Europe's rival to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, Euro-Office, is set to start shipping next week as part of the bloc's move towards sovereign technology.

First announced in March, Euro-Office has involved a collaboration between a number of European companies and organizations, including IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian, BTactic, OpenXchange and Office.eu.

It's a web-based editor integrated into other products that handle documents, for example file-sharing solutions, online wikis, or project management tools.

It allows users to view, edit and work with others on spreadsheets, documents, presentations and PDF files, as well as other file formats including DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, ODT, ODS, ODP, and TXT.

Users can edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentation files with others in real time and save the document back to the application used to open it, or download in various file formats.

The inspiration behind Euro-Office

The Euro-Office project comes as part of a growing trend to try and reduce EU reliance on US software.

The new office suite will be released as an integration in solutions from participating companies from the start, including the latest Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring version.

IONOS Managed Nextcloud customers will follow, with the roll-out to IONOS’ Nextcloud Workspace offering planned for later this summer.

French company XWiki expects to integrate it in the fourth quarter of this year, while Netherlands-based Office.eu also plans to roll it out.

“Our top priority was to provide a version that people could actually work with. First, we had to clean up the code, implement some security updates, and integrate Euro-Office with existing solutions,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud.

"The next step is to work on the desktop and mobile apps and integration features. For a truly sovereign solution, it is also important to fully support open standards such as ODF formats, and this will be on top of the agenda for the next release."

In order to make it as easy as possible for contributors to join the open source project, automated testing has been set up, code comments have been translated into English, documentation has been improved, and the code has been cleaned up.

Controversy surrounding Euro-Office

There's a bit of controversy around the project. Euro-Office is based on the code of open source productivity suite OnlyOffice.

In March, project maintainers issued a statement accusing Euro-Office of violating the software’s licensing terms and international intellectual property law.

OnlyOffice is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL v3), with a few additional requirements, OnlyOffice said.

These include preserving OnlyOffice branding in derivative works, providing proper attribution to the original technology, and fully complying with open source distribution obligations.

"These conditions are not optional. They are a fundamental part of using the software legally and ethically," the firm said.

"Any argument that a modified or derivative version of the software may be distributed under a “pure” AGPLv3 license, excluding the additional conditions imposed pursuant to Section 7, is legally unfounded."

Euro-Office is available on GitHub, here.

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Organizations are spending a fortune on fixing software license non-compliance, prompting some IT leaders to embrace open source alternatives.

Java platform Azul and the ITAM Forum said that 27% of enterprises now spend more than $500,000 each year dealing with the issue.

Oracle Java is a top concern, with 73% having undergone an Oracle Java audit within the past three years and nearly eight-in-ten saying they have migrated, or intend to migrate, to open source Java alternatives to try and manage the risk and cost.

Just under two-thirds reckoned that open source Java alternatives could save them at least 40% compared with Oracle Java licensing costs.

“The data reveals a concerning trend where the increasing complexity of vendor licensing and pricing has turned routine upkeep into recurring six-figure compliance exercises,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO of Azul.

"When 73% of enterprises have been audited and one in four now spends more than $500,000 a year cleaning up license issues, the cost of merely staying compliant with software licensing and pricing is unsustainable."

Hybrid cloud architectures and an increasing inventory of applications are making it harder than ever to maintain compliance and visibility across teams, while organisations are struggling to track usage consistently, both on-premises and in the cloud.

More than a third of survey respondents said that compliance, including the management of excessive licensing, was the top issue facing their organization.

A quarter complained that complex software configurations make tracking application usage more difficult, particularly across teams or between on-premises and cloud platforms.

Other challenges around managing software licensing and compliance included difficulty in aligning teams, including IT, software development, legal, and procurement, cited by 27%.

Similarly, resource constraints, escalating prices, and compliance with evolving licensing rules or vendor policy updates are all key pain points for enterprises.

Audit challenges are causing headaches

Notably, the study found three-quarters of organizations are handling audits internally, but cite challenges with coordination, collaboration, and organization when it comes to tracking software inventory.

More than a quarter struggle to maintain accurate software usage records, while 23% said it's hard to understand complex licensing terms and conditions, with the same number struggling to provide accurate licensing compliance metrics.

Just over eight-in-ten organizations carry out licensing audits at least twice a year, with 25% conducting audits continuously.

Meanwhile, a quarter report frequent financial penalties and legal actions against them.

“The results highlight a fundamental mismatch between the complexity of modern software licensing and the resources organisations rely on to effectively manage software compliance,” said Martin Thompson, founder of the ITAM Forum.

“ITAM and SAM professionals are becoming increasingly vital as organizations recognize that poor license management can result in significant financial penalties and operational disruptions. They must have the resources and executive buy-in to ensure compliance and successful license management.”

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Organizations that have cracked IT cost optimization and innovation reap the rewards both financially and in terms of time to market, according to new research from SoftwareOne.

They are twice as likely as the rest of the pack to see an improved return on investment, researchers found. A third reported higher profitability, compared with 23% of other organizations, and 43% said they were seeing a faster time to market.

The researchers surveyed organizations in 12 countries and across six industry sectors in North and Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region.

They categorized survey respondents into three categories — Optimized Innovators, Aspiring Innovators and Initiating Innovators — based on their reported levels of progress in optimizing IT costs and building a modern IT foundation.

The study found that while 48% of executives at mid-sized companies lacked the budget or were unsure they had the budget to fund the next round of innovation, Optimized Innovators achieved significantly better results.

"Aligning the business benefits of innovation investments with opportunities to strategically optimize IT estates is critical to success," said Oliver Berchtold, president of software and cloud at SoftwareOne.

"Our study suggests that there is a clear opportunity for companies to optimize to innovate."

Top-performing enterprises have nailed IT cost optimization

Optimized Innovators shared seven best practices, the research found, being well ahead of other companies in installing a modern IT foundation for driving ongoing cost optimization and innovation.

Over the next two years, they plan to significantly outspend other companies on critical technologies, particularly in network security, automation, and cloud and SaaS management. They also prioritized data security and privacy, using nearly every available cybersecurity solution more often than others.

More than two-thirds said they'd made significant progress in building a cloud-based infrastructure, with more than half having moved their apps to the cloud and migrated core processes. A similar percentage have established governance, compliance, and security policies.

Meanwhile, they are closing the AI gap and moving ahead with adoption strategies to automate processes, improve decision-making, internal processes and customer engagement.

This means they are nearly twice as likely as others to be at mid-or-advanced levels of implementation for internal purposes, as well as being considerably further ahead in customer engagement.

All in all, Optimized Innovators are ahead of their peers across nearly all areas of cost management, having made significant progress in monitoring and cutting operational, software licensing and IT infrastructure costs.

Optimization efforts will continue

This sharpened focus on IT optimization is expected to continue, according to SoftwareOne.

Over the next two years, the firm expects these high-flying enterprises to make the most progress in areas such as sustainability, while others will align FinOps with sustainability practices to optimize resource usage, reduce waste, and cut energy costs.

"Having defined innovation priorities that drive business outcomes, companies can have a more informed understanding of their IT landscape with an end-goal in mind. This includes analyzing software licenses, cloud environments and custom applications to identify areas for optimization," said Berchtold.

"This process will free up resources to invest where it matters most to the business, whether it be GenAI adoption, security solutions, or accelerated cloud transformation. Bringing these opportunities into reach serves as a catalyst for growth."

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The secret to completing a successful software purchase is to know what you're aiming to achieve, keep your list of options short, and temper expectations, according to new analysis.

A survey of UK software buyers by Capterra found that 57% of UK businesses regret at least one software purchase that they've made in the past 18 months – and a third of these regretful buyers say they wished they'd clarified their company goals and desired outcomes better.

By aligning on goals early in the process, this helped buyers make sure they had a realistic plan for integrating and using the technology.

Notably, having a short initial list seems to help. Nearly three-quarters of happy customers had between one and four options on their initial list, compared to regretful buyers, who had as many as 59.

Successful buyers are also more flexible when it comes to swapping out some of their initial vendor choices during the process.

Other useful tactics were to listen to users and industry experts. Successful buyers, the survey found, use expert advice, customer testimonials, and review comparison sites to assess their choices.

Similarly, seven-in-ten software buyers said they trusted review and comparison sites over vendor sites for gauging customer satisfaction.

Software buyers who try a product first via a product trial or online demonstration were less likely to regret their purchase. Meanwhile, seven-in-ten satisfied software buyers carried out a product trial, compared with just half of regretful buyers.

For buyers in the UK, the research found other frequent challenges included adopting software that is too complex alongside difficulties onboarding staff onto the new software.

"One of the biggest points highlighted by a third of regretful buyers in the U.K. is having clearer goals and working more closely around desired outcomes," said David Jani, UK analyst for Capterra.

"Other common issues revolve around having better processes around stakeholder communication and conducting more in-depth research around possible vendors, particularly in the case of security provisions."

Poor choices deliver poor outcomes

A bad choice, the study found, increased costs for more than half of software buyers, with four-in-ten citing reduced productivity.

A third said they'd experienced security vulnerabilities, a third had adoption difficulties and a quarter cited competitive disadvantage.

"There’s a lot to learn from the 43% of UK companies that had successful software purchases. Just like companies tend to analyze their competitors’ marketing or sales strategies, they should also pay closer attention to how other businesses make decisions during the software buying process," said Jani.

"Not only is this essential in helping disappointed buyers make the right tech choices, but also helps businesses remain efficient and at a competitive advantage for years to come."

Payroll and HR solutions provider Zellis has announced plans to acquire elementsuite in a move the firm said will expand the capabilities of its HR software offering.

The transaction, for which financial terms were not disclosed, will see elementsuite combined with Zellis’ own payroll and HR software to create an end-to-end, AI-powered platform.

Headquartered in Watford, elementsuite provides an AI-powered HR and workforce management (WFM) software suite designed to manage the full employee lifecycle.

Prominent fast food giants McDonald’s and Five Guys are listed as customers.

Subject to customary closing conditions, Zellis and elementsuite will now become one company in a move Zellis said will see both sets of customers gain access to new AI-powered software capabilities.

“We’re excited by the opportunity that this combination brings for new and existing customers of both elementsuite and Zellis,” commented Zellis CEO Abigail Vaughan.

“Bringing together the depth of talent across both businesses and combining the strength of elementsuite’s HR and AI capabilities with Zellis’ payroll, HR and AI capabilities will deliver even more value to our combined customers.”

Founded in 1963, Zellis specializes in the provision of payroll, HR, and managed services to customers across the UK and Ireland with more than 500 employees.

The firm itself has grown to become the largest provider of its kind in the UK, serving more than five million customers’ employees and over 60 million payslips every year.

Zellis eyes AI gains with latest acquisition

The elementsuite acquisition is Zellis’ latest move to expand its AI capabilities and follows the release of its HCM AIR solution, which is designed to enhance functionality and the employee experience, in June of last year.

Commenting on the move, Steve Elcock, CEO and founder of elementsuite, said Zellis’ standing will enable the firm to better meet the needs of the market.

“We are incredibly proud of the AI enabled HR suite we have developed in recent years and, with the support of Zellis, are looking forward to bringing the benefits of our technology to more businesses,” he said.

“Zellis’ leadership in payroll will further enhance our overall offering and will help us better meet market demand.”

Tech leaders have voiced serious concerns about the rising trend of ‘SaaS dependency’, warning that developers are being hindered by a growing array of tools.

In its SaaS Disruption Report, Onymos found that 84% of technology leaders rely on SaaS tools with low-code or no-code capabilities for software development.

However, there are big challenges across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), with almost a quarter of technology leaders indicating that application performance is a major business impediment.

Technology leaders singled out development (22%), quality assurance (20%), and maintenance (20%) as the three most arduous phases of the SDLC, with more than three-quarters saying that workloads for updating applications have risen in the last year.

Over half identified daily maintenance and application operations tasks as taking the most time. But while 84% of technology leaders reckoned that optimizing application development capabilities was of primary importance, fewer than half said they spend time on application innovation.

"While SaaS tools have seemingly become indispensable for enterprises as they focus on software development to drive business value, our findings reveal critical gaps in the current model – particularly around maintenance, innovation, and data," said Shiva Nathan, founder and CEO of Onymos.

Technology leaders said there are significant business risks tied to unaddressed challenges in software development. More than half highlighted higher operational costs, while 45% cited increased security risks, and 38% compliance and regulatory concerns.

Around one-third mentioned reduced profitability, with 28% citing missed revenue opportunities.

"To truly enable enterprises to maximize their software development efforts and create innovative and differentiated applications and secure their data, we must transform the current SaaS model to offer greater flexibility, empower development teams with more control, reduce the burdens of maintenance and updates, and give data ownership back," said Nathan.

"By reimagining SaaS to address the challenges enterprises face, we can realize new opportunities for enterprises to innovate faster, deliver greater value to their customers, and secure their data and reputations."

Earlier this year, a report from Red Canary found that software ecosystems are riddled with underutilized or inefficient SaaS tools, which is bogging down practitioners operating across a range of different industries.

Three-quarters of security teams said their attack surface had widened by 77% in the past two years.

In a previous study released this summer, Onymos found that more than three-quarters of technology leaders were concerned about SaaS security threats, with 45% saying they'd experienced a cybersecurity incident through a third party SaaS solution in the past year.

The average enterprise uses 130 different SaaS applications, the survey found, with around 85% of IT leaders saying they rely on low-code or no-code SaaS solutions for their application and software projects.

Monday.com is a project management tool. It's also a process monitoring platform, team management hub, low-code development environment, and more. What looks at first glance like a spreadsheet with added smarts is, in fact, a flexible hub for managing and monitoring a distributed workload, keeping teams on the same page, and tracking projects as they progress. It's so flexible that there are few teams for which it couldn't sit at the heart of their ongoing business.

There are three distinct modules to the Monday.com platform. Here, we're looking at Monday.com for Work Management, but this is supplemented by CRM and Dev environments. The first of these helps with lead capture, sales pipelines, and customer onboarding, while the Dev option eyes sprint management, bug tracking, and roadmap planning. There's some commonality between them, chiefly in the way they present information, which is tied to tasks that progress through distinct stages as work is completed.

Each is built around a board, much like a spreadsheet database hybrid, that can be sorted, arranged, and split as appropriate. So, if you have separate teams responsible for discrete steps in an overall process, you could define these within your table. As a member of one team marks their work complete, automation (see below) could move it from their section of the board to the next, for an at-a-glance overview of the current state of play.

Monday.com: Sign-up and pricing

Sign-up is a breeze. Specify a name, password, and company, select what you'd like to manage – legal, HR, operations, and so on – and where you want to focus first. This could be contact management, strategic planning, your sales pipeline, or a dozen other options. You can then start inviting colleagues to collaborate. Beyond this, there's a simple wizard that will help you set up your first board so you can start using it right away, even before your colleagues sign up.

If you're using the free tier, you can enroll two seats in total, and organize up to 200 items on three boards. Beyond that, you're paying on a per-seat per-month basis, subject to a minimum of three seats. So Basic, which lifts the restriction on the number of boards and items you can manage, costs £8 per seat per month, equivalent to a starting price of £288 a year if you pay upfront, where you benefit from an 18% discount, or £396 if you split the cost 12 ways. 

Three other tiers, each of them more expensive, naturally push things further. Standard, starting at £13 per seat per month, introduces timeline and Gantt views, guest access, automations, and integrations. Pro (£21 per seat per month) includes private boards, chart views, time tracking, and the ability to use formulas to perform calculations on your data. And Enterprise, for which you'll need to discuss the fee with Sales, improves on existing security, automation, integration, and permissions controls.

Monday.com: Spreadsheets

At its simplest, Monday.com is a smart table with columns for tasks, owners, status and so on. You can use it to plan work, assign tasks, and monitor progress. So far, so simple, but dig deeper and it's a lot more accomplished.

If the table layout doesn't suit your way of working and you're signed to Standard or above, switch to the calendar or timeline, see how sequential jobs rely on earlier tasks with a Gantt chart, or use a kanban board like you'd find in Trello.

All data can be input and managed manually, with users populating cards and assigning them to teams or individuals. However, pay for the Standard tier or above, and you can integrate the third-party tools you already use elsewhere. More than 200 apps, including Teams, Slack, Gmail, and Excel, can share data with the platform. You could create a task directly from a message received in Gmail, or build a Monday.com dashboard widget drawing data from QuickBooks.

Some of these integrations are free, but not all. You can connect to DocuSign, track issues in Github, or use Ziflow to share and review creative assets without paying anything extra – but, depending on the extension you choose, you could be looking at $4 a month to embed Microsoft Office files, and between $50 and $750 a month to integrate Zoom phone. As a rule of thumb, if the integration is developed by a third party, it's more likely you'll need to pay. The Microsoft and Zoom examples cited above are each a case in point: neither Microsoft nor Zoom were the original developers of the add-ons in question.

Monday.com: Low-code programming

Where a feature doesn't already exist, you may be able to develop it yourself using no-code/low-code programming. The idea behind no-code/low-code is that teams are given the tools they need to produce their own workflows. The benefits are obvious: so long as they have a clear idea of how the workflow will operate and don't put company data at risk, they can avoid writing lengthy spec documents and instead produce the program themselves, rather than sharing a central development resource with other departments, and waiting for their job to reach the top of the stack.

If you've ever used IFTTT, which relies on conditions, tests, and actions, the process will be familiar: test for condition X and, if met, do Y. Start by picking an option from a 'When this happens' menu, like 'date arrives', 'status changes', or 'update created', then pick an outcome: move an item to a group, send an email, create an item in a board, and so on. Many outcomes have options, too, so, to dig further into the email-sending example, you can specify the recipient, subject line, and body copy, and drag in variables like item names, status, and due dates. Use this to notify team members when they've been assigned a task and there will be no excuse for projects running late.

The number of integrations and automation you can set is determined by your tier. Standard gets you 250 actuations of each, rising to 25,000 if you upgrade to Pro. You don't get any on the free plan, which is fair enough, but we think it's a bit stingy that Basic loses out, too.

Monday.com: Workflow

Monday.com bills itself as a Work OS. Its low-code programming features probably justify this on their own, but additional tools, like file sharing and the ability to attach chat threads to individual board items go a long way to giving them greater context and helping keep the team focused on a single environment, in much the same way that the tools for sharing within context do in platforms like Teams and Slack.

Separately, a Workdocs feature provides space for less specific collaboration where colleagues can chat, draw up lists and checkboxes, brainstorm, share images, and more. Team members can contribute simultaneously, and everything is saved automatically. You can link Workdocs to one another, other users, and even embed a board inside a Workdoc for a single point of reference.

Workdocs first appeared in 2021 but other additions, like the button column, are more recent. Implement this, and you can tie a specific action to a button embedded in your board, by completing a simple form – much as you would when setting up an automation. Other recent additions include CSV imports, automatic task assignment, keyboard navigation, and more granular board filtering.

Perhaps inevitably, AI also makes an appearance. Built on Azure OpenAI, Monday.com suggests you'd use it to quickly define the tasks required to complete common projects, summarise documents, or develop formulas to embed in a board and analyze its contents.

Monday.com: Integration with rival platforms

You can't argue that Monday.com lacks a USP – but that's not to say it lacks rivals. However you organize your tasks, whether you prefer kanban, Gantt, or the smart table, the board is its central focus and, for our money, its strongest appeal. Additional features, like chat and AI, are logical extensions, but not something you can't find elsewhere.

Teams and Slack are both working hard to integrate AI, and they have document sharing and live collaboration features built in, much like Monday.com. Each is fully tooled to act as a team hub, and you can access features of project management tools, like Teamwork.com, Trello, and even Monday.com, through extensions. The Monday.com extensions for Slack and Teams let you add items to boards from within either platform, so long as you're signed up to Monday.com's Standard tier or above.

Monday.com: Is it right for you?

As is common across the SaaS landscape, you can sign up and get started for free. However, where Slack and Teams offer pretty much anything smaller organizations could need in their gratis plans, that's not the case with Monday.com. Here, the Free tier limits you to two seats, three boards, and 200 items (which you can increase to 1000 through referrals). If it could stretch this to three seats, we could live with the three-board limit – but, depending on your business, that 200-item start point could be an issue.

Monday.com claims that the Standard tier, at £13 per seat per month, subject to a minimum of three seats, is the most popular option, and it's not hard to see why. This level introduces automations and integrations; timeline, Gantt, and calendar views; Zoom integration; and guest access. You'll also benefit from the custom fields, unlimited boards, and unlimited documents that carry over from the £11 per seat per month Basic plan.

Even if you only make light use of the platform, paying for the Standard tier gets you a lot of features at a very fair price, which makes it easy to recommend.

A system administrator at software firm Avaya has been indicted following his involvement in a fraud scheme that saw pirated licenses worth $88 million sold to co-conspirators over the course of several years. 

US courts said on Friday that Brad Pearce conspired with New Jersey-based businessman Jason Hines in what officials described as a “massive international scheme” to profit from the sale of pirated telephone system software licenses. 

Pearce, who officials said was a “long-time customer service employee” at the software firm, abused his sysadmin privileges to generate keys for IP Office software licenses. 

IP Office is a telephone system used by hundreds of small businesses across the United States and abroad. To access the system, users were required to purchase access keys from an authorized Avaya distributor or reseller. 

“Brad Pearce, a long-time customer service employee at Avaya, allegedly used his system administrator privileges to generate those keys without authorization, creating tens of thousands of them that he sold to Hines and other customers,” the Department of Justice said in a statement on Friday. 

According to earlier court documents on the case, Pearce was alleged to have abused sysadmin privileges to use former Avaya employee accounts to generate additional license keys. 

Thereafter, the licenses were purchased by Hanes’ company, Direct Business Services International (DBSI) - a New Jersey-based business communications systems provider and, up until recently, an authorized Avaya reseller. 

The scheme, which lasted several years, resulted in the sale of software licenses with a retail value of over £88 million. 

Officials added that Hines’ business was “by far” the largest customer in the pirated license scheme, purchasing over 55% of the total stolen. 

Hines pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, officials said last week. 

As part of a plea agreement, the Department of Justice said it had agreed “not to advocate” for a prison sentence of more than five years. 

In addition, Hines must forfeit “at least” $2 million as part of the deal and make full restitution to his victims. 

For their involvement in the scheme, Brad and Dusti Pearce were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, as well as a charge of money laundering.

Pearce’s involvement in the conspiracy marks the second case this year in which a company employee has actively defrauded their employer, or colluded with outside individuals to do so. 

In May, a UK-based IT worker was convicted of unauthorized computer access and blackmail after hijacking a ransomware attack on his employer. 

Ashley Liles was found to have attempted to blackmail his employer, Oxford Biomedica, into paying a ransom in the wake of a 2018 security breach. 

Liles hijacked the ransomware attack and posed as the culprits in order to blackmail company executives into paying a ransom. 

NHS ambulance services in the south of England have been impacted by a security incident at a third-party service provider, with systems knocked offline and staff unable to access records. 

South Western Ambulance Service Foundation Trust (SWASFT) and the South Central Ambulance Service Trust (SCAS), have both reported that staff have been forced to rely on paper records following the incident. 

The source of the disruption has been traced to an attack on Ortivus, a Swedish third-party software provider for the trusts. 

Both ambulance services use the firm’s MobiMed software, which provides real-time information sharing for paramedics “throughout the pre-hospital care chain”. 

The software is used by more than 12,000 paramedics across Europe and the UK, including hundreds of ambulances across the two trusts. 

Last week on 18 July , the Swedish company confirmed it had fallen victim to a cyber attack that targeted its data center environment. 

The firm revealed that electronic patient records were unavailable and that users would be forced to use manual systems “until further notice”. 

Ortivus insisted at the time that no patients had been “directly affected” by the incident, adding that “no other systems have been attacked and no customers outside of those in the hosted data center have been affected”. 

In a follow-up statement on 21 July, the firm said that it was “ready to re-initiate” MobiMed electronic patient records for customers that were affected by the attack. 

Ortivus noted that it was awaiting “final approval by NHS authorities before the ambulance trusts can reconnect”.

“Ortivus can announce that the MobiMed ePR system that was hit by the previously reported cyber attack is ready to be re-initiated for the affected customers as an interim live environment has been constructed using new equipment,” the firm said. 

“Before the system can be brought into operation it has to be approved and verified by an independent actor to ensure that the system meets certain criteria indicated by NHS England and the Ambulance Trusts.”

Exact details on the scale of the attack, or those responsible, are yet to be confirmed by Ortivus. Similarly, whether patient data has been directly exposed as a result of the attack is yet to be confirmed. 

An NHS spokesperson told ITPro it was aware of the incident and that it was working with the affected trusts. 

“We are aware of an incident affecting a small number of ambulance services. Our Cyber Security Operations Centre is working with affected organizations to investigate, alongside law enforcement colleagues, and supporting suppliers as they work to reconnect the system.”

Lucrative targets in healthcare

This attack marks the second major cyber-related disruption for NHS services in the space of a month. 

In early July, the Barts Health NHS Trust was struck by a cyber attack believed to have been carried out by the BlackCat ransomware group. 

The trust was cited on the group’s dark web victim blog in the wake of the incident with claims that several terabytes of sensitive data had been compromised. 

This included “confidential documents” such as financial details and copies of passports and driving licenses, the group claimed. 

Spencer Starkey, VP of EMEA at SonicWall, said the incident serves as a stark reminder that healthcare organizations are viewed as prime targets for highly sophisticated and aggressive hacker groups. 

“The recent heinous attack on the UK NHS ambulance service is one of many reminders of the threat the healthcare industry currently faces,” he said. 

“Cyber criminals are actively targeting the most critical aspects of our society. In this digital era, the abundance of servers and processing power has created an ideal environment for cyber criminals seeking systems to exploit for their own gain.”

Despite the increased targeting of healthcare organizations globally, research from ENISA has shown that many still employ lackluster defenses to counter growing threats. 

Its analysis of the healthcare industry in the EU found that only 27% of organizations have a dedicated ransomware defense program. 

Similarly, nearly half (40%) told the cyber security agency that they have “no security awareness program for non-IT staff”, which could be exacerbating risks. 

When the death knell finally rang out for Windows XP, there were still many organizations either scrabbling to update to Windows 7 or 8, or making their peace with running an out-of-date operating system on some of their machines.

While there were some companies in the latter group able to work out a bespoke continued support deal with Microsoft, for others it was a case of crossing their fingers and hoping for the best when it came to fending off cyber attacks.

Since then, things have been relatively stable, even as end of life for Windows 7 and Windows 8 have rolled round. But there’s now a new Windows-shaped headache looming on the horizon.

In 2025, Windows 10 will reach end-of-life. Dubbed the “last version of Windows” when it was released in 2015, it turns out that Microsoft has a somewhat elastic interpretation of the word “last”. Come 14 October, the new and improved ‘last’ version of Windows – Windows 11 – will become the only kid on the block. At least until the next one is released…

Windows 11 update problems

So why the big deal? The main issue is the hardware requirements for Windows 11, which are more stringent than those for Windows 10. This isn’t unexpected, given Windows 10 was released in 2015, but nevertheless it’s causing headaches for IT administrators and decision makers already.

The primary hurdle to Windows 11 adoption is the need for a TPM 2.0 chip. While it enhances the security of any machine – undoubtedly a good thing – it isn’t ubiquitous. For larger businesses that refresh their IT estate on a regular basis (every five years, for example), their hardware is likely to already be in line with Windows 11 requirements by the deadline. For those in the public sector, education, and smaller businesses, however, the prospect of replacing their entire IT estate is daunting. Indeed, in the words of one member of the ITPro Network, the public sector can be “laggy in places”, giving the example of one Windows 7 roll-out completing “just as everyone else was working on projects for Windows 10”.

Is Windows 10 EOL as bad as Windows XP?

One of the reasons so many organizations clung to Windows XP for so long was the significant differences in compatibility between that operating system and Windows 7 or Windows 8.

For Paul Watts, distinguished analyst at the Information Security Forum, while there are hardware compatibility challenges when upgrading to Windows 11, they’re not as significant as those of the past.

“The hardware requisites will be a problem for many.  And we still have the odd flutter of supply chain issues from the past few years causing additional challenges there. I don't think this is as big a crisis as Win XP EOL,” he says.

“[There] seems to be a narrower compatibility 'leap' from 10 to 11, as opposed to XP to 10.”

Nevertheless, he believes Windows 10 won’t go gentle into that good night, pointing not only to the hardware challenges but also the changes to the Windows 11 user interface (UI) that in his opinion make it somewhat less pleasant to use than its predecessor.

Gerard McGovern, director of digital strategy at a large NGO, says he “[doesn’t] really see the crisis”.

“2025 will be 10 years after Windows 10 launched. This is fairly standard from Microsoft. There will be a small number of machines that can’t run 11 in 2025 but the majority will,” he says. “Worst case, Microsoft will offer extended support, just like they did with Windows NT/2000/XP/7.”

The certification stumbling block

When it comes to the public sector and higher education, IT decision makers may find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Cyber Essentials Plus certification, which almost all such organizations want to have, requires the use of up-to-date software that’s fully supported by the manufacturer. Equally, though, many may find their IT estate isn’t currently up to the job, while a wholesale hardware refresh may be out of reach.

Peter O’Rourke, assistant director of IT operations at the University of Sussex said a “substantive part of [the university’s] Windows PC estate will not allegedly run Windows 11”.

“Across the University we have a diverse group of stakeholders, students, academics, active researchers, and professional services staff. While a lot of these groups will … spend a lot of their time using fairly traditional business applications, we do have our fair share of expensive academic and research equipment attached to ancient computers. This will never change for us,” he explains.

“We do have thousands of devices that are in everyday use both personally and in lab, teaching, or study spaces. A lot of these are not Windows 11 compatible.”

Should the university opt to simply overhaul its IT estate, within the limitations outlined above, it would present “a large refresh bill”. There are, however, other options as O’Rourke points out.

“We are also taking the time to consider how we wish to deliver applications and services in the future. i.e. Not simply assuming these must always be locally installed on an end user device,” he says.

“Desktop as a service might be another option, but a potentially costly one,” says Watts. “And it's not just about the endpoint anyway; it's the whole backwards compatibility with bespoke and aged software issue to be dealt with as well.  Although I'd warrant that it won't be as painful as previous EOL events.”

Happy birthday, Windows 11?

Windows 11 adoption has been slow. According to StatCounter, only 24% of all Windows computers were running Windows 11 in June 2023 and while this is an increase on the 10% adoption rate of June 2022, it’s still meager growth. Windows 10, on the other hand, continues to ride high with a 71% market share.

Our experts think this may change in the coming months, though.

Chris Madden, IT and operations director at Kreston Reeves, suggests that “businesses will wait until the first anniversary update is released before jumping on Windows 11”.

Watts agrees, saying: “Microsoft would argue that 11 has already benefited from updates and enhancements of course, but yes there is always a temptation to stay n-1 in the interests of stability – stay away from the bleeding edge and all that.  Certainly when operating at scale.”

If Madden and Watts are right, this could lead to a significant boost in adoption of Windows 11. While the Windows 11 first anniversary update release date is yet to be set officially, it’s generally expected to be before the end of the summer.

The Windows 10 cliff edge doesn’t seem to be quite as steep as that of Windows XP but there are still challenges to be overcome for many organizations. Our ITPro Network members indicate there’s hope even in tricky situations and when considering your own strategy a straightforward hardware refresh doesn’t have to be the only option.

As firms push to become more efficient, a strong internal development community can help them embrace agile development. So-called citizen developers – employees who aren’t developers but have ideas for internal apps – could be instrumental in this change.

Aerospace giant Rolls-Royce has embraced its internal developer community to drive change across its manufacturing and corporate environments. Through Microsoft’s low-code Power Apps platform, the company has allowed employees to overcome internal work hurdles via self-made software, as well as to build a lively developer community.

“This all started when as a team we asked ourselves the question: ‘What if 1,000 people could do something that would save £10,000 each?’,” says Stuart Hughes, CIO and chief digital officer (CDO) at Rolls-Royce, tells ITPro.

“That's actually really significant digital transformation, right? It fundamentally changes our finances, but also hopefully would give us a better product for our customers that meets that kind of availability reliability and efficiency.”

Recruiting citizen developers to build new apps

Rolls-Royce develops engines for a number of wide-body aircraft used for long-haul or cargo flights. The firm is a key part of the aerospace supply chain.

An app that employees have already created through Power Apps is a 24/7 on-call system for workers in R&D, allowing for internal innovation to happen around the clock.

“If a plane’s canceled, it can actually affect up to about 8,000 people for a single plane cancelation, so it can be quite significant if we don't do a great job.”

The firm tends to charge per engine flying hour rather than per unit sold, so ensuring engines work as intended and don't take long to be repaired is core to its business model. Hughes notes with the employee-developed on-call system, Rolls-Royce avoids spending on a third-party system.

Another example of internal success stories for the firm can be found in Kudos, an-employee led app through which colleagues can easily praise one another. Rolls-Royce credits Kudos with a 25% increase in employee engagement with the company culture, and helped remote workers feel more connected.

Despite these positive statistics, Hughes denies these micro-innovations are best judged by the cost savings they’ve generated.

“Microsoft is very keen for me to tell you in pound coins how much we’ve saved,” he says. “But I don’t think that’s what this is really about. If somebody asked them what digital transformation they’ve done, they can tell you the answer. And that is probably quite rare.”

This community is building itself

It became clear from the start that promoting low-code development was a cultural and strategic challenge rather than technical, head of self-service technology Phil Kaufman explains. His team worked to identify “evangelists” within the organization they could empower first and foremost.

“Actually, at that point, we knew the technology we needed, we knew the platform. It was about ‘who are the people that are going to actually try and help us to make this change across the business?’ and they’ve now become our super users, our champions that we use to do with other people in the business.”

The team had to carefully balance the power and potential of the platform with the user experience for these enthusiastic employees. Kaufman says Power BI allowed his team to enter into a prototyping ‘wire-framing phase’, during which mockups could be made.

“We could get there really quickly, but we could test with it. So we could put it out to a community of one hundred people who use these checklists all the time, and get some feedback,” he says.

Hughes notes the speed at which employees and the IT team could report back on changes was integral to the program’s success, as it allowed the new systems to be implemented in a way that had previously been impossible. By delivering insight into a process that you couldn’t see before, you start to deliver genuine business benefits, he adds.

While Hughes and Kaufman had worked to select enthusiastic Power Apps evangelists to kick the project off, neither expected the speed and enthusiasm with which this has spread throughout the company.

“I signed the purchase order (PO) for the licenses and agreed on some services and things like that. But I didn't do this all, the community just started to create itself, right?”

Inspiring employees to take the initiative

The firm now runs a yearly digital expo, in which citizen developers run stalls showcasing their apps and explaining them to others within the company to spread awareness. Kaufman tells ITPro that after the most recent expo, five teams reached out to follow up on a shift handover app they had seen in employee-led demonstrations.

“I think having those applications, the big ones that people know, people then ask “how have they done this?” and it inspires people to come to the team,” Hughes says.

In hindsight, Hughes says, any other approach wouldn’t have led to the success in this area that Rolls-Royce has enjoyed. “That’s my advice to other CIOs: if I tried to organize that event, it had been overly formal,” he stresses.

The same applies to the approach employees have taken to helping each other with errors or developmental hurdles, in contrast to the typical IT ticketing system many firms use. In contrast, Rolls-Royce employees have taken to custom channels in Microsoft Viva and Teams. Kaufman compared these to StackOverflow, noting the shared language of Power BI has allowed for inter-departmental collaboration that couldn’t be anticipated.

This isn’t to say more formal events haven’t continued to add to this community. Microsoft, for example, regularly holds events at Rolls-Royce offices and streamed online to inspire citizen developers to change through discussions of emerging technologies.

The first steps in upskilling the workforce

Today, Rolls-Royce is engaged in formal upskilling projects through Microsoft’s Enterprise Skills Initiative. Workers go through a four-day course and can pursue an exam to obtain a certificate if they wish. 

But Kaufman also highlights the more informal, self-led learning platforms for budding citizen developers. His team has overseen the ‘app in a day’ program, in which employees can take 30mins of their day to build an app.

“We tried to think about the obstacles that would stop somebody actually doing this,” Hughes says, giving the example of employees hitting issues with poor UI quality and noting that to remedy this a built-in company style has been applied to the app builder Cobalt.

All design elements in Cobalt are pre-defined, which Hughes says keeps the app from gatekeeping the app builder from those who aren’t confident in design.

Going forward, Hughes suggests that if 15% of office-based staff could be using data science tools in the near future, it would continue to drive efficiency gains across the company. “I think that's where this goes,” he says,” adding: “We've got to democratize data science and big data in the same way that we’re obviously demonstrating now with apps.”

Microsoft couldn't have launched its Teams collaboration platform at a more appropriate time. Unveiled in 2017, it had three years to mature before COVID-19 ushered in a new era of hybrid work. Three years after the pandemic had begun changing our relationship with work, Microsoft decided the collaboration product was due for a revamp. It’s reviewed the entire application from the ground up, in response to feedback users were finding it slow. 

Microsoft has long operated a public preview program to test new features to early adopters before making them generally available. Users can only gain access if their admins assign them a policy allowing it. They can then choose 'public preview' in the 'About' submenu next to their names.

Don't confuse this with the 'New Teams' software option, which is such a fundamental restructure that it gets its own toggle in the Windows version of the desktop app. Users can flip this toggle to switch between the old and new versions at will. Microsoft will drip-feed new features into the preview version over the next few months so eager users can try them first while falling back to the classic desktop app if anything goes wrong. 

Administrators can turn on access to the new Teams client in the same update policy that they use to enable public preview, but it is a separate option. 

What the new Microsoft Teams features include

When a kindly admin enables the new Teams client, what goodies do their brave users get access to? For now, the most significant improvements are under the hood. Microsoft says the new Teams starts in half the time as its predecessor and uses half the disk space and memory overall. That's due in part to some major architectural changes in the software. 

An updated back-end

Teams Classic was originally built in AngularJS. Microsoft moved to React for a more compact code base but ran the client on both frameworks for a while, making it slow and bulky. It’s now switched entirely to React for the new software. It also introduced a new client data layer that handles the data processing for Teams. That gave it more speed by enabling it to run more software threads in parallel, removing some of the strain from the JavaScript layer. It also ditched Electron as the host for Teams in favor of WebView2, which is a control that allows developers to embed web components like HTML and JavaScript in native apps. It uses Microsoft Edge as its rendering engine.

These architectural enhancements are like engine tweaks – they'll make the software purr along much faster than it used to under the hood. However, Teams is also getting some new driver controls on the dashboard. Many of these are due to roll out over the coming months, but there are some noticeable improvements already.

A new authentication model

One big win that is already available is the updated authentication model. In the past, you'd have to log in and out of your Teams account to access teams across different organizations. This forced account-hopping added speed bumps for many freelancers forced to use Teams by multiple clients. Workarounds to deal with this included using the desktop client for one organization and a browser – or even multiple browsers – for others.

The authentication change means that you can jump between different organizations' accounts without signing out, and you can also see notifications from all of them in one place. This is great, but with external contractors so prevalent in the modern workplace, it's difficult to consider this as an innovation. It's more like a long-overdue necessity.

A slicker user interface

The other area Microsoft wants to innovate is in the new Teams' visual design. It’s toned down the purple in the new client, and subtly changed the way it displays information, particularly in channel-based conversation flows. In the old Teams, you'd make posts at the bottom of a conversation, and then you'd scroll up to read more of that in-channel chat. Now, you post at the top of the channel and scroll infinitely downward through the threaded list of discussions. You can also pop out conversations into separate windows for added focus.

The Activity section has also changed to offer more focus. In the incumbent Teams, the feed shows you all posts. In the new one, you only see individual posts. You select a 'Go to channel' option to access the full list.

These changes are all very subtle. Perhaps it’s by design we didn’t notice them much, but that the client seemed snappy and responsive. In time, Teams users will get more notable aesthetic features. For example, they'll be able to configure groups individually to reflect their different personalities. We couldn't find this option at the time of writing, but we remain hopeful that your organization's 'Mad About Cats' social group will soon no longer have to look like your legal team's process review channel, much to the joy of office feline lovers everywhere. 

Microsoft Teams collaboration features

There are other improvements currently in public preview, including a speaker coach that reports back on your speaking performance during a meeting. You'll be able to hear how repetitive you were and how much you relied on filler words. 

Some other features are still in the pipeline. The new Teams still didn't support third-party or line-of-business applications at the time of writing, while call queues and meeting breakout rooms had yet to be implemented. These are on the way, though. 

While we wait for these shiny new features, we might also have to contend with some broken existing ones. One welcome feature already in Teams was the ability to insert Loop components directly into chats. Loop is Microsoft's cross-application platform for editable widgets that enable you to insert editable items like tables or tasks in chats. We noticed a server error that stopped it from appearing in the new Teams, although this later resolved itself. 

Microsoft will hopefully iron out wrinkles like these, but the new Teams is currently a work in progress. Some basic features – such as the ability to create a channel – are still missing. Consequently, Microsoft admits the new Teams is presently less functional than the incumbent one. 

So the biggest enhancements in the new Teams desktop at present are under the hood. For more eye-catching innovations, we must turn to a whole other set of preview features as part of the Teams public preview that Microsoft runs to test upcoming enhancements. One of these is the avatars app, which has been in preview since October. 

The avatar app allows you to replace yourself with up to three different avatar versions for different Teams meetings and calls. Adjust your body shape, face, hair, appearance, and what you're wearing. You can even add prosthetics. Teams can then superimpose the moving avatar on your webcam video, hiding the real you with the fake one during video calls.

It was fun messing around with this for a few minutes, and the idea of not having to show yourself on a bad hair day has some merit, but we’ll probably stick to just leaving the camera off. 

Microsoft Teams AI features

Perhaps a more interesting future enhancement is the inclusion of its AI-powered Copilot assistant with select customers. That feature allows users to include an AI participant in meetings who will carry out tasks on the fly, such as summarizing what’s been said, and even drawing up pros and cons tables around different decisions. This could be the most exciting enhancement of all. 

According to the Financial Times (FT), the future could also see Teams going solo. Microsoft is reportedly preparing to break up the band, spinning the product off from the Office suite to head off an EU investigation. 

Perhaps this partly explains the preoccupation with revamping Teams. It’s a complex product with many features, and Microsoft has done a good job of making it faster and less demanding on systems so that it can dominate the collaboration space.

However, industry contacts that have worked closely upgrading their clients from basic email to Teams have reported that it's a struggle getting users to play with Teams’ constant trickle of new features. We suspect most people just want to get their jobs done without unnecessary tinkering. While some landmark Teams enhancements such as live transcription have been invaluable, there’s a lot of ephemera here. More superfluous features mean more fuss.

Microsoft is touting the major Teams revamp just as it discontinues the free edition of Teams Classic. From April 12, users of that product – including paying Microsoft 365 Personal subscribers – had to upgrade to Teams Essentials for a $4 monthly fee or lose their existing Teams data and history. Microsoft flagged this change in advance, but one Microsoft tech support worker told ITPro in late April he was tired after fielding calls from confused, furious customers about this all month.

Microsoft is betting that a faster, leaner version of the product will keep users away from simpler, easier-to-use, and free collaboration alternatives from the likes of Google and Zoom. Let’s hope it’s right.

As the sun sets on Appian’s annual conference, it’s clear artificial intelligence (AI) now plays a larger role for the company than ever before.

Whether it’s the integration of natural language prompts and digitization of documents in Appian 22.3, or new documentation capabilities for the platform’s own language SAIL, attendees have been treated to a buffet of AI options. Indeed, there’s a real sense that Appian is angling to make itself the go-to platform for AI usage among firms that aren’t yet sure if AI is for them, or otherwise consider it too risky in its current form.

Speaking with customers and officials alike, there’s a sense that Appian’s tender approach to integrating large language models (LLMs) within its platform is going down well. Depending on who you talk to, one gets the sense this is seen as either a necessary precursor to a larger expansion into generative AI tools, or a natural extension of Appian's existing suite of AI and automation offerings.

Adam Glaser, SVP of engineering at Appian rebuffs my suggestion the firm has done a remarkable about-turn to point itself so fully towards AI adoption in the six months since Appian Europe. He also denies the newfound support for developers creating their own AI models is a response to the market.

"We've had AI in the product in various forms of fashions, for quite some time," he states, pointing to Appian's machine learning-based smart recommendations and its intelligent document processing. "That's just a progression of us looking at AI, not even anticipating the hype and interesting things you can do with that GPT-style AI. It's 'what's practical? What's actually really useful?'"

Appian’s cautious optimism

Only time will tell whether this risk-averse strategy is likely to work, and whether Appian picks up pace to roll out generative AI solutions. There are, though, several indicators of an enthusiasm to see more of the technology at an executive level. 

Every image used in the first day’s keynote presentation was generated using the generative AI image model Midjourney, as ITPro was cheerfully informed by both Karina Buschsieweke and Malcolm Ross, director and SVP of product strategy, respectively. 

In addition, the script for the keynote's introductory video was generated in ChatGPT, as personally overseen by Ross. “We did edit it a little,” he admits. “It was a collaboration between AI and humans.”

Beyond the clear AI enthusiasm, these decisions also act as a suitable microcosm for Appian’s entire approach going forward. Buschsieweke and Ross, for instance, both note the output seen by conference attendees was the result of an iterative process involving precise natural language prompts.

Whether the end result was images of Toyota factories or leafcutter ants (both carried metaphorical weight in the proper context) none of the final images were without fault on the first Midjourney pass.

It’s this precise experience that Appian claims that it aims to eliminate with its low-code approach to LLM training and input. 

Despite all it’s shown off in the conference, from natural language input with its Data Fabric to advances in process mining, this balance of fine controls without too much need for experience could be a hard needle to thread.

It's promising, however, that Appian is approaching it as a low-code, user experience problem first and foremost rather than trying to iron out hallucinations or other foundational issues within the LLMs themselves.

"Our focus on generative AI in our product is really around having it embed inside the design time experience," Ross tells ITPro. "Because what you get back from it needs to be immediately refined, you'll find that it's not written quite right or interpreted [your prompt] wrong. So it's a very good complement to low-code design, where you get the initial result and you drag, move it around and tweak it to the final design."

More AI is waiting in the wings

There’s also a sense much is left unrealised in Appian’s current approach. Caution makes sense here, but it appears to have come at the expense of even more powerful functionality for systems such as process mining.

Buschsieweke says worries over generative AI hallucinations have dashed initial interest in integrating LLMs within the core solution.

“We had these discussions already… I wanted a chat for process mining, even before ChatGPT was released, a conversational interface with the user” she asserts. “But it was exactly these concerns: ‘how can we make sure that the insights are actually reliable?’ My perspective was that maybe we should just get started for now to see how it can work.”

The second keynote, headed up by Appian co-founder and chief marketing officer Michael Beckley, comprised in-depth look at current and future AI features. As is standard for promises made in keynotes, the audience was shown a disclaimer 

“This is what I believe today,” Beckley announced to the audience. “This is what we believe today, and with a rapidly-changing field like AI, the product roadmap is subject to rapid change.”

Appian has positioned itself remarkably well, in light of the AI competition. In staying relatively still while the AI market has rushed to innovate, it has counterintuitively come out on top in terms of its public image. It’s an approach that lives or dies with how its customers take it. But the Appian platform is well-placed to deliver on its promises for enterprise AI.

Dropbox has announced it plans to cut 16% of its workforce, equivalent to around 500 staff, as the company bets on artificial intelligence (AI) to support future operations. 

In a statement yesterday, CEO Drew Houston outlined the reasoning behind the company’s round of layoffs, noting sluggish growth and economic headwinds have “put pressure on our customers” and the business. 

While economic factors have played a role in the decision to cut staff, Houston said that recent developments in the AI space have also played a key role. 

By cutting staff, it appears the company will be able to focus on the development of AI-supported products, on which the company has been bullish in recent months. 

“The AI era of computing has finally arrived,” he said. “We’ve believed for many years that AI will give us new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work. And we’ve been building towards this future for a long time, as this year’s product pipeline will demonstrate.”

Houston said that the acceleration of generative AI products has unfolded “more rapidly than any of us could have anticipated” and that Dropbox seeks to keep pace with competitors exploring the use of AI within core service offerings. 

Crucially, he noted, this means that the company will focus heavily on attracting staff with skill sets spanning AI and early-stage product development.

“In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible,” he said. “However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development.”

“We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more.”

Dropbox’s decision to cut staff comes amid a period of rising concern over the potential impact of AI on the global jobs market. 

The acceleration of generative AI products such as ChatGPT in the last six months has sparked warnings that human workers could be at risk as companies seek to integrate AI platforms and streamline processes. 

ANALYSIS

The explicit connection between the layoffs and AI is likely to leave a bad taste in the mouths of workers who have been promised for years that these tools will assist them, rather than replace them.

Houston has said the quiet part rather loudly in his admission that Dropbox would move people around rather than engage in layoffs “in an ideal world”.

Artificial intelligence, particularly new generative AI models into which many companies have heavily invested, has arrived at an unfortunate time where worker rights and security are concerned. 

It also provides grim reading for those in the tech industry and beyond who work in a department that could soon adopt AI tools on a larger scale.

The UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) has already issued a warning over the potential for AI to endanger workers’ rights, and these conversations will only intensify as practice such as this continues. 

A recent study from Goldman Sachs suggested that as many as 300 million jobs worldwide could be lost to automation. 

The study, published in March, predicted that around 18% of work could become computerized and that AI-related job losses are expected to significantly impact advanced economies. 

“A new wave of AI systems may have a major impact on employment markets around the world,” the company said. “Shifts in workflows triggered by these advances could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation.”

Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI, the California tech company behind ChatGPT, has been vocal over the potential risk of AI-related job losses in recent months. 

In an interview with ABC News in March, Altman warned that he was a “little bit scared” of what generative AI tools could mean for the global labor force. 

"It’s going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true,” he said at the time. “We can make much better ones. The reason to develop AI at all is that I believe this will be - in terms of impact on our lives and improving our lives and upsides - will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed.”

AWS is making its largest foray into the generative AI space yet with the launch of Amazon Bedrock, a managed service offering customers the “easiest way to build and scale enterprise-ready generative AI applications”.

The hyperscaler unveiled Bedrock on Thursday alongside the launch of two new ‘Amazon Titan’ foundation models (FMs) as it seeks to provide developers with access to “some of the most cutting-edge FMs available today”.

Bedrock will grant customers access to a range of foundation models from third parties including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI. 

Among these is the Jurassic-2 family of multilingual LLMs from AI21, which generate text in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch. Alongside this offering is Stability AI’s range of text-to-image foundation models, which includes Stable Diffusion. 

The Amazon Titan large language models (LLMs) form part of AWS’ own internal FMs.

The first of these, AWS revealed, is a generative LLM for tasks such as summarization, text generation - to create a blog post, for example - classification, open-ended Q&A, and information extraction. 

The second is an embeddings LLM that will translate text inputs into numerical representations that “contain the semantic meaning of the text”, AWS added.

“Today we are excited to announce Amazon Bedrock, a new service that makes FMs from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon accessible via an API,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP for machine learning at AWS.

“Bedrock is the easiest way for customers to build and scale generative AI-based applications using FMs, democratizing access for all builders.” 

AWS enters the generative AI ring

The launch of Amazon Bedrock marks AWS’ most aggressive move in the generative AI space so far and takes a different approach to that seen by competitors such as Google and Microsoft. 

Microsoft has fostered closer ties with OpenAI in recent months and accelerated the integration of platforms such as ChatGPT within core product offerings. 

In January, the firm launched its Azure OpenAI Service which provides cloud customers access to OpenAI models. 

The move was hailed as a key differentiator for the tech giant in gaining ground on AWS in the broader cloud market.

Similarly, Google has made significant strides in developing and rolling out its own internal generative AI system, Bard. 

With Bedrock, AWS looks primed to take a different approach to competitors in the space and capitalize on existing relationships with third parties to augment its generative AI capabilities and product offering. 

Long-term, this appears like it could provide a more developer-friendly approach to generative AI and diversify its offering to prospective customers. 

Competition in the generative AI market continues to heat up, and AWS’ quiet approach in this space has been noted in recent months amid the flurry of announcements from Google and Microsoft.

Sivasubramanian suggested that a key differentiator for AWS moving forward will be the ease of access and use, and the sheer diversity of models available to developers. 

“Bedrock makes the power of FMs accessible to companies of all sizes so that they can accelerate the use of ML across their organizations and build their own generative AI applications because it will be easy for all developers,” Sivasubramanian said. 

He added that Bedrock will be a “massive step” toward democratizing FMs and opening up access to a broader range of models for developers within its own ecosystem. 

Microsoft has integrated its AI technology into the entirety of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, with businesses set to experience significant time savings with meetings.

Named 365 Copilot, the AI helper is being added across the Office apps and can cut down time spent writing up meeting notes, combing through inboxes, and drafting talking points.

Copilot was repeatedly branded a “time saver” during a livestreamed demonstration. It can prepare notes and talking points for upcoming client meetings, draft documents in Word, analyse and visualise dense Excel spreadsheets, and pick out key emails from a busy inbox.

Among the most notable features was Copilot's ability to prepare documents ahead of meetings. It works by reading data from across the 365 suite to provide recommended reading and upcoming deadlines with which staff can familiarise themselves ahead of time.

Copilot’s Business Chat feature can also take data from meeting minutes, emails, calendars, and chats to provide a summary of interactions with a specific individual, complete with containing citations and contact cards on key customers.

The AI tool is also capable of summarising events in a live meeting, giving commentary on how a group feels about the contents so far, and providing suggestions on talking points that still need to be touched on.

As a call comes to a close, Copilot can generate a list of next steps saveable directly into the user’s chosen Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

For further improvements to productivity, this relationship goes both ways as Copilot can draw on CRM records to contextualise emails, meeting plans, and other automatically generated communications.

Microsoft Copilot 365: Email integration

Copilot harnesses user context to cut down time spent manually drawing together data or processing information, even in tasks that have rarely been automated in the past. An example of this is the tool’s email ‘catchup’ feature, which rounds up emails it has identified as particularly urgent.

“We all struggle with the pull of the inbox,” said Sumit Chauhan, CVP of the Office product group at Microsoft.

“Sometimes it keeps us from focusing on our most important work. But at the same time, you do have important emails to respond to. Copilot separates the signal from the noise and gives you hours of time back. Copilot can help you triage your inbox, highlighting the most important emails to prioritise.”

Copilot will also be available on the Outlook app, and can also summarise long email threads, and convert documents such as a sales spreadsheet into digestible texts and graphs within the email client. All text generated in this manner is fully-editable, and users can change the tone or brevity of emails with one click.

Microsoft Copilot 365: Smart documents

Selecting and converting documents is a core function of Copilot, and Microsoft singled out its ability to helpfully draw data from across a range of locations in real time as one reason the AI tool could entirely change the way people work.

Copilot is powered by a processing and orchestration engine it is calling ‘The Copilot System’, which combines 365 apps, Microsoft Graph, and a dedicated large language model (LLM).

Microsoft Graph is the API developer platform for Microsoft 365 - it comprises content and context from files, chats, calendar, and emails. Microsoft stated that Copilot draws on all of this to ensure that results are as relevant and contextualised to each business as possible, and that the process is carried out in a secure way to preserve privacy and maintain compliance.

The firm also specified that Copilot uses GPT-4, OpenAI’s powerful multimodal model announced this week, for the LLM portion of the ‘Copilot System’. The LLM trained on a “large but limited” amount of a business’ data, and the firm stressed that tenant data and prompts are not used for training purposes.

In bringing together apps, content, and context from across a customer's suite, Microsoft has set its sights on full intelligent automation of tasks.

This is reflected in the shared name scheme of its recent AI productivity announcements, with GitHub Copilot, 'AI copilot' for Edge, and now Microsoft 365 Copilot cementing the degree to which the company is set on making helpful AI a brand experience rather than limiting it to a particular software.

Microsoft Copilot 365: Extra time-saving powers

The cross-discipline time-saving power of Copilot was also emphasised in a demonstration showing how it can make Microsoft’s Power Automate more accessible.

Users can request an automated workflow using natural language and Copilot will produce a diagram to explain the workflow and allow user edits.

Microsoft showed an example in which a developer requested Power Automate to create a private Teams channel whenever a specific customer sent an urgent support ticket.

After its initial summary of the proposed workflow, Copilot was able to take feedback from the developer and ensure that when the event was triggered. Copilot should also summarise the support ticket and tag relevant departments that can help.

"Although people may initially resist the idea of using AI, the ability to do things like summarise long documents and prioritise your email inbox will be an absolute godsend for most people struggling to cope with the ever-increasing volume of information we have to get through every day,” said Dr Andrew Rogoyski, director of innovation and partnerships at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI.

"Writers, copyrighters, screenwriters, and journalists will have to integrate these new tools if they want to match the productivity of their competitors.

"My guess is that the next step will be for Microsoft and others to offer enterprise bolt-ons to Copilot that incorporates all the corporate knowledge in a particular company, thus allowing customised versions of Copilot to provide bespoke help to individual companies.

"This is yet another blow for Google as companies who have invested in the Google Workspace, which grew massively during the pandemic as users shifted to the cloud, may be asking themselves if they backed the right horse."

SolarWinds offers one of the most extensive ranges of network management products and its Network Performance Monitor (NPM) has always taken pride of place. This is no surprise: it offers a wealth of network troubleshooting and monitoring features all easily accessed from the same Orion web console that's used by all its stablemates.

You need to be careful with licensing, though, as it's based on monitored elements, which can be nodes, interfaces and volumes. We've shown the price for an SL250 yearly subscription licence, which allows you to monitor up to 250 of each type, but if any single element goes over this limit, you'll need to upgrade to an SL500 licence, which pushes yearly costs to £4,594.

New features in NPM 2022.4 aren't very exciting. Along with visibility into VeloCloud SD-WAN services, the interface status views have been improved to show their assigned alert thresholds. NPM can monitor and report on Microsoft Azure cloud services, but for Amazon Web Services, you'll need the optional SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability or Server and Application Monitor products.

It took 90 minutes on a Windows Server 2019 host for the routine to download and install all the required components. When evaluating NPM you can use the included SQL Server Express, which has a 10GB database limit, but this isn't supported for production environments so you'll need to source a full version of SQL Server 2016 or later.

Our first network discovery took ten minutes, and NPM reported back with a detailed list of all our lab systems. Discovery tasks can be scheduled to run at regular intervals and will alert you when changes have occurred or new devices are detected.

The Orion web console presents an avalanche of information that can be refined with customised views. New dashboards are produced by adding extra columns, choosing resource views and placing them in the desired order and, if you run out of room, the network operations centre rotates through multiple dashboard views at predefined intervals.

Coloured icons highlight device issues, with the console's Alerts & Activity tab providing a detailed overview where you can drill down into each entry to see what the problem is. The Message Center adds full search facilities and alerts can be linked to actions such as sending SMS messages and emails.

NPM provides only basic availability monitoring of virtualisation hosts so you may need to consider the Virtualization Manager, which offers much more but costs £1,337 for an 8-socket licence. Snapping into the Orion web console, it presented plenty of details about our VMware and Hyper-V hosts, including CPU, memory and datastore use, along with VM resource usage.

Businesses that need to quickly identify the root cause of problems will find the NPM Performance Monitor a boon as it compares data collected from multiple monitors in one dashboard. You can also stay on top of cloud service performance issues with NPM's NetPath, which probes external web locations and provides hop-by-hop maps with latency and packet loss details.

NPM's Quality of Experience (QoE) service is another winner. This uses sensors linked to switch mirror ports to identify, categorise and analyse traffic for over 1,500 apps. The QoE dashboard is ideal for keeping an eye on app usage: it displays transactions, traffic volumes and response times, and separates them into business, social and potentially risky categories.

The quirky licensing needs to be kept under control, but NPM offers a remarkable range of network monitoring and troubleshooting tools. The Orion web console is well-designed and easily customised, ensuring support staff always stay one step ahead of network problems.

Recent Oracle price changes for Java customers has sparked concerns that small businesses could encounter a significant spike in costs.

Planned price changes outlined by the company last week will see firms on the Java SE Universal subscription charged based on their total number of employees, as opposed to only those using the service.

The move by Oracle will see companies with 1-999 employees will be charged a minimum of $15 (£12) per employee. For larger organisations with 40,000+ employees, prices will begin at a minimum of $5.25 (£4.26) per head, the company revealed.

According to Oracle’s updated price guide, this means that a company with 28,000 employees would now be required to pay $6.75 (£5.48) per employee each month.

These changes would apply to employees spanning both full-time and part-time roles, as well as temporary staff and contractors, resulting in a significant price hike to around $2.2 million (£1.78 million) each year.

Price hikes could affect smaller businesses

Oracle’s subscription changes have sparked criticism over how smaller firms could be forced to pay significantly more for business-critical software.

In a blog post dissecting the price hike, Nathan Biggs, CEO at House of Brick consultancy, suggested that SMBs could pay thousands more each year.

One scenario outlined by Biggs revealed that a company with 250 employees and a “small Java footprint” - which equated to 20 desktop users and eight Java installed processors – would have paid $3,000 (£2,435) per year under the old pricing model.

This same business could now incur costs of up to $45,000 (£36,535) per year, he said, equating to a 1,400% price increase.

Given the scale of potential price increases, Biggs suggested that the changes could cause major issues for smaller businesses.

“What this means for your organisation is that regardless of your Java users or server footprint, you now must count every employee, contractor, consultant, and agent to determine your Java subscription bill,” he said.

“You are potentially on the hook for a massive subscription fee increase that may have very little benefit to your operation.”

Oracle published an FAQ section on their website in an attempt to clarify how new licence subscriptions will be priced.

The company said that customers using the legacy SE subscription model will be permitted to renew “under their existing terms and metrics”.

While this clarification was welcomed, Biggs noted that customers seeking to increase their footprint further down the line may be “forced” into using the new universal subscription model.

“This is good news for customers that already have a Java SE subscription based on processor counts and desktop users, but it does not address key concerns or questions,” he said.

“This is not good news for Java customers that have not been on the legacy subscription. New customers will be forced into the new Universal Subscription and will likely pay at least double what the previous subscription would have cost.”

Rising software prices

News of Oracle’s changes come as businesses globally are forced to contend with surging software costs and increasing rates at major providers.

Last year, Oracle revealed it would increase support prices by around 8% for customers to compensate for inflation and rising costs. It also isn’t the only business adjusting rates due to economic instability.

Earlier this month, Sage was criticised for changes to its subscription model which required customers with perpetual 15-year licences to switch to a new monthly payments scheme.

Some businesses claimed that the move by Sage was an attempt to “strong-arm” them into the new subscription model and was “merely a means to increase the cost” of services.

Sage strongly denied the claim, citing security grounds as a key factor behind the move.

Microsoft has revealed the features that will remain exclusive to the upcoming Microsoft Teams Premium - a more expensive subscription for its flagship collaboration platform.

The tech giant first revealed plans for Teams Premium in October 2022, and since mid-December, the product has been available for preview as a “limited trial for commercial customers”.

Now, Microsoft has revealed what features will only be available on the more expensive subscription tier. They will remain accessible for 30 days after Premium's launch to all users but after that will be close doff only to Premium users.

Speaking in October, Microsoft Teams VP Nicole Herskowitz said the Teams Premium push is part of a broader strategy to deliver “more personalised, intelligent, and secure” meetings and improve synergy across products.

“Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaboration experience of Microsoft Teams, this new offering makes every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars more personalised, intelligent, and secure,” she said.

“Unlike the disconnected experience and costs of multiple point products or add-ons, with Teams Premium you get everything you need for just one low price.”

Teams Premium features – what can customers expect?

According to Microsoft, the Teams Premium platform will provide users with a raft of intuitive new tools and features.

But be warned, this will see “some Teams features” move from the regular licence to the new product, meaning that users will likely be nudged towards upgrading to access certain functionalities.

AI-supported productivity

A key feature highlighted by Microsoft includes the ability for organisations to extend their “brand and company culture across meetings” with customised branding and backgrounds, as well as more customisable Together mode scenes.

The premium platform will also make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve productivity in meetings.

Features benefitting from AI will include real-time translation for captions in up to 40 spoken languages, intelligent recap features that offer “smarter recordings”, and auto-generated chapters for meetings.

“Intelligent recap uses AI to suggest action items and owners so that follow-ups are not missed,” Microsoft said. “It’s like having a virtual assistant attend every meeting.”

Intelligent recap works by capturing recordings from a meeting where a user’s name was mentioned, a screen was shared or when a specific user left a meeting early.

Better webinar experiences

Webinar capabilities will be granted a major boost as part of the Teams Premium upgrade, allowing users “streamline event workflows” with the inclusion of manual approval for registrants and the creation of waiting lists.

This will also see the launch of a virtual ‘green room’ for events where presenters and participants can meet before a webinar goes live.

Webinar admins will also have greater control over shared content and what participants can see on screen.

Advanced meeting protection

Teams Premium users will now be able to apply “advanced” meeting protections such as watermarks and sensitivity labels for meetings.

The latter of these features, Microsoft revealed, will prevent copying and pasting of meeting chat text to improve security. Similarly, Microsoft 365 E5 customers can use existing Microsoft Purview Information Protection tools to automatically apply labels to relevant meetings.

End-to-end encryption for meetings containing more than 50 users will also be made available, the firm revealed.

Virtual appointment improvements

Microsoft’s virtual appointments feature, which it views as a key tool for businesses engaging with clients, is also expected to see a number of improvements.

With Teams Premium the tech giant hopes to “facilitate a seamless customer experience” by providing customers with text reminders for meetings and bespoke-branded virtual appointments without downloading the app itself.

Schedulers will also have access to advanced appointment queueing capabilities and a centralised virtual appointment dashboard offering a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics to monitor and track no-shows and waiting times.

Pricing

Microsoft said the “expected price” for Teams Premium is currently set at $10 per profile each month.

“Official pricing will be shared once Teams Premium is available to the public in February,” the company said.

British businesses have complained that Sage “strong-armed” them into accepting subscription services amid threats that their software packages could be switched off.

Companies with perpetual single-payment software licences told the Financial Times that the firm pushed them into accepting more expensive packages on a monthly subscription model, prompting a wave of complaints.

Perpetual licences purchased by Sage customers are expected to last 15 years, according to the company’s terms and conditions.

However, the firm informed customers that it would switch off access to software by 30 September. Sage justified the decision on ‘security grounds’, and told FT that this would be done to “protect consumer data”.

"A small number of customers will be impacted unless they move to a subscription product as we don’t sell perpetual plans anymore,” the firm added.

The move by Sage meant that some companies rapidly upgraded their subscriptions to avoid the risk of losing access to critical organisational data, and could see many paying more for services in the long run.

Complainants also suggested that the decision to direct them to monthly packages seemed “merely a means to increase the cost” of services. Sage strongly denied the claims.

A spokesperson for the company told IT Pro that the “vast majority” of impacted customers were entitled to an upgrade as part of their Sage Cover contract. This provides customers with free upgrades to the latest version, in addition to product support.

“The remainder of customers, which equates to a small subset, who are using impacted versions of Sage 50 perpetual are off plan, which means they’ve chosen to not have a Sage Cover contract and therefore are not entitled to version upgrades or product support,” the spokesperson said.

“Sage communicated with its customers about this, giving six months’ notice and advised on the action they needed to take and how we could support them.”

Sage's pivoting subscription approach

Denis Torii, VP analyst at Gartner told IT Pro that the decision could be an attempt to better align company practices with market competitors, such as QuickBooks or Xero, for example.

The accountancy software giant has made a concerted shift towards promoting subscription software offerings. A key factor in this move appears to be a determination to improve resilience in the face of challenging market conditions.

And in the long run, monthly software packages represent a more robust, recurring revenue stream compared to one-off long-term licence purchases.

“Are they trying to align themselves with other vendor practices? I think yes", Torii said. "There is a component here of them trying to better align with what others are already doing.

“It’s hard to blame them for trying to do something like this, because again, there might be an honourable reason for that, such as investing resources in solutions and innovation.

“There’s of course a portion of this that could be increasing revenue and positioning themselves better in the market as a company,” Torii added.

Sage told IT Pro that increasing recurring revenues was not the purpose of phasing out the software. The firm added that this was “not material” to the business.

“This was not a revenue opportunity for us, this was about futureproofing customer data, and for the vast majority of customers this resulted in a free upgrade, with no material benefit to us," a spokesperson said.

“What Sage may be doing here is not necessarily something that is exclusive to Sage, and is probably something that we would see others doing,” Torii said.

In recent months, there have been public discussions about SAP potentially increasing maintenance rates. In September, the software giant announced it will “moderately” increase annual support fees by a maximum of 3.3%.

Meanwhile, in July 2022 Oracle confirmed it would increase support prices by around 8% to compensate for inflation and rising costs.

Torii said that it is understandable that small businesses are affected by increased software costs amidst a period of rising costs and inflation.

“For larger organisations, that increase on individual user licences won’t make a big difference, but it’s a different thing for small businesses,” he said.

“I think that message is clear. And one can’t blame customers for being concerned about that, because if you increase a $50 licence on a monthly basis, for example, then at the end of the year you are paying $600 dollars more – which in a low margin business is a heavy impact.”

Since September, shares at Sage have increased by 7%. The firm also reported strong revenue growth in the year to September 2022.

Revenue increased 5% to £1.9 billion, the company announced. This was partly buoyed by impressive growth across cloud products and North American sales, where recurring revenue surged by 14% to £779 million.

Back in 2009, Slack was a small team of software engineers, building a massive multiplayer game called Glitch. Today, Slack has become bigger than the company ever imagined - and its adoption by Dev teams of all sizes is a major reason. Yes, Slack is used in pretty much every department and discipline these days, but software engineering is where it all started. Engineering is still the source of a lot of the user love that keeps them coming to work smiling.

This eBook is a quick introduction to some of the ways Slack helps developers. It explains why software engineers seem to like Slack so much and how Slack could benefit your own teams.

Celebrating its 20th year in 2025, it's little surprise that TeamViewer is one of the first names to come to mind when looking for a remote access solution. Built for Windows, Windows Server, macOS, and common Linux distros, it lets you administer a whole fleet of remote machines from a single keyboard and mouse – or from an Android or iOS client.

It's primarily used by IT technicians who need to access clients' or employees' devices, and by employees who need to access office computers from home or while travelling. As well as facilitating remote control of a distant machine, much like VNC, some tiers allow for file transfer, video conferencing, and collaboration.

Pricing varies, based on features and use case, with single-user access to three managed devices starting at £15.90 a month, billed annually. A single business licence, at £35.90, adds Google Meet integration, mobile device support, the ability to record and play back sessions, and a 200-device limit. Team plans run from £67.90 for 15 users and 300 devices, and enterprise pricing is fully customised, so quoted on request.

Non-profit and education users get a 30% discount, and there's a free tier for personal use, although that drops support for file transfers, Wake on LAN, and remote printing.

However, TeamViewer isn't your only option. A wide range of alternatives offers a similar set of core tools plus a range of specific features tailored to particular use cases. Here, we'll take a look at six alternatives you may want to consider alongside TeamViewer.

The best TeamViewer alternatives available

Chrome Remote Desktop

Chrome Remote Desktop uses a proprietary protocol to connect computers over the web. It's entirely browser-based, as you might expect from Google, and guests don't need to install anything, so long as their browser supports WebRTC. Most modern browsers will satisfy these requirements.

Host machines will need to be running Firefox or Chrome, plus the necessary host utility, which you can download for free from remotedesktop.google.com. Once installed, set a six digit pin to protect your machine and grant the necessary access rights at the OS level – and you're done. The connection is saved to your Google Account, so all you need to do to use it is log in to the same account on a second machine, and click the name of the device you want to access.

Once connected, you can set up clipboard synchronisation so that anything copied on one machine can be pasted on the other, and you can transfer files between machines by opening the hidden sidebar (look for the tab on the right of the browser window).

If you won't need to return to the remote machine several times, you can instead set up an ad-hoc connection by generating a one-time code on the host and typing it in on the guest. This function is hived off in a separate Remote Support section, and although it's for short-term use, so isn't the option you'd use if you regularly want to work with your own machine remotely, it still allows keyboard and mouse control of the host.

Chrome Remote Desktop is a neat, free solution for accessing remote machines, on either a one-off or ongoing basis. For many smaller businesses, it offers everything they're likely to need, without the associated price tag.

Read more on Chrome Remote Desktop for more information.

IDrive RemotePC

RemotePC, from cloud-backup specialist IDrive, is another through-the-browser solution that doesn't require dedicated software on the guest machine. However, it does offer a connector for RDP should you need it, and there are apps for Android and iOS.

Setup is refreshingly simple. Install the host utility on the remote machine and log in to your RemotePC account on both devices. You'll see a list of all enrolled machines on your guest device, where a Connect button lets you initiate an in-browser or app-based connection. Once up and running, you can collaborate with remote users using chat or whiteboard (the latter allowing you to draw directly on their screen), blank their terminal while you work, and exchange files using the integrated file browser.

RemotePC's flexible pricing is both feature- and seat-based. Soho pricing starts at $79.50 for five computers (discounted in the first year) and offers file transfer, remote printing, session recording, remote chat, and support for Windows, macOS, and Linux. There's even a package for Raspberry Pi.

The Team tier (from $299.50 for 50 computers) rolls in Active Directory / SSO and on-demand remote support, and Enterprise plans, for which pricing is advertised up front (starting at $599.60 for 100 computers) allow you to organise computers into groups, and set roles and access permissions for users. As you'd expect, each tier includes every feature of the tiers below, and there are two consumer plans for home use.

We were impressed by both how easy this was to set up and use. The up-front Enterprise pricing, which is often hidden elsewhere, was likewise welcome. The fact that there's a free seven-day trial for all plans that don't require card details means there's nothing to be lost in giving it a go.

Read our full IDrive review for more information.

LogMeIn Pro

LogMeIn Pro is part of a varied portfolio of remote control and access platforms from GoTo, where it sits alongside training, webinar, and communications products. It's aimed primarily at small businesses and offers both browser- and app-based access. The browser-based screen viewer is still in beta at the time of writing.

We performed our tests using the LogMeIn client on a Mac, from which we connected to a Windows PC. This initially asked for our Windows password, as it doesn't support PIN-based login (which we use to access Windows). Entering our Microsoft account credentials did the trick, and it's possible to set up an access code as an alternative inside LogMeIn itself.

Once up and running, you can chat between machines, exchange files, draw on the remote display, and use an on-screen laser pointer. If you have a PC at both ends of the connection, you can drag and drop files between them, but if either is a Mac, you'll need to use the file browser instead

Upon clicking to end the remote connection, the client warned us that the host wasn't "completely protected from modern cyber threats" and prompted us to install LogMeIn's own antivirus software powered by Bitdefender. We opted not to do this as the host was already running Windows Security virus and threat protection.

The recommended Power Users plan starts at £69.99 a month (£839 a year), discounted to £699 if you opt for an annual payment. This lets an unlimited number of users access to five computers. The small business plan, at £108 per month when paid annually, ups the computer count to 10. These might not be impulse-purchase prices, but there's no need to commit right away: LogMeIn offers a generous 14 day free trial for which there's no need to enter any card details.

Read our full LogMeIn Pro review for more information.

RealVNC Connect 8

RealVNC claims that more than a billion devices run its software. Connect 8 offers both code-based temporary control of remote machines, as well as longer term device enrollment for ongoing management. It's app-based rather than browser-based, with a unified server/client utility that handles both ends of the connection.

New in this version is a redesigned toolbar that you can move around the screen, and a reworked file transfer tool with a side-by-side view of local and remote files. These include in-session chat, session recording, and support for multiple monitors. At the time of writing, session handover and annotations were listed as upcoming features.

VNC passwords are set per-machine and are distinct from both your Windows login and your RealVNC account password (unless you set them to match). Devices are organised in the client app, optionally with a thumbnail of the last-known state, which can help you identify several similar machines if you only check in periodically.

Team plans start with the Plus tier, at £12.50 per active connection per month, which allows an unlimited number of users to connect to 50 devices. The Premium plan, at £20.75 per active connection per month, raises the device limit to 150 and adds support for audit logs of key events, MFA for sessions, and on-demand connections over LAN that don't traverse the cloud. There's also an Essentials plan (single user and three device limit) for £7.25 a month, and enterprise pricing is available on demand. Although prices are quoted per-month, billing is annual. RealVNC offers a 14-day free trial with no need to provide your card details up front.

Connect 8 works with Windows, macOS, and Linux. Essentials tier users can also connect to Raspberry Pi OS, which is perhaps not surprising given that both Raspberry Pi and RealVNC are based in Cambridge, UK, and RealVNC was Raspberry Pi's default mode of remote access on launch.

Read our full RealVNC Connect review for more information.

Splashtop Remote Access

Splashtop supports remote Windows, macOS and Linux machines, accessed from Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Chromebook. You can also access virtual machines on a range of common cloud platforms, and it's even possible for two remote users to access the same host machine simultaneously. It requires a host app, known as a streamer, to be running on the remote computer, but clients can connect using either the accompanying business app or via the browser. We took this latter option and authenticated ourselves using our Microsoft Account credentials.

The cheapest business plan – Pro – is keenly priced at £7 per user, per month. Aimed at individuals and small teams that need to work remotely, it supports multiple monitors, and chat, and session recording. The Performance plan, at £10 per user per month, builds on this with 240FPS compatibility, high-fidelity audio, USB pass-through, and both remote stylus and Wacom Bridge, with support for pressure, orientation, tilt, and size of stylus during the session. This will likely make Splashtop Remote Access an appealing proposition for hybrid design teams.

Enterprise pricing is available as a quote, and at the opposite end of the scale, there's a Solo tier for individual users at £5 a month. This allows unattended remote access, file transfer, and remote printing. Although prices are quoted per-month, billing is annual.

Read our full Splashtop review for more information.

Zoho Assist

Zoho has separate plans for remote support and unattended access, each starting at £10 a month (reduced to an equivalent £8 per month if you pay for a year up front). They require a host application on the remote machine for access through the browser at the local end. This enables clipboard sharing, instant chat, video and voice chat, file transfer, and multi-monitor navigation. There's also a free plan, but this drops support for file transfers and remote screen blanking, as well as limiting the number of enrolled technicians to one (this is unlimited on all other plans).

Windows, macOS, and Linux are supported at all levels, but you'll need to upgrade to at least the Professional tier (£14 / £12 per month for monthly or annual access respectively) if you need to support ChromeOS, iOS, Android, or IoT devices.

As well as being interactive with the remote display, you can perform a lot of powerful admin tasks through the browser, without affecting the remote user's screen. For example, the browser-based Task Manager displays all running services and applications, which you can shut down from a distance. You can access the Device Manager, add and remove users, edit the Registry, and more. You can also enable Wake on LAN, where supported, so that you can activate and log into machines that have gone to sleep.

Assist is a flexible platform that's easy to get up and running – and, like the others featured here, you can try it yourself, for 15 days, without providing card details.

Read our full Zoho Assist review for more information.

Further reading on remote desktops

If you'd like to learn more about remote desktop technology and platforms, we've got a wide range of content available for your reference. 

Learn more about protocols such as RDP, XRDP or VNC and what TeamViewer offers; find out how to use Microsoft Remote Desktop and how to use remote desktop on Windows 10.

If you need walkthroughs for setting up remote access via Microsoft or Apple OS', see how to use remote desktop on Mac, how to set up Chrome Remote Desktop; and how to remote desktop from Mac to Windows.

Robotic process automation (RPA) firm UiPath has announced a quartet of new features that will soon be coming to its Business Automation Platform.

UiPath Studio Web is the first of the new platform updates that builds upon the existing UiPath Studio and StudioX products.

It’s a browser-based automation development tool that aims to simplify the creation of public-facing apps and processes for various use cases.

UiPath said the tool brings new capabilities such as a connection builder to link APIs ​​to both in-house applications and bespoke industry solutions, while offering the opportunity to develop automations on a cross-platform basis.

Studio Web was used by Microsoft to organise a raffle in which conference delegates participated. It was able to develop a web app to log each entrant and randomly pick winners, sending them bespoke emails confirming their prize automatically.

The company has also bundled three individual improvements under a moniker of ‘continuous discovery’, as part of its first day of its Forward 5 conference.

UiPath said customers are now able to investigate the as-is state of processes and take actions based on the result, while also being able to continuously monitor other processes to identify areas that can be tweaked for better profitability, for example.

‘Continuous discovery’ brings improvements to the UiPath Automation Hub through new return on investment (ROI) capabilities, offering comparisons between estimated benefits and actual outcomes.

New analytics features are coming to Process Mining - a tool used to understand how humans and software robots interoperate on different task - for better insights, as well as general performance improvements.

UiPath’s Task Mining product, which scans staff workflows and suggests the most efficient automations, will also receive a new assisted mode. This will allow those involved in developing the automations to add in their own insights in addition to what the tool’s AI learns.

The third big feature coming to the platform is Communication Mining, a feature born out of the standalone product developed by Re:infer, a natural language processing company that UiPath acquired in August.

Communication Mining will allow businesses to analyse emails, chat logs, and other communication channels to open up new automation opportunities from within the UiPath Business Automation Platform.

The technology can be used in collateral management scenarios, for example, where teams send a large volume of margin call emails to trading counterparties. These emails are usually met with one of three responses: agree, partially agree, and dispute.

Assuming the centralised margin call email inbox has communication mining enabled, automations can be configured to take the responses, filter them by the response type, and send them to the necessary internal teams without any human intervention.

Speaking at Wednesday’s Forward 5 conference keynote, Rushabh Shah, programme director of intelligent automation at Deutsche Bank, told delegates that the financial institution has been using the technology across the business, leading to savings of “weeks and months of work”.

“When you can understand every message flowing through your business, you can understand all your customers' needs, all of your business' problems, and the bottlenecks you have in your processes,” said Ed Challis founder and CEO at RE:infer. “And what's more important is you can uncover all of the great automation opportunities.”

New enterprise-focused features in UiPath Automation Cloud and Automation Suite complete the new platform features, with the former receiving new security capabilities such as IP range restriction.

Automation Suite sees process mining embeded within the platform for the first time after previously only being available through an on-prem installation model.

Serverless robots are also soon to become part of Automation Suite and act similarly to those already available in Automation Cloud, offering “an elastic way to way to scale up automations automatedly,” UiPath told IT Pro.

“They are different in that they will only scale up as high as the customer has infrastructure for them.”

All the newly announced upgrades to UiPath’s Business Automation Platform will become generally available to all customers on 31 October 2022.

The NHS' automation efforts, used to clear the COVID-19-related patient backlog, are being hampered in part by sub-optimal 'depth of understanding’, one NHS Trust head of emerging technology has said.

Each Trust is saving the hours of between one and ten full-time equivalent (FTE) staff, on average, each year with robotic process automation (RPA), according to Tremaine Richard-Noel, head of emerging technology at Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust. However, more staff training is needed to build robust RPA solutions in each organisation.

The NHS’ RPA tools are deployed across every single one of its sub-organisations in some capacity and are currently seen as “one of the biggest solutions” it has to tackle the six-million-patient backlog.

"If you consider the fact that the NHS has got 1.7 million staff, at the minute - this might sound odd - there's quite a lot of impact but, on the grand scheme of things, there's a lot more to do," said Richard-Noel to IT Pro at UiPath’s Forward 5 conference.

There are numerous challenges facing the UK’s healthcare service and deploying RPA across each NHS organisation, of which each is entirely different, is “not very easy”, he added.

The primary difficulty in deploying the tools is educating the IT experts in each Trust, since there is no centralised list of systems and RPA has to be deployed in each organisation individually.

“It's not like you deploy it once, you have to deploy in every place and there isn't a centralised list of systems in the NHS, so there are challenges in educating quickly,” he said.

There is no shortage of experts within the NHS who are willing to train to use and deploy RPA in each organisation - “they’re really keen,” said Richard-Noel. Around 50 individuals are trained each month through workshops and other upskilling programmes.

The upskilling programmes currently in place aim to improve the existing FTE figures and increase each Trust’s expertise to a point where they can build their own software robots and maintain the automations - although completing nationwide baseline training is a “huge undertaking”.

Cyber security considerations are also slowing the rate of robot development within the NHS, albeit not with the same significance as the lack of training across each Trust.

Some of the software robots being developed by the NHS are built for basic, non-sensitive data entry, and these can be deployed relatively quickly.

Other robot builds require the safe management of patient data and some projects rely on overseas developers, raising the need for NHS organisations to gain a greater understanding of these new risks.

The only risk when managing the safe transfer of patient data, for example, with software robots is if a bot was built badly from the outset, said Richard-Noel. However, the high degree of governance within an organisation like the NHS prevents unsecured bots from ever being deployed, he added.

How is RPA being used across the NHS already?

The healthcare industry is one of the areas in which use cases for RPA are often touted. For example, previous research has shown that clinicians in the US are spending around 43% of their jobs doing data entry and not face-to-face with patients.

Richard-Noel said there is an endless list of ways RPA is being used in the NHS but one of the most notable is with automated appointment scheduling.

He called the specific initiative ‘automation-initiated follow-up’ which is used by some NHS Trusts to deploy RPA software in a way that reads blood tests, for example, and automatically book a follow-up appointment if the result reveals a cause for concern.

Before the use of RPA, NHS IT systems would book a follow-up appointment by default, even if the results were unproblematic. It’s one way in which the NHS is using RPA to gradually mitigate the patient backlog.

Some NHS Trusts are also using RPA to process the significant number of referrals for people being transferred from primary to secondary care - around 20 million a year, Richard-Noel said.

The processing of these referrals can be done autonomously using RPA, he said, moving away from the days of needing them to be printed off.

The NHS’ use of RPA has accelerated in the past five years thanks to it being part of a national directive from the healthcare service to each of its subsidiaries, but “there is evidence of it being used for about ten years” in total, said Richard-Noel.

The NHS has also been funding dedicated centres of excellence (CoE) for specific technologies.

“A centre of excellence develops common solutions, promotes best practice, and acquires new skills that are then spread throughout the enterprise to increase the likelihood of adopting new ways of working to realise value and allow teams to become self-sufficient,” read the NHS’ cloud CoE website.

Microsoft launched the first major update to Windows 11 on Tuesday, bringing with it a score of new features to enhance security and the overall Windows experience.

The Windows 11 2022 update, also known as the 22H2 update, focuses on four key innovation areas, said Panos Panay, EVP, chief product officer at Microsoft’s Windows and Devices division.

Microsoft aimed to make the PC experience easier and safer for all, deliver productivity improvements, bring new features for communication and gaming, and improve security controls for those working in hybrid environments.

There are numerous features that will appeal to the everyday consumer, such as faster and more accurate search in the Start menu, improvements to snap layouts, and improved accessibility features such as system-wide live captions.

There are also several business-focused features that users will appreciate spanning productivity, collaboration, security, and the updates themselves.

Windows 11 2022 Update: Productivity improvements

New Focus features such as the focus sessions are designed to make the PC less distracting for periods of work that require deeper concentration.

Starting a focus session enables the Do Not Disturb mode, eliminating notifications and taskbar badges. It also syncs up to the Windows Clock app the time from which can be configured to break up work periods and small breaks, when needed.

Snap Layouts have been a part of Windows 11 since its launch last year but small tweaks in the new update aim to make the feature a little more usable.

In addition to the different quick-select layouts to which Windows 11 users are accustomed, when users drag a window a new bar that looks like Apple’s Mission Control will appear at the top of the display.

The small new feature gives users an additional method of snapping windows into the desired position on the screen which may prove easier and more intuitive for some people.

Windows 11 2022 Update: Collaboration and video call enhancements

Business users familiar with collaboration apps and tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom, will be familiar with the built-in settings that can be tweaked to add blurred backgrounds and other enhancements to improve virtual meetings.

The latest Windows 11 update adds similar features to the operating system’s (OS) settings itself under the name of Windows Studio Effects. Camera effects can be configured such as automatic framing, background blur, and a setting where the front-facing camera will use AI to alter the image so that eye contact is always made, even if looking elsewhere on the screen.

AI is also used with the Voice Focus feature which computationally removes background noise to make the speaker’s voice clearer.

Microsoft made the small-print caveat that some of these features will only be available to some users who have the required hardware to support them.

Windows 11 2022 Update: Anti-phishing and other new security tools

New improvements to Microsoft Defender SmartScreen offer a range of new benefits, including new protections against phishing attempts.

Phishing remains the top attack method for gaining an initial foothold in an organisation’s IT estate via credential theft and one new SmartScreen capability aims to automatically detect when users enter their Microsoft credentials into a malicious website, then delivering clear prompts explaining the threat.

Another hardware-dependent feature is presence sensing in Windows Hello for Business. Devices that are equipped with the necessary hardware can be set up to securely log in and log out when the user approaches and leaves the vicinity of the device.

Smart App Control will also now block untrusted or unsigned applications and script files from running. Supporting Microsoft’s push this year to crack down on VBA Office macros, Smart App Control will additionally provide another layer of protection, blocking macro commands from executing on Windows 11.

“As a result, your employees can use the tools they want and need, while you can relax knowing your organisation is protected,” said Panay. “Built on the same AI used in Windows Defender Application Control, Smart App Control can predict the safety of an application in real-time before it runs on your device.

“This is a great solution for organisations who are not yet using a modern device management (MDM) tool like Microsoft Intune.”

Microsoft will be enabling several other features by default for business users. PCs and laptops equipped with 8th generation Intel CPUs and higher will have virtualisation-based security (VBS) and hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI) enabled as standard after the update is applied.

Neither are new features to Windows but both aim to offer greater protection against malware and vulnerability exploits.

VBS is a feature that allows users to make use of hardware virtualisation, placing certain apps such as security tools in a “virtual secure mode” that protects against exploitation via security vulnerabilities.

HVCI is one type of security tool which uses VBS and is sometimes referred to as ‘memory integrity’ and works in tandem with VBS to create a secure, isolated environment.

“VBS leverages the Windows Hypervisor to create an isolated virtual environment that becomes the root of trust of the OS that assumes the kernel can be compromised,” Microsoft explained in technical documentation.

“HVCI is a critical component that protects and hardens this virtual environment by running kernel mode code integrity within it and restricting kernel memory allocations that could be used to compromise the system.”

There are numerous other security controls that Windows 11 now supports, designed specifically for hybrid workers, that are detailed in a separate blog post.

Windows 11 2022 update: Reformed updates

Microsoft has embarked on a mission to make its updates more efficient and performant for users by making changes to its feature and monthly cumulative updates.

A “significantly reduced download size” and a more “streamlined” approach are the two key methods Microsoft has used to improve its updates, it said.

“We have significantly reduced the download size for feature updates by redesigning how we handle the "in-box apps' that ship with Windows 11,” said Microsoft.

“We estimate that these and other changes, like the restructuring of Unified Update Platform (UUP) files reduce the overall download size by [around] 450 MB. We've also streamlined cumulative updates by making them smaller to download, faster to install, and consuming less disk space.”

Microsoft also introduced ‘carbon aware’ updates to the OS as part of its big 2022 update. Windows will now schedule update installations at times that it calculates to result in fewer carbon emissions used.

When devices are connected to the internet and able to retrieve carbon intensity data, Windows may attempt to install updates, which typically use more electricity, at times when energy is being sourced from lower-carbon sources.

Slack is introducing a new feature that will allow users to create and edit full documents from within the chat platform.

The Salesforce-owned business revealed Slack Canvas at the Dreamforce developer conference as part of a product update that includes further expansion of its digital HQ initiative.

Along with Slack Huddles, Canvas is one of the biggest departures yet from its original form as an email-alternative chat platform. However, it makes sense from a productivity standpoint and fits in with the wider trend of software companies looking for more reasons to keep users within their platforms.

The idea is to take documents or projects out of Slack's chat windows and move them into a more permanent but findable space. Canvases can house text or imagery, but they can also use video or social media content. It can even grab the information straight from a link and embed it automatically. And, it can also interact with third-party tools through Slack's many integrations, which presumably include Google Apps. What's more, documents in Canvas are collaborative and multiple users can work on them at the same time with all comments kept in as a separate Slack thread.

Slack used to be seen as a competitor to Microsoft Teams, but with its new video capabilities (Slack Huddles) and now Canvas, it's moving beyond that and almost challenging the likes of Office and Workspace. This is also the case with Zoom, which is adding more and more collaboration features making it more of a productivity suite than merely video conferencing.

"We're focused on helping our customers navigate the future of work, whether that's hybrid, remote or in the office," said Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer, Slack. "We've been introducing capabilities like Slack Connect, clips, huddles and now canvas, that bring more value to our customers and enhance working in a digital HQ."

Canvas isn't available yet - it's still in testing - but Slack said it will be available to users sometime next year.

Best known for the excellent Cyber Protect backup and endpoint protection products, Acronis is making a play for the remote support market with this cloud-hosted package. Pricing for Acronis Cyber Protect Connect looks good: the top-end Professional version on review has a yearly cost of £72 per technician, with unlimited concurrent sessions.

Connect presents an account administration web portal and client console apps for technicians to provide remote support. On-demand and unattended access to Windows, macOS and Linux systems, otherwise known as destinations, are provisioned respectively by a lightweight quick assist portable app and an agent.

Acronis also offers client apps (formerly Remotix) for iOS and Android devices so technicians can provide support on the move. These each cost an extra £13 and, at present, apps are not available for remotely connecting to mobile destination devices.

The Teams feature in Connect Professional allows administrators to organise support staff into groups where each one is permitted to access specific sets of devices with the agent installed. Licences are required for each user, joining invitations are sent to them from the portal and access security can be tightened with SSO (single sign-on).

Administrators add selected users to teams and create access groups that contain the devices they’re allowed to see. This is a versatile feature as users can be removed from a team, perhaps when a project has finished, and allocated to a new one without having to change each device’s access permissions.

On first contact with their web portal, technicians download the client app, which provides a personal console for adding connections, running on-demand support sessions and accessing systems with the agent installed. Connections can be made using Acronis’ proprietary NEAR remote desktop protocol, which, among other things, uses H.264 for smooth remote sessions, and it allows them to create direct connections using the RDP and VNC protocols.

Annoyingly, Connect doesn’t offer automated deployment tools for agent distribution so you’ll need to provide each user with a download link. At this point, you can initiate quick assist sessions from the client app using the ID and code displayed by the remote agent.

These generic apps aren’t customised for your account, either, so enabling unattended access requires users to update their agents with the email addresses of trusted technicians or add them to teams using the unique ID displayed in the web portal. On completion, devices then appear in the web portal and associated technician consoles ready for swift remote access.

Quick assist sessions for devices without the agent installed require the end user to download a portable app and provide the technician with the computer ID and code it displays. Again, this is a manual affair as, unlike most other support products, Connect can’t issue email or SMS invitations with a link that users click on to download a temporary app and enter a session ID provided by the technician.

For either access method, individual desktop consoles are opened for each session and technicians can choose to start with remote control, file transfer, chat or passively observe the user’s screen. They can’t share their own screen with a user for training or guidance, but an upper ribbon menu provides tools to access multiple monitors, take screenshots and reboot the device, with the client app offering an automatic reconnect option using the saved ID code.

Acronis Cyber Protect Connect Professional comes up short when compared to established names in the remote support field like Netop Remote Control or ConnectWise Control, and the agent deployment processes could easily be improved. That said, it’s a very affordable remote support solution with good administrative features and a diverse range of device connection options.

Online graphic design and publishing company Canva has announced it will be expanding its product offerings with a new suite of Office software.

Canva Visual Worksuite is being marketed as an all-in-one visual communication platform that will include web apps for document creation, presentations, tools for editing videos and quickly creating social media posts, as well as a built-in website builder.

The idea behind Canva Docs is that it will offer consumers and businesses a full document editor but with a focus on design elements.

Like Google Docs, it will be accessed online through a computer or mobile and includes collaboration features such as comments and assigning of tasks.

It also brings with it a feature Canva calls ‘Docs to Decks’ which allows users to write their content in Docs and convert it into a presentation with one click.

Canva Docs is currently in beta and is accepting sign-ups for the waiting list. All other apps included in the new Canva Visual Worksuite are available to use now.

Canva Whiteboards offer design-led brainstorming tools for teams looking to collaborate visually. There are different presets for different tasks such as brainstorming, mind mapping, taking meeting notes, building flowcharts, developing a gap analysis and more.

Presentations is an app for building PowerPoint and Google Slides-like documents with different modes for regular presentations, talking presentations, and mobile-first presentations which adopt a portrait format for smartphone viewing.

Businesses looking to improve their presence on social media could benefit from its tool dedicated to building visually striking posts without the need for an in-house or agency graphic design team.

There are presets for all kinds of design work a business could need, from Facebook ads to all the different types of Instagram posts.

Canva videos also have the same potential to ease the burden of producing online content for businesses without any expertise in the area. Video templates and simple editing tools are available to create many different types of online content, from LinkedIn ads to YouTube videos.

Canva’s new website builder allows businesses to easily build simple websites for a variety of purposes such as advertising services or promoting an event.

There are a number of services dedicated to modular, drag-and-drop-style web building like WordPress and Squarespace whose technology is more mature and are better-tooled, though.

For simple tasks though, some businesses already familiar with Canva’s user interface may find it easier to use its new proprietary platform.

One of its capabilities involves converting documents, presentations, and PDFs straight into a responsive web page that can have its own domain.

Giving a platform to creators

The launch of Canva Visual Worksuite also brings with it two platforms that will help creators and developers earn money for their work.

The Canva Creators Programme will see designers being able to contribute their work to the Canva marketplace and earn money for their content and templates they produce. Photographers and illustrators can also sell their work for use across the new suite of productivity apps.

Canva has also opened up its design engine for developers to create new apps and functionality that can enhance the user experience in the Worksuite.

“Some of our most recent apps and integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Photos, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Bynder – and this is just the start,” it said in an announcement.

“As more and more developers build innovative apps in Canva, you'll be able to complete entire workflows within Canva. Adding new elements to your designs will be richer and more functional – for example, our QR Code app lets you instantly add a QR code to any design, no coding required.”

An update to Windows Terminal coming this week will deliver users the ability to create custom themes for the command-line interface (CLI).

Version 1.16 of Windows Terminal Preview will allow users with a little programming experience to customise the look of the CLI’s window with a variety of colours, backgrounds, and themes.

It replaces the minimal customisation options that have previously been included in Windows’ default CLI for years.

Customisation is only available through the modification of a JSON file, but this will be made accessible through the Terminal's user interface (UI) via the Appearance page in the settings dropdown menu.

The programming of the custom themes will be familiar to those with coding knowledge - it’s a case of adding properties to the ‘themes’ object and setting values for each, such as hex codes for specific colours.

Customisation options include separate designs for tabs, tab rows, and the window itself, each of which supports different properties with which users can experiment.

There are other minor cosmetic changes to the default colour scheme, too, and Microsoft has also changed Terminal to a dark theme by default.

In addition to the visual changes brought in version 1.16, Microsoft has made the previously experimental text rendering engine, introduced in version 1.13 and only enabled through a special command, the default for all Windows Terminal profiles.

“The new renderer is more performant and now supports additional pixel shaders (including the retro effect), bold text, and underline/overline/hyperlink lines,” said Kayla Cinnamon program manager 2, Windows Terminal, console, command line, and Cascadia Code, in a blog post.

“If your machine doesn’t have a GPU, or you’re remoting to a virtual machine that doesn’t have a GPU, it will fall back to a more performant mode that doesn’t require hardware support.”

Microsoft has been planning to make Windows Terminal the default terminal for its operating system since December 2021, it said at the time.

This was made official at the end of August when it was enabled as standard in the Windows 11 Insider preview build 25188.

It replaced the Windows Console Host which has been the default terminal emulator since Windows began, Cinnamon said, tasked with bringing programs like Command Prompt and PowerShell to life.

“Over the course of 2022, we are planning to make Windows Terminal the default experience on Windows 11 devices,” she said.

“We will start with the Windows Insider programme and start moving through rings until we reach everyone on Windows 11. We would love to have your feedback while we are working on this to help iron out all of the bugs and ensure everyone has a great experience with Terminal.”

Financial services firm Square is to offer its UK sellers ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) capability across their platforms.

Sellers will be able to offer customers BNPL online through a Clearpay integration at the checkout, while any in-person Square checkouts will also support Clearpay options, including Square Point of Sale, Square for Retail and Square for Restaurants.

The move makes the UK the only market in which all Square platforms offer BNPL solutions.

Clearpay, known as Afterpay outside the UK and EU, was acquired by Square in 2021 for approximately $29 billion. Square registered a 180% global increase in new customers using Afterpay through Square sellers between February and March, and US businesses that offered it as a BNPL service saw increases such as a 17% increase in clothing sales.

The integration means Customers can complete payments in four interest-free instalments over a six week period, while sellers receive the full amount up-front. Clearpay integration will also be available for developers within the Square Web Payments SDK, offering businesses the option to maintain Square and Clearpay payments easily.

Clearpay will also be available as a payment method for sellers who utilise Square’s Virtual Terminal dashboard, through which customers can be sent Pay Links via text message.

Square offers businesses hardware and software to facilitate card payments, with dedicated Square Readers and Stands, or even through a simple iOS or Android app. As its customer base is primarily made up of businesses that did not formerly have card payment capabilities, 96% of Square Sellers are small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), according to market insight firm Enlyft.

BNPL payments accounted for almost £13 billion of UK e-commerce spending in 2021, and could exceed £16 billion in 2022, according to US fintech giant FIS. In the UK, BNPL is expected to account for 12% of UK e-commerce spending by 2025, and is currently the fastest growing online payment method.

Rich Bayer, UK country manager at Clearpay, identified “young and engaged shoppers who want BNPL as their preferred payment method” as a key market that the integration opens up to Square Sellers.

With the worsening cost of living crisis and rising inflation, SMBs are increasingly look for ways to offset costs for their customers, as even smaller purchases begin to be weighed up against the price tag of essential items.

“We’re thrilled to be integrating Clearpay both in-store and online in the UK,” stated Alyssa Henry, head of Square. "The integration across platforms furthers our goal to give sellers of all sizes omnichannel tools that help them to grow by meeting consumer shopping habits, whatever and wherever they are.

“Clearpay provides our ecosystem with a new tool beyond an alternative payment method; it enables an omnichannel commerce solution that can offer true value to our sellers.”

When the IT Pro team went into lockdown, way back in March 2020, we began reviewing some of the services that enabled us to work remotely. We dived deeply into Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack and even Skype. I, myself, went head first into the world of Google Hangouts, the tech giant’s main video conferencing app, at the time.

I liked Hangouts. To be honest, it was all I’d known until Zoom went mainstream. I used it for work and family lockdown quizzes (oh, God, remember those?). I wrote a fairly decent review and a few days after its publication, Google announced Hangouts was to be killed off. Typical.

‘Killed by Google’ is a phrase the company reportedly hates, but it has that very reputation for good reason (Google+ anyone?). However, Hangouts wasn’t wholly getting binned as its capabilities were actually being integrated into Google Chat.

Is this a way for Google to avoid the ‘Killed by’ label? Probably not. Instead, it's actually more about condensing Workspace, the company’s productivity suite formerly known as G Suite, into a less bloated platform.

That, in itself, though, is part of a wider trend to make these cloud-based business apps more holistic, to the point that they no longer need to integrate with other providers: I’m talking here about the new age of vendor lock-in.

It’s a trend we can also see in the metaverse, with each business essentially creating their own virtual realm from scratch.

Hangouts is still there, of course, quite literally hanging out, waiting for its scheduled death in November. And yet, Google is still moving things around, mixing apps together in a bid to find the right balance. The latest change is adding the capabilities of Meet to the Duo app, which will also be rebranded to ‘Meet’. But there’s an odd twist, as, at the same time, the original Google Meet app is still going to be around. Yes, it's all very confusing and needlessly complicated.

Eventually, it should all make sense. Duo is an app for making one-to-one calls and Meet is a pure video conferencing platform, so adding them together is a no-brainer. It’s just a bit of a mess in the short term where you’ll have two Meet apps on your desktop. Users that have Duo already installed won’t necessarily have to do anything; the features for Meet have already begun rolling out to Duo and the app icon will change (to Meet) in the coming months. What’s more, anyone who downloads Meet from September will have the combined Duo-Meet version.

You can still use the original Meet app, but enjoy that while you can as it’s clearly headed for the end. Again, Google has managed to avoid the whole ‘killed by Google’ tag here by not technically killing anything as Duo and Meet are simply merging - all that will be lost is the name Duo. When the time comes, Google will prompt users to migrate over, although a specific date hasn’t been disclosed as yet.

These types of tweaks are likely to keep coming as we further navigate the world of hybrid work. To be fair, the way our cloud services look and function has drastically changed since 2020. G Suite is now ‘Workspace’, Gmail is now a hub for more than just email and Office 365 works more like Workspace.

The sudden popularity of video conferencing and collaboration platforms like Zoom and Slack can sort of be blamed here. Their rapid rise almost forced the likes of Google and Microsoft to reinvest in their business apps. Slack, indeed, will have you know that Microsoft Teams is nothing but a poor imitation of its own product. Slack, however, which was taken over by Salesforce is, itself, now trying to position itself as a ‘digital HQ’, a one-stop shop for all you need, with mini video conferencing capabilities and email-like external chat functions.

Slack and Zoom was once a popular pairing for smaller businesses, but the latter is slowly adding Slack-like chat functions. It recently announced Zoom One, a set of business and enterprise tiers that offer more than just video conferencing services. Again, it's about keeping users in one place, under one umbrella. There’s nothing very collaborative about that, now, is there?

Google is rolling out a minor refresh of the Gmail user interface that might offer a productivity boost to Workspace customers.

The change will pull Chat, Spaces, and Meet apps closer together as integrated apps that sit in a sidebar on the right.

Google initially announced these changes back in February with a view to rolling them out in April, though it has only just begun that process. Gmail users can expect to see the changes over the coming weeks. Later this year, the features will be added to Gmail for tablets.

By adding icons for Mail, Meet, Spaces and Chat into one sidelined list, Gmail essentially tidies that section up and rids itself of showing multiple conversations from each of the apps. They're still easy to access and jump into any conversation, but they will instead be in the form of a pop-out when the cursor hovers over the icon.

If you're resistant to change, the new UI can be switched back to the old one, for the time being. If you have an account that doesn't have Chat enabled, you will still get the new look, but in a Gmail-only view as a default.

The changes form part of Google's new approach to Workspace that offers a more unified look and feel. That includes new machine learning capabilities that aim to improve productivity. The new Gmail search functionality is a good example of this.

'Intent matching', a machine learning tool that helps find topics related to search queries has been added. With this users should have a better way of finding specific contacts, emails or files. For instance, the feature will prioritise search results for email addresses and first names, rather than those based on last names as it previously did. Searches will also be personalised based on previous searches, so the correspondents you speak with most will appear at the top.

An intranet is a private internet space internally accessible only by an organisation's staff. An evolution of the public internet, intranets became highly popular as a means of internal communication from the 1990s onwards.

Since the inception of intranets, other collaborative tools have appeared, alongside, of course, social media networks that pushed intranets out of favour. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic deepened, enterprises were forced to quickly find a communications channel that was secure, private and would enable them to reach all their workers no matter their location.

As such, there’s been a resurgence of interest in how businesses can wield intranets. As we emerge from COVID-19, enterprises are casting an eye towards their post-pandemic digital futures, with the humble intranet once again establishing itself as a critical component. These channels are becoming a key part of development strategies, especially in the way they can be used to support the wellbeing of staff, and reinforce company culture.

It’s also essential to appreciate exactly how – and where – the culture of an enterprise manifests. Where staff once occupied an office space, the shift to mass remote working and hybrid work has challenged companies to establish new ways to keep workers connected. Indeed, research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) concludes 40% of workers will never return to the office.

Robert Rutherford, CEO at IT consultancy QuoStar, tells IT Pro the intranet is essential to make hybrid work efficient and effective for all businesses. “The intranet can be an important anchor piece to improve the remote worker’s experience,” he says, “allowing them to get some sort of window into the wider organisation.” In this way, the shifting labour market and the new, post-pandemic age of hybrid work is crucial to the birth of the modern intranet.

Intranets are connecting organisations

Many companies may already have a dormant intranet. Others will need to build an intranet from scratch. In each of these scenarios, it’s critical the intranet has clearly defined strategic goals. Intranets should allow employees to locate information quickly. An intranet can also communicate and support the business's brand values and the enterprise's culture. For example, employee experience (EX) is proving to be a significant asset companies can use to reinforce workforce loyalty as they combat the great resignation.

One of the significant issues with intranets when they first appeared was the low uptake of users. Most often, employees did not see their intranet’s advantages because the project had been poorly conceived with little input from the workforce and ineffective communication from management.

Rutherford warns an intranet initiative must be approached with all the due diligence of any new project. "Intranets can deliver significant value to an organisation,” he says, “but they do require significant investment in terms of time and money. A business cannot simply install a new platform and expect it to make any difference to an employee’s working life, or to deliver any effective outcome for the wider business.”

Today's intranets are for their users. They’re the core focus of this technology. If high levels of engagement are to be attained, an integrated approach to their development must be taken. Successful intranets are not a directive but mandated and validated by the people who use them.

What do next-gen intranets look like?

“What we’re really seeing is a step change in how companies’ put information in the hands of employees – and what they require from the platforms that help them do so,” says Christine Trodella, head of B2B commercial sales at Meta’s Reality Labs, and head of Workplace from Meta.

Trodella continues: “The companies and HR teams that get this right – providing employees with access to information and training without roadblocks – will reap the benefits of a connected, informed and empowered workforce.”

So, what does a next-gen intranet look like? A dashboard interface has remained popular. Accessing company information, tasks, booking meetings, leave, and other essential office services also form the core of modern intranets. Far from being an abstract idea, companies are already striving to mimic such a platform. One such example is Microsoft's Viva, which connects Teams to Microsoft 365 in what the company calls 'an employee experience platform.'

"We need to stop thinking about work as a place, and start thinking about how to maintain the culture, connect employees, and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world," says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. "As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and wellbeing so organisations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity."

Time will tell whether Viva's modular approach will become as commonplace as Teams has evolved during COVID-19. The difference between the intranet of yesterday and that of today is the extent to which users can personalise their accounts to make them unique. Linking to collaboration tools can also offer the 'watercooler connections’ many workers miss. The delivery of support for wellness, education and training, too, are also being included within next-gen intranets.

Intranets are shared spaces and experiences

Businesses are looking to make – in some cases – radical changes to how they organise their enterprises to future-proof their workplaces. Redrawing their digital transformation roadmaps is also important as companies transition to post-pandemic businesses. From a strategic planning perspective, this means supporting workforces with the digital tools they need and understanding how the connected internal spaces they use must also form a critical component of the blueprint.

Meta’s Christine Trodella concludes: “When it comes to knowledge at work, the most important thing is access. And to provide that access, companies must invest in tools that are inclusive and easily searchable and shareable on any device. In the new world of work, we shouldn’t be filing documents away never to be seen again, we need to take them to the people that need them.”

Intranets have been used for decades as an internal private communications channel. In the modern era, however, intranets can be spaces where businesses can connect with their workforces on a more fundamental level. Ultimately, an intranet will succeed or fail with its users; they're built to offer a shared space where information can be accessed, but also where the culture of a business can be practised.

Intranets also align with multiple business goals, including the support of workers no matter their location. As a result, intranets have become a central hub around which internal communications orbits. More vitally, however, next-gen intranets deliver a comprehensive channel to support EX – a vital component to ensure businesses thrive in the post-pandemic landscape.

While increasing digitisation of our workloads might have brought the dream of the paperless office closer than ever to reality, the fact remains that printing out physical documents is still something that most of us will need to do every so often.

Having a shortcut to your printer can save time, especially when you need to manage your print queue or hardware settings on a regular basis, and don’t want the hassle of selecting your printer through options menus each and every time you do so. Thankfully, creating a shortcut to your printer in Windows 10 is a relatively smooth and straightforward process.

First, open your control panel by pressing the start button and searching ‘control panel’, then clicking on the control panel application.

Next, under ‘Hardware and Sound’ select ‘View devices and printers’. Once this is open, right click on your printer of choice and select ‘create shortcut’. You will be prompted with an option to create a desktop shortcut: select ‘yes’.

Once this is complete, you should have a shortcut for your printer right on your desktop, from which you can check the print tray and access its settings at any time. In the print tray, one can see all documents currently sent to the printer, as well as cancel documents from printing and reorder the print queue.

If you would like to rename the shortcut, simply right click on the icon and select ‘Rename’, or alternatively click twice on the name it has and then enter your own (not a double click — click on the name to select it, and then a second or two later click again to highlight the text itself).

For ease of access, the printer shortcut can also be added to the taskbar. To do this, simply right click on your newly created printer shortcut and select the option ‘add to taskbar’.

Additionally, the printer shortcut you created does not have to stay on your desktop. The icon, like any program shortcut, can be moved or copied to any folder on your computer. One way to do this is to open windows explorer and navigate to the folder of your choice.

Next, move Windows Explorer so that the shortcut is not obscured behind it on the desktop (this may require pressing the maximise button to make explorer a smaller window, if you have it in full screen). Then simply drag the shortcut from the desktop into the folder of your choice.

Alternatively, you can click once on the printer shortcut to select it, and use the keyboard shortcut Control + C to add the printer shortcut to the clipboard. Then, navigate to the folder of your choice and press Control + V on your keyboard to paste it into the folder.

This article originally appeared in issue 28 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here

Weaponised artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer some futuristic sci-fi nightmare. Autonomous killer robots aren't out to get us just yet, but AI technologies such as machine learning have been adopted by criminal gangs who, like any ambitious organisations, want to give their operations an edge.

One of the best-known botnets, TrickBot, is a prime example of a once standard Trojan that's now brimming with AI capabilities. Its creators have added intelligent algorithm-based modules which, for instance, calculate how to hide in a specific target system, making it almost impossible to detect.

Imaginative attackers are also using AI to scan for minute vulnerabilities in systems; process vast stores of personal data and create deepfakes so realistic they'd fool a CEO's mum. Tools to achieve this nefarious magic are widely available through the dark web, but even more frightening still is the prospect of criminals weaponising organisations' own AI by infiltrating and manipulating the data that informs it.

The implications for global security are indeed grim. Business leaders also fear lagging behind in the AI security race, with 60% of those surveyed by Darktrace last year suggesting human-driven responses are failing to keep up. Nearly all (96%) have begun to guard against AI, but with threats escalating, what tools and systems are available?

How AI learns to guard your data

To face down AI threats, you need AI defences. More than two-thirds (69%) of organisations surveyed in a Capgemini study said AI security is urgent, and this number is likely to grow as more are hit by AI-driven attacks. "I don't know any IT security vendor that hasn't included machine learning algorithms in security toolsets," says Freeform Dynamics analyst Tony Lock. "Security was one of the earliest sectors to use machine learning because it's so good at looking for patterns, especially anomalies that might indicate a threat."

Traditional security tools can't keep pace with the sheer scale of malware and ransomware created every week. AI, by contrast, can detect even the tiniest potential risk before it enters the system, without having to constantly run computer scans or be told what threats to look out for. Instead, it learns a baseline and then automatically flags anything out of the ordinary.

AI apps and components are available in cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, and can be added to existing systems without interrupting workflows. Everyone can get on with their jobs with minimal risk of mistakes, and the tools are designed to scale as required. Microsoft Azure's secure research environment for regulated data is a good example. It uses smart automation to supervise and analyse the user's business data, while its machine learning is ready to leap into action if it detects a blip. Similarly, email scanners such as Proofpoint use machine learning to detect malicious emails by spotting clues far too subtle for a human to see.

The more these tools are used, the more accurate and faster they get. Response times are slashed as AI tools learn from their own experiences and from those of other organisations, through analysis of samples shared in the cloud. "The AI might miss the first attack, but then it'll share that knowledge with other AI systems and create new ways to detect the new attack, and so on," says Adam Kujawa, security evangelist at Malwarebytes. Eventually, says Kujawa, the user won't encounter threats at all.

Beyond anomalies: Automation, scale and prediction

Automated threats can't be tackled using legacy security tools, but AI-powered cyber security tools can help. Deployed in a system, algorithms build a thorough understanding of activity such as website traffic, and learn to automatically and instantly distinguish between humans, good data, bad data, and bots.

Martin Rehak, CEO of security firm Resistant AI and lecturer at Prague University, gives the example of large-scale financial fraud that exploits organisations' own automation systems. "AI and machine learning are the only scaling factors that can supervise these systems effectively in real-time," he says. The system will then continuously refine relationships between algorithms, getting better at evaluating documents and behaviour in real-time, potentially uncovering all kinds of fraud.

AI also prioritises risks far more intuitively than a human can. "Technology has evolved to allow prioritisation backed by AI algorithms, which computes risk score," explains Naveen Vijay, VP of threat research at risk analytics firm Gurucul. "This approach allows it to automate not only the detection of incidents but also the mitigation process."

AI helps you prioritise resources, too. By enabling you to analyse vast amounts of data and create a detailed record of all your assets, an AI system can predict how and where you're most likely to be compromised, so you can organise your defences to protect the most vulnerable areas.

Deep learning, attack simulations and beyond

At the moment, AI defences can't do all the work by themselves. They still have to be correctly managed by humans. "The common mistake I see is companies paying for AI systems then not configuring them correctly," says Jamie King, information and cyber security manager at IT provider TSG. "I personally like Microsoft Sentinel as part of a security strategy, because it's cost-effective and works well. But organisations need to be aware that it is an option, and quality management needs to be in place."

AI is great for spotting anomalies, but a human is still needed to make the final call, agrees Phil Bindley, MD of cloud and security at Intercity. "Having a blend that uses both AI and humans helps to spot false positives. Solutions like Checkpoint Harmony inform about potential threats based on AI and machine learning, then require human interaction to make a choice on the best course of action."

Just as driverless cars are set to transform transport, though, autonomous AI systems may render human supervision unnecessary. Already, the most advanced AI security services offer elements of deep learning, which doesn't depend on human-designed algorithms but instead on neural networks, which comprise many layers of analytical nodes and are effectively artificial brains. Such a system could learn to "know" the difference between benign and malicious activity.

Security teams can already harness the predictive powers of AI by building models that help them predict what malware will do next, and then build AI workflows that swing into action automatically when an attack or variant is detected. AI prediction is evolving fast, however. Firms such as Darktrace are developing smart attack simulations that'll autonomously anticipate and block the actions of even the most inventive AI-tooled cyberpunk.

"Proactive security and simulations will be incredibly powerful," says Max Heinemeyer, VP of cyber innovation at Darktrace. "This will turn the tables on bad actors, giving security teams ways to future-proof their organisations against unknown and AI-driven threats."

Big Four auditing giant KPMG has launched a new suite of digital products to help CEOs on their digital transformation journeys.

The company is launching the new products under a new KPMG Products branding, which comprises new digital tools and applications to help address digital transformation challenges.

According to its 2021 CEO outlook report, more than a third of UK CEOs (34%) said they viewed digital transformation as their most important operational priority for the next three years.

Three of the products have been announced today, with more coming later in the three-year project:

• Dash: a pre-configured analytics platform that provides sector-specific insights on performance, portfolio management, pricing, and range
• ESG IQ: a big data analytics product that helps finance organisations to gain a deeper understanding of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of existing and prospective assets based on their own ESG risk appetite
• Strategic Workforce Planning Solution: a product that helps NHS Trusts specifically to model their workforce capacity

“Businesses are making wholesale changes to both their operations and their strategy as they seek to shore up their resilience against a challenging economic and geopolitical backdrop,” said Jon Holt, CEO at KPMG UK. "Our technologists will help them to interrogate and understand the data flowing out of their businesses and make informed decisions to drive future growth."

KPMG Products is part of the company’s long-term £300 million investment plan for innovations and the development of new technologies - a separate investment from its $5 billion (£3.96 billion) five-year fund to improve its current products.

The company is also more than doubling the number of its technical employees, from 3,000 to 6,500, over the next three years to further build out KPMG products. These roles will include product designers, engineers, and data scientists.

Its expanded team will be tasked with building new applications for KPMG Products, designed to meet the challenges of digital transformation and help make better use of the data collected by the business.

“The consulting industry is evolving, and this considerable investment signals a significant change in how we operate and serve the organisations we work with,” said Lisa Heneghan, global chief digital officer at KPMG UK.

“To realise this change, we have already started to significantly grow our pool of digital talent to develop these revolutionary technologies. Founded on our consulting heritage, these products are being designed using the firm’s unique expertise to support our clients in the most innovative ways where they need it most.”

Security researchers have developed a tool to scan popular office software for security vulnerabilities, and have already found more than 100 vulnerabilities across Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat and Foxit Reader.

The tool, known as Cooper, approaches vulnerability scanning by looking at the way in which office software integrates programming languages like JavaScript and Python to perform automated functions such as file manipulation.

The research co-authored by Peng Xu, Yanhao Wang, Hong Hu, and Purui Su from the School of Cyber Security at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced the tool and highlights vulnerabilities caused by the interaction of high and low-level languages.

In a research paper detailing the Cooper tool, the researchers said a ‘binding layer’ is required to essentially translate the script’s actions, written in the high-level languages such as JavaScript and Python, into code that can be interpreted by low-level languages (C/C++) used to implement the script’s actions into the software itself.

This binding layer is prone to producing inconsistent representations of the scripts and can sometimes also overlook crucial security checks, leading to “severe security vulnerabilities” being found in the software.

After running Cooper on Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, and Foxit Reader, the researchers were able to find a total of 134 novel bugs – 60 for Adobe Acrobat, 56 in Foxit Reader, and 18 in Microsoft Word.

Most of the bugs found by Cooper as part of the research (103) have been confirmed and 59 of them have been fixed already, netting the researchers $22,000 in bug bounties.

A total of 33 CVEs (official, trackable vulnerability codes) have been issued too, including CVE-2021-21028 and CVE-2021-21035 - a pair of bugs in Adobe Acrobat each with an 8.8 rating on the CVSSv3 severity scale.

The researchers used fuzzing to test for vulnerabilities in the programmes – a technique commonly used in such research and involves randomly generating a large number of inputs which are fed into the programme to highlight behavioural anomalies, the researchers said.

There were limitations to using the technique, and the researchers developed “novel techniques”: object clustering, statistical relationship inference, and relationship-guided mutation to address these.

The limitations of fuzzing lie in the way in which it explores the mutation of code. Fuzzing is one-dimensional, in that it modifies statements from the high-level code only, but binding statements receives inputs from two dimensions – the high-level code in the scripts and the low-level code in the underlying system.

This restriction means every bug in the binding code cannot be discovered in just one dimension.

This was evidenced by the researchers who used the existing Domato JavaScript fuzzer in the experiment too, which found markedly fewer bugs that Cooper.

The researchers plan to release the open source code for Cooper via their GitHub page so the community can help build it out and further improve the security of binding layers.

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String me up on charges of shooting fish in a barrel, if you will, but I’m 99% sure we’re all sick of paying subscriptions for software.

Two companies that are having no trouble living with themselves are those who arguably swung the pendulum towards subscriptions in the first place: Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe first launched Creative Cloud back in 2012, moving from the big one-off cost of Creative Suite to the subscription model, since when the company’s net income charts have taken on the appearance of Tour de France mountain stage. Microsoft financial reports, meanwhile, reveal that Microsoft 365 Consumer subscriptions have increased by almost ten million over the past year alone to 54.1 million, while Office 365 commercial seat growth is up 17% year-on-year.

So, subscriptions are the gift that keeps on giving for the software giants, which is why almost the entire industry has latched onto the idea. If your small business files accounts, you’re almost certainly paying QuickBooks, Sage, Xero or someone else a monthly stipend to record your financials; password managers want a monthly fee to spit out the f%djfDBbe3!d’s for you; even gaming is swinging heavily towards subscription plans.

In my experience, most people won’t grumble too much if software switches to a subscription model and offers something in return. There’s a growing and obnoxious trend, however, for companies to switch to subscriptions and offer nothing extra – or to even withhold features from customers who previously paid for a one-off licence in full expectation of being able to use them for as long as they liked.

This was the case recently with the iPad/Mac note-taking app Notability. In a blog post with more spin on it than a Shane Warne delivery, the developer announced the app was going free! Free, that is, except for the $14.99 per year subscription that you’d have to pay to access most of its useful features. The company would generously give customers who’d previously bought the app one year’s grace before the subscription kicked in, but then they’d be expected to pay again for some features they'd already bought.

That went down about as well as a Jacob Rees-Mogg lecture on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage and within 24 hours the company was forced to yank the handbrake, spin round and promise not to take features off customers who’d already paid for them. But the apology came with a slab of emotional blackmail. “We are a small company, so we designed the original one-year access plan as a precautionary measure since we were not certain if we could support lifetime access,” the Notability team wrote on its blog. “We sincerely apologise for putting our current users in this position.”

Then there are companies that justify shuffling to a subscription by throwing in features you don’t necessarily want in the first place. Acronis True Image 2021 got a five-star review, even though we grumbled about the one-off £34 cost. Now, however, Acronis True Image is no more and is replaced by Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, which has “made the leap from backup to a complete cyber protection solution – combatting the full scope of data threats, from accidents and hardware failure to device theft and cyberattack”. In other words, it’s thrown in a series of security features that you might already have and is charging customers, you guessed it, £34 per year for the privilege.

Notability and Acronis are far from alone in being sucked into the subscriptions model – they’re just the two most recent examples I had to hand. Although there are plenty of free alternatives to subscription-based software, the direction of travel is clear.

This, I fear, is bad for customers. Not only because there’s a finite limit to how many subscriptions most people can afford to maintain, but because the monthly payout makes software firms complacent. They don’t need to tempt you every year or two with killer new features that will persuade you to buy a new version – they’ve got you in the keep net. Especially when – as with Microsoft and Adobe – their software has a virtual monopoly on their particular sectors. Name a recent addition to Microsoft Word, or Excel, or Photoshop that would have tempted you to pay hundreds of quid for an upgrade? Bet you can’t.

My first interaction in the metaverse was with a black man in a bow tie. He didn’t say anything and after a minute talking to him I eventually realised he wasn’t a welcome party. He was the avatar I needed to customise. It was at this point I realised I might be the wrong IT Pro journalist to be reporting live from inside the world of virtual reality (VR).

This version of the metaverse had been built by the American IT specialist DXC, which had kindly invited us on a tour of its virtual campus. Once I had sorted out my face and clothes, my avatar was ‘teleported’ to the welcoming area, when I met up with the DXC media team and some fellow journalists.

There were two instant red flags. Firstly, what the fudge is the dress code? I was meant to be “working” and this was a media briefing, but the tour guide wore a pink cowboy hat like he was leading us on a hen do. Secondly, there was a guy doing some sort of dance move. I found it totally distracting. In fact, the whole space was a distraction. I was spinning around looking at the virtual scenery and, quite frankly, I missed most of the actual presentation.

What I did catch, though, was that DXC said it had been working in this area since 2018. Had they been using the term “metaverse” the whole time? We know it comes from the novel Snow Crash, which was published in 1992, but it wasn’t until Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook to Meta in 2021 that it became common parlance.

“We’ve been calling it ‘immersive collaboration’,” a member of its presentation team told me. “But we have been using the term ‘metaverse as well, actually. Since 2001, we were already talking about working in the metaverse, way back before Meta changed its name. So it was not new for us”

Whatever terminology DXC was using, I couldn’t fault its efforts because the world it had built was very beautiful. It was a sort of island with a beach area, a “soccer” field (it’s an American company) alongside a building with meeting rooms and a dance hall. I enjoyed it so much I was still running around exploring long after the briefing had finished. I wasn’t alone, as there were a few avatars dotted around the beach area, mostly loitering at the lighthouse, presumably trying to get the full view of the island. I tried making some small talk here, to no avail. I said “hello” a few times and even got my avatar to wave. I was ignored, though.

DXC probably could have made some kind of effort to get people talking to one another – this was supposed to be ‘immersive collaboration’ after all. I was keen to hear from the other guests and add more perspectives to this account of my first foray into the metaverse. Sadly you only have my thoughts and feelings and they’re largely negative. I mean, well done to DXC, it’s a great place, but what actual ‘work’ can I do there? I didn’t really meet anyone, I didn’t uncover any newsworthy info and, in all honesty, I wasted about two hours – I felt a bit guilty going for lunch straight after it.

So, I had my fun – I even tried to drown myself in the virtual sea – but I left the metaverse still unsure of what use it has in the business world.

Uber has been granted a 30-month licence to operate private hire vehicles in London.

The ride-hailing company confirmed in a tweet that it had secured a two-and-a-half-year licence from Transport for London (TfL), adding that TfL rightly holds its industry to the highest regulatory and safety standards and it is pleased to have met their high bar.

The company said that as it continues to serve in London, it remains focused on raising industry standards in all areas. This includes offering drivers the benefits and protections they deserve, ensuring all Londoners can get around safely and becoming a fully electric platform by 2025.

"Uber has been granted a London private hire vehicle operator’s licence for a period of two and a half years," a TfL spokesperson told IT Pro.

Uber has had to fight for a licence to operate in London over the past few years. In 2017, TfL said it wouldn’t issue Uber a private hire operator licence, stating that the company wasn’t fit and proper to hold one.

Then, in June 2018, Uber was granted a 15-month probationary licence following a two-day hearing in London. The judge said the company was considered fit and proper to hold a licence, after hearing of the sweeping operational changes it had made since TfL chose not to renew its licence the prior year.

However, in November 2019 it lost its licence to operate once again, with authorities saying it wasn’t a fit and proper operator. Authorities recognised it had made a number of positive changes and improvements but wasn’t enough to satisfy safety officials.

Finally, in September 2020, it won a licence to operate in London after plugging IT gaps. It made changes to its systems and internal processes, including the addition of software tools and more automation. This was enough to satisfy Westminster magistrates court, who ruled in favour of Uber after TfL refused to give the company a licence extension.

Uber securing a 30-month licence comes after the Supreme Court in the UK ruled that Uber drivers must be treated as workers instead of self-employed, which could lead tp minimum wage and holiday pay for thousands of Uber drivers. The Supreme Court said the ride-hailing company has to consider its drivers as workers from the time they log on to the app until they log off.

The 555 sub-postmasters who were the first to take the Post Office to court in 2019 over its faulty Fujitsu Horizon software will receive “their fair share of compensation”, chancellor Rishi Sunak announced today.

Despite winning the landmark High Court case, the group, also known as ‘the 555’, were prevented from benefiting from the Historic Shortfall Scheme – a fund created by the Post Office to compensate another group of 181 victims following the original court case.

Last month, Sunak was urged to adequately compensate the ‘555’, who were facing “financial ruin” after being forced to use the 2019 compensation to cover high legal fees as well as financial losses sustained in the years following their wrongful convictions.

“There is no valid reason to exclude the 555 from being fully compensated and the Chancellor must come forward with the required funding now,” said Darren Jones, chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee.

Five weeks after Jones’ appeal, Sunak expressed hopes that the newly announced compensation scheme will provide “a measure of comfort” for the ‘555’.

“The Horizon IT dispute has had a devastating impact on postmasters and their families, with many losing their livelihoods or being wrongly convicted for crimes they didn’t commit. Without the efforts of these postmasters, this terrible injustice may have never been uncovered so it is only right that they are compensated fully and fairly,” he added.

Commenting on the news, Postal Affairs minister Paul Scully said that “the pain and distress that the Horizon scandal has inflicted on hundreds of postmasters over the years cannot be overstated”.

“Without the efforts of the 555 pioneering postmasters who brought this to court, this injustice may never have seen the light of day nor would the statutory inquiry have been set up, which is why I made it my priority to ensure they are all fairly compensated. While we can’t right the wrongs of the past, I hope this important compensation package is a turning of the page, as we continue working with the Post Office to ensure something like this can never happen again,” he added.

The amount of compensation they will receive is due announced “in due course” and will be set out by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

The Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee wasn't immediately available to comment on Sunak’s announcement.

Microsoft has committed to its initial proposal of adding watermarks to Windows 11 environments that are running on unsupported hardware.

After updating to the latest preview version of Windows 11 (build 22000.588), users have noticed a watermark on the desktop that reads: “System requirements not met”. A similar message also appears in the Windows 11 settings app.

The observation is thought to confirm Microsoft’s plan to warn users that they’re using hardware that isn’t supported but will not impede the performance of the computer itself.

Microsoft has made no official admission that is implementing the watermark for unsupported hardware, omitting it from the latest preview build’s release notes, though testers have reported it since updating.

Microsoft’s decision to impose minimum hardware specifications was a controversial one. Only PCs with a TPM 2.0 chip, Intel 8th-gen Coffee Lake, Zen 2 CPUs, or a higher-spec processor will be able to run the operating system without seeing the watermark.

This means computers running on hardware that pre-dates the Coffee Lake series of chips, which were released in 2017, will not be able to reliably upgrade to Windows 11.

By contrast, Apple’s latest macOS version, Monterey, is compatible with certain devices built as far back as 2013.

PC users previously used open source workarounds to manipulate Windows into allowing an upgrade on unsupported hardware. Users who opted for this route will likely see the watermark on their machines when Microsoft releases the preview build to the wider Windows user base.

Microsoft’s testing of the watermark began in February 2022 with suers noticing the same “System requirements not met” message on their desktop and setting app.

It said at the time that if users willfully install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, then they should be comfortable risking compatibility issues down the line.

Microsoft device malfunctioning was a possibility and said devices would not be guaranteed to receive security updates, it said on its support page.

The exception to the rule is virtual machines, which will not be subject to the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11.

Microsoft's cloud business is facing a potential antitrust investigation from the European Union over the way its software is licensed.

"Several" European-based cloud computing companies are alleged to have made the complaint, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Reports have suggested that the complaint was made in the summer and that it claims Microsoft's licenses for cloud-based products, such as its Office productivity suite, favour its own cloud service (Azure). Specifically, it's alleged that the services work better on Azure and are licensed in a way that makes it more expensive to use on other cloud platforms.

The companies behind the complaint have yet to be identified by the European Commission, though it has gone on record to confirm it is "assessing" a complaint under the Standard Commission procedures.

French cloud firm OVHcloud has released a statement confirming that it is one of the parties involved.

"Through abusing its dominant position, Microsoft undermines fair competition and limits consumer choice in the cloud computing services market," the company said in a statement to Reuters.

A Microsoft spokesperson told IT Pro: "We're continuously evaluating how we can best support partners and make Microsoft software available to customers across all environments, including those of other cloud providers."

The company has yet to comment on the specific complaint.

Since 2017, the European cloud market has grown fourfold, according to Synergy Research Group, reaching €7.3 billion by the second quarter of 2021. The region is currently dominated by US providers AWS, Google, and Microsoft, with a combined market share of 69%.

The biggest European player, at the time of Synergy's report, was Deutsche Telecom, which accounted for just 2% of the market. Directly under Deutsche is OVH, SAP, and Orange.

Complaints can take months, or even years, to become investigations. Microsoft was accused of antitrust practices in 2020, a complaint filed against its Teams product by Slack. There has been little development on the matter, aside from a few reports that suggest the European Commission has sought to gather information from rival companies. There is also the possibility that the Commission had found no wrongdoing on Microsoft's part.

The company's president, Brad Smith is set to meet with EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager on Friday, to discuss the impact of digital technology.

SentinelOne has announced its intent to acquire identity detection and response expert Attivo Networks for $616.5 million in cash and equity.

The acquisition will allow SentinelOne to further expand its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities to address identity-based threats, paving the way for advanced enterprise zero trust and extended detection and response (XDR) solutions.

“The shift to hybrid work and increased cloud adoption has established identity as the new perimeter, highlighting the importance of visibility into user activity. Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is the missing link in holistic XDR and zero trust strategies,” said Nicholas Warner, SentinelOne COO.

“Our Attivo acquisition is a natural platform progression for protecting organizations from threats at every stage of the attack lifecycle.”

As part of SentinelOne's Singularity XDR for autonomous protection, SentinelOne and Attivo Networks have said they will now deliver identity security across a range of products, including Identity Threat Detection and Response, Identity Infrastructure Assessment, and Identity Cyber Deception.

The solution suite will help organizations develop a robust defense against credential theft, privilege escalation, lateral movement, data cloaking, and identity exposure, the companies added.

For instance, Attivo’s identity assessment tool helps minimize the attack surface by identifying misconfigurations, suspicious passwords, and account changes by offering real-time visibility into Active Directory.

The acquisition is expected to close by the second quarter of the current fiscal year, pending regulatory approvals.

“We are thrilled to join SentinelOne, the category leader in XDR. Attivo’s solutions are a perfect complement, as an XDR with identity protection significantly improves organizational security posture,” said Tushar Kothari, Attivo Networks CEO.

“As the threat landscape evolves, identity remains the central nervous system of the enterprise. Combined with the power of SentinelOne’s autonomous XDR, we’ll bring real-time identity threat detection and response to the front lines of cyber defense.”

If you’re feeling bamboozled by complicated licensing models, PRTG Network Monitor is the answer. Pricing is based purely on the number of sensors you want to use – and you don’t have to worry about add-ons and extras, as the entire range of 285 different sensor types is included as standard. These cover virtually every type of network device, hardware component, business app and service, so you’d be hard pushed to find something on your network that PRTG couldn’t monitor. It’s reasonably priced, too, with the Small Business package starting at €1,500 a year for 500 sensors – enough to monitor around 50 devices.

Installation is simple. After we’d loaded PRTG’s on-site server software onto a Windows Server 2019 system, a wizard guided us through our first network discovery. This took a slightly leisurely 45 minutes, but PRTG relieved us of a lot of legwork by automatically assigning a suitable set of sensors to each detected device on the network, along with preset thresholds for triggering alerts.

Once you’re set up you can access PRTG through a friendly web console. This opens with a network overview showing the status of all sensors, and clicking on any of the icons next to the donut charts takes you directly to a filtered view. Alternatively, you can open the device view, which presents a tree structure with all systems organised into hierarchical groups.

This may initially look a little overwhelming for large networks, but you can organise things by creating your own groups and moving devices into them, whereupon they inherit settings such as discovery schedules and login credentials. It’s easy to spot devices with issues as all sensor icons are colour-coded, and hovering the mouse pointer over any device pops up a window with live graphs and alert messages.

This page is also where you’ll discover how quickly the sensor count gets consumed. For example, we found that our 24-port Gigabit switch, Hyper-V and VMware hosts and five-bay Synology NAS appliance had together been allocated a total of 192 sensors. Don’t panic, though – with just a few clicks we were able to remove sensors we didn’t need and reassign them where we wanted them.

You can also add sensors for services that aren’t on the local network. PRTG supports a whole heap of cloud providers, including Dropbox, OneDrive, Microsoft 365 services and Amazon CloudWatch. Those using Azure can also set up sensors to monitor SQL databases, cloud VMs, storage and subscription costs, with more advanced sensors currently in development. All of this makes it far more flexible than the typical per-device monitoring suite.

Aside from the web console, you can keep an eye on network activity using Paessler’s desktop apps for Windows and macOS, which log in to the PRTG host and present an equally detailed summary of all sensors. Mobile access isn’t a problem either, as the free PRTG apps for Android and iOS are easily the best of their kind.

Even when you’re not actively checking up on your network, PRTG ensures you’re kept in the loop with an extensive range of notification methods, including email, SMS, Syslog, Slack, Microsoft Teams and an MQTT service for IoT devices. Custom triggers can be applied to any level of the device tree or to individual sensors – for example, alerts can be sent when a device goes offline, when a traffic threshold has been breached or when a hard disk is getting full.

In all, when it comes to on-premises monitoring solutions, PRTG Network Monitor is very hard to beat. It provides a terrific range of sensor options for both local devices and cloud services, along with plenty of monitoring facilities, yet it’s easy to manage, and comes with a simple, affordable pricing scheme that’s perfect for SMBs.

Microsoft has announced that it will be delaying the planned price increase on Office 365 and Microsoft 365 products by a few weeks due to high demand for the services in the run up to the changes.

First announced in August 2021, the “substantive” price increases across a number of Modern Work products was due to come into effect on 1 March 2022.

Microsoft said the “transitional grace period” was implemented to “provide partners with additional lead time for adapting business processes”. It added that it does not believe partners will use the additional time to pull forward demand for the products.

All new commerce transactions will need to be submitted to Microsoft by no later than 14 March 2022 at 5 PM Pacific Daylight Time, or midnight at Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), in order to be eligible for the February 2022 pricing.

The price increases range between $1-$3 per user, depending on the product, but in large companies this can amount to a sizeable increase to IT departments’ overhead costs.

The six Modern Work products affected by the price changes include:

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $6 per user per month, up from $5
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium: $22 per user per month, up from $20
• Office 365 E1: $10 per user per month, up from $8
• Office 365 E3: $23 per user per month, up from $20
• Office 365 E5: $38 per user per month, up from $35
• Microsoft 365 E3: $36 per user per month, up from $32

In the initial announcement, Microsoft said it represented the first major pricing adjustment for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 since it was launched in 2011, a decade previously.

Higher demand for cloud services brought on by the ongoing trend of home and hybrid working prompted the tech giant to make the change, said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president at Microsoft 365.

In December 2021, four months after the announced price increases, Microsoft also said it would be raising the prices of pay-monthly Microsoft 365 products by 20% unless partners chose to be billed on an annual basis.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) complained at the time that they could stand to lose money if a customer went bankrupt or chose to decrease the number of licenses they needed if they opted for an annual subscription.

The move prompted heated online discussions and a Change.org petition lobbying Microsoft to reconsider the decision, which garnered more than 2,000 signatures.

WhatsUp Gold (WUG) has been a popular network-monitoring solution since the 1990s, thanks to its excellent ease of use and extensive troubleshooting features. Publisher Progress Software isn’t resting on its laurels, either: this latest edition gains the ability to collect Windows Event Log and Syslog events, with extensive log search, filtering and export facilities courtesy of the Elasticsearch analytics engine.

Licensing is fairly straightforward. The Premium edition can be had as either a yearly subscription or a perpetual licence, and is priced according to the number of monitored devices, regardless of how many ports or CPU cores they have.

All the key features we’d want to see are here, including network discovery, device, cloud, wireless network and storage monitoring, plus alerting and reporting. However, the new log-management features are an optional add-on package, and further add-ons are required for monitoring virtualisation hosts and applications, and performing network traffic analysis.

Larger businesses may find the Total Plus edition more practical as it includes all these add-on components as standard. It also uses a more flexible points-based licensing scheme, with devices, servers and VMs counting as one point and log data sources and monitored applications each counting for ten.

Installing WUG 2021 on a Windows Server 2019 host took us around 25 minutes, after which the software got to work and immediately offered to run a network discovery. Once we’d provided our network details, device credentials and a schedule, it churned away for around 15 minutes before reporting back with a complete list of discovered devices.

Keeping track of all these devices is easy. Each item is assigned a colour-coded icon in the web console, so you can see immediately what’s up and what’s down, and custom policies can be created, linked with state changes and assigned actions such as running a script, restarting a service or sending emails. Dashboards present live graphical overviews of your network and can be customised to your taste, giving you the ability to set up big-screen NOC views for support staff.

Tabs and menus provide access to the rest of the major features, enabling you to quickly run network discoveries, view your network topology, switch to an interactive network map view, access a wealth of analysis views and configure settings for WUG and any add-on modules.

Log management is accessed from the Analyze tab. A search facility helps you quickly find logs of interest, and acquiring data is a cinch, as WUG presents all eligible sources for swift selection. On selecting our Windows servers we were prompted to select from application, system and security logs, and to decide whether or not we wanted to see critical, error, warning and informational-level events. You can fine-tune the information view with advanced filters, set thresholds so that unusual activity will trigger an alert and define a datastore and retention time in days, months or years for archived logs.

Just note that the standard installation uses the open-source Elasticsearch engine, which only accepts connections from the WUG 2021 host. If you want to increase security with authentication and encryption, you’ll have to source the standard version of Elasticsearch and direct the WUG host to it.

WhatsUp Gold 2021 offers an impressive range of network-monitoring tools, with flexible licensing plans to suit companies of all sizes. The smartly designed and informative web console will keep downtime to a minimum, and the new log-management features make it more powerful than ever.

VirtualMetric may not be so well known in the network-monitoring world as old-timers such as Paessler PRTG and WhatsUp Gold, but it makes its mark with an impressive range of features. It offers real-time agentless monitoring of both physical and virtual servers, works with numerous popular business apps and additionally provides log monitoring, change tracking and inventory functions.

Subscription terms are flexible, with monthly and annual options. Each monitored SNMP endpoint costs €2.90 or €29 respectively, while one physical server or virtual machine will cost €9.90 or €99.

Installing the software takes just two minutes, but be aware that VirtualMetric requires a minimum of Windows Server 2016, plus SQL Server 2014 or higher. We used a Windows Server 2019 host, and for our lab environment we found Microsoft’s free SQL Server 2014 Express worked fine.

Once you’re set up with the software, there’s more work to do. VirtualMetric doesn’t offer any auto-discovery services, so you have to open up the web console and manually declare each Windows server in turn, by entering its fully qualified domain name or IP address and supplying administrative credentials (unless you’re using Active Directory authentication). VirtualMetric then scans each system for around ten minutes before presenting it in the devices page for further inspection.

The amount of information the program provides is impressive. For each server you get graphs of overall and per-core CPU utilisation, details of total and used RAM and indications of traffic on each network adapter. Storage reports are excellent, too; selecting a volume brings up not just its total and used capacity, but also performance measurements in IOPS and latency graphs. And at the server system level you get a detailed hardware inventory, lists of running processes and services, installed software, firewall rules and more.

The audit and security sections are equally powerful. These track all changes to each system’s hardware and software since it was first scanned, along with Windows event logs and detected file changes. Since VirtualMetric uses Windows Defender reports to highlight security threats, it can also tell you about installed hotfixes and pending Windows updates.

To monitor Hyper-V servers you need to install an extra module from the devices view, but this only takes a minute, with other modules provided for monitoring IIS, Exchange, SQL Server, Storage Spaces and Active Directory.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get VirtualMetric to connect to our VMware ESXi 7 and vCenter server, and the outdated online documentation was no help. Contacting support proved equally useless: we submitted multiple questions over a two-week period, but received only a few unhelpful emails back.

Console dashboards can be customised with a range of graphs, including a by-the-second real-time view of all server utilisation, and you can create your own favourites and add extra widgets for any metered data. The playlist option is a nice touch, combining sets of screens with different widgets and presenting support staff with a scrolling heads-up network status display.

VirtualMetric offers a lot of potential for network engineers wanting a detailed, customisable monitoring solution. It’s not as easy to set up as other options, though; we’d be very hesitant to recommend this product to SMBs with limited IT expertise, especially in light of our poor support experience.