The big story in Tech today is that several of T-Mobile’s Sidekick owners are without their contacts, to-do-lists and calendars today after a massive server fail.

According to T-Mobile, the loss is a result of a server failure at Microsoft. In 2008, Microsoft acquired start-up company Danger which hosts all of the Sidekick’s data.

While the Sidekick hasn’t achieved iPhone or Blackberry status, the phone was extremely popular in early 2000 and was one of the first phones to grab the younger demographic with text and Internet packages built in to the phone package.

A big part of the story today has centered around how this could happen, but I have a different question. What does this say about cloud computing?

With Google, Microsoft and others rumored to be working on an operating system which operates in a “cloud,” what kind of faith can users have in companies which can’t even successfully host cell phone data?

This is a very scary question and one that may challenge the idea that we are ready for such a move.
To quote a somewhat censored favorite saying of mine, “stuff still happens.”

So if your company isn’t backing up its data or isn’t using a reputable Blackberry hosting provider, what will happen when you lose all your data.
Give us a ring at www.finalasp.com or 1-800-959-9034 if you can’t answer this question.

Glance at the business section at your local bookstore and you’ll probably see the same titles I do every time I enter my favorite bookstore.
“Increase your company’s sales” and “develop real customer relationships” bombard us at every turn. As business owners, we are addicted to new sales ideas and love to believe some new technique we will find in a book will put us ahead of our competitors.
I’m not knocking these authors or the helpfulness of their curriculum, but are we really reading anything new?
The truth is the concept of developing great customer service and new business relationships is easy – it’s the implementation that’s the tricky part.
I’ve yet to meet a half-way-decent business owner who went out of his way to treat customers badly. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen which begs the question, where do we go wrong in customer service?

Microsoft opens Windows Marketplace for Mobile with 246 apps

Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft's equivalen to the Apple's iPhone App Store, opened for business officially on October 6 with 246 applications. That is nowhere near the more than 85,000 apps in the App Store, but Microsoft officials claim not to be discouraged.

Mary Jo Foley from ZDNET asks When Will Live Mesh Matter...?

"I asked Robbie Bach, the President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division about how and when he expected teams in his unit to take advantage of Live Mesh."

There’s no wonder that when software giant Microsoft released details on Exchange 2010, saving money was the theme.
The recession has left no industry unscathed and Microsoft was smart to recognize that businesses are looking to save money.
In Exchange 2010, you can expect the key benefits to all go towards improving your bottom line.
A big new feature is an email archiving system built straight into exchange. Your company’s email is one of the most important sources of information your business has, but only a few companies are taking the proper steps to protect it.
According to Osterman Research, only 28 percent of organizations currently archive their email content.  That’s not exactly the majority.
As far as cost savings go, Microsoft hosted exchange is all about making your office more efficient.
Business owners know that a loss of productivity is one of their major expenses.  According to Basex, Inc., businesses are expected to lose $650 million because of unnecessary interruptions during the day. Email can of course be a huge interruption. The average employee is expected to receive 93 emails a day by 2010. That’s a lot of interruptions.
Microsoft Hosted Exchange 2010 centers around preventing those interruptions by giving users more information on the emails they are replying to and options on avoiding long email strings.
Here’s a full list of new features:

• -MailTips. Warn users before they commit an e-mail faux pas such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization, helping protect against information leaks and reduce unnecessary e-mail messages.
• -Voice Mail Preview. See text previews of voice mail directly in Outlook.
• -Ignore Conversation. This e-mail “mute button” allows people to remove themselves from an irrelevant e-mail string, reducing unwanted e-mail and runaway reply-all threads.
• -Conversation View. Combine related e-mail messages in a single conversation to reduce inbox clutter.
• -Call Answering Rules. Create customized “Press 1 for …” call-routing menus with Exchange voice mail.
• -Consistent Experience. Use Outlook on the PC, a mobile phone or a browser for the same experience with enhancements in Outlook Mobile and Outlook Web Access

Of course this only a few features you can expect in hosted exchange 2010. A new Web interface also looks promising as well as better integration with non-Internet Explorer browsers.

For more information on in Microsoft Exchange and when 2010 will be available, contact Final ASP or call 1-800-959-9034.

One of the great things about a quality hosted exchange environment is that it can be used to accomplish so many of the everyday tasks that face us at the office.

No doubt many of you are on Twitter and, if your company is smart, your business is on Twitter as well. If you're not on the Twitter then you may want to check out our spinoff company Magnetic SEO but that's a topic for another day.

But how do you incorporate your workflow into Twitter? The Website version is a little clunky and many of the Twitter clients run off Adobe Air and aren't quite ready for business use.

Enter TwInbox. The software runs right in your Outlook box and looks just like a normal Outlook message. The solution isn't obtrusive and it doesn't get in the way of your every day work. In fact, with this software you may actual find more use and business leads from the powerful social media site.

Oh by the way: It's free.

Some features:

Check out the features:

• Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
• Receive your friend updates in Outlook.
• Archive, manage, group and search your tweets the
  same way you manage your email.
• Search, track keywords. TwInbox will automatically download ALL tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender. This feature is perfect for keeping up to date with the Twitter buzz on your name, brand, interests, etc.
• Group tweets by sender, topic, etc using the Search feature.
• Upload and post picture files and Outlook email attachments.
• See new tweets at a glance.
• Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
• Use Outlook's "Reply" and "ReplyAll" commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
• Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
• Shorten URLs
• See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.
• Tweets sent to you (@replies and direct) are marked with high importance, so you can see them at a glance.

We jst got back from presenting a very large deal to a customer for Hosted Exchange, Office communications server and Sharepoint.  This client would be migrating from a very large Novell Groupwise environment.

I was able to locate some very useful information about Novell Groupwise to Hosted Microsoft Exchange here:

In addition to that the Quest Software Groupwise to Miocrosoft Exchange Migrator is always a useful tool for these migrations.