Archive for October, 2006

Zimbra 4: (Commercial) Open Source Productivity

Friday, October 20th, 2006

Today is a good day. I’m not referring to the availability of Internet Explorer 7 and the fact that some of our internal as well as our clients website do not show correct anymore. Zimbra LogoIt might also be the beautiful autumn weather we currently have here in beautiful Switzerland or Hugo’s MacBook on my desk but the realy important news are the new Zimbra Outlook Connector and Zimbra Mobile.

Zimbra Outlook Connector will give you full Exchange Server feeling in Outlook using Zimbra Collaboration Suite. I’ve used the previous version which worked but felt a little instable (I find it really difficult to blame the right component on Windows as most of the parts of the infrastructure work more-or-less). The new version has not crashed my outlook yet and has a more complete feature set, so you get a progress indication regarding the server activity, the little envelope icon in the icon tray indicating new mail works, you get the new mail indication hover and so on.

E61Even better: Zimbra Mobile enables two-way, over-the-air synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar data between mobile devices and the Zimbra server. It works with popular devices such as the Treo 650, Treo 700 w/p, Motorola Q, all Windows Mobile 5 devices and Nokia E-Series which includes my beautiful and now even more useful Nokia E61.

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Pause | Bed 2.0

Monday, October 16th, 2006

I meant not to blog about gadgets and stuff that you find on geek portals like Gizmodo and Engadget, but this is different. :) Pause
This looks like a really great bed and it has a realy useful feature. Not that I could not imagine to spend time in my bedroom without an iPod but…

New Zealand’s designmobel is offering a bed with an iPod Dock & Bose Speaker Shelf…

Personalised sleep.
In designing Pause we have furthered our driving philosophy that a bed should be completely personalised. This process starts at the bed base where using our unique sleep system each side is tailored to both partners comfort and support requirements.

Product description.
Pause is crafted from sustainable New Zealand Rimu with aluminium detailing. Optional accessories include minimalist side lamps and aluminium storage trays, yet perhaps the most exciting feature is how the shelves can seamlessly accommodate an iPod universal dock and BOSE speaker system. These electronic accessories allow you to enjoy and awaken to your favourite tunes in the most personal of spaces. The concealed iPod universal dock also provides a convenient means for recharging your iPod.

Watch the video intro here.

Find the product description here.

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Online Office: Google Docs & Spreadsheets | ZOHO

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

docslogoGoogle has merged their apps Google spreadsheets and Writely (which they acquired in March) to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. You can import your old Writely docs but the name Writely has apparently been dropped.
They seem to be on the way of aligning the UIs of the two aps but still no integration on one into the other (spreadsheet inside a doc). They still require a recent version of Firefox or IE.

Zoho LogoA (to me) new player is Zoho with a much more promising offer. They offer more, more integrated and with a better browser support. Apart from word processing and spread sheeting they offer a presentation tool (Zoho Show) and groupware (Zoho Virtual Office) which is a web-based collaboration groupware that includes Email Client, Documents, Calendar and more.
Zoho also offers CRM, project and team/time management, online databases and a chat client (haven’t checked on these).

Zohox (coming soon) will apparently offer a virtual desktop to switch between the services. They have also announced a plug-in for Thunderbird and Outlook as well as a Skype module.

24/7 LogoIn their Utilities section they also have a 24/7 monitoring service for websites. This is something (free) I have been looking for for a while. I’ll try this service and report back here in my blog in a couple of days.

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