Intel have long dominated the market for PC and server processors, while smaller British firm ARM and its large federation of manufacturing partners has held sway in the market for mobile chips. Now, with Intel using their Atom range of processors to target smart phone manufacturers and ARM making energy efficient chips for servers, each is attacking the others stronghold. Who do you think will win and what will it mean for users?

Microsoft are planning to release Windows 8 by mid-2012 but software vendors will need around 18 months to test their applications with it.

Microsoft’s support for Windows XP will end in 2014 but businesses should start migrating in 2012 to allow enough time for testing of legacy applications, particularly those which are hard-coded to run in IE6.

AntiVirus software typically costs in the region of £40 per user for the license then £20 per year thereafter for updates.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free, it provides adequate protection and of course it comes from the same vendor as your Windows Operating System. You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security_essentials/default.aspx

Amazon's legendary Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) went off line following a routine upgrade on 21 April 2011. Is it time we started considering the use of multiple redundant clouds to ensure business continuity during an outage? Interoperability between different vendors cloud applications and services could also be improved.

If so what are you using them for? Share your tablet innovations here!

Google's Android operating system is the most popular amongst recent buyers of smart-phones and Microsoft is unlikely to catch up. Will Microsoft now use its $37 billion cash pile to buy RIM/BlackBerry?

Switching to thinner fonts like Century Gothic can save up to £60 per printer per year. Let us know what you think here. 

For most of us the announcement was a bolt from the blue... Obvious reasons for the move are a) clearing cash off the balance sheet and b) a desire to improve security in the growing wireless market. Can you think of any others?

1. Co-authoring feature in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote for simultaneous editing.

2. Conversation View in Outlook combines all messages within a conversation thread, removes duplicate information and lets you delete current and future irrelevant messages.

3. Broadcast slideshow feature in PowerPoint enables you to present over the internet directly to anyone with a supported web browser.

4. When you recieve a meeting request in Outlook you get a preview of your callendar to show how the request affects other callendar items without leaving your inbox.

5. Much improved video editing tools in PowerPoint.

Attended the International Association of Microsoft Certified Professionals (IAMCP) forum. Also visited the European Parliament for a meeting with Kay Swinburne MEP who is currently focused on Finance.  

The case for using social media as a collaboration tool in business is becoming stronger. Does your organization use it? If so we would love to hear about your experiences.

Just announced: BES Express software free download and free client access supporting up to 2,000 users! We expect this to become available on 1 March 2010.

After much calculation and contemplation we have decided there is very little difference between VMware and Microsoft when it comes to the cost of virtualisation. Call us now to discuss the pro's and cons of both!

IBM have just released a new low cost appliance called "Tivoli Foundations Application Manager." Does your organisation run systems management tools? Share your experience by commenting here!

More and more organisations are moving to virtualisation and cloud computing. Can you see yours having no IT assets at all in the near future?

Products built around this technology are starting to appear in the market. In our opinion this technology is still problematic and we are unable to recommend it at present.

I think It's great that Dell are buying Perot Systems and diversifying their business. Might they have room for EMC too? I could draw out how the new company would look... if only I had a whiteboard ;-)

 This is currently big news but will it take off?

Release candidate 1 seems to be going down quite well so far. Are you using it? If so we would be interested to hear your comments.