Last month, i.e. on October 22nd 2009, a test was conducted at Sophos Labs on Microsoft’s new operating system – Windows 7. The test was carried out to check if Windows 7 really matched its claims about the OS being more secured for virus, spyware and malware. Sophos claimed that the User Account Control (UAC) feature of Windows 7 bypassed 8 viruses out of the 10 that were tested. Further, it claimed that Windows 7 UAC’s default configuration is not effective at protecting a PC from modern malwares. You still need to run an anti-virus on Windows 7.

I was just waiting for something to happen from Microsoft end and after a long wait, yes it did happen. In a blog posting recently, Paul Cooke, Director of Windows Enterprise Client Security at Microsoft stated that the Sophos claim was deceptive and bogus. Further he adds that, “This test shows that most people don’t knowingly have and run known malware on their system. Malware typically makes it onto a system through other avenues like the browser or email program. So while I absolutely agree that anti-virus software is essential to protecting your PC, there are other defenses as well.” “I do agree that you still need to run anti-virus software on Windows 7,” Cooke noted, “but it is equally important to keep all of your software up-to-date through automatic updates, such as through Windows Update service.”

Now to the main point – I absolutely agree with what Paul Cooke has to say in terms of securing your PC. Being in the IT industry since 20 years now and moreover having given consultancy in Infrastructure Security to number of organizations, I’ve only seen that 40% to 50% of the problems faced by an organization are due to un-patched system, pirated software and out-of-date anti-virus signatures. In fact, when we install Windows Vista or Windows 7 on a PC, the operating system keeps on alerting via its Windows Security system if Automatic Updates are not configured or if the PC is missing an anti-virus solution. If that is the case, the question is – when and where did Microsoft claim that the new version of their Operating System Windows 7 does not require an anti-virus? If you know the answer to this, I would like to hear back from you.

Alright! The word is out.

Gartner says that it is almost inevitable for any Enterprise to move to windows 7 and also added that the release of Windows 7 will generate renewed interest in hardware upgrades in consumers and small business segments – though the corporate demand is not expected to gain momentum until the end of 2010.

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted five key issues enterprises should examine as Windows 7 hits the market:

1. Plan to be Off Windows XP by Year-End 2012 — Microsoft will support Windows XP with security fixes into April of 2014, but past experience has shown that independent software vendors (ISVs) will stop testing much earlier. “New releases of critical business software will require Windows 7 long before Microsoft support for Windows XP ends,” said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner. “Organizations that get all of their users off Windows XP by the end of 2012 will avoid significant potential problems.”

2. Start Working on Migration Projects Now — The typical organization requires 12 to 18 months waiting, testing, and planning before it can start deploying a new client OS. There is a lot of work to be done in preparation, and delays in getting started will only result in added costs later.

3. Don’t Wait for Windows 7 SP1 to Begin Testing and Deployment — Many organizations say they plan to wait until SP1 ships to begin testing and deploying a new client OS. Gartner analysts suggest starting work now (especially if companies have skipped Windows Vista), but are planning to switch to SP1 before their actual rollout.

4. Don’t Skip Windows 7 — Gartner categorizes Windows 7 as a “polishing” release on top of the architectural change that the Windows Vista “plumbing” release delivered. Gartner analysts said polishing releases should never be skipped. “While organizations that skipped Windows 2000 and waited for XP had some problems spanning the gap, organizations that adopted Windows 2000 and tried to skip Windows XP, waiting for Vista, had a much harder time,” said Michael Silver, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

5. Budget Carefully — Migration Costs to Vary Significantly Gartner’s model shows that migration costs could be $1,035 to $1,930 per user to move from Windows XP to Windows 7, and $339 to $510 per user to move from Windows Vista to Windows 7 depending on an organization’s approach.

Inputs taken from Gartner.

This is the best Outlook add-in so far from a company called Xobni located in San Francisco. “Xobni” is basically “Inbox” spelled backwards. The main idea behind the development of this plug-in was to give users an organized Inbox without them spending time on searching for conversations/emails, attachments and other relevant information. It creates profiles for each person that emails you and these profiles contain information like statistics of how many emails are being sent to and fro to that contact, what times are the most emails sent and received for that contact, social connections of the contact, conversations that are done with a particular contact in a nice threaded view and the attachments shared.

The system requirements to optimally run Xobni are a Windows XP (SP2 or greater) or Vista machine, Outlook 2003 or 2007, Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or above, a minimum of 1 GB RAM (most of the desktops have more than that today), a 2GHz of higher processor speed and a monitor with a resolution of 1024×768 (recommend a higher resolution if possible as the Xobni tool bar eats up some screen area of Outlook after installation).

It is also recommended that if the Outlook profile is connected with a Microsoft Exchange Server, then the profile be configured in a “Cached Exchange Mode”. This makes sense since this would create an OST file in the desktop and thus would help Xobni or even a normal Outlook user to gain access to emails in case of the non-availability of the Exchange Server.

Once installed, Xobni takes some time to scan and index the emails in your Outlook and starts ranking your contacts by the number of emails that are shared. It takes about a minute or two for the initial indexing. Much of the indexing is then later done by the plug-in in the background.

The statistics area displays useful information about the selected contact such as the number of emails sent and received, a bar graph showing what time of day most emails are exchanged and the rank which is determined by the number of emails exchanged between you and that contact.

The best part is the Actions area which helps to perform common interactions with the selected contact. For example, assume that there is no phone number stored in the contact information of a particular person. The request phone number action automatically creates a new email for that contact asking for the phone number. When a response is received from that person, Xobni automatically extracts the phone number and adds it to the profile.

Again in the Actions area are two great features – LinkedIn and Facebook tabs. Upon selecting a email from a contact, click on the LinkedIn or Facebook tabs and Xobni will pull out relevant information of that contact from LinkedIn or Facebook. Click on “view profile” and it directly opens up the selected contacts Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Again, the best part is that you can see the wall posts directly from Facebook in to this area.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The way Xobni displays the conversations using a threaded style similar to Google’s Gmail is amazing. All emails upon indexing are grouped in to conversations based on the subject, people in To and CC header fields, etc.

Each entry in the conversations panel will show the subject line of the email thread, a count of the emails the thread contains, as well as an approximate time that the last email in the conversation was sent. If the conversation contains an attached file, a small paper clip icon appears to the right of the subject line.

The title bar also totals the number of unique conversations. Clicking on the conversations bar expands the viewable area of conversations and gives you the option to filter the results. Clicking on any conversation entry consisting of more than one email will bring up a new sidebar frame showing the conversation thread.

The entry information will be shown at the top of the sidebar and the emails in the conversation are displayed just below that. If the email thread is longer than the sidebar can contain, there’s a detail slider, which can change the visible size of each email entry.

This way you can quickly find the right email that you’re looking for. If the conversation thread includes multiple people, they’re listed below in a panel called “People in Conversation”. Likewise, if there were any email attachments in that thread, these will be shown at the bottom of the sidebar in the “Files Exchanged” panel.

Each email entry in this view can be clicked on to further reveal the entire message. From here, you’re given the option to do standard email actions such as “Reply” and “Forward”. The “Open” button will open the original email from Outlook folders and the “View Conversation” button will take you back to the previous view of the entire conversation. Aside from the standard email header info, we can also see exactly where in the folder structure the email resides.

Xobni Analytics is another cool feature. This can be accessed from the menu bar of Outlook. Whether it’s the total volume of emails today, last week, entire year or the total volume of emails from your friend, analytics is the place to check all this out.

The data that’s displayed for the persons In and Out mail count, Rank, and Emails received graph are all powered behind the scenes by Analytics. One of the most widely used features within the Analytics window is the ability to determine own network rankings.

In short, Xobni is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that:

- Shows up previously hidden information about email interactions with people
- Allows to explore emails by contacts and conversations
- Performs lightning-fast searches
- Gives immediate access to files exchanged with contacts
- Allows to link Outlook and online social networks and data services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Hoover’s
- Indexes personal Yahoo! mail for integrated searching
- Provides an in-depth analysis of the overall flow of email traffic via Analytics

Go ahead and try out Xobni today. You won’t regret the decision. Xobni can be downloaded from http://www.xobni.com. If you manage to download and install it, do share your views here so that other visitors reading this post can read more about the user experiences from you.

Everyone’s talking about open source and open standards now-a-days but hardly have I come across any who knows what exactly it contains and what the importance is. I’m putting this post in my blog today as I desire for people to have a better understanding of what is the difference between these two terms. Let’s get a first hand understanding of what these terms mean.

Open Source is a methodology based on which the design, development and the distribution of the developed software is carried out along with its source code. On the other hand, Open Standards means a royalty-free distribution of technology which has been formalized and approved by committees that are open to participation by all interested parties. For example, W3C is a body working on standards for Web Technologies. Click here for more information.

The word “Standards” means a set of guidelines to which a lot of people have agreed upon. Putting this definition in the context of software, “standards” allow a company to pick and choose from competing vendors and interoperate their systems without being pinned down to one of them.

Many think that open source software offers the same advantage, but that is not true. Open source means that you have access to source code for inspection and modifications but it may fail interoperability. This does not mean that open source is not good. There is lots of software available which are better or provide a similar kind of functionality that paid software will do. And the best part of open source is that it is free and comes with the entire source code. But what happens when you need assistance? Is the assistance free or is there a price tag? We all know that there is lot of stake involved in providing support. If you are thinking that support means training people on how to use the product or software, you are mistaken. There is more to support then that. It involves product trainings, more research to fix bugs and vulnerabilities, distributing patches and updates, etc. There may be companies that provide support on open source platforms and have no tie-up or relation with the parent company that designed and distributed the software for free. They may be able to fix small issues since there is access to the source code, but imagine a situation where there is something wrong at the core level and requires dependency on the original developer. Further to this, there is plenty of evidence that suggests that open source does not necessarily equate to cost savings. There are still licensing fees, service fees, implementation fees and support fees associated with it.

I would feel comfortable if I knew that the open source software that I downloaded for free gave me the source code and so I can fix or modify the application as per my needs. But I would be more comfortable thinking that the paid software I use from the vendor is going to be in the industry for long and many brains are working on the software to ensure that it runs smoothly and has improvised functionality with every new release.

All this does not mean that open source is a big NO-NO. Open source does provide the benefit of using someone’s work in your own and then redistributing your work in similar fashion so that someone else can get benefit from your work. This way the community can make progress using a collaborative manner of production. Most of the time this needs to be shared and released under GPL (General Public License) which means that you cannot charge others for a license and you must make your own source code available to the public. This makes it IP (Intellectual Property) unfriendly. Many a times this code will not even make its way to the main stream and will simply end up as an individual company’s product. This leaves a question in mind – will everything in the long run be compatible or provide interoperability? Will my investment in one segment ensure returns in the other or vice-versa? Who’s going to provide updates and security patches to fix vulnerabilities? Who’s going to invest billions to innovate? From my perspective, it’s not a fight between open source and commercial software. It’s all about open standards versus proprietary standards.

I feel we should have more specific and beneficial standards that are not vendor specific or not vendor dictated because ultimately it is the interoperability that counts at the end of the day. If open source software fits your environment and gets the work done in terms of costs, features, support or maintenance – all’s well. But if you are putting security, compliance, performance, upgrades and scalability before everything else then proprietary software designed with open standards in mind is your choice. We can even extend this further and run a combination of both – it’s our choice.

What do you think? Let me know.