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Are You An IT Hostage?

Whether a business flies or flops depends on how well critical core functions are performed, and small business owner/managers are particularly adept at role multitasking. However, unless the business is computer related, or the owner/manager has a special interest in computer and networking technology, stick-handling IT issues almost never makes it onto the "Top 10 Things I Can't Wait To Do Today" list. With good reason. Over the past 25 years, increasingly complex processes and applications have migrated from large to ...
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System Status

By Norada Engineering

Status

Last updated 11:00 AM 11/05/2007 EST

Service	Status	Notes
Internet Connectivity
Solve360 Web Application
Email (filtering / delivery)
Email (external IMAP/POP)
Email (SMTP)

Scheduled Maintenance Events

None at this time

Technical support inquires can be made to support@norada.com

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Storage Space Increases

By Norada Engineering

Norada is committed to ensuring that Solve360 remains a best-of-breed service at a reasonable price. In support of this commitment to our customers, we regularly increase the amount of storage available to each user. Effective immediately, email storage allocations have doubled to 2GB for primary and standard accounts and 200mb for value accounts, and shared file storage has also doubled from 5GB to 10GB.

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Internet Explorer 7 Recommendation

By Norada Engineering

Microsoft recently distributed IE7 to Windows XP and Windows 2003 systems as a regular Windows Update (installation was optional). IE7 is a significant improvement over IE6 and Solve360 fully supports this new browser.

IE7 does however have a bug which can cause the browser to slow down resulting in delayed typing and/or missed keystrokes. To workaround this bug Microsoft recommends disabling IE7's new "Phishing Filter" or applying a software patch.

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Service Upgrades

By Norada Engineering

Our Engineering team will be implementing software and hardware upgrades to our hosting environment. These changes will occur during non-prime time over the next two-three weeks and provide the following benefits:

Enable Norada to maintain state-of-the-art perimeter security against spam and viruses
Increase performance and storage capacity of our mail services
Ready the hosting infrastructure for the next version of Solve360

Our Team will make every effort to make these changes as transparent to our customers as possible. If you have any questions please email us at support@norada.com

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A Framework For The Future

By George Curnew

One of the cornerstones of Solve360 is invisible to users. It's the core platform upon which the Solve360 feature set has been built, and it's been carefully constructed and nurtured over the past few years. When we brought the first iteration of our product to market, the fledgling Web application services industry was mistakenly lumped in with ASP. Many of the early applications were slow and unreliable; hastily constructed IT science projects cobbled together from legacy server and desktop code and dumped into a hostile online environment. We took a different path. We built our SaaS product from scratch, inventing approaches which later turned out to be best practice for browser-delivered apps, because there was no other way then to get the functionality and reliability that are required to deliver a complex service like Solve360.

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Leading The Evolution

By George Curnew

OK, consider this the official announcement: we expect to release a new version of Solve360 in about 100 days. As outlined in a previous post by Norada's Steve Ireland, the new version will feature significant interface and performance improvements, and has been hugely influenced by feedback and suggestions from customers.

Instead of teasing users with hints about what Solve360 will look like and do, then staging a "pull the cover off the new version" event, we're going to do regular posts and updates as we approach launch date.

Of course it's not possibly to engineer a major upgrade to an application as complex as Solve360 in just a few months. The preliminary planning and development work began in earnest about 16 months ago, more or less coinciding with the emergence in the marketplace of the notion that something called Web 2.0 was coming. While hype and media spin quickly encrusted the Web 2.0 idea and sapped it of any meaning, the tenets that anchor the next Solve360 to the future emerged based on fundamental changes we saw driving the Internet application environment.

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Comments (12) Permalink

Comments

1. "I am a new but enthusiastic user of solve 360, and hope that the new version will include, among other things, on line back up and storage. That would really make solve360 absolutely essential."

By Bruce

2. "Solve360 backup is transparent to users...even in the current version all email, contacts, calendar info and other data (including anything stored in the files area) is backed up twice daily. For a few extra dollars a month, we also offer an email archiving service that continuously backs up everything going in and out of your mailbox, including attachments; any change that takes place is recorded."

By George Curnew

3. "George - "we expect to release a new version of Solve360 in about 100 days." OK, but 100 days from when? I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new version. When will that be? Will it include online apps like word processing,spreadsheets, etc.? Will it allow me to store my files online in the familiar file & folder hierarchy? Thanks Bruce"

By Bruce

4. "Will someone answer the question in comment 3 above. I am also interested to know about when I might something new. I am also interested to know if the new version will include online applicatons and other refinements that will make it even more useful for the business user."

By Jack

5. "Thanks for your questions and sorry for the delay in responding. We've been very busy getting new customers onboard while hammering out the new version.

100 days from when George posted the article is mid-November. That's when the next-generation of Solve360 (codename "Canvas") will be available for demonstration and early adopters to start using the service. As was mentioned earlier, customers will be able to login to either version until the time is right to remove the current version.

Our single purpose is to serve the needs of the business user. To that end we a recently asked of all of our customers "What new enhancements would offer you the most value?" Based on the results of that survey, the initial focus of this update is improve the existing feature sets and complement them with related services such as instant messaging. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the results. On the heels of this update there are many new features being considered and we are currently evaluating the addition of word-processing and spreadsheet applications. Our expectation is not to simply replace Microsoft Office but embrace the aspects of universal access and collaboration which is what the Internet and web offices like Solve360 are all about."

By Steve Ireland (Norada)

6. "Let me start by saying that after test driving your app you guys hit the nail on the head! Looks and feels great, however, in my opinion the system has a fatal flaw... no offline access of any sort! You see I own a Treo 650... if I'm on the road its hard to access the info using the slow cell phone web browsers of today. But even if I were able to get my hands on a Treo 700P which has EVDO high speed internet it wouldn't matter... why you ask? Because if I'm on a phone call and need to lookup a contact or calendar entry while speaking to someone on the phone I will not be able to access the web!!! When on a cell phone it's a "either, or" prosposition! Either you make a call or you surf the web... you can't do both at the same time. On top of that there are the obvious scenarios why one needs offline access to their data. Why hasn't the Solve 360 team made this a priority??? There are so many options... develope a outlook connector sync or simple do it directly with the phone using a SyncML tool. I REALLY wish I could migrate my company to the service instead of having to settle for MS-Exchange and my stupid Outlook 2003 client!!!! I'm also sick of test driving every imaginable web hosted intranet service out there... weboffice.com, hyperoffice.com; inforstreet.com, etc, etc, etc,.. they all SUCK! Of Norada won't you please heed my call for this of so important feature!!!!! Thanks"

By Offline access is still a reality

7. "We hear you loud and clear and appreciate the kind words and honest feedback!

It should be mentioned that you can sync your Solve360 email with almost any mobile device available today using our IMAP service. Moving on to calendar, contacts, tasks and such... Sync is on our product development roadmap and the team will likely get started on it right after this upgrade is complete. We will likely focus on supporting a single popular platform such as Windows Mobile to ensure the service doesn't become a best effort just to get the "tick in the box", but instead becomes a truly easy to use (simple point-and-click), robust and useful extension of our platform. Although many companies claim to offer sync their feature is always underwhelming, and often doesn't even work.

Sync's legacy is a way to manage some of your personal information while not in front of your computer. Solve360 supports an advanced data sharing model so users can collaborate on the same set information in real-time. For example, multiple people could be changing your calendar and updating contact information. If you're working on a copy you're out of "sync" with your team. We understand both sides of this and our goals include over the air sync so we can minimize the gap between your synced set of data and your real-time data in Solve360.

I agree that devices can help teams improve productivity though mobility and universal access to data. However lets not overlook that Solve360 already delivers much of this benefit by being a web application; providing significant advantages over the old desktop software approach. Even savvy customers really only understand this once they've been using Solve360 for a few months. So today our customers rally around the web application, connect their mobile device to our mail system via IMAP (email sync), and take pleasure in that this is already much better than anything they've used before. Improving the web application itself is critical and the pay back is huge so all hands are on deck preparing an update that will really stir things up in this space; sync will be a really nice complement to that."

By Steve Ireland (Norada)

8. "I find it difficult and very time consuming to have to upload a single document at a time. Will the new version enable me to upload entire directories at once? That would be VERY helpful. I like solve360 very much and I use it every day all the time. I look forward to seeing the new version very soon. Thanks"

By Luis

9. "Greetings Luis! Thanks for your kind words. File uploading is important and we have implemented some very useful innovations in this area such as one-click upload, transfer multiple files at the same time, background transfers allowing you to continue your work without waiting, faster upload speed, real-time progress indicator (and true to our philosophy still not requiring any client software / Java etc)."

By Norada Engineering

10. "Hi again. I find it really inconvenient to have to download a file from your storage area, open it in my word processor, modify it and restore in my local files, and then re-upload it to your file area. Isn't there an easier way to open, modify, and restore a document in Solve file area? Thanks for a great product and service. Luis"

By Luis

11. "Hmm, Mid-Novemeber, was about 100 days. Any news on the update? "

By Daniel

12. "Hi Daniel, As it's referred to internally Solve360 "Canvas" is now walking and talking and being nurtured among a small group of testers. We’re reviewing and refining the usability improvements, doing a bit of extra work on commonly accessed functions such as window/list management, editor, etc, and tweaking themes. Next month we will be expanding and upgrading our hosting infrastructure to accommodate the new application platform and its expanded indexing requirements. We're excited about the enhancements and can't wait to share them. We plan to expand our testing to a group of customers in January to gain broader, objective feedback on the many changes we’ve made and measure our progress against our original project objectives."

By Norada Engineering

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