Digital Samurai

ANOTHER MICROSOFT ANNOUNCEMENT – FREE OFFICE 2010

Tired of the all Microsoft announcements lately? Well, they’ve released another one. Their most recent announcement follows the introduction of Bing, their new hip search engine and the setting of a date (October 22) for the upcoming anticipated release of Windows 7.

Microsoft has unveiled a major overhaul of its business software suite, Microsoft Office. Microsoft will offer free, ad-supported versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote through the Windows Live portal, where users will have online access to the Office Web interface. The lightweight versions of these applications will allow users to access their documents from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection. It’s expected that the next full version of MS Office will be made available sometime during the first quarter of 2010.

More information regarding Microsoft Office 2010 can be found online at: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/.

- John and Mike

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

LEXISNEXIS ANNOUNCES PCLAW 10

If you’re considering the upgrade or purchase of PCLaw, now is probably a good time to act. LexisNexis is offering a 20% discount on the purchase price when you buy PCLaw 10 along with an annual maintenance plan. This offer is only good until July 31, 2009 and not retroactive to any sale prior to July 1, 2009.

The new enhancements include an automatic backup feature where you can schedule backups during non-work or off-peak times. What a novel idea…a backup that doesn’t impact system performance during work hours. There is also a records management type function that allows you to track closed files and documents with links to pertinent details about the files and their locations. In addition, there are extended functions available if you use a SQL database.

- John and Mike

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

ADOBE AGAIN?

So much for Adobe’s quarterly updates. We can’t even go two months without writing about another Adobe vulnerability. SC Magazine just announced that ANOTHER zero-day exploit for Adobe has been discovered. CERT has also issued an advisory.

The latest vulnerability impacts Flash Player 9 and 10 and Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. This one is real folks and is already occurring in the wild. The issue has to do with the Flash module and the fact that you can embed Flash objects in a PDF. The flaw can cause your computer to crash or allow an attacker to take control of an affected system.

A fix is expected by the end of the month. In the meantime, users of Adobe Reader and Acrobat can delete, rename or remove access to the authplay.dll file. Sure, let your users go screwing around with file deletions. We don’t think so. You still have the problem with the Flash Player since there is no temporary fix available. Not much help there either.

So what’s a user to do? As Elmer Fudd would say, “Be very, very, careful.”

- John and Mike

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

BIG BROTHER REALLY IS WATCHING

If you own a Kindle and purchased George Orwell’s Animal Farm or 1984, you already know that they’ve “gone missing” on your device. Apparently, in the dead of the night, Amazon sent out their electronic robots and deleted copies from the Kindle. They did refund the purchase price, but if you were in the middle of a chapter…too bad.

Now that the dust has had a chance to settle, it seems that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that didn’t have the rights to the material. The publisher, MobileReference, yanked the plug when they found out, which caused the electronic versions of the books to go poof! The scary part is that items you’ve purchased can suddenly go away without any notice.

That’s Big Brother in action. And what a delicious irony that it should happen to 1984 – we can hear Orwell chuckling.

- John and Mike

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

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