Race the Runway 2010
WEBIT took part in a charitable event with a difference yesterday. Over 30 cars descended onto the secondary runway of Edinburgh Airport to drag-race each other! WEBIT’s driver, Rob Davidson beat his opponent in the first round of qualifications however lost in the second round. All in all, an awesome day out! Not only that but the event raised around £20,000 for St Columba’s Hospice in Edinburgh and the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow.
For more details on the event and the charities involved visit:
http://www.stcolumbashospicefundraising.org.uk/news/supercars-race-along-edinburgh-airports-runway-for-hospices-race-the-runway-2010-4-176.aspx
Forgotten Attachment Detector
Ever written an email, referred to an attachment and then sent the email without the document? Well this handy application might just be for you. It’s a great addition to Outlook and should ensure none of those embarrassing second emails “oops, attached now” 
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/forgottenattachmentdetector/Pages/default.aspx
Internet Explorer 9 platform preview 3
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 platform preview 3 today, marking the third and possibly final release prior to the beta phase.
Looking forward to doing some testing with this early next week. Hopefully when the beta and final is released we can alter our development to include Internet Explorer in the early stages as it becomes more standards compliant.
WordPress Updated
In keeping with best practice, we’ve updated our WordPress to their new major version “3.0″. Still looking into the new features to see how we can make use of them for our own blog, but for our customers as well.
For the rest of the year, we will be offering free WordPress blog hosting for all our existing and future customers if they host their main website or application with us. Call us now for details!
PHP 5.3.2 Deployed
PHP 5.3.2 MySQL 5.1.47 fully deployed and tested on our new High Availability FreeBSD 8 servers. Migration of current websites will commence throughout July with no downtime.
If you want view the info page, you can do so here: http://black.anythinghosted.co.uk/info.php.
BLACK and LIME mark the set of servers running on our XEN environment for Anything Hosted. We plan to deploy ORANGE and GREEN during August in our other data centre and finally upgrading RED and PINK in September. GREY, which currently handles most of our outgoing mail for our Exchange environment will be decommissioned towards the end of the year as the other servers take over its role.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the team.
June Patch Tuesday
June’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
More Shell Work
Back in February/March this year, Chris was asked to come on board once again working for Shell Downstream/Oil Products to help with an interface between an existing system and their new Enterprise Data Warehouse. This week marked a milestone for his work on the project but will come back later in the year to oversee some data profiling and testing. The project is scheduled to go live in October this year.
Next week, however, will mark the beginning of a new project at Shell for Chris, which he is very excited about. Watch this space for more information.
All the best from the staff at WEBIT for the long weekend!
May Patch Tuesday
May’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
New Sharepoint 2010 “Teamspace”
Over the past couple weeks we have been testing a new SharePoint Enterprise 2010 installation for use both internally and externally with our customers.
Internally we will now be able to manage and collaborate documents with our staff more efficiently, whereever they are working around the globe. With integrated Office Web Apps 2010 and Project Server 2010, we see a full integration with the desktop applications and our Exchange Server, but also allow our staff to view and edit update documents without even downloading them (useful if they are onsite and have to use external/customer equipment).
For our customers, it means we can have a central location where all documents are held, securely. Exchange customers will have a seamless integration to this new service. We will be rolling this out to our customers over the course of May 2010.
It will be mandatory from June 2010 for all new projects for WEBIT and Anything Hosted to use our new Teamspace.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Office 2010 RTM Released
Office 2010 RTM has been released on MSDN and Technet for selected Microsoft Partners. We have already been using Office 2010 Beta and RC at WEBIT for many months and plan to deploy the RTM version across all our desktops and laptops over the coming days.
Outlook 2010 will be available to all our Exchange customers from April 30th. Volume Licence keys will be available from May 4th and download links will be sent to all our customers shortly.
April Patch Tuesday Complete
April’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
New Business Venture: The Final Frontier
Today, WEBIT would like to annouch the launch of its new business venture; The Final Frontier project. We’re all very excited about this 50 year piece of work. Check out http://www.spacethefinalfrontier.co.uk/
March Patch Tuesday Complete
March patch Tuesday was completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted infrastructure without interruption to service.
You can view full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms10-mar.mspx
New Media Breakfast
Just back from the New Media Breakfast at The Roxburghe Hotel, which I found very informative. Saw some crazy statistics and how the customer interaction has changed over the past few years. It seems we’re doing some things right, but we could do more on the social media front. We’re already putting a plan of action together, so watch this space. I may even start tweeting
The bacon and egg roles were also a great start to what looks like a great day in Edinburgh.
February Patch Tuesday Complete
February patch Tuesday was completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted infrastructure without interruption to service.
You can view full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms10-feb.mspx
Visual Studio 2010 RC
Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate has been released to MSDN subscribers. There are some clear improvements over the Beta, namely on the performance side, which is great news.
We use Visual Studio to build our offline/Windows based applications that interact with our web based applications, for example, allowing you to continue working even without an Internet connection. We’re hoping the new version will lead to less effort and time spent on coding/building our apps, lowering costs for our customers.
Edinburgh Charity Fashion Show
Last year, WEBIT helped build and put together the ticket sales area of the site, enabling charity givers to book their Student and/or VIP tickets to the ECFS event online, securely. Ticket sales for this year have just started and we would encourage anyone that is able to go on March 20th, to book tickets! It’s a great event and the money will go to a great cause.
For more information and to book your tickets, visit:
New Microsite for Anvil Hall
We’ve been working hard with team at the Gretna Wedding Bureau on their new dedicated micro site for Anvil Hall, the premier wedding venue for Gretna Green weddings. You can view the new site at:
Maintenance Periods
When a new customer approaches us for a new system or an update to their website we often get asked “So how long are we going to be down?”. The simple answer is that it won’t be noticeable. Too often we see websites that are undergoing “maintenance periods”. Why? Unless you have hundreds of thousands of hits and a large database to update there is no reason.
With the methodologies used by WEBIT and Anything Hosted, interruption to service is kept to a minimum. In reality, when we say minimum, we’re talking under 10 seconds…and that doesn’t include our High Availability service, which has zero interruption.
If you would like to learn more on how we work, methodologies used and why we consider ourselves to be in the top percentile of software development, give us a call.
Internet Explorer patch released – KB978207
Microsoft has issued security hot-fixes to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer which saw Google fall victim to some targeted and sophisticated attacks recently. The vulnerability was unveiled when Google went public that they were targeted in a sophisticated cyber-attack. The breach, involving Internet Explorer 6, resulted in the theft of intellectual property. The hot fix is out of band from the normal “Patch Tuesday”, and WEBIT would urge all to update via Windows Update as soon as possible.
A restart of your computer will be needed.
All of our Microsoft based servers were patched earlier today without interruption to service.
Project Completion
A complete revamp of Scotland and Gretna’s premier wedding photographers and planners has just gone live.
You can check out their site here: http://www.gretnaweddings.co.uk/
January Patch Tuesday Complete
January’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all our Windows based servers. With our improved infrastructure, there was no interruption to any of our services.
A fitting quote
Came across this quote, which reminded me of what WEBIT and I are trying to do with our software:
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
— Albert Einstein
Windows 7 -Godmode
For those Power Users among us, you can enable a one stop shop for all settings in Windows 7.
Create a new folder (can be anywhere, such as your desktop) and choose the name “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without the quotes). From here, you can now change/view nearly all of your computer settings in one place.
Happy New Year – 2010
All the staff at WEBIT and Anything Hosted would like to wish our customers, friends and family a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.We have lots of exciting new things happening this year, so stay tuned!
Merry Christmas
WEBIT and Anything Hosted would like wish all our customers and friends a Merry Christmas and all the best for 2010.
CEng Awarded
Further to our previous post in July (CITP), Chris has yet again shown excellence in IT, by being awarded Chartered Engineer from the Engineering Council UK.
According to Engineering Council UK, Chartered Engineers “are characterised by their ability to develop appropriate solutions to engineering problems, using new or existing technologies, through innovation, creativity and change. They might develop and apply new technologies, promote advanced designs and design methods, introduce new and more efficient production techniques, marketing and construction concepts, pioneer new engineering services and management methods. Chartered Engineers are variously engaged in technical and commercial leadership and possess interpersonal skills.”
We would like to congratulate Chris on this prestigious accomplishment.
Project Completion
Over the past 3-4 months WEBIT has been working hard with our longest customer, R G Carter Construction on an exciting new project.
At the beginning of this month we went live, marking the the transition from our “deploy and stabilise” phase to “support and maintenance”.
Exchange 2010 Migration Complete
Our migration to Exchange 2010 has been completed successfully. All phases (1-6) were completed within the target timescales. We would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding during the migration.
Our new environment has a much improved infrastructure, taking advantage of the new (easier) high availability offerings available in Exchange 2010 Enterprise and Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise, not to mention the new features 2010 brings.
Our new dedicated Exchange site will be ready early in the new year.
PHP 5.3.1 running on FreeBSD
We have upgraded our latest development and testing environments with 5.3.1 running on FreeBSD. For those that want a hand, here are the steps to patch the port (remember to run portsnap fetch update first!):
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Family Guy and Windows 7 Clips revealed
Microsoft has posted the ‘missing’ family guy clips on their youtube channel. They’re just adverts to be honest…still good though. I rate the first one as the funniest. You be the judge…see the link below for all four clips:
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/26/microsofts-windows-7-family-guy-clips-revealed
FreeBSD 8 Release
“The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. This release starts off the new 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.X and introduces many new features.”
With most of our web servers running FreeBSD, we will be installing and testing the new version in a virtual machine and consider the servers in our portfolio to upgrade. All new virtual machines and servers will use version 8. You can grab more information on the updates/changes here.
Fasthosts in day-long email FAIL
Spotted this article over at the Reg:
“Customers of Fasthosts – the UK-based webhost – have been without both POP and web-based email for much of the day, complaining that such outages have become, shall we say, far too prevalent in recent months.
A half-dozen users have contacted The Reg about the outage, and countless others have complained via posts to the web. According to web posts, the problem began as early as Monday evening.”
Fasthosts are part of United Internet, which also includes 1&1 Internet.
Our Exchange 2010 Enterprise service boasts a 5 nines availability, if you want to switch, just contact a member of the team and we’ll set everything up for you.
Exchange 2010 Migration
The migration of all WEBIT and Anything Hosted staff mailboxes to Exchange 2010 Enterprise is now complete.
Over the next few weeks we will be moving our customers’ mailboxes to the new high availability environment. An email will be sent out on Wednesday this week detailing the planned migration date(s).
Office 2010 Beta
Office 2010 Beta was made available to Partners today (public should get it later this week). We’re really looking forward to testing this with our new Exchange 2010 setup.
Note that when Office 2010 is released, all of our Exchange customers will be able to grab a copy of Outlook 2010 free of charge under our licence agreement. Contact one of the team if you have any questions…
Exchange 2010 Available to Partners
Exchange 2010 RTM was made available to strategic Microsoft Partners today. A trial version can be downloaded by the public.
We’ve already started to download the new verion and plan deploy into our new Exchange High Availability environment shortly…watch this space!
Spotted
Walking home after jumping off the bus I spotted Chris and took a quick photo of him recycling all evidence of his late nights last week with pizza and diet coke.
Click the post to view the photo!
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Relaunch: 3…2…1…Go!
After a lot of hard work last week, the team have made our revamped sites live. You can visit the them below:
http://www.webit-tech.co.uk
http://www.theitrange.co.uk
http://www.anythinghosted.co.uk
Watchdog & (in)secure email
For anyone that watched last night’s Watchdog on how insecure email can be at wireless hot spots; I can confirm that all of our Exchange 2007 customers would not have been affected/at risk. Our Exchange 2007 Client Access Server requires access via an encrypted connection (https) for whole duration of your session. This differes from many other popular web based services that only require the secure connection when entering the password.
You can watch the episode online here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nmv0l/Watchdog_29_10_2009/
As a reiteration, all of our applications and websites that require a username/password (usually for the admin panel) run over https and are forced to use https.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact myself or a member of the team and we’ll be happy to answer them.
New domain acquired
WEBIT and Anything Hosted have acquired www.microsoftexchangehosting.co.uk. This is going to be a great addition in building our Exchange 2010 arm of Anything Hosted.
Watch this space!
No Support For Family Guy
Despite early approval from Microsoft about a Family Guy special involving Windows 7, Microsoft has confirmed that they’ve dropped their support for the episode. The reason being that, “…after reviewing an early version of the variety show, it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand”. I’m sure avid viewers will understand. But as they say, the show must go on, and so will this: it’s being aired in the US on November 8th. Although it won’t be released in the UK for a few months, our friends across the border will fill us in on what happens.
Windows 7 Official Release
Windows 7 was made available to the general public today. Having used it personally since the beta in January and the final version in August, it is a must upgrade for anyone!
You can get more information on Windows 7 here or contact one of the team at WEBIT here and we’ll be happy to answer any questions or talk you the best upgrade path for your organisation.
Move Over Harry Potter
Amazon has reported that pre-orders for the Windows 7 operating system has stormed ahead of the pre-orders made for ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. Come on Windows 7! However it should be noted that this isn’t the case for The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. Speaking of which, can anyone tell me if it’s worth reading?
Windows Mobile 6.5
We are really pleased that Vodafone, WEBIT’s chosen mobile carrier has released a ROM update for the new version of Windows Mobile 6.5. The improved benefits WM6.5 will become apparant when we switch to Exchange 2010 before the end of the year -namely being able to push Outlook Mobile updates to the phone and synchronising SMS.
If you have this phone (Touch Pro II on Vodafone), you can get the update here: http://devicehelp.vodafone.co.uk/firmwaredevice.php?ModelID=384&e=0
Exchange 2010 RTM
Microsoft Exchange 2010′s code is complete is on it’s way to General Availbility. Anything Hosted, WEBIT’s wholly owned partner hopes to launch E2010 before the end of the year for new and existing customers. All of us here are very excited to offer their new version, which boasts many improvements.
You can read more here:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx
http://www.exchange2010hosting.co.uk/
E-Rage!
I was searching the net when I came across an old article in the BBC archive. It highlights the fact that a big contributor to the loss of computer data is due to human error (yes..You!). One American man got so angry at his laptop he actually shot at it! (failing to realise that none of his files were backed-up). Have a read of the article; it’s quite an eye-opener, especially the examples at the bottom. After you’re finished, check out BACK IT UP for our solution to these problems (the loss of data that is…not e-rage).
PHP 5.2.11 Released.
After last week’s release announced at www.php.net we are happy to announce that all our managed and high availbility servers have been upgraded to the latest release without any problems or downtime.If yo
For more information on the release, please visit the changelog here http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.2.11. You can visit our hosting site here at http://www.anythinghosted.co.uk
‘Race the Runway’ at Edinburgh Airport
Today some of the Webit Team enjoyed a day on the runway helping raise money for St. Columba’s Hospice in Edinburgh and the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow. We had drag races along the runway hitting speeds of 140 mph! (others hit over 200mph) We not only raced along the closed off runway at Edinburgh Airport, we also enjoyed ‘another’ tour of the Air Traffic Control Tower (see post dated June 9 for more info), drove a very large fire truck (airport style, not the ones we see on the roads) and finally took part in a fire drill exercise in a smoked filled shell of a plane. All in all a great day! But more importantly, all those that took part help raise over £16,000 for charity.
http://blogs.discoverychannel.co.uk/discovery-news/2009/09/supercars-race-on-edinburgh-runway.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8273690.stm
The Cost of Data Loss
This information may be old (and based in America), but the information still runs true for today’s businesses in the United Kingdom. View the video and hear what Dr David M. Smith has to say on the subject! And remember, all our servers are based in the UK and come under UK law and compliance, all the more reason to start using back IT up right now (which in one way or another the Doc did say to do).
Memory-Stick Disaster at Ealing Council
An employee at Ealing Council (just outside London) put in their infected memory-stick into the network causing a virus to spread and infect many of their systems. This resulted in £500,000 of lost revenue and system repairs! If organisations such as this can make mistakes, could you? Just letting you know, it’s really important for businesses to start looking into methods of backing-up their data ‘just in case’; our simple, safe and secure solution to this problem is BACK IT UP (did you see what we did there)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/sep/03/ealing-council-computer-virus