Microsoft has urged users of Office 2016 and Office 2019 to upgrade as both applications approach the end of their extended support deadlines next month.

Both applications will no longer receive updates as of 14 October, the tech giant confirmed last week. The move will also see a host of popular apps under the Office umbrella mothballed, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Similarly, Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 will be scrapped alongside Skype for Business.

This doesn’t mean these Office suites will completely stop working. However, Microsoft has been keen to emphasize that they’ll receive no more updates or technical support.

Opting to stick with these versions puts users at greater risk of security breaches, according to Jeremy Carlson, Microsoft's director of product marketing for the Microsoft 365 portfolio.

“Continuing to use software after end of support can leave your devices vulnerable to potential security threats, productivity losses, and compliance issues,” he wrote in a community notice.

“After that date [14 October], Microsoft will no longer provide security fixes, bug fixes, or technical support for these products.”

Microsoft urges users to upgrade

Naturally, Microsoft is urging users to sign up for Microsoft 365, its most up-to-date suite of applications. For those with fewer than 300 users, there is the option of Microsoft 365 Business Standard.

This, Carlson explained, represents a more cost-effective option based on their individual needs and budget.

“We know there is no “one-size-fits-all" approach for managing end of support – and we encourage you to explore our business and enterprise plans to find the right fit for your organization,” he wrote.

Notably, there is a lifeline for those that aren’t keen on switching to the cloud-based option, Carlson revealed. This comes in the form of the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 2024.

This option will give users access to the most recent supported on-prem versions of Office for commercial customers.

“The Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for devices that cannot accept feature updates or connect to the internet,” Carlson explained. “Office LTSC 2024 was released last year along with new on-premises versions of Project and Visio.”

A big month for Microsoft shops

October is set to be a busy month for Microsoft customers worldwide. In addition to Office 2016 and 2019 being scrapped, the end of life deadline for Windows 10 also falls on 14 October, meaning users will either be forced to upgrade or continue without regular updates.

Once again, there is a lifeline for those opting to stick with the older operating system – but it’ll come at a steep price.

Extended support for Windows 10 will set enterprises back $61 per device, and that’s just for the first year. Thereafter, the price doubles on an annual basis for a maximum of three years.

As ITPro reported earlier this month, the total cost worldwide could reach a staggering sum. Analysis from Nexthink found maintaining custom versions of the operating system could top $7.3 billion globally.

A significant portion of users appear to be content with the situation, or at the very least are taking their time ahead of the deadline. Figures from Statcounter showed the operating system still holds a 43% market share.

Based on the current rate of upgrades, this means that around 121 million devices worldwide will still be running Windows 10 by the October deadline.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• These popular Microsoft 365 features are being cut in 2025
• Curious about Microsoft 365? Check out our review
• 10 of the best Microsoft 365 features for small businesses

The love-hate relationship between Apple and Microsoft is clearly back in love' mode at the moment. Following last month's launch of the iOS version of Outlook, Microsoft has now released a public preview of the next version of Office for Mac. It's been five years since Office 2011 was released for the Mac, back in 2010, so this new version is certainly long overdue.

However, Office 2011 received mixed reviews from some Mac users, who saw the introduction of the Ribbon' toolbar as an unwelcome intruder from the Windows world. The Ribbon isn't going away, but the streamlined makeover that it receives in this new version of Office for Mac should ensure that it gets a much better reception from Mac users.

Ribbon Redux

The adoption of the Ribbon in Office 2011 marked a conscious decision by Microsoft to bring the Mac version of Office more in line with its Windows counterpart. However, the sheer number of tools crammed into the Ribbon meant that the Mac versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint became much more cluttered and not to put too fine a point on it less Mac-like.

That criticism has clearly been taken to heart by Microsoft, as the single over-riding theme of the new Office for Mac is the move towards a more streamlined Ribbon. There are a few minor cosmetic changes that help here nudging one small set of buttons into a slightly different position eliminates a chunk of wasted space at the top of each document window, and removing the text headings that previously labelled different sections of the Ribbon helps to make the Ribbon look a little less cluttered. But, more importantly, there have also been some major changes to the way that the Ribbon itself is organised.

Word 2016

Word is the major beneficiary here, as a large number of tools and features have simply been removed from the Ribbon altogether. The Styles panel that previously occupied almost one quarter of the entire width of the Ribbon has now been reduced to a single button that activates a pull-down menu. Several tools for working with graphics files and clip-art have also been removed and relocated within the new Insert tab. This tab also incorporates additional tools for creating tables and charts, headers and footers, and even mathematical equations, resulting in a drastically streamlined Ribbon that takes up far less space on your screen.

Some of that space has been used to create a new Design tab that allows you to quickly format text within your documents, and a new Mailings tab to help with mail-merge work. Stepping away from the Ribbon, the document sidebar also gains a handy new Navigation view that lists headings and other important elements within a document so that you can quickly leap to the point you need.

Excel and PowerPoint

Excel and PowerPoint haven't received quite such drastic makeovers. These two apps are more likely to be used in full-screen mode, so Microsoft has left many of the standard Ribbon tools in place. However, the tabs that provide access to additional sets of tools have been completely reorganized. Like Word, PowerPoint and Excel both gain a new Insert tab, which gathers together all the graphics tools that were previously spread across three separate tabs for Tables, Charts and SmartArt.

They also gain a new View tab that provides a number of options for viewing your documents, such as the Notes view in PowerPoint or the split-pane view in Excel. The only minor oddity here is that the Play button for PowerPoint presentations has been removed from the main Home tab on the Ribbon, so when you want to preview your slides you'll need to either switch into the Slideshow tab or remember the fiddly three-finger keyboard shortcut that triggers the Play command.

Excel gains a number of new features for working with data, including PivotTable Slicers and an Analysis ToolPak for complex statistical work. However, PowerPoint mostly concentrates on refining existing features, such as the note-taking tools in its Presenter mode, and improved compatibility with the Windows version of PowerPoint.

OneDrive and the Cloud

Microsoft's Office blog says that the new Office for Mac is powered by the cloud' but, in fact, the 2011 editions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint already had a Share command in the main File menu that allowed you to save documents to OneDrive and SharePoint. The new Office for Mac merely relocates those options to the Save dialog within each app. A simple button allows you to switch between saving to online locations' or on my Mac', and you are then prompted to enter the details of your online account.

The Preview version of Office for Mac currently supports OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint. Apple's iCloud Drive is hard-wired into the Save dialog in Yosemite the latest version of the Mac OS so you can save documents to iCloud as well. The downside of this is that the preview version of Office for Mac currently only runs on Yosemite. Microsoft hasn't stated whether the finished version will also require Yosemite which will obviously cause problems for businesses that are still running older versions of the Mac OS nor has it said anything about supporting additional cloud services such as Dropbox.

Outlook 2016

Strictly speaking, the new' version of Outlook isn't actually new, as Microsoft actually released it for Office 365 subscribers last October. However, the new Outlook is included in this preview and will be part of the standalone edition of Office for Mac released later this year (along with the Mac version of OneNote).

The Ribbon has largely been left alone in Outlook, but there are interface changes elsewhere. Unread messages are now highlighted in blue, rather than bold text, and conversation threads show the entire body of emails rather than just a list of headers. These are small changes, but they do make it easier to quickly scan through the long lists of emails that pile up in our inboxes every day.

Is It Worth Upgrading?

Upgrades to Microsoft Office normally arrive trailing a long list of new features for each of its core applications, but the 2016 edition of Office for Mac focuses primarily on its more streamlined interface in order to improve productivity and ease of use. That's not a bad move, though, particularly given the criticisms that were made of the previous version of Office for the Mac. There are few entirely new features that make the new Office for Mac an essential upgrade, but its improved look and feel will be welcomed by Mac users who need to share Office documents with their Windows colleagues.

Verdict

There’s nothing that makes this a ‘must-have’ update, but the interface overhaul that has been given to the Ribbon makes the new Office for Mac feel less cumbersome and should speed up many routine tasks.

A bug in PowerPoint has been discovered that will allow hackers to hijack a victim's PC.

The zero-day vulnerability was outlined in an advisory by the firm, and prompted Microsoft to issue a one-click "Fixit" tool to help users protect their PCs while a patch is developed.

Hackers can take over a PC by sending victim's a message with a malicious Office file containing an OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) file.

By persuading users to open the file, hackers could then gain the same rights as the user, allowing criminals to install malware on the victim's computer.

"Customers whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with administrative user rights.

"The attack requires user interaction to succeed on Windows clients with a default configuration, as User Account Control (UAC) is enabled and a consent prompt is displayed," the advisory stated.

Microsoft added that it is "aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit the vulnerability through Microsoft PowerPoint". The flaw is said to affect all supported versions of Windows including Windows Server 2008 and 2012.

Security experts said hackers are likely to employ phishing techniques to infect victims.

"This is not the first time that a vulnerability in OLE has been exploited by cybercriminals, however most previous OLE vulnerabilities have been limited to specific older versions of the Windows operating system," said Mark Sparshott, EMEA director at Proofpoint.

"What makes this vulnerability dangerous is that it affects the latest, fully-patched versions of Windows."

He added that while Microsoft and security vendors rush to close the security hole, "the best form of defence remains using the latest next generation detection technologies such as sandboxing at the email gateway to prevent the emails reaching users in the first place".

"Organisations not yet using advanced detection tools will need to fall back to notifying users and relying on them not to click the links and open files," he added.

Despite a phalanx of competitors emerging in recent years, PowerPoint remains the industry standard for delivering presentations, and the emergence of the iPad app cements its position in the boardroom.

However, the iPad app is a different beast from the desktop software, and has its own strengths and weaknesses. Our top 10 tips will show you how to get the most from PowerPoint on the iPad.

1. Create on the PC, refine on the iPad

If at all possible, avoid creating presentations on the iPad itself. The iPad app has only 20 presentation templates to choose from, compared to the thousands available to download from the PC and Mac version, and some of those 20 are mundane. Any template that you download on the PC/Mac is editable on the iPad, even if it's not one of those preloaded in the app.

If you do decide to create a presentation on the tablet, be wary of the same fonts issue that afflicts the Microsoft Word app. If you choose iOS fonts, they won't be displayed properly when you open the presentation on the PC, and you may experience problems with text running out of boxes or wrapping around images erratically.

2. Beam the presentation wirelessly

The iPad is better suited to delivering, rather than creating, presentations. You can beam your presentation wirelessly to a big display or projector using Apple's AirPlay technology, and use the iPad to flick through slides and more.

To do this, you'll either need an Apple TV or Mac (2011 onwards) connected to your large display, or a PC running AirPlay compatible software such as AirServer (www.airserver.com). Both iPad and the receiving Apple TV/Mac/PC must be connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Once connected, you can mirror the iPad's display on the big screen, but when you open your presentation on the iPad you should put it into Presenter View, by clicking the Slide Show tab and selecting the relevant option. Now your iPad will display any presenter notes you've made and forthcoming slides, while the viewers of the big screen display will only see the presentation itself.

If you hold your finger down on the main window showing the current slide, you'll activate the virtual laser pointer, allowing you to highlight key points on the slide. The pen tools in the top right of the screen let you draw on or use a highlighter pen on your slides.

3. Learn the gestures

You'll need to be familiar with a few gesture controls to get the most out of PowerPoint for iPad, some of which aren't obvious.

For example, if you're in full-screen slideshow view activated by pressing the Play button in the top right-hand corner you can use a closed pinch gesture to return to the editing view, which is quicker than tapping at the top of the screen and selecting End Slide Show.

If you want to move a slide to a new position in the deck, simply tap on its thumbnail in the edit view and drag it to the desired position.

4. Importing old-format presentations

PowerPoint for iPad can work with presentations created in either the latest Office formats (.pptx files) or the older PowerPoint 97-2003 formats (.ppt and .pps). However, any files opened in the older formats will need to be converted to .pptx before you can edit them. PowerPoint for iPad will give you the option to convert the old-style presentations when you first open them.

5. Transferring Keynote presentations

Given that PowerPoint for iPad only launched earlier this year, it's likely that you might have some presentations stored in Apple's own presentation app, Keynote. The good news is you can import these into PowerPoint without much hassle.

Open the presentation in Keynote, then click the icon showing a page with an up arrow and select Open in Another App. Choose the PowerPoint format from the pop-up that appears, and after Keynote has crunched through the slides select the Choose App button and Open in PowerPoint. Once it's opened in PowerPoint, you'll need to save a copy if you want to edit the slides.

The bad news is that some of Keynote's slide transitions, animations and fonts won't be carried across perfectly into PowerPoint, so make sure to review and edit your slideshow (if necessary) before presenting to an audience.

You can also go the other way, and import slideshows created in the PowerPoint app to Keynote. The easiest way to do this is to open the presentation in PowerPoint, click the little person and + sign icon in the top-right corner and email a copy of the presentation to yourself.

Open the Mail app, download the attachment, then hold down on the attachment's icon and select Open in PowerPoint. You'll once again find that many transitions, animations and fonts don't survive the move, however.

PowerPoint for iPad allows you to import photos and videos in your presentations, but only from the iPad's Photo Stream. There isn't the option to search online for photos or embed YouTube videos like there is in the latest desktop versions of PowerPoint.

You therefore need to make sure you've prepared and saved any photos or videos to the iPad before you start creating your slide decks. Also make sure you've got the tablet held the right way up (volume controls at the top) if you're planning to shoot a video on the iPad to insert in your slide deck. Whilst PowerPoint for iPad will automatically re-orientate incorrectly shot video, you'll find that the video plays upside down when you view it on your PC.

7. But forget about videos and audio you've embedded on your PC

One major problem with PowerPoint for iPad is that it won't play any embedded video files inserted using PowerPoint on the PC. Both embedded videos and YouTube clips will refuse to play, even if the iPad has an internet connection to serve the latter. The same goes for audio files that are embedded into individual slides. If your presentation depends on a video clip, best take a laptop with you.

8. Handling transitions and animations

PowerPoint for iPad has a comprehensive library of slide transitions those whooshing effects as you move from one slide to the next. It's got all but a couple of the transitions that you'll find in Office 2013 on the PC. You can't add sounds to transitions on the iPad, but those inserted on the PC (such as the rather cheesy sound of an audience clapping at the end of a presentation) are carried over when you present from the iPad.

It's a different story on animations, however the effects that allow you to slow reveal one bullet point at a time, for example. There's no way to create animations in the iPad version, although animations inserted on the PC are supported on the iPad. To move to the next stage of an animation on the iPad, you have to swipe from left to right, as if you were moving to the next slide.

9. Fiddling with SmartArt

SmartArt is a widely used feature in business presentations, particularly for displaying the management hierarchy of a company. Alas, there's no way to insert SmartArt using PowerPoint for iPad, although you do have a limited ability to edit SmartArt within presentations created on a PC. You can change the shape and size of boxes containing SmartArt and the style of text used, with the contents automatically adjusting to fit in both instances.

You cannot, however, edit the text itself, so if you've spelt the CEO's name incorrectly, you're either going to have to fire up a PC or

10. Fall back on Office Online

You will have by now realised that PowerPoint for iPad doesn't support a number of quite important features. This is where Microsoft's web apps, Office Online, can save your bacon. If you've got a decent internet connection, you can log in at https://office.com on your iPad and edit your slide decks from within the browser.

From Office Online you can access many features not supported in the app, including inserting animations, responding to comments, watching embedded videos and inserting and editing SmartArt although we found the formatting of an organisational chart was ruined when we made a slight text change on one of our test slides, so proceed with care.

Editing in the iPad browser is fiddly and made even more awkward by the domineering onscreen keyboard, but it might get you out of a hole in an emergency.

Office 365 isn't a new version of the Office desktop suite; it's a cloud service offering the key server-based versions of desktop applications Exchange mail server with Forefront malware and spam protection, SharePoint document management (which can also power a public-facing Web site) and Lync Online for communications (presence, instant messaging and audio and video calls).

This is similar to the BPOS cloud service Microsoft has been running, but it has newer versions of the server-side software that are multi-tenant and (Microsoft claims) better suited to running as a cloud service. You also get online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook and some subscriptions even include the full Office Professional Plus suite. There's also an Office 365 marketplace for third-party tools that work with the service.

Office 365 is commonly seen as competing with Google Apps so we decided to look at them both.

Google Apps for Business includes Gmail with Postini spam and malware filtering and basic smartphone management, Calendar and Contacts, Google Docs (including spreadsheets and presentations), Chat, Groups mailing lists, Sites (for both intranet and public Web sites).

There's a control panel for managing users and what they can do with the Google Apps tools. You can also control user access to various other Google services like Picasa (which may get more important as Google combines personal and Google Apps accounts into a single account type) and add third party services from the Google Apps Marketplace.

Office 365 is commonly seen as competing with Google Apps so we decided to look at them both to see how similar the services really are and how they compare to each other.

Administration interface

As cloud services, you manage Google Apps and Office 365 online. Despite the simple layout, the Google Apps control panel is confusing until you learn where everything is. Options are scattered between Domain Settings, Settings, Advanced tools and the various links from the Dashboard tab which duplicate the Settings hierarchy. The Dashboard is also cluttered with adverts for optional tools in the Google App marketplace and adverts for new features.

The Google Apps admin page is cluttered with adverts for new features and third-party tools.

The Office 365 admin console is cleaner and better laid out, with a pane for switching between managing users, services and domain, clear explanations of what the main management tools are for next to the links to manage them. There are also handy shortcuts at the bottom of the window and links to relevant resources and community discussions.

By comparison, the Office 365 dashboard is clear and well laid out; you can see immediately what to do.

Google Apps has two levels of administration rights; the 'super admin' who has full access and admins to whom you can delegate some administration tasks. You can give different users a different mix of rights but you have to remember who can do what.

Office 365 has five named admin roles; you can give someone the rights to manage billing, passwords, users or services if you don't want them to have full admin rights. If you need more granularity, you can also set up administrator roles for Discovery Management, Records Management, UM (Unified Messaging) Management and other tasks in the Exchange Control Panel. It's more complex than Google Apps, but enterprises will welcome having the option.

Winner: Office 365. Microsoft's administration interface is not only better organised, it's also easier to handle when delegating management rights to others.

Setup and user management

There's a setup guide to get you started on Google Apps which walks you through things like verifying the domain you're using , creating user accounts and changing your MX records to point to Gmail (you need your own domain to use Google Apps). It's mostly clear and simple, but the duplicated instructions and sometimes circuitous inteface make setup a very fragmented experience. Setting up the Postini spam service tells you it may take up to an hour and again you have to change the MX records to redirect mail to the Postini service and configure some settings in Google Apps email by hand - all of which should be far more automated and suggests that Google has still not fully integrated the Postini acquisition with its platform.

Office 365's Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online are running by default so all you have to do is create or migrate users. You only need to configure settings if you want to use an optional vanity domain, to get finer control or if you're integrating with on-premise servers. Thankfully the guides to doing this are clear and detailed.

You can create Office 365 users individually assigning admin rights and turning on services for them at the same time - or by importing a CSV file. You can also connect to an existing on-premise Exchange server and migrate users and mailboxes, or synchronise with your Active Directory to manage Office 365 users with roles and policies the same way you manage existing users (so you can delete a user in AD and they're removed from Exchange Online). You even get PowerShell cmdlets that let you configure Office 365 from the command line.

The Forefront rules and filters are very powerful but the interface is more complex.

To create Google Apps users you can set them up one by one in the control panel or import a CSV file - but most enterprises will use the Google Apps Directory Sync to get user details from AD or Lotus Domino, which the setup guide doesn't cover. This is a one-way sync and you have to leave the tool running on your local server and make changes to users in AD and propagate them up to Google Apps. To migrate mailboxes you have to run an Outlook sync utility individually and you can't migrate distribution lists, so you have to recreate them. It's initially confusing which tools you need for synchronising and migrating different information and settings to Google Apps, especially as the help pages often refer to old tools that have been replaced.

What Google Apps calls 'groups' are merely mailing lists. To control who gets which Google services you need to set up organization units. These cover both the core offerings like Gmail and the wide range of other Google tools whose terms and conditions your business will be deemed to have accepted if users from your business sign in with their Google Apps account - so this is mainly useful for disabling access to Picasa or YouTube if you don't want to accept those terms.

If business users sign into other Google services with their Google Apps account, the business is bound by the terms and conditions, so you can block this.

There's a separate option for whether users get access to functions and features from Google Labs, which could be a new option in Gmail or a tool like Google Moderator for managing a question and answer session at a company meeting (it's unclear what happens to these tools as Google recently announced that it is shutting down Google Labs). You can also use organization units to restrict which domains users can send email to, but you can't use them to control any other settings so it's nothing like as powerful as AD groups. You can't delete an organization without moving or deleting the users first, and deleting a user gives you the choice of deleting their documents or moving them to another user.

Both Microsoft and Google promise single sign-on. If you have Active Directory and AFDS 2, Office 365 users can use their Windows login to sign on to the local network (including any business apps you've integrated with that login) and to Office 365 services. Your Google Apps sign in gives you access to all the online Google services (including services that aren't part of Google Apps if the administrator allows this). It's possible to use a SAML bridge and the provisioning API to make that work with your in-house LDAP directory and local apps, but this is far from trivial to set up and it won't work with Google desktop applications.

Winner: Office 365. Microsoft's product is easier to set up and integrate into your company's existing infrastructure.

Mail server, malware and spam

Office 365 has a simple interface for basic admin options like managing passwords and security groups but you can also use the full Exchange Online interface. This is identical to the Web interface for Exchange Server, so it will be very familiar to Exchange admins. You get a comprehensive set of tools for setting up features like role-based access control, transport rules (such as adding disclaimers to external email) and reports to help you track down any problems along with auditing logs for compliance. If you don't need them then you can stick to the basics and be set up in minutes.

All the key email management features in Office 365 are available through a straightforward interface if you don't want to use the full Exchange interface.

Gmail has vastly fewer options because you don't get to control a mail server, although you do have some control over routing and mail gateway settings. The options are mostly on the level of setting up a vanity URL for users, choosing whether users can use Gmail Labs and chat or allowing Docs results to show up in a Gmail search. With Google looking after the mail server, most businesses won't need more admin options.

There are useful features in Google Apps that aren't turned on by default, and the interface is basic but clear.

Both Google Apps and Office 365 have a mailbox limit of 25GB. There's isn't an archiving option from Gmail, but with Office 365 you have a choice between third-party archiving services or a specific Office 365 plan with unlimited storage for email archiving.

Google Apps for business includes Postini Services for spam and malware detection, but you can't use it is you have multiple domains or if you want to use the Postini Discovery ediscovery and archiving service (in those cases you need to pay for Postini spam services separately). The Postini admin console is separate from the main Google Apps console and has tabs for viewing and deleting or approving messages detected as junk or viruses in the past three days, a week or for as long as it keeps records. The only option for virus blocking is whether you get email notifications that a mail has been quarantined, so you can check and release it if it's a false positive.

For spam you can whitelist individual senders, domains or mailing lists and block specific addresses or domains, set up inbound and outbound content filters for specific words, phrases or patterns and create attachment filters by size or type. You can also choose five levels of spam blocking, from lenient to very aggressive, and use category filters to put more emphasis on blocking explicit, 'racially insensitive' and financial spam. Oddly, IP whitelists to avoid spam filters go under the email settings pane, not in the Postini configuration page.

The Forefront admin console is also separate and has a very different interface from the rest of Office 365; it's powerful but also confusingly complicated for anything except checking quarantined email - we'd like to see this simplified for admins who don't already have Forefront expertise. What you get are the powerful Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) tools; not just malware and spam filtering, but options to safelist specific IP addresses, options for auditing and tracing messages and extensive filtering rules for both inbound and outbound email. You can therefore write rules to stop your users emailing out confidential information such as credit card numbers. You can upload dictionary files when you have a lot of values to use in a filter and manage rules by type; there are a lot more options compared to Postini.

Neither service lets you add additional reputation services or real-time block lists, but both let you use SPF for your own reputation - only Google Apps supports DKIM so far.

Winner:Tie. There's no outright winner in this category. Gmail is perfect if you want to get up and running as quickly as possible, while Office 365 provides fine grained controls and capabilities that will suit particularly fastidious organisations.

Mobile management

With Google Apps for Business, you can manage Android devices (as long as they run Android 2.2 or later). You can set a policy that enforces a password of a particular strength and wipe lost devices and users can remotely locate or lock their phone or make it ring. You have to manage rolling out device security as it requires an app users download from Android Marketplace, but turning on device security stops them using Android Marketplace until the app is installed (there's a direct link to get around the chicken and egg problem here).

There's also a connector to allow you to manage BlackBerry users of Google Apps from a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and options for applying password and other device policies to smartphones using Google Sync or Exchange ActiveSync, which can end up as a confusing mix of management options.

Fine control of smartphone security in an interface that will be familiar to any Exchange administrator.

Office 365 has a more unified and comprehensive approach. Exchange Online gives you the same mobile device management as Exchange Server using ActiveSync Policies which work to some extent on virtually all smartphones including Android, iPhone. BlackBerry and Symbian as well as Windows Mobile and Windows Phone. You can enforce strong passwords and encryption, control individual device features (like Bluetooth), configure sync options like whether attachments can be downloaded on a phone and wipe devices automatically if the password is wrong too many times. You can also block or quarantine specific mobile devices from connecting. Users can even block or wipe their own phones.

Winner: Office 365's unified and comprehensive approach to smartphone management makes it the clear winner here.

Document management

Google Docs has no equivalent to SharePoint Online. Sites is a nice simple tool for creating internal or external Web pages and with Google Docs, you can control whether users can publish or share documents outside the business and whether documents default to being private or public. Otherwise sharing is an ad hoc thing that users control.

SharePoint Online combines workflow, document management and Web publishing and it looks professional straight away.

SharePoint Online combines Web page authoring for external sites with a full document management tool with libraries, lists, templates, discussion tools, shared calendars, RSS feeds, workflow, check in and check out options and version control plus powerful search options. Your Team Site includes pages for every user where they can blog, share links and documents or access their files on the move. Taking advantage of all the options is more complex but it's also far more powerful.

Winner: Office 365 has much more capable sharing features, but these are correspondingly more complicated to manage. If you need them though, then it's worth bearing with.

Chat and talk

Google Chat is the same simple but powerful tool available to the public; users can see presence for Google Apps contacts inside Gmail and start a text, voice or video chat from there once they've downloaded the plug-in. Alternatively they can use the Windows Google Talk software for text and voice chat or file transfer. Management is minimal; you can block chat outside the organisation or just warn users but you can't block file transfers.

Microsoft's Lync Online is more powerful. The extensive management options let you choose whether users can transfer files, make audio or video calls and talk to people outside the business or just colleagues.

Users can see each other's presence and status in Outlook and Outlook Web Access (including information from someone's Exchange calendar), and in any Office app where you're collaborating. It's possible to start a chat, voice or video call from there or from the Lync client. Microsoft is also promising Lync clients from a range of smartphones, offering IM first and voice features later. If you have an in-house PBX you can also set up unified messaging (like dialling phone calls from Outlook) and integrate voicemail with Exchange Online although we weren't able to test this.

Lync Online automatically federates with Windows Messenger and AOL for instant messaging.

Lync Online automatically federates with Windows Messenger and AOL for instant messaging. It can also federate with on-premise Lync servers if permitted by the server admin.

Google Apps can federate with any XMPP service, but to make that work you have to edit the SRV record in your domain by hand (or ask your domain hoster to do it for you), and you then get federation with all the services Google is connected to - you don't get to choose which are allowed or blocked. Similarly, you can allow users to chat with any Gmail or Google Apps user or block them all; you can't pick and choose which Google Apps-using companies they can communicate with and you can't block or allow chat access for specific users (individually or by groups).

Lync Online also incorporates the features of LiveMeeting; you can switch from an IM chat to an online meeting with up to 250 people with audio, video and Web conferencing, and you can schedule meetings in advance through Outlook. If you want to let people phone in to a meeting without needing Lync (customers for example), you can buy an audio conferencing service for Lync Online from BT.

Winner: Office 365. Google App's chat and messaging features are fine for most users, but for more fine-grained controls, Office 365 is better.

Online apps

Online apps like Google Docs are primitive compared to the richness of the full Office suite. In general, the features of the Office Web Apps and Google Docs are broadly similar, but while many like the sparse interface of Google Docs for its simplicity, the Office Web Apps tend to have the edge in sophistication.

Create a PowerPoint presentation in the Office Web Apps and you get good-looking themes and images you place are automatically sized to fit; a Google Docs presentation starts out in plain black and white and the designs aren't as appealing.

The Office 365 Outlook Web App has good self-service features for users (and you only see the admin links if you're an administrator).

Office Web Apps make inserting images from your hard drive the same simple experience it is in a local app. Google Docs gives you a wider choice for inserting images from a URL or a Google image search in a document, but it's a completely different dialog box in a presentation where inserting an image has fewer options and is a clunkier experience. The mismatch of features between different document types in Google Docs is more extreme and more jarring than in the Office Web Apps.

Sharing is better integrated in Google Docs, with a big blue Share button on the page that opens a popup dialog box. The Office Web Apps make you save the document and take you away from the editor to choose who to share it with, and take you back to viewing but not editing the document. This is because Microsoft assumes that you won't share a document until you've finished working on it. Updates appear live in Google Docs; this also happens in the OneNote Web App but the other Microsoft Web apps make you save your own changes to see edits by other users.

There are many features in both Outlook and Outlook Web that are missing from Gmail from macros to Quick Steps. Gmail equivalents tend to have fewer features which some users prefer because they're simpler. Gmail's stars, labels and priority buttons let you do much the same things as Outlook's flags, categories and folders with the advantage that a message can have multiple labels instead of being in only one folder.

You can turn an email into a Gmail task and then make a reminder, although this isn't quite as immediate as setting a follow-up flag for a specific day directly on an email. Filters the Gmail equivalent of Outlook rules have far fewer actions; in Outlook you can play sounds, send an automatic reply or even print a message that matches a rule. Gmail does include all the mostly commonly used ones though such as filing, forwarding and deleting messages.

Google Apps for Business Gmail users finally get the option to request read receipts, but these have to be enabled by the administrator and Gmail doesn't respond to delivery or read receipt requests in emails sent from Exchange. Gmail only shows the request when you close the message (Outlook shows it when you open the message) and you have to decide for each message as Gmail doesn't have Outlook's don't ask me again' checkbox. Even more irritating; if you don't want to send the receipt the button you click is marked not now' and Gmail will ask you again every time you read the message.

Apart from creating resources using Google's complex naming structure, you have only a few controls for calendar sharing.

Google Calendar can include shared resources - like rooms and projectors that need booking - which you create by typing in the details one at a time. Oddly there isn't a drop-down picklist to ensure the resources are given consistent names or a wizard to help with the complex naming conventions Google suggests, so you could end up with six conference rooms and one meeting room if you're not careful. If you follow the convention suggested, all resources that start with the same three letters will be grouped into a hierarchy but you can't do this manually.

Exchange Online has templates for creating resources like rooms (as well as equipment that isn't in a fixed location); you can even say which users can reserve rooms without permission and how often.

The Google Calendar features for end users aren't quite as powerful or complex as in Outlook, but you get the important options like overlaid calendars and recurring appointments. The Quick add tool that lets you type in a sentence, including the day and date of what you need to do, which then sets an event on the right day at the right time is a phenomenal time saver.

Winner: Tie. The Microsoft Web Apps for crediting documents are more sophisticated than Google's equivalents, but Google Docs has better sharing and collaboration features. Exchange Online has a plethorea of configurable options, but many organisations won't need these and may prefer Google's less feature-packed but also less cluttered approach.

Office and working offline

Depending on which plan you sign up for Office 365 includes download rights for the professional version of Office 2010, which includes OneNote, Publisher and Access as well as the usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can load and save documents from all of them into the SharePoint Online site included in Office 365 and use the online collaboration features to edit documents at the same time in the main apps.

Depending on which plan you sign up for Office 365 includes download rights for the professional version of Office 2010.

This is a bargain; you get the full power of Office and the back-end servers that enable all the features, from using Information Rights Management to control who can distribute a file to asking people to update a database by replying to email. One great feature for businesses; you can host PowerPoint presentations online and present to a group of people on the Web, letting them ask questions and make comments ideal for training or sales pitches.

Also available are the publicly accessible Office Web Apps; Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote all but PowerPoint let multiple users edit the same document at the same time. SharePoint synchronisation neatly takes care of making documents available offline as well as accessing them from anywhere online.

Although offline access to Gmail and Google Docs (without the deprecated Gears plugin) is still only available to Google employees, Google recognises that offline document access matters. You can run software to sync Outlook with Gmail, Calendar and Contacts, and to move Outlook Notes to Google Docs (though they're read-only, it doesn't sync notes filed in folders - and if you use Outlook on multiple PCs you have to run the tool on all of them because categories, follow-up flags and other settings don't sync fully otherwise).

There's a connector toolbar for Office that lets you sync documents to Google Docs; the latest release fixes many of the problems in the first version, but it's not as polished as the SharePoint integration and converting files into Google Docs for editing online doesn't preserve all document features (the same thing happens when you open an email attachment in Google Docs). You can't edit watermarks, smart art, charts or footers in Office Web Apps, but you can see them in the read-only viewer and they're preserved in the document so you get them back when you open it back in Office. Google Docs doesn't show those details and doesn't keep them if you edit the document. Even fonts and line spacing can change when you move Office documents in and out of Google Docs.

Winner: Office 365. Microsoft's offline support is far from polished, essentially being dependent on SharePoint and subscription access to the full Office suite, but this is also, unsurprisingly, far more capable than Google's cumbersome and crude offline tools.

Service levels and support

The Google Apps dashboard repeatedly told us that there might be a problem with an unspecified Google Apps service; whenever we clicked through to the dashboard all the services showed as having no issues, but seeing the warning virtually all the time was concerning. Office 365 has a similar service health dashboard; neither service had any major outages or failures while we were testing them, but Office 365 didn't keep warning us of non-existent problems.

Despite frequent warnings about a problem, Google Apps didn't record any disruptions to the service.

Both services promise 99.9% availability. Google Apps measures this on a monthly basis with a credit of three days of service if the SLA is not met in a month; Office 365 credits 25%, 50% or 100% of the service cost if the SLA falls below 99.9%, 99% and 95% respectively.

Google Apps has no planned downtime; Office365 does schedule maintenance when usage is likely to be low for example Lync might be unavailable for five minutes at 1am on a Saturday morning and dates and times are listed five days in advance in the support area.

Support is definitely better with Office 365. Support is requested using the admin console and your requests are managed there, but 24-7 phone support is also available with response times from 15 minutes to four hours depending on the severity.

Issues with Office 365 can be broken down by exactly which part of the service is affected.

Google Apps also has 24-7 phone support but only for critical problems that involve more than half your users and affect the Google Apps Web services. If the problem was with mobile emails you'd be stuck with email support, which doesn't cover weekends.

Winner: Office 365, but only just. It's tough to judge how reliable a cloud service is, but Microsoft's technical support has better availability which is reassuring.

Verdict

Google Apps has a flat price of 33 per user per year; Office 365 has a range of prices from 6.50 to 17.75 a month, depending on whether you want Office, Office Web Apps, SharePoint, Lync or archiving it can be more expensive but you can choose what services you want to pay for and there are discounts for volume pricing (including transferring existing Exchange and SharePoint server licences to Office 365).

Google Apps is in a constant state of flux.

Google Apps is in a constant state of flux; the whole service is migrating to a new platform, there are two versions of the control panel available, there are options to give users access to previews of new interfaces and features from Google Labs which itself is going away, with no indication of what happens to the features it provides and new features like return receipts arrive periodically. Getting continuous, instant improvements is one of the benefits of cloud services, but if you're managing the service and supporting users you might prefer Microsoft's approach where updates come at regular intervals and you can choose whether to adopt them immediately or by a specific date.

That underlines one key difference between the two services that has little to do with features; Office 365 has the professional feel of a service planned in advance and designed for administrators; Google Apps has the feel of a service that has grown by leaps and bounds, but sometimes in a rather haphazard way that's not always consistent.

In the end, the two services are both powerful but they suit different audiences.

In the end, the two services are both powerful but they suit different audiences. If your business already uses Microsoft tools, Office 365 is the logical progression, giving you server workloads that integrate with and make the most of your existing investments. It's a comprehensive, powerful, end-to-end cloud platform for business that doesn't make you do everything online, which many businesses find a step too far. You can have all the power of Exchange and SharePoint without the bother of configuring and running them.

If you need a mix of on-premise and cloud services, having to manage both Active Directory and the Google Apps control panel is more work than being able to do everything through System Center. Google Apps is a better fit for businesses starting from scratch online with no legacy systems who can benefit from the simplicity without having to keep the service in sync with on-premise tools, but it has definite limits.

MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Operating system: Windows XP SP3 or later; MacOS X Leopard 10.5 or later; Windows Server 2003 or later Office client: Office 2007 SP2; Office 2008 or later; Lync 2010 Administration and Office Web Apps: a modern web browser Active Directory-based features: single forest GOOGLE APPS SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Modern web browser

The U5200 is a strange-looking projector by anyone's definition, and wouldn't be out of place on the set of a sci-fi movie. The front tapers to a thin series of vents and there's no visible lens. Instead, there's a large panel which slowly opens when you press the release button on top. It reveals a sunken lens and - on the underside of the panel - a mirror.

The reason for all the drama is the ultra-short-throw nature of the U5200. The mirror allows it to project an 80in image when it's just 6in from the wall. This is ideal for classrooms or any other situation where throw distances are very limited. It also prevents the beam from damaging teachers' eyes, and eliminates the problem of shadows when the teacher or presenter has to stand in the path of the beam.

There's no zoom control, so image size is dictated entirely by the projector's distance from the screen or wall the minimum size of 72in could be a problem in small rooms, or those with low ceilings. It's possible to project onto a non-white wall thanks to colour compensation. The bad news is that the choice of colours covers only pink, light blue, yellow and dark green. This compensation is also supposed to help to counter colour degradation as the projector ages Acer calls this ColorSafe II.

There are several other convenient features including the ability to replace the lamp through the top panel: useful if the projector is mounted on the ceiling. Network management is also possible, and the U5200 is fully compatible with the Crestron Network System for controlling the projector remotely. The administration can power the U5200 on and off as well as scheduling power up and power down times, and configuring email alerts.

As well as the variety of ways to project content, the DLP chip inside the U5200 supports a 120Hz refresh rate, so it's 3D ready. Naturally, you'll need a compatible 3D video source and additional hardware: Nvidia's 3D Vision system is compatible, but this requires a pair of active shutter glasses for each viewer a big expense for a packed classroom or meeting room.

The native resolution of 1,024x768 is unremarkable, but the 2,500-lumen brightness should be enough for clear viewing with accurate colours with the blinds drawn and lights dimmed. Don't expect the image to be clear with sunlight streaming through the windows, though. Contrast is better than many LCD-based projectors at 4,200:1 thanks to the DLP chip.

In our tests, colours were just as we'd expect from a DLP projector - vibrant and accurate. Contrast was also good. The six-segment colour wheel helped to add punch to yellows, which can appear greenish with a traditional three-segment wheel made up of red, green and blue portions. There are several colour modes to choose between, including standard, video, education, presentation and bright. The latter skewed colours so much it was virtually unusable, but standard delivered the best compromise between brightness and colour accuracy. The pair of 10W speakers are loud, and shouldn't have a problem filling a classroom.

The fans were remarkably quiet, and we appreciated the audible beep to indicate when the projector had been turned on or off. If you plan to ceiling mount it, the manual zoom control won't be a problem, but bear in mind that the lid isn't powered, so you'll have to leave it open. When on a table, you can close it to prevent dust entering.

Another gripe is the poorly designed remote control. Buttons are small and have equally small, hard-to-read labels. Unlike other remotes with a direction pad and a Enter' button in the middle, the U5200's has a Menu button in the centre. Enter and back are located above. One small consolation is the bright laser pointer, and also the fact that the remote can double as a mouse control.

It takes around 20 seconds from turning the U5200 on to a clearly visible image, but well over a minute to shut down. Once in standby, power consumption is less than 1W. If there's no input signal detected for five minutes, the projector will automatically turn off.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The 3D feature is a gimmick most businesses and schools can do without. Few projectors can match the U5200’s extremely short throw ratio though, so if you’re happy to live with the imperfect image quality in exchange for the ability to wall-mount the projector immediately above or below your screen, it’s a decent choice.

Display Size: 72-300in Resolution: 1,024 x 768 Display technology: DLP Brightness: 2,500 ANSI lumens Contrast Ratio: 4,200:1 Connections: 2x D-Sub in, 1x D-Sub out, 2x HDMI in, S-Video in, composite in, 2x USB2, 1x mini-USB2, 1x Ethernet, 2x minijack audio in, 1x minijack mic in, 1x minijack audio out, 1x RS232, 12V DC out Adjustments: Keystone, wall colour, colour mode, red, green, blue levels, degamma, colour temperature, saturation, tint, front/rear, floor/ceiling projection modes, sharpness, aspect ratio, VGA out in standby. Dimensions (W x D x H): 420 x 340 x 145mm Power consumption: 320W active, 0.7W standby Speakers: 2x 10W Security: Kensington lock VESA mounting: N/A Warranty: two years collect and return (one year lamp) Part code: EY.JC205.001

Microsoft Office is arguably one of the most important suite of programs available for the Mac. Despite the increasing number of competitors, such as Apple's iWork or the free OpenOffice, without Microsoft Office, the Mac would arguably not be viable as a business computer. This makes the latest 2011 version of Office especially important.

Each of the Office programs is full of features and foibles, so we've dedicated individual reviews to each one:Word 2011Excel 2011PowerPoint 2011Outlook 2011

The biggest change in this version of Office is the replacement of the previous email program, Entourage, with a brand-new Mac version of Outlook. There are plenty of changes affecting the entire suite though. Among them is the Ribbon interface, which will be familiar to Office 2007 and 2010 Office for Windows users. It is designed to make it easier for users to discover and use the wealth of available features in each program. The Visual Basic for Applications scripting language for creating macros has returned - an especially important feature for Excel power users.

A less noticeable and potentially less welcome change is the introduction of product activation to Office. Previous versions simply required a license key, but Office 2011 now has to validate itself with Microsoft's servers during installation before it will work so you therefore can't use the same licence non-concurrently on a desktop and a laptop as you could with previous versions. Although an understandable counter-piracy measure, it could be inconvenient if you have to deploy Office on an office full of computers.

The biggest competitor to Office is now the Google Apps online suite. Although not as fully featured as Office, and therefore not as capable at creating complex documents, it has proven very attractive to many businesses. This is due not only to its low cost, but also due to its web-based nature allowing easy remote access, lack of maintenance and, most importantly, allowing multiple people to work on a document simultaneously.

Companies that have stuck with older Macs will be left out in the cold. Office 2011 requires Macs running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or later on an Intel processor. Laggards still using PowerPC Macs and Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 will have to be content with Office 2008, but if you're still using such old computers then it's likely you're not too fussed about keeping up with the latest software releases.

Unlike its competitors, Office isn't cheap. We've reviewed the Home and Business Edition which comes with Outlook. A single user licence costs 162 ex VAT. If you don't need Outlook, the Home and Student Edition single user licence costs 72 ex VAT a significant drop. Word, Excel and PowerPoint (but not Outlook) are each available separately at 85 ex VAT. If you need any two of them however, it's more economical to simply buy the entire suite.

Verdict

None of the improvements in Office 2011 for Mac are revolutionary, but they are nonetheless useful and together make Office 2011 the best Mac office suite yet. It's not perfect though – there are still features found in Office 2010 for Windows that aren't present here. Plus, the accompanying Office Web Apps are inferior to Google Apps for collaborating online. If your document creation needs are fairly simple, OpenOffice, iWork or Google Docs is more than sufficient, but for serious work then there's no choice other than Microsoft Office 2011.

Processor: Intel only Memory: 1GB (minimum) Hard disk: Mac OS Extended disk with 1.8GB free space Display: 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution or higher OS: Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later

PowerPoint has a rocky history with Mac users. A byword for the kind of dull, clunky slideshows that are accepted as a fact of life by executives but frowned on by creative professionals, it's often dismissed in favour of Keynote, Apple's less comprehensive but more aesthetically pleasing presentation app. This could be the moment, however, when PowerPoint fights back.

The difference is clear as soon as you launch the program. Like the other Office 2011 components, it opens incredibly quickly and displays an attractive welcome screen inviting you to explore the new features. You'd expect this to disappear when you click the Close button, but instead it flips around in 3D to show the Presentation Gallery on the back a neat touch that shows Microsoft has been paying attention to Apple's user interface design.

Most of the templates in that Gallery will be familiar from Office 2008, which considerably upped the standard of Microsoft's ready-made materials. New is the direct link to Microsoft's much larger collection online. Although it feels like an afterthought, we also liked the handful of Guided Methods example business presentations, using some of the latest features, whose authors have annotated the slide notes to explain why they made them the way they did. The tone is a bit entrepreneur-of-the-year, but for anyone unsure what a good presentation should be like, these are a very handy leg-up.

Within the app, the improvements continue. You'll immediately notice the new Ribbon interface, which works particularly well in PowerPoint, replacing a jumble of toolbars and palettes with a strip of clearly presented options that makes good use of whatever amount of screen width you have available. Losing old friends like the Formatting palette will initially have your mouse diving in the wrong direction, but after a while it all begins to feel quite natural. Adjusting your view is smoother, since the screen updates interactively when you drag either the new Zoom slider or the divider between your slide thumbnails and current slide.

Microsoft has even tackled one of the perennial bugbears of slide design: trying to click overlapping items. Under the Format tab is the Reorder Objects button which splays out all the objects on the slide in a 3D view reminiscent of Windows 7's Flip3D; you can then riffle through them and drag to move an element up or down the stacking order. It's a cute idea, but you can't select an item here and then move or resize it, so you may still end up having to bring an item to the front to edit it, then send it back again.

The temptation to pile lots of media onto each slide is increased by the radically overhauled Animation options, which along with extra SmartArt elevate PowerPoint almost to the level of a multimedia authoring tool. If you just need results fast, there are plenty of cool graphics and effects to apply instantly, and rather than being limited to a preset number of circles or boxes you can just keep adding them, with SmartArt doing the fiddly work of duplicating elements and making them fit together. But if you want things just so, you can customise extensively, breaking apart the supplied diagrams if necessary or animating your own graphics. The return of Visual Basic for Applications scripting provides further scope for more ambitious presenters.

One item that remains on our wish list is font embedding. The freedom to pick your own fonts, including your organisation's corporate identity typefaces where appropriate, is an essential aspect of professional presentations. The last thing you want is to turn up with your .pptx file on a USB flash drive, only to find nothing looks as intended on the podium computer because it doesn't have the same fonts installed.

PowerPoint for Windows can include the font data in its files, but PowerPoint 2011 can't read this, and nor can it save font data so unless your show will only ever be run from your own Mac or exported as a non-interactive movie, you'll be well advised to stick to web-safe fonts. Given that PDFs embed fonts and ensure correct appearance seamlessly across platforms, Microsoft has little excuse.

Mac users will appreciate the ability to export all the slides in a presentation, or just a selection, as image files to iPhoto, in case you prefer to create your slideshow there. Another new sharing feature is the Broadcast Slide Show command, which prepares and uploads your presentation via Windows Live so that other users can view it on the web. Features are rather limited there's no audio, movies or advanced transitions but it could be useful when you can't physically present.

Co-authoring is also supported, so having saved to your SkyDrive you can edit a presentation simultaneously with other users, though for some reason this doesn't work with files containing macros, which have to be saved in a special format. Using the PowerPoint Web App, you can also tweak and present your show from any computer, although there aren't really enough features here to create good-looking or sophisticated presentations from scratch. Note that you'll need a desktop browser for editing as the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad can only display documents.

There's a lot to like in PowerPoint 2011. It's still PowerPoint, and if you're just looking for a simple way to create a presentation Steve Jobs wouldn't mind standing in front of, Keynote will get you there faster. However, users prepared to dig deeper into styles and animation will be richly rewarded.

Verdict

The Ribbon goes some way towards taming PowerPoint 2011’s over-abundance of features, making it a little less daunting for casual users. Yet there’s even more power for the more ambitious presenter – or even designers – to discover.

Processor: Intel only Memory: 1GB (minimum) Hard disk: Mac OS Extended drive with 1.8GB free space Display: 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution screen OS: Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later

Adobe is expanding its web-based software offering with the launch of new free presentation software.

Still in Adobe's labs, Acrobat.com Presentations is basically a Flash-based variation Microsoft's PowerPoint. It features set layouts, effects and transitions so often used in slide show presentations, in addition to embedded video.

Like other web-based office suites, such as Google Docs, the Acrobat.com lineup pushes the ability for collaboration between coworkers, even in different offices. Adobe noted that Presentations shows who is working on the document, which slide is being edited, and who is viewing it. The finished slideshows can be viewed online or exported to Adobe's PDF format to be used offline.

"By adding Acrobat.com Presentations to our existing set of hosted services, our customers will be able to extend the experience of creating and collaborating on documents into the visual world of presentations," said Erik Larson, Adobe's director of business productivity management, in a statement.

Adobe also offers hosted meeting and document tools called ConnectNow and Buzzword, as well as an online version of PhotoShop, in its bid to compete with Google's Docs and Microsoft's in the next version of Office.

Acrobat.com's Presentations can be trialled here; it's free, but you'll need the latest version of Flash and to register with the site.

Microsoft has released a security patch to fix a series of serious flaws in its PowerPoint software - but only in the Windows versions of its Office suite, leaving Mac users to wait for a second release.

While one aspect of the PowerPoint flaw was discovered and made public in early April, Microsoft said on its security site that there were "several privately reported vulnerabilities" as well. There are 14 PowerPoint flaws in total that Microsoft is fixing with the patch.

Because the flaws could allow for remote code execution, Microsoft's has called the patch "critical" - it's highest security rating. Microsoft has previously admitted that the public flaw has already been targeted by hackers.

Among other fixes, the patch removes the ability to convert PowerPoint 4 files, which have effectively been disused since Office 2003, Microsoft said.

The patch is only for Microsoft Office in Windows, however. Microsoft said it will release fixes for the Mac version of the suite as well as for Microsoft Works and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac as soon as testing is finished.

"We normally do not update one supported platform before another but given this situation of a package available for an entire product line that protects the vast majority of customers at risk within the predictable release cycle, we made a decision to go early with the Windows packages," Jonathan Ness of the Microsoft Security Response Centre said in a blog post.

Unpatched systems can be protected with a workaround, Microsoft said, advising admins to temporarily disable affected file formats or force legacy PowerPoint files to open in an isolated environment.

While the PowerPoint flaw is serious, the single update for this month will give IT admins less work than the eight released last month.

Microsoft has warned of a zero-day vulnerability in its PowerPoint software, which is already being exploited by cybercriminals.

The advisory said that Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and Mac Office are all vulnerable. The latest version in Office 2007 is the only one which is not.

According to the Microsoft Malware Protection Centre, they are aware of several distinct exploit files used. However, it also said that they were only being used in targeted attacks and therefore the number of affected customers was very low.

For example, an attacker would create a malicious Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow and send it as an attachment to the target's email address.

A user would simply have to open the malicious slideshow for the computer to become compromised.

The Microsoft Security Research & Defence Centre posted workarounds that users could apply to their systems.

Microsoft will decide on appropriate action in the meantime, which could mean a solution in its monthly security update or an out-of-cycle security patch.

Microsoft late last week re-issued one of the patches it originally included in its August round of monthly security updates.

The MS08-051 patch was originally released to plug three critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office PowerPoint and Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer that could allow remote code execution and control of an affected if a user opens a specially crafted PowerPoint file.

In re-issuing the patch last week, the software giant said those IT security administrators who had manually downloaded the patch should install the latest version, which replaced the original.

But it said those who had applied the patch after downloading it using Windows Update or through an enterprise Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server need not reinstall MS08-051.

And those users who have updated other versions of Office are also not affected, it added.

The revised bulletin said the wrong versions of the original PowerPoint 2003 patch were posted to Microsoft's Download Centre.

"While these versions did protect against the vulnerabilities discussed in the bulletin, they lacked other important security and reliability updates," said Microsoft.

And it also advised: "If you choose to not reinstall the update, you must manually set the registry key in order to block PowerPoint file types as a workaround."

But this is the third time in the last two months that Microsoft has re-released a security related update and it is by no means an isolated case since Microsoft began its regular monthly round of security updates.

In June, Microsoft re-released a Windows Bluetooth patch citing unspecified "human issues" for the originally incorrect update. Last week, it re-issued a patch for a bug that prevented some administrators from using the WSUS patch management tool to deploy security updates.

The re-issued MS08-051 patch was one of a bumper crop of 11 security bulletins patching 26 bugs. This amounted to the most updates Microsoft has put out in a single month for the last eighteen months.