Windows XP Goes The Way of Incandescent Light Bulbs

On April 8th, 2014, support and updates for the now 12 year old OS Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 will no longer be available. But believe it or not, many businesses are still running on the aged OS. A recent survey from the research firm Gartner showed that more than 15% of midsize to large businesses still have Windows XP running on at least 10% of their PCs. If you're one of them - this article is for you. 

I personally have worked for the past two years or so with companies such as UBS Financial Services and Morgan Stanley to migrate their users over to Windows 7. For the companies that have moved away from Windows XP, it has been a long and complicated process. Derrick Wood, group CIO at Wood Group, said that it took a three-year multi-million dollar program to get his company ready for life after XP. But don't get the idea that staying in the past would only effect major companies; Windows XP will soon be extremely vulnerable to attack via even the most simple functions such as email and browsing the web.  

The support that Microsoft has been providing for the past 12 years includes security fixes and patches for vulnerable features such as Internet Explorer, not to mention the base OS itself. So after April 8th, any newly discovered exploits won't be fixed, leaving your entire network and systems vulnerable to various cyber attacks such as network intrusions, data theft and identity theft. And no, your antivirus software will not be the band aide for this problem.

If you are one of the many still running XP, migrating to a newer or different OS may be easier said than done. If you're just running things like Quickbooks, Outlook or Excel, then you're probably okay to upgrade or replace your systems rather easily. But if you have small time, independent software, you may want to give me a call.

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LIVEMESH TO RETIRE



A good deal of my clients (Including me) have been using Microsoft LiveMesh for some time now. For those of you unfamiliar with the program, it is a free syncing utility which also grants you 7GB of free cloud storage amongst other very cool features. Well, Microsoft has decided to kill LiveMesh and replace it with the newly recognized and much talked about program SkyDrive.
SkyDrive does a great deal of the same things LiveMesh did except for one very cool, and to some - very important - feature; Peer to Peer syncing. SkyDrive only allows for cloud syncing which restricts the user to 7GB before charging you for additional space where as Peer to Peer syncing is only limited to your hard drive space.

Personally, I've been using LiveMesh as a free backup utility by syncing it to a large file server back at home in my basement, so it was even more important for me to find an alternative. For those of you searching, you might want to try Cubby from LogMeIn. I've been testing it for a few days now, and though i don't care too much for the interface - it does the job.

https://www.cubby.com/

 

LogMeIn's Cubby, unfortunately only grants you 5GB of free storage. It does however have a multi-OS platform - meaning it can run on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It also has mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Similar to SkyDrive, Cubby allows you to share specific files stored in the Cloud with friends and family. The main reasons i have chosen to start my testing with Cubby is because of the amount of features one gets for free, and the security, reliability, and customer service I know and love from LogMeIn.

 

 

It is truly unfortunate that Microsoft has chosen to remove this feature. The SkyDrive team noted in a Windows 8 blog post [via liveside.net] that syncing between PCs won't be a feature any more because it's too complex. This is probably also due to the amount of load on their servers which they were giving for free, so one really can't complain. To those of you interested in SkyDrive, I encourage your interest and for now will have to forward you here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/skydrive/compare. I may write something in the near future.