can accomplish.

So all you Windows users of Acrobat and Adobe Reader – patch away.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

ADOBE HARD AT WORK – AGAIN

For the second time this year, Abobe has been forced to react to zero-day vulnerabilities in their products. We just wrote about the latest incident in our last post. Now, according to David Lenoe, Adobe’s security program manager, a fix is expected to be available by May 12, 2009. That’s a lot faster than the previous zero-day fix, but is it fast enough? The other interesting part of David’s blog post is that only versions 9.x, 8.x and 7.x will get the fix. Perhaps it’s time for you version 6.x users to upgrade.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com