Microsoft customers in Europe have complained that both the Teams and Outlook platforms are down as users start their working day. 

Users of the sysadmin subreddit have queried whether both platforms are working optimally this morning, with some noting that portals are failing to load and reporting that Exchange Online is “extremely slow”. 

This issue appears to be affecting mainly European-based customers, with one user reporting that German admin teams are experiencing “no incoming or outgoing emails” for the Outlook service. 

Others reported that their teams called ‘dropped’ mid-call. 

Allestorungen, the European equivalent of Downdetector, shows a flurry of outage reports this morning for users. 

At present, UK-based users have not reported any widespread issues. However, Downdetector shows that some are reporting difficulties. 

Microsoft's own service update portal also shows that Teams and Outlook are down for selected users. 

Microsoft said the current issue is causing duplication of users’ contact lists, and is due to a syncing problem between Teams and Outlook. 

“The issue only impacts users who synced their personal account device contacts with Microsoft Teams,” the company said in its status update. 

“New syncs are no longer resulting in duplicate contacts since we’ve implemented the long-term fix.”

Microsoft revealed that a workaround is available for Outlook and Teams users, however. This can be done by following these steps:

• Visiting the Teams app on your mobile device (iOS or Android).   
• Clicking on the Profile Icon Home and navigate to Settings and People. 
• Turn off Sync using the “Sync my device contacts” toggle  
• Device contacts in Outlook will then be automatically deleted within a few days

The outage marks the second incident in as many weeks for Microsoft 365 customers. In early June, thousands of users across Europe were left without access to Microsoft Teams due to an outage that severely disrupted communications for a host of companies. 

Microsoft has revealed that threat actor group Anonymous Sudan was behind a recent spate of outages that affected cloud services earlier this month. 

In an advisory published at the weekend, the tech giant revealed that a series of outages were caused by highly effective distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. 

Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive customers were left in the dark for hours due to the incidents, prompting a rapid investigation by Microsoft’s threat analysts. 

“Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft identified surges in traffic against some services that temporarily impacted availability,” Microsoft said in its advisory. 

“Microsoft promptly opened an investigation and subsequently began tracking ongoing DDoS activity by the threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-1359.”

Microsoft noted that, to date, it has seen no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised.

The investigation by Microsoft revealed that the attacks specifically targeted level 7 web traffic using a number of methods. These included cache bypass, slowloris, and HTTP(S) flood attacks.

The latter of these attacks, Microsoft explained, aims to exhaust system resources by leveraging a high volume of SSL/TLS ‘handshakes’ and HTTP(S) requests processing. 

“In this case, the attacker sends a high load (in the millions) and HTTP(S) requests that are well distributed across the globe from different source IPs. This causes the application backend to run out of compute resources (CPU and memory),” Microsoft’s advisory read. 

In response, Microsoft said it hardened layer 7 protections, including “tuning Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) to better protect customers from the impact of similar DDoS attacks”.

Who is behind Anonymous Sudan?

Anonymous Sudan is one of the newcomers to the global threat landscape, having officially launched operations in January 2023, assembling on the Telegram messaging platform according to security firm CyberCX. 

CyberCX said the use of the Anonymous Sudan name was an “apparent reference to a 2019 operation by Anonymous”. 

The group, which describes itself as a ‘hacktivist’ organization has already gained notoriety through a series of major attacks. 

In March, the group threatened to disrupt Melbourne Fashion Week shows, citing opposition to a clothing line that displayed the term ‘God walks with me’. 

While this preceded a broader spate of attacks against Australian organizations, at the time the move against Melbourne Fashion Week suggested that the group may have had religious motivations. 

The group is also behind an apparent attack on the European Investment Bank (EIB). Anonymous’ DDoS attack against EIB follows recent threats made against the bank. 

EIB confirmed the attack in a statement via Twitter on 19 June, adding that the incident was affecting the availability of the EIB and EIF websites. 

At present, there is no clear-cut information on the scale or severity of the attack. However, security researcher Kevin Beaumont commented on Twitter that it has “absolutely no financial impact whatsoever”. 

“What Killnet and Anonymous Sudan tend to do is look at things like share price changes and market moves and link them to their actions incorrectly,” he said. “Eg they linked MSFT share price moves to DDoS. No real link.”

However, analysis by CyberCX suggests that the group is unlikely to be a legitimate hacktivist group. Similarly, the firm said that the group is unlikely to be geographically linked to Sudan itself. 

“Anonymous Sudan has no known overlap with the original membership of the 2019 Sudan operation, which was anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine, and has been denounced by a prominent Anonymous account,” the firm said. 

CyberCX said that, based on current assessments of the group’s operations, Anonymous Sudan is likely affiliated with the Russian state. 

The group is publicly aligned with pro-Russian threat actors, and is known to be a member of the pro-Russian Killnet hacker collective. 

Observations of the group’s tradecraft also align with Russian-style tactics, CyberCX added, including the targeting of Western organizations in the government, healthcare, transport, and media sectors. 

“CyberCX assesses that there is a real chance that Anonymous Sudan is affiliated with the Russian state,” the firm said. “Persistent low-level disruption of Western countries is consistent with established Russian information warfare strategies.”

“Anonymous Sudan also primarily posts in English and Russian, with its first Arabic post more than a month after its creation.”

Anonymous Sudan has been highly aggressive since emerging earlier this year, and CyberCX said it expects the group to continue ramping up operations in the months ahead. 

“Anonymous Sudan is likely to continue to increase its tempo of operations over the next three months,” the firm said. “Anonymous Sudan now has more than 60,000 followers on its Telegram channel and reactions to its post have dramatically increased through May.”

“The group’s apparent access to significant resources and its dubious ideological associations means that it poses an atypical threat.”

Microsoft Outlook is susceptible to phishing attacks using internationalized domain names (IDNs), according to reports from two separate security researchers.

Phishing attacks sent from IDNs are also known as homograph attacks. They use Unicode characters from non-Latin character sets, such as Cyrillic or Greek, that look like regular Latin characters. An attacker might register the domain tωitter.com, which uses an international alternative to a regular 'w'.

Browsers have long recognized and flagged IDNs, displaying them in their original Unicode format (known as Punycode), making them easier to spot. The tωitter.com IDN would show up as xn–titter-i2e.com, for example.

However, researcher dobby1kenobi revealed that Microsoft Outlook does not highlight them. Moreover, if a spoofed email using an IDN resembles a legitimate email address in the recipient's Outlook contact book - for example, real.person@tωitter.com instead of real.person@twitter.com - the software will display the legitimate person's contact details next to the phishing email.

For the attack to work, the sender must include the real email address in the 'Sender' field, which is trivial.

"This means if a company’s domain is “somecompany[.]com”, an attacker that registers an IDN such as “ѕomecompany[.]com” (xn–omecompany-l2i[.]com) could take advantage of this bug and send convincing phishing emails to employees within “somecompany.com” that used Microsoft Outlook for Windows," he reported.

Because a spoofed email address would cause the real employee's contact details to appear, many employees might be fooled into thinking the email was legitimate.

Mike Manzotti, senior consultant at security company Dionach, also noted the issue. He reported the same response from Microsoft as dobby1kenobi:

"We’ve finished going over your case, but in this instance it was decided that we will not be fixing this vulnerability in the current version and are closing this case," the company said. "In this case, while spoofing could occur, the senders identity cannot be trusted without a digital signature. The changes needed are likely to cause false positives and issues in other ways."

However, Manzotti noticed that the latest version of Microsoft Outlook (16.0.14228.20216) is no longer vulnerable. Microsoft was unable to confirm if it had issued a fix, he said.

Companies with versions of Outlook still susceptible to this flaw can work around the issue by digitally signing their emails and visually classifying all mails from external sources, dobby1kenobi said.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has simplified its cyber scam-reporting with a new add-in for Outlook on Microsoft 365 which makes it even easier to flag phishing emails to its Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS).

Launched in April of last year, SERS allows users to report email scams by forwarding them to report@phishing.gov.uk. Within the last 16 months, it has received over 6.5 million reports from the public resulting in the removal of 97,000 online scams, the NCSC said.

However, the organisation has said that this isn’t enough, with NCSC technical director Dr Ian Levy saying that the new tool will make it easier for businesses to “further help combat cyber crime”.

Designed as a simple button, it allows staff to report a suspicious-looking email with just one click, saving the time that it takes to find the SERS email address and forward the message. The more automated approach aims to make reporting easier and faster, allowing users to protect the security of the business without compromising on time and productivity.

“As more people report more dodgy stuff to us, the safer everyone gets,” said Levy. “The pandemic has shown the cyber criminals will stop at nothing to attack and defraud citizens and businesses. But our Suspicious Email Reporting Service has also shown that the British public can help us fight back against this scourge."

SMBs have been especially vulnerable to hackers, with almost a third of cyber attacks now involving a small business. According to Federation of Small Businesses national chair Mike Cherry, innovations such as the simplified reporting tool “are crucial to calling time on business crime”.

“Small achievable steps will go a long way to protect thousands of small firms from cyber attacks. Every year, there are almost four million cases of cyber attacks against small businesses in the UK, and more than 50 per cent of these come from phishing,” he said, adding that “these systems not only help prevent disruption to small firms today but will become increasingly important to help safeguard small businesses for the future”.

Organisations interested in equipping their staff with the Microsoft 365 tool can go to the Microsoft AppSource portal and search for the Report Phishing add-in, click the “Get it now” button, and follow the instructions to complete the installation.

Hotmail was one of the first free online email (aka webmail) services to launch following the popularisation of the internet that wasn't linked to an ISP. It was originally released as an independent platform on 4 July 1996 and following rapid growth was bought by Microsoft in December 1997.

Hotmail had a couple of iterations over the years since the Microsoft purchase, first becoming MSN Hotmail then later Windows Live Hotmail. This latter upgrade, which was announced in 2005 and completed in 2007, was significant itself, representing a ground-up overhaul. It was also the first time Microsoft thought about killing off the Hotmail brand, but backtracked after the new proposed name, Windows Live Mail, caused some user confusion.

Finally, in 2012, Microsoft decided to bite the bullet with a second major overhaul when the email service was migrated to the company's Office 365 infrastructure and the branding changed from Hotmail to Outlook.com (a change that took about a year to complete). The new name reflected the company's efforts to unify branding across its desktop and cloud-based software offerings. While perpetual license holders and Office 365 subscribers got Outlook, Word, Excel and so on, users of the free tier of Microsoft productivity services had Word Online, Excel Online and now Outlook.com.

A pretty big switch

Microsoft implemented a much more aesthetically-appealing user interface (UI) for Outlook.com compared against previous Hotmail design iterations. This new look was based on the Windows 8 tablet-first tile-based layout in order to signify unity between Microsoft's products. Many advanced users, however, found the UI frustrating to use and not appropriate for in-browser user experience (UX), arguing the benefits in terms of UI simplification were not worth the navigation difficulties.

User feedback led to a suite of new add-ons, meanwhile, like an advanced search feature as well as a secondary inbox, more templates and closer integration with Microsoft's web-based tools like Bing Maps. Skype, too, became more closely wrapped into the firm's emailing system with users given the tools to communicate via speech in such a way that the company was positioned to compete with Google and its Hangouts app. Google Drive was also targeted with Microsoft's own version of document-sharing, while email attachments could be edited in the body of a message without downloading and reopening files.

Many Hotmail users were taken by surprise despite Microsoft's attempts to publicise the transition at the time, with loyalists expressing shock at being met with the Windows 8-esque tablet UI when logging into Outlook.com for the first time. The UI has evolved drastically since it debuted, however, to more closely resemble the updated Windows 10 and productivity suite design scheme - deemed far more palatable.

Moreover, a host of premium features are on offer, including advanced protection against malware and phishing, ad blocking, 1TB of OneDrive storage, and offline email access on PCs and Macs. Premium customer support is also on offer for people willing to shell out a monthly or yearly fee for premium privileges.

Hotmail to Outlook migration

The great Hotmail to Outlook.com migration started at the beginning of 2013 after a preview in which Microsoft could test out its functionality and garner feedback from users. Microsoft took user comments on board to improve the service before launching it worldwide and moving users off Hotmail, said David Law, director of Outlook.com product management, back in February that year.

"Through the preview, we've heard and learned a great deal about your favourite features and how well Outlook.com is delivering on our vision for modern email," he said.

"For example, millions of people are connecting Outlook.com to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to keep up-to-date on their friends' contact info, updates, photos, and Tweets.

"And a number of people have expressed appreciation that Outlook.com replaces advertising with the latest updates from Facebook or Twitter when they're reading email from one of their contacts."

Law also claimed that, on average, users would see 60% fewer ads while using Outlook.com.

The launch was backed by a major marketing campaign to promote the service, but not every former Hotmail user was happy with the forced migration to Outlook.com, with many dissatisfied with the initial user interface, and some functionality.

Newer Outlook.com features

In recent months and years since the migration to Outlook, Microsoft has included a number of features to improve the overall UX, largely in response to feedback from its users. One of the most prominent examples of a UI change has been the introduction of a dark mode' with a revamped colour scheme, rolled out in July.

A host of new features in Outlook have subsequently been rolled out to improve its interface and design, largely in response to a recent Gmail overhaul that's seen key design and functionality improvements.

Among the string of changes, since Outlook was first launched, include bill reminders appearing as entries in a user's calendar, whether this takes the form of subscriptions or monthly payments. These are similar to travel reminders, with Outlook detecting a transportation booking (a flight or train journey, for example), which are added as calendar entries. Users are also reminded two days before the bill is due so payment can be issued in time. These calendar improvements also introduce more detail to entries, with aspects like venue populated by the Bing search engine.

Customisation, too, has seen a huge focus from Microsoft, with users able to add more items to the Outlook ribbon, and the ability to add multiple accounts, folders, and tabs to switch between email, calendar and address book.

In more recent months, Microsoft has rolled out features like a focused inbox', which automatically filters any messages deemed not pertinent or useful, with this content instead found in an other' inbox. Outlook can also read email messages out loud, and includes one-click functionality to improve accessibility.

Unfortunately, you can't. While users who trialled Outlook.com before its full launch were able to switch back and forth, since the Hotmail brand was retired if you switched over there's no way to switch back and you can't sign up for a new hotmail account.

The option to forward on an email no longer has its own standalone tab, like it did in Hotmail, which has created confusion for lots of users since the Outlook.com switchover took place.

If you need to access this feature, open an email and click on the reply tab. This will result in a drop down menu appearing that features a "Forward" option.

If you click on the downward arrow in the top left hand corner of the Outlook.com home screen, a menu with four tabs should drop down.

Click on the one marked "People" and all of your old Hotmail contacts should be there. If that's not the case, it might be worth flagging this issue to Microsoft to see if they can shed any light on it.

The People tab also lets you populate your contacts list with details of your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connections, and message their social networking profiles without leaving Outlook.

Whereas Hotmail provided users with a chronological view of ever email they had received, Outlook.com groups together correspondents that have been sent by the same contact into an ongoing thread, making it difficult for users to pick out individual messages.

It's a similar system to the one employed by Gmail and the online version of Microsoft's corporate Outlook product, but if you're used to seeing your emails lined up in a linear fashion it may take a little while to get used to.

Microsoft appears to have re-jigged the print email function in Outlook since we originally posted our tutorial, much to the chargrin of users.

Previously, when you opened an Outlook email, you would click on the "Actions" button in the top right hand corner, which would result in a drop down menu appearing with a "Print Message" option.

Since then the "Actions" tab appears to have been discontinued and replaced with a "...", as pictured.

If you click on this, a new drop down menu should appear, and the "Print" option is listed at the bottom.

However, as you can see from the comments box below, some users seem to be without an "Actions" or "..." tab at this time, so all we can suggest is using your browser's print page function (CTRL + P) until Microsoft comes up with a suitable alternative.

Although this is hardly an ideal solution because, as well as the email, the Outlook side bars (detailing how many items are currently sitting in your inbox) and the ads along the right hand side, will also be printed out too.

If you click on the setting wheel icon within Outlook.com, you should see a drop down menu with a Leave Feedback option.

Click on this, and you'll be asked to select a box that best describes the nature of your feedback ("I love the new look" or "I don't like the new look"). Once that's done, you'll be asked to complete a form where you can go into more detail about what you do or don't like about the service, and whether or not you would recommend it to others.

Microsoft has made it relatively easy to deactivate Outlook.com accounts. To do this, users simply need to click on the account settings tab, scroll down and there should be an option to close your account there.

When you click on this, you'll be asked to enter your Outlook.com password and then taken to another screen that asks you to deactivate your account.

For some reason, when IT Pro clicked on the deactive Hotmail account link, we were taken back to the MSN home page. However, if this happens to you, try clicking here instead, as this allowed us to proceed with the termination process.

If you have a change of heart once you've deactivated your account, as long as you log into it again within 365 days, you can reclaim your email address and username.

Unfortunately, your contacts and emails are likely to have been wiped. So, if you do decide to pursue this route, make sure you've backed up everything first.

Microsoft’s Outlook is the email and calendar application of choice for millions of people around the globe. Available across a variety of platforms, it’s perfect for both business and personal use.

However, it's likely that you're just scratching the surface when it comes to making use of all its functionalities. Here are 20 tips to get the most out of Outlook and increase productivity.

1. To-do lists

One of the best ways to keep on top of your work is by using a task management tool. Microsoft’s To Do is an excellent example, allowing you to create and manage daily tasks across all your devices.

Thanks to integration with Outlook, you can easily view, add and complete items on your to-do list within the email app.

2. Use folders

Your inbox can quickly become confusing to navigate and manage if you’ve not organised your emails, contacts, calendars and to-do lists. Luckily, you can easily and quickly do this with Outlook folders.

To create a folder, simply click “new folder” in the “folders” section of the left side of Outlook.

3. Focused Inbox

Another great way to declutter your emails is by using Focused Inbox, which essentially sorts your emails into two folders. It automatically stores important emails in “Focused”, whereas junk mail is saved in “Other”.

You can easily move emails between these inboxes and use “Always Move to Focused” so that emails from particular senders always end up in “Focused”. You can turn it on and off by going to settings, where you’ll see a Focused Inbox toggle.

4. Cortana integrations (US users)

Getting your emails to talk to you may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s actually possible thanks to Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant.

With Play Your Emails on Outlook iOS and Android, you can have your emails read aloud and use your voice to manage them on-the-go. You’re able to do things like mark emails as read, delete them and draft replies.

Unfortunately, this feature is only available to users in the US.

5. Limit notifications

Email notifications can quickly become distracting if you receive large amounts of messages per day, many of which will spam. But you can actually limit notifications to important people.

It’s a case of stopping message alerts in mail options, before setting up a new rule to get notifications from specific people who email you. Software firm ZenDesk explains this pretty well.

6. Scheduling Assistant

For anyone who shares calendars, it’s definitely worth checking out Scheduling Assistant in the mobile app.

This nifty feature allows you to set up meetings and check someone’s availability, meaning you no longer need to send multiple emails to work out if people are busy or not.

7. Mention people

When you want to get the attention of someone, just mention their name in an email (e.g. @Nicholas). It becomes highlighted and will also be added to the “To” line of an email or meeting invite.

Microsoft has created easy-to-use instructions of how to use this feature.

8. Change your timezone

When you travel abroad for work, your meetings and calendar entries won't display the correct time. To fix this, you’ll need to change your timezone by heading to File > Options > Calendar. Once you’ve done that, your emails and calendars will have the correct local time.

9. Keyboard shortcuts

To make things faster, there are a range of keyboard shortcuts you can use in Outlook. Some of the most helpful ones include:

• Ctrl + Shift + M to write a new email
• Ctrl + Shift + Enter to send an email
• Ctrl + Shift + Q to create a meeting
• Ctrl + Shift + C to add a contact
• Ctrl + B to access your address book
• Ctrl + 2 to open your calendar

Microsoft has created a list of further shortcuts here.

10. Swipe options

When you’re checking your emails on a smartphone or tablet, you can use Swipe Options to access common actions like mark as read, mark as unread, archive, flag and delete quickly. You have the option to swipe right or left for any of these actions - just go into settings to get started.

11. Delay Delivery

If you want to write an email to send in the near future, Outlook gives you the option to delay delivery. After you’ve drafted an email message, go to Options and select Delay Delivery.

When you click on this, you’ll see a field that says "Do not deliver before”. Here, you can set a date and time. Then hit send, and the email will go out on the selected date.

12. Encrypt emails

For sending important and sensitive information, you can set up encryption for emails and attachments. This means that the recipient will only be able to access them using a security key.

Head over to Trust Center Settings and select Email Security.

13. Backup Outlook

There’s nothing more annoying than losing an important email or having to start from scratch if you change email accounts, which is why you should definitely back up your Outlook account.

Thankfully, Microsoft allows you to export or backup your Outlook account – including all emails, calendar entries as well as your contact book – and download as a .pst file.

14. Clean your emails

Sorting through old emails is a mundane task, but Microsoft’s Conversation Clean Up feature makes this easier. It analyses emails and works out which can be sent to the Deleted Items folder.

To do this, click Home > Delete > Clean Up.

15. Create notes

In Outlook, you can create digital sticky notes for things like ideas, reminders and questions. Either click on “Notes” under the Home tab, or use this keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+N.

16. Get email signature templates

If you want a professional email signature and don’t know where to start, you needn’t worry as you can download templates from Microsoft. You can then just paste the one you want into an email and add your details.

17. Curb junk mail

Junk mail is one of the most annoying things in the digital world, but you can curb this problem by blocking certain senders. All you need to do is head over to Home and click Junk email options.

18. Conversation view

To make emails easier to read, you have the option to view messages as a single conversation. Go to View > Show as conversations.

19. Outlook rules

Rules also make managing your emails easier. You can use them to flag, organise and reply to emails automatically. Right click on an email or folder; then you’ll see the option to create a rule.

20. Read and delivery receipts

If you’re conscious about whether someone has received or read your email, we’d recommend setting up delivery and read receipts. In an email, click Options > Tracking > Request a Delivery Receipt or Request a Read Receipt.

Learning how to restore Outlook emails is a handy skill that could help avoid disaster for you or your organization. 

If email is a large part of your daily work, accidentally deleting an email could leave you scrambling to locate vital business correspondence. 

Luckily, Outlook provides a fairly straightforward method for you to restore deleted emails, albeit with slightly different menus and processes depending on the specific version of the email application you currently use. 

One of many email services available on the market, Outlook is one of the most widely-used by professionals and businesses, mostly because it forms part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. 

This ecosystem includes a number of useful productivity and communications apps such as Microsoft Teams. 

So, if you’ve haphazardly deleted some correspondence, this guide will run you through all the steps that will help you rectify that mistake. 

How to restore Outlook emails: Getting started

Given there are a variety of Outlook versions, and that the steps for recovering deleted emails differ slightly. 

We've detailed each of the main versions and platforms below. We will be covering:

• Outlook.com
• Outlook on the Web App (OWA)
• Outlook 2016 and 2013
• Outlook 2010

Microsoft has launched a new 'Dark Mode' for Outlook, following persistent requests from users.

The feature, which inverts the colour scheme so that the background is black with text picked out in white, is designed to reduce eye strain and to make using the app in low-light conditions more pleasant. Many apps, including Twitter, Gmail and YouTube, have also adopted similar features.

Dark Mode is currently only available on the Outlook.com web app, and only available through the beta version, which can be easily enabled by toggling a switch at the top of the inbox. Dark Mode can also be toggled on and off in individual emails by clicking a button at the top of an email labelled 'turn on the lights'.

The news was revealed by an administrator in Microsoft's Outlook feedback forum, responding to a popularly-supported user request for the company to add the feature.

"When we designed Dark Mode, we debated having it exist in Outlook.com as a theme," the post read. "We quickly concluded that the way most people would expect themes to work and the way Dark Mode works were fundamentally different."

"Also, we imagine that there would be a dark experience for all available themes in the future, so having Dark Mode be a separate toggle would facilitate that. Plus, this is consistent with many other applications that have a dark mode."

The company has not confirmed when (or indeed if) the feature will be making its way to desktop and mobile versions of the Outlook client.

Microsoft has decided to switch off its Outlook Web Apps (OWA) for iPhone, iPad and Android, instead, pushing users to download and install the standalone Outlook app, which it said it has turned into an "award-winning app."

The company's OWAs effectively functioned as a halfway-house between the browser-based Outlook experience and the fully-fledged Outlook app, offering functions that can only be provided by a native app such as contact syncing and push notifications.

Microsoft explained it's decided to discontinue the apps as of April, removing them from the App Store and Google Play. It will notify existing users of the expiry via in-app messages, advising them to instead install the standalone Outlook app for their platform.

From May 15, the apps will stop working altogether and any Office 365 users who open them will be advised it's been discontinued, telling them to download and install the Outlook app for iOS or Android.

"Outlook for iOS and Android has an architecture fully powered by the Microsoft Cloud and has 4.5+ star ratings in the app stores," Eugenie Burrage, one of Microsoft's product marketers explained to the community.

"And as we streamline our mobile portfolio, we'll be able to further focus our efforts to deliver on our promise of the best-in-class, enterprise-grade mail, calendar and search experience and the best way to experience Office 365 features on a mobile device with Outlook."

Microsoft's OWA apps were designed to offer extra functionality compared to the mobile browser iterations of Outlook, such as such as push notifications, syncing of contacts, voice-activated actions, but were superseded by the much richer standalone Outlook apps that offer the same functionality as the desktop versions of Outlook, just on a smaller screen.

Microsoft hasn't updated the OWA apps in recent months and so they don't work particularly well now. This is clear by taking a look at the star ratings in the Android and iOS app stores - rated 2.9/5 and 2.8/5 respectively.

Sunrise has a new dawn in Microsoft's Outlook mobile apps, after the company bought and shut down the third-party calendar tool.

Microsoft picked up the calendar app last year, with reports suggesting it paid $100 million for the productivity tool. At the end of August, it killed off the standalone app.

But Sunrise's features haven't been gone long. An update to the Outlook app for Android and iOS introduces a host of new features, many of which are pulled from Sunrise.

"As we continue to bring more of the Sunrise design expertise to Outlook, we updated our date and time pickers so that scheduling is easier than ever," noted Javier Soltero, vice president of Outlook, in a blog post. "Our new design provides a simpler, more intuitive way to choose the date and time when creating a meetingmatching how Outlook works on the web or desktop."

Outlook apps for mobile will also use icons to show the type of event, an idea taken from Sunrise. "Try typing 'coffee' or 'lunch' next time you create an event and see what happens in your agenda viewthe keywords automatically trigger an icon that matches your event title," Soltero said. "Icons come in handy when you want to scan your day quickly and see what's coming up.

He added: "Also, they're fun."

Plus, maps will be integrated directly into event details.

"Just start typing a location next time you create an event, choose one of the handy suggestions (powered by Bing) and Outlook will include a map with your event details," noted Soltero. "Now, before your next event, you can simply tap on the map in the event details and get directions from your favorite maps app."

Other changes include "Interesting Calendars", which lets users subscribe to a sport's team to get events automatically in their calendar. TV shows and other topics will be coming soon, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has also added the ability to edit recurring meetings from a mobile device and set up Skype for Business meetings from the app.

Microsoft has made it relatively easy to deactivate Outlook.com accounts. To do this, users simply need to click on the account settings tab, scroll down and there should be an option to close your account there.

When you click on this, you'll be asked to enter your Outlook.com password and then taken to another screen that asks you to deactivate your account.

For some reason, when IT Pro clicked on the deactive Hotmail account link, we were taken back to the MSN home page. However, if this happens to you, try clicking here instead, as this allowed us to proceed with the termination process.

If you have a change of heart once you've deactivated your account, as long as you log into it again within 365 days, you can reclaim your email address and username.

Unfortunately, your contacts and emails are likely to have been wiped. So, if you do decide to pursue this route, make sure you've backed up everything first.

Unfortunately, you can't. While users who trialled Outlook.com before its full launch were able to switch back and forth, since the Hotmail brand was retired if you switched over there's no way to switch back and you can't sign up for a new hotmail account.

The option to forward on an email no longer has its own standalone tab, like it did in Hotmail, which has created confusion for lots of users since the Outlook.com switchover took place.

If you need to access this feature, open an email and click on the reply tab. This will result in a drop down menu appearing that features a "Forward" option.

If you click on the downward arrow in the top left hand corner of the Outlook.com home screen, a menu with four tabs should drop down.

Click on the one marked "People" and all of your old Hotmail contacts should be there. If that's not the case, it might be worth flagging this issue to Microsoft to see if they can shed any light on it.

The People tab also lets you populate your contacts list with details of your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connections, and message their social networking profiles without leaving Outlook.

Whereas Hotmail provided users with a chronological view of ever email they had received, Outlook.com groups together correspondents that have been sent by the same contact into an ongoing thread, making it difficult for users to pick out individual messages.

It's a similar system to the one employed by Gmail and the online version of Microsoft's corporate Outlook product, but if you're used to seeing your emails lined up in a linear fashion it may take a little while to get used to.

Microsoft appears to have re-jigged the print email function in Outlook since we originally posted our tutorial, much to the chargrin of users.

Previously, when you opened an Outlook email, you would click on the "Actions" button in the top right hand corner, which would result in a drop down menu appearing with a "Print Message" option.

Since then the "Actions" tab appears to have been discontinued and replaced with a "...", as pictured.

If you click on this, a new drop down menu should appear, and the "Print" option is listed at the bottom.

However, as you can see from the comments box below, some users seem to be without an "Actions" or "..." tab at this time, so all we can suggest is using your browser's print page function (CTRL + P) until Microsoft comes up with a suitable alternative.

Although this is hardly an ideal solution because, as well as the email, the Outlook side bars (detailing how many items are currently sitting in your inbox) and the ads along the right hand side, will also be printed out too.

If you click on the setting wheel icon within Outlook.com, you should see a drop down menu with a Leave Feedback option.

Click on this, and you'll be asked to select a box that best describes the nature of your feedback ("I love the new look" or "I don't like the new look"). Once that's done, you'll be asked to complete a form where you can go into more detail about what you do or don't like about the service, and whether or not you would recommend it to others.

Microsoft has made it relatively easy to deactivate Outlook.com accounts. To do this, users simply need to click on the account settings tab, scroll down and there should be an option to close your account there.

When you click on this, you'll be asked to enter your Outlook.com password and then taken to another screen that asks you to deactivate your account.

For some reason, when IT Pro clicked on the deactive Hotmail account link, we were taken back to the MSN home page. However, if this happens to you, try clicking here instead, as this allowed us to proceed with the termination process.

If you have a change of heart once you've deactivated your account, as long as you log into it again within 365 days, you can reclaim your email address and username.

Unfortunately, your contacts and emails are likely to have been wiped. So, if you do decide to pursue this route, make sure you've backed up everything first.

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.

Microsoft is developing a solution to an encryption flaw in the Outlook Android and iOS apps that cause some devices to ignore IT department passwords and policies, including encryption.

The company said additional features will be rolled out in the next few months to heighten security for corporate IT departments, including the addition of PIN lock and new Exchange ActiveSync policies.

Dirk Sigurdson, director of engineering at Rapid 7's Mobilisafe uncovered the flaw, and demonstrated how encryption policies are being ignored on some mobile devices.

Sigurdson explained in a blog: "[With Outlook for Android and iOS] any ActiveSync policy defined on the server is completely ignored. Your company can define a sophisticated passcode or encryption policy that will have absolutely no impact on devices if this new email client is used by your employees. There are other potential security issues with Outlook as well, but this one I think is the most egregious.

"If your organisation is dependent on ActiveSync policies in anyway you should immediately block ActiveSync access to Outlook for iOS and Android," he advised.

Another security blogger, Rene Winkelmeyer, warned of a number of other corporate security flaws in the Outlook apps when they were first released in January. He explained that Microsoft allows users to share corporate mail attachments with personal accounts, share ActiveSync IDs across a single user's devices and shares these credentials with Microsoft.

"The only advice I can give you at this stage is: block the app from accessing your companies [sic] mail servers. And inform your users that they shouldn't use the app," he explained.

The release of Outlook for iOS follows Microsoft's acquisition of a mobile email app called Acompli, so it's optimised for mobile devices rather than being a direct port of the desktop version of Outlook.

Apple's own Mail app has had problems working with Exchange in the past, so organisations that use Exchange will certainly welcome the arrival of Microsoft's own email client on iOS at long last.

Free Mail

Outlook for iOS uses up a tiny 22MB of memory, but it packs plenty of useful features. Designed to run on iPhones and iPads, it's free to download and unlike the iOS optimised versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, does not require a subscription to Office 365 to use full functions.

To run the Outlook app you'll require iOS 8 or above. This tends to run slowly on older devices such as the iPhone 4/4S and iPad 2, so you'll need a fairly new iPhone or iPad for the best experience.

Microsoft's focus is on corporate email services, so the app supports Exchange, Outlook and Hotmail services, as well as Gmail. There's currently no support for IMAP or POP services on iOS, which may rule out the email services that many people use with their home broadband accounts (IMAP is supported on the Android version). However, you can hook up sync up iCloud and Yahoo Mail accounts.

We were also pleased to see that Outlook was able to work with our existing iCloud email accounts with no problems at all. One other useful option is the ability to link Outlook to a Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive account so that you can send files that are stored online as email attachments from within Outlook.

Focused Inbox

At first glance, Outlook doesn't look all that different from Apple's own Mail app. On an iPhone, Outlook shows a simple list of email headers that you can tap in order to read the full email, while the larger screen of the iPad allows you to view the header list alongside the body of the email.

There are some important differences, though. The mail inbox shows two tabs at the top of the screen, labeled Focused' and Other'. The Focused Inbox is one of Outlook's key features. The app attempts to learn which of your emails and contacts are most important, and then automatically places them into the Focus' inbox, while leaving everything else in the Other' inbox.

When you're reading an email there's a small pull-down menu that allows you to move the email between the Focus' and Other' inboxes, and this helps Outlook to learn which contacts and subjects should have priority. But if you prefer to keep all your emails together in a single inbox then you can simply turn off the Focused Inbox option in the app's main Settings panel.

Managing Mail

Other options for managing emails include the ability to swipe left or right on the email header in order to perform various tasks. One feature that many people will find useful is the left-swipe schedule' option. This allows you to read an email and then specify a time when that email will pop up again with a notification to remind you that you need to deal with it.

Swiping to the right archives the email, placing it into a separate Archive folder so that you can keep it for future reference. However, these default commands can be changed in the Settings panel, allowing you to select other commands, such as deleting the email or marking it unread.

There's a conventional Search tool that allowing you to locate text or emails, but Outlook also provides a Quick Filter option that can locate unread, flagged, or messages with attachments. There's no out of office' option, though, which suggests the app was rushed out and we expect this to be a priority addition in future updates.

Calendar And Events

Apple's Mail and Calendar are separate apps, and while they do have some ability to share information when creating meetings or other events you still need to switch back and forth between the two apps. Outlook has an edge over Mail as it includes an integrated calendar alongside its primary email functions.

The Calendar views vary on the iPhone and iPad. The tablet (above) can display both one-day and seven-day views. When holding our iPhone 6 (below) in the upright position the Calendar just displays one day at a time, although you can get a three-day view if you turn the phone's screen sideways.

There's a useful Agenda' view that provides a quick day-by-day list of all your events on both devices.

You can add events by tapping on the required date and time, and events can be colour-coded to keep business and private events separate. However, the lack of an option for creating repeating events is another sign of the app's rushed release. You can invite people while creating an event in Calendar mode, but it's also possible to create an event and send invitations when composing an email. We were pleased to see that Outlook synced events between our iPhone and iPad although not to the desktop version of Outlook running on our office iMac. There's currently no support for shared Exchange calendars either, although Outlook does support shared Google calendars.

Overall

The iOS version of Outlook may not be described as a preview' as the Android version is but it does still have the feel of a work in progress, which will be improved with future updates.

Even so many organisations will welcome the arrival of an official' Microsoft email client for iOS devices. Many business users will also prefer Outlook's integration of email and calendar features, which make it an attractive alternative to Apple's home-grown Mail and Contacts apps.

Verdict

This rushed release does have some rough edges, but Exchange support and slick email management will appeal to business users and IT managers.

Requires iOS 8.0 or later.

Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

The app is optimised for iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Mac users with Office 365 subscriptions will be able to download the latest version of Outlook for Mac months before the rest of the suite becomes available on OS X.

The latest version brings features over from the PC version that Mac users have had to go without for the last couple of years.

The latest version offers an updated user interface that ties in a little more with the version on Windows. There is also real-time push delivery of email as well as improvements in mail category and colour organisation sync between Mac, Windows, and Outlook Web Access.

The download will only be available to users with an active Office 365 subscription.

"The new Outlook for Mac is available to Office 365 commercial customers and Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal and Office 365 University subscribers," the Office team said in a blog post.

The firm said the new Outlook could be run alongside the old Office for Mac 2011, but this would require removing the old version of Outlook first. A support page on Microsoft details how this can be done.

Microsoft said it would release the next version of Office for Mac in the first half of 2015. This would be a public beta. The final code would ship in the latter half of the year

While subscribers would not be charged for the update, they would have to continue to pay a subscription for the service. Microsoft did not disclose how much the next version of Office for Mac would be to non-subscribers.

Microsoft is to offer rewards to anyone who discovers bugs within many of its online services.

Dubbed the 'Microsoft Online Services Bug Bounty Program', the company kicked off the scheme earlier this week, saying anyone submitting a bug is eligible for a minimum payment of $500 (340).

According to the post on Technet, bugs can include any vulnerabilities discovered in its Office, Outlook 365 and Office 365 for business email services applications, Sharepoint, Lync, Yammer and other services that belong to Microsoft.

Bounties will be paid out to anyone discovering cross site scripting (XSS), cross site request forgery (CSRF), unauthorised cross-tenant data tampering or access (for multi-tenant services), insecure direct object references, injection and authentication flaws, server-side code execution, privilege escalation and significant security misconfiguration vulnerabilities.

A number of vulnerabilities have, however, been blacklisted including bugs that only affect unsupported browsers and plugins and those that would not necessarily pose a risk to people using its services in a regular way. Microsoft will also not pay out if a Denial of Service (DoS) attack is discovered.

Microsoft encourages those who wish to mine for bugs to set up test accounts for security testing rather than use live ones.

Depending on the severity of the bug, Microsoft will vary its payments, but the company says the minimum paid out will be $500 (340). However, the "detail, quality, and complexity of the vulnerability" will also be considered in determining the level of payment.

Some of the biggest tech companies around the world already offer rewards to researchers or regular users who uncover bugs or vulnerabilities. Twitter recently announced it would pay around $140 (85) for every security flaw its users find, while Yahoo came under fire for offering just $12.50 (7.65) in its scheme.

Microsoft has escaped the wrath of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), despite complaints being made about an anti-Gmail radio ad campaign the software giant recently ran.

The advert at the centre of the controversy suggested Gmail users should communicate with their contacts in Pig Latin to prevent Google from scanning the content of their emails for ad targeting purposes.

It then went on to claim Microsoft's own Outlook.com does not indulge in this practice, and also gives users the option to opt out from receiving personalised ads.

"To stop Gmail from using your emails, use Outlook.com," the advert stated.

According to an adjudication notice on the ASA's website, two people complained about the advert, claiming Microsoft was misleading listeners by implying Outlook provides greater privacy than Gmail.

"They understood that Outlook also scanned the contents of all emails, for purposes other than targeting ads," the ASA statement continued.

In its defence, Microsoft insisted it only scanned users' emails for viruses and spam, and that using the contents of emails to create targeted ads was a "significant privacy issue".

It then went on to state that it failed to mention its protective scanning procedures in the ad because it was standard practice within the industry, and many consumers will already be aware that it does this.

Therefore, the advert was not misleading listeners, Microsoft claimed.

In response, the ASA said Microsoft has no case to answer, because scanning emails for viruses is standard practice, and as such listeners were likely to expect it to be carried out as a matter of course.

"We noted the ad referred explicitly to Gmail scanning email content for the purposes of targeting ads, and this reference was immediately followed by the statement Outlook.com doesn't'. We considered listeners were likely to appreciate this statement was only in relation to scanning for ad targeting rather than protective scanning," the ASA stated.

"Because the ad made clear that the privacy claims were in relation to ad targeting, which Outlook.com does not carry out, [and] we therefore concluded that the ad was not misleading."

Microsoft has moved to boost the security of its online services, including Outlook, SkyDrive and Xbox. The new features include improved activity monitoring and backup codes.

Users will be able to view a recent usage log containing details such as date/time, IP address and location from where the account was accessed. It will also tell them about successful logins and incorrect password entries. If a user detects any suspicious activity, they can click on a button marked "This wasn't me" to report that an activity wasn't carried out by them and then take steps to tighten up the security of their account.

There are also more controls over security notifications for activities such as resetting passwords and logging in from new devices. While users will still get notifications sent to a primary email address, Microsoft has now added an option to send notifications to extra phone numbers.

Services provided by Microsoft will now also sport recovery codes. These 25-character one-use only codes allow users to log in if a two-step verification fails.

Writing in a blog post, group program manager for Microsoft Accounts - Eric Doerr - said the code was like a spare key to your house. "So make sure you store it in a safe place. You can only request one recovery code at a time; requesting a new code cancels the old one," he added.

Doerr said protecting accounts was a "partnership" between Microsoft and the user.

"The more you help us (with accurate account info, and updated security info), the more we can help you keep your stuff safe," he said. "You know best what's been happening with your account so the more we give you tools to understand what's happening, the better we can work together to protect your account."

He added: "Our goal with this new experience is to give you peace of mind when everything is going well, and give you actionable information if there's questionable activity that concerns you."

The new security features should be available to all users within the next couple of days.

Inside the Enterprise: The last few weeks have not been good for cloud computing and cloud services. In the space of just a few days, there have been outages at Microsoft's Outlook.com, Amazon, and even Google.

During the shut downs, Microsoft admitted that some users were unable to access their online, Outlook.com email accounts. Amazon was offline for about half an hour, as was its Netflix subsidiary. Our sister title PC Pro reports that some users of Amazon Web Services were also affected. But the Google outage was the most notable for its reach.

In fact, the Google shut down, which also affected Google Drive, Gmail and YouTube services caused a 40 per cent drop in internet traffic, even though the downtime itself was brief.

And, whilst it might not matter so much if some people can't buy books online our high streets need some help the impact on online services such as email or productivity applications is far more significant.

Companies are increasingly allowing, or even relying on, the use of services such as Google Drive, or Microsoft's Office365. Microsoft's service itself suffered a 16-hour outage back in March.

If businesses use these services to store documents, or instead of desktop software, even a short outage can cause a real loss of productivity. If companies build business processes around services such as Google Drive, the impact reach even further: end users, for example, might not know that a back-end process relies on a feature such as Google Drive's Forms to operate. They will just know that their query has not been answered.

There will be plenty of IT vendors lining up to say "I told you so" and cautioning that businesses should not rely on consumer services. But this is easier said than done.

Consumer online services spread through a business with alarming rapidity. The Rhododendrons of computing, they can crop up anywhere. Sometimes, the growth is driven by the adoption of consumer devices such as tablets; sometimes staff use consumer services for one off or experimental projects which become permanent, and sometimes they use them to bypass clunky or dated in-house IT infrastructure.

In each case, though, managing and monitoring let alone removing -- these services will be a real challenge, if not impossible. Instead, companies should look at improving their in-house IT to make it more attractive, or else invest in enterprise-grade cloud services, and promote their use.

The outages are, according to Ray R Wang, founder of analysts Constellation Research, "a warning sign that you need to be enterprise class." He wants to see cloud providers offer service level agreements (SLAs) "with teeth" and is also calling for a cloud computing bill of rights.

These would be useful measures. But until then, it is a question of buyer beware, or, you get what you (don't) pay for.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

Outlook.com, the successor to Microsoft's venerable Hotmail.com webmail service, has celebrated one year since the first beta version of the email Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering was released.

In a blog post to mark the anniversary, Dick Craddock, partner group programme manager for Outlook.com at Microsoft, said: "A year ago today, we introduced the preview of Outlook.com. It was the first step in our mission to reimagine personal email, from the datacentre all the way to the customer experience.

"You've been a tremendous help in making Outlook.com a better service for all of us and the world's fastest growing email service, so we want to take a moment to say thank you."

However, since the beta launch on 31 July 2012 and subsequent full rollout over the course of this year, Outlook.com has been dogged by controversy.

During the beta testing period, which ran until February 2013, users flooded Microsoft's forums with complaints.

Some users were upgraded without their permission and found the "Go Back To Hotmail" button was not working, while others upgraded to the preview voluntarily, only to be greeted with a blank screen when they tried to log in.

Still others managed to successfully upgrade and log in, but found all their Hotmail emails had disappeared.

Nevertheless, Microsoft ploughed on with the upgrade and in December 2012 began introducing ads into Hotmail encouraging users to upgrade to Outlook.com.

Eventually, those who had not already taken the plunge were pushed, as Microsoft began to automatically upgrade Hotmail accounts to Outlook.com.

The process was completed in May, but many users were left confused by the new interface leading IT Pro to produce a tutorial, which is regularly updated, addressing many of the common difficulties raised by readers since the Outlook.com upgrade began.

But despite the glitches, including a major hiccup during migration that left users unable to log in to either Hotmail or Outlook.com, Craddock has hailed the rollout of the overhauled service a success.

Outlook.com now has over 400 million users more than the total population of the USA and has over the past 12 months received 600 improvements delivered in 34 feature releases, which were, according to Craddock, based primarily on user feedback.

"It's been a pretty busy and exciting 12 months (and less than 6 months since we came out of preview on February 19). Thank you all for the hundreds of improvements you've helped us make, and for choosing to make Outlook.com part of your daily lives," said Craddock.

"We're excited about where we are today, the world's fastest growing email service and there's still a ton more to come. So keep letting us know what you want to see next and how we can deliver an amazing personal email service for you," he concluded.

We've all got opinions, and the IT Pro community certainly isn't shy about sharing them. From ranting about the proposed internet porn filters and the botched Outlook.com switchover, to educating fellow readers with quotes from Roman Emperors, there's never a dull moment.

Below we take a look at some of the news stories and features that have got readers riled this week.

Web porn wig out

The most talked about story of the week was undoubtedly David Cameron's plans to introduce default porn filters to UK homes, as part of a Government-led online pornography clampdown.

The filters will be automatically switched on to prevent users from accessing adult content online, unless they contact their ISP to opt-out of the scheme.

The initiative has been universally panned by IT Pro's readers, with some claiming the plans could pave the way for widespread censorship of the UK's web space.

"This is pure censorship, the kind of thing that we associate with China," wailed Jimbo.

While, Mobasa69 said there are already plenty of online systems in place to trap those with a penchant for the worst the internet has to offer.

"This policy put forward by Cameron isn't about porn control, it's about total control over the internet, so his elite masters can control the alternative media sites that show them up for what they truly are," they added.

Others said the proposals highlight a lack of understanding within Government of how the internet works, with several readers pointing out that a lot of the material it is trying to curtail access to is rarely shared on the open web.

"Are David Cameron, and his Porn-Tsar Claire 'Mary Whitehouse' Perry, completely out of touch with reality and how technology works," asked IT Pro fan UK Taxpayer.

The same commentator also questioned Apple's (rumoured) decision to launch a new budget version of the iPhone, when the aged iPhone 3GS would fit the bill quite nicely, thank you.

"The iPhone 3GS still suffices as a perfectly satisfactory cheap iPhone," they pointed out.

"Unfortunately, due to IOS 7 and a lack of support for this device, it is now approaching obsolescence."

Microsoft movers and shakers

IT Pro tech editor Khidr Suleman wrote a thought provoking column this week on what has undoubtedly been a turbulent month for software giant Microsoft.

In it he questioned whether the firm's CEO Steve Ballmer has what it takes to help the firm negotiate its way through the post-PC era.

The article was so thought provoking, in fact, it prompted one learned reader (GrahamMills) to start quoting the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, while discussing Microsoft's recent senior management shuffle.

"We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn in this life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganisng," he wrote.

"And a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation." Deep.

Outlook outrage

Aside from that, the site was deluged with another wave of comments from former Microsoft Hotmail users, many of whom still seem to be struggling with the new-look Outlook.com service.

This time users have flagged issues when trying to print emails, as well as myriad of other account access problems, with several readers complaining about being unable to read old emails.

"I have lost two accounts...All my emails lost and they are important. Is there any reprieve so we can get the email address [re]stored from the 'closed' account? It is disgusting [and I]think I may leave Outlook, and Hotmail," fumed Whoppet.

"F*****g Microsoft. Because of their security obsession I can't access my email account. Idiots !!! I'm leaving f*****g Hotmail," added Lukamo, whose rant tested the very limits of the IT Pro swear filter.

BlackBerry tablet talk

BlackBerry chief Thorsten Hein's recent prediction that the tablet form factor will be obsolete in five year's time continues to perplex the IT Pro universe, with one reader pondering exactly what the smartphone maker's CEO expects to replace it?

"The evidence suggests the mass migration away from laptops by many (especially the casual consumer) to tablets coupled with intuitive easy to use OS and a huge software base," said Privet Romashski.

"If tablets are to be replaced one has to ask, with what?" Well, what indeed!

Microsoft has made an Outlook Web App (OWA) available to download for iPhone and iPad devices, as the firm continues to bolster its offerings on the iOS platform.

The app integrates commonly used features such as the Exchange inbox, Calendar and People Hub into the heart of iOS. It follows the launch of the Office Mobile for iOS app in June.

Core features of OWA include the long overdue introduction of push notifications for Exchange email and event reminders. OWA contacts are also automatically synced with the device address book, so when a colleague calls your iPhone their name will pop up.

Microsoft has tried to optimise the apps for different screen sizes. The inbox for iPad app defaults to a two-column view, showing a list of messages and the reading pane. The iPhone uses a one-column view with controls to switch to the folder pane and reading pane.

The app include all the options you'd expect from its web-based and PC counterpart. It's possible to search your inbox, manage automatic replies, set the time zone and configure email signatures. Microsoft has also built in an offline mode into the app, so it's possible to compose, read, delete and flag messages when you're not connected to the internet. Users can also view and edit calendar and contact information.

Voice input has been integrated too, although only for English language users at present. Tapping the button allows users to execute commands such as "Open calendar for tomorrow" or "New email to Augustus".

On the security side, IT admins are able to delete emails and unsync the calendar remotely in the event an employee takes a device when leaving a company or if the handset is lost/stolen.

Microsoft has only provided a native email client on its own Windows Phone mobile operating system up till now. However, with the platform failing to shift a significant number of units compared to Android and iOS devices, the firm seems to have realised it needs to make apps for the more popular platforms.

"Our goal is to help our customers remain productive anytime, anywhere. In order to better support many of our customers who use their iPhones and iPads for work, we are introducing OWA for iPhone and OWA for iPad, which bring a native Outlook Web App experience to iOS devices," noted Steve Chew, senior product marketing manager in the Office blog.

To use the OWA, users will need an iPhone 4S or above. No limitations have been placed on which version of the iPad can be used, but Microsoft specifies that users will need iOS 6 or above to function.

Microsoft has revealed that Outlook will finally be made available on Windows RT tablets when the Windows 8.1 upgrade is launched later this year.

Tami Reller, CFO and CMO of Microsoft's Windows division made the annoucement at Computex and claimed it was the result of yet more customer feedback.

"We're always listening to our customers and one piece of feedback was that people want the power of Outlook on all their Windows PCs and tablets," Reller said in the Office blog.

"We're pleased to have Outlook 2013 RT join the other best-in-class Office 2013 RT applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. And just like those applications, Outlook 2013 RT delivers a great touch experience for people using tablets."

AWindows 8.1preview is expected to be made available at the end of the month, but it is unclear whether any Outlook specific app will be included in this.

Earlier in the day, Reller announced that all "new small screen x86 tablets" such as the Acer Iconia W3, will come with Office Home and Student 2013 pre-loaded. Microsoft has yet to announce which other devices will ship with the full version of Office, but it is likely to be bundled with the wave of 8in Windows 8 tablets.

Despite the iPad being the most popular tablet on the market and lacking a Microsoft Office app, Reller also claimed that when users shop around for a tablet, the inclusion of Office is the most important software factor.

"[A] Morgan Stanley research study found that 61 per cent of people shopping for tablets consider Microsoft Office to be the single most important software feature," she added.

It remains to be seen whether such offers can boost the adoption of Windows 8 tablets.

Microsoft claims it now has 400 million active Outlook.com users, after completing work on upgrading all of its Hotmail customers to the redesigned webmail platform.

The software giant confirmed the completion of its contentious Hotmail to Outlook.com upgrades in a blog post, where it revealed the process had required the migration of 150 petabyes of data.

"When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts...[but] Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts," the blog post stated.

"This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes equalling more than 150 million gigabytes of data and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders and personal preferences were preserved.

"With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about six weeks," it added.

The blog post also acknowledges the upgrade has not been welcomed by everyone, something that has been borne out in many of the comments IT Pro has received from readers since Outlook.com first launched.

Many have complained about the product's new Windows 8-like interface, while others have experienced issues navigating the software, which IT Pro has sought to address here.

"Whenever a widely-used consumer service makes any substantial change, there will always be some folks that don't like it, and that shows up in the feedback," the blog post continues.

"Our belief is that as people start using the new experience, they will come to love it even more than they loved Hotmail."

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that Skype would be imminently available within Outlook.com for a select group of users to preview, while the blog post also hints that other new features and functionality will be added in due course too.

"Thank you for all the feedback along the way and everything you did to help make Outlook.com the best and fastest growing personal email out there," the blog post continued.

"We're excited to keep hearing from you and there's a lot more to come. Welcome to the new Outlook.com and onwards to a billion inboxes!"

Microsoft has started rolling out a preview version of its Skype video calling and messaging service to a select group of Outlook.com users in the UK.

By merging the two products, the software giant said users will be able to add their Skype contacts to their Outlook.com address book and call them back with "just a click" of the mouse.

The functionality is initially being offered to a sample of Outlook.com users in the US and UK for testing purposes, before being rolled out to all users in due course.

The software giant announced the move in a blog post yesterday, which features a step-by-step guide about how to use Skype in Outlook.com.

"With Skype coming to Outlook.com, we're bringing two of the world's largest communications services together in one place," wrote Douglas Pearce, group programme manager of connected services at Microsoft.

"We'll gradually make Skype calling available to all our Outlook.com customers as we update the experience based on your feedback," he added.

Outlook.com users selected to participate in the preview will be notified by a pop-up within their inbox, and can use their existing Skype account to take part.

To make use of the offering's video and audio call functionality, Outlook.com users will need to download a Skype web-plug in first, but this won't be necessary if they simply want to take advantage of its instant messaging capabilities.

Windows Messenger users upgraded to Skype as part of Microsoft's retirement plans for its ageing instant messaging platform can also draw on the merger to call their contacts using a web browser or Skype client, the blog post confirmed.

"As with any new experience we build, we'll be listening to feedback from the community and welcome your comments and ideas," added Pearce.

"When the Skype preview arrives in your Outlook.com inbox, we hope you try it out and let us know what you think."

The appearance of Skype is the latest enhancement Microsoft has made to Outlook.com, since ushering it in as a replacement for Hotmail earlier this year.

The switchover has hardly been plain sailing for the firm, with many users complaining about Outlook.com's new Windows 8-like interface and how difficult the new webmail service is to navigate.

Read our Outlook.com tutorial here.

Users of Microsoft's web-based email services have been hit by another round of technical difficulties, as the firm's Hotmail to Outlook.com upgrades gather pace.

According to the software giant's Service Status page, Hotmail and Outlook users have experienced email access problems since yesterday evening.

The firm's cloud-based storage service SkyDrive also experienced service troubles that made it difficult for users to add, edit and remove files, but these were fixed in the earlier hours of this morning.

"You might not be able to see all your email messages. We're working to restore service right now," said the company in a Hotmail service update.

"Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped...We apologise for the lengthy interruption in service," it concluded.

The downtime reports are appearing on Microsoft's main Service Status page, suggesting this is a wider-scale outage than the one that blighted Hotmail users last month.

At the time of that outage, Hotmail users complained that Microsoft had not kept them updated about when the service would be resolved.

In a statement to IT Pro at the time, Microsoft said, because of the small percentage of users affected by the outage, affected users would have seen a personalised status update when they logged into their accounts.

The migration of Hotmail users to Outlook.com is expected to be completed in the summer, but has been beset with issues so far.

As reported by IT Pro last week, many users claim to have been updated without being notified first and have complained about the system's new Windows 8-like user interface.

Updated: Microsoft has since claimed yesterday's Hotmail and Outlook service problems were caused by an unexpected temperature spike in one of the firm's datacentres.

In a blog post, the company said the temperature rose in a "rapid and substantial" way following a firmware update at a core part of the physical plant.

"This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way," the post stated.

"This [temperature] spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused safeguards to come into place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacentre.

"These safeguards prevented access to mailboxes houses on these servers and also prevented any other pieces of our infrastructure to automatically failover and allow continued access," it added.

This article was originally published on 13 March, but updated to include details of Microsoft's response.

Microsoft's planned upgrade of Hotmail users to its new Outlook.com service hit a snag today, with numerous reports of users being locked out of their accounts.

The problem seems to be affecting existing Hotmail users that have recently upgraded to Outlook, preventing them from accessing their emails when they try to sign in via its desktop and mobile sites.

Based on IT Pro's own investigation, non-Hotmail users that have signed up for Outlook.com accounts do not appear to be affected at this time in the UK.

Hotmail and Outlook.com users have used the social networking site Twitter to express their frustration at the service trouble, which is thought to have been going on for several hours.

One user, @WillGorgeousy, wrote: "@Microsoft Looks like the migration to Outlook isn't working. Hotmail down on the web. Keep us posted on any updates."

Meanwhile, Hotmail user ‏@LouboutinJools claimed: "Absolutely nothing but grief with my Hotmail account since I [moved] to Outlook. Put it off for as long as you can."

IT Pro approached Microsoft for clarification about the number and general location of the affected users, but was still awaiting a response as this article went to press.

In the meantime, the Microsoft Support account on Twitter confirmed that "Hotmail/Outlook services are down" and that it is working to fix the issue.

The account also advises users to check its service status page, which at the time of publication reported no problems affecting Hotmail or Outlook.com.

News of the outage comes less than a week after Microsoft announced that it was stepping up its efforts to get Hotmail users to migrate to Outlook.com, as it prepares to retire its aging email brand.

This isn't the first time Hotmail users have run into problems with the move to Outlook, as many claimed to have been switched to Outlook.com without permission back in August 2012, and reported problems accessing emails.

Updated: Since IT Pro broke news of the Hotmail/Outlook outage yesterday, Microsoft have been in touch with a brief statement. In it, the company said the problem has now been fixed.

"Hotmail and Outlook.com experienced a short-term incident that caused a small percentage of customers not to be able to access their email. We worked quickly to resolve the issue, and service is now restored to normal; we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers," a company spokesperson wrote.

Whether or not yesterday's problems will affect Microsoft's reported momentum, when it comes to getting users to ditch Hotmail in favour of Outlook.com is anyone's guess, as the company recently claimed its new email client already has 60 million active users.

Hotmail users will officially start being upgraded to Microsoft's Outlook.com email service, which has been officially launched today.

The firm claims that 60 million users have signed up to Outlook.com since it was made available for preview six months ago.

David Law, director of Outlook.com product management said that Microsoft has taken feedback on board to improve the service before launching it worldwide and moving users off of Hotmail.

"Through the preview, we've heard and learned a great deal about your favourite features and how well Outlook.com is delivering on our vision for modern email," he said in the Official Microsoft blog.

"For example, millions of people are connecting Outlook.com to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to keep up-to-date on their friends' contact info, updates, photos, and Tweets. And a number of people have expressed appreciation that Outlook.com replaces advertising with the latest updates from Facebook or Twitter when they're reading email from one of their contacts."

Law claimed on average users see 60 per cent fewer ads when using Outlook.com. Microsoft plans to kick-off a major marketing campaign to promote the service and claims that it is ready to scale to a billion users.

However, not everything has gone smoothly with the planned migration. When the Outlook.com service was originally debuted in August 2012, Hotmail users vented their frustration as they were automatically upgraded without being consulted.

There appeared no way to switch back to the Hotmail service and some users were left without access to email.

Microsoft tried to remedy the situation by providing a step-by-step guide to upgrading, but it remained adament that the Hotmail brand would be phased out.

It remains to be seen if the upgrade goes smoothly. This is the second mass migration which Microsoft is working on con-currently.

The firm is also retiring its long-serving Windows Live Messenger service on 8 April and moving everyone over to the Skype platform, which it purchased in 2010 for $8.5bn.

Microsoft has assured Hotmail users that it will not force them off the email platform just yet, despite announcing plans to ramp up its Outlook.com advertising efforts in the coming weeks.

The software giant announced plans to rebrand Hotmail as Outlook.com at the end of July, and urged users to register and try out its new web-based email service.

The important thing for us is to get the word out there as quickly as we can.

In the early days of the new product's release, IT Pro was inundated with reports from disgruntled Hotmail users who struggled with the transition , but since then the platform has been adopted by more than 25 million users.

In an interview with The Next Web, David Law, director of product management at Microsoft's Outlook.com arm, said the company will start advertising the service to Hotmail users via inbox ads and emails this week.

"We want to make sure people know they don't have to change their email address, or their password," he explained. "Also, they won't lose any emails or calendar entries.nothing changes, except they get the new UI."

At the moment, there is no set switch-off date for Hotmail, he added, but the company is hopeful that all users will eventually make the jump to Outlook.com.

"Our goal is to get everyone over from Hotmail to Outlook. We're going to push this quite a bit, as an optional upgrade," said Law.

"At some point, we will end up moving folks over. It won't be months, but we haven't set a date for it yet...The important thing for us is to get the word out there as quickly as we can," he added.

A number of Hotmail users were locked out of their email accounts by a login glitch earlier today.

The problem had been reported by a slew of Hotmail users on social networking site Twitter, who after inputting their username and password claimed to have been either redirected to the login screen again or faced with a blank, white screen.

"Is Hotmail down? I cant access my email on my Android app and the webpage is not available," said @XboxSONJ2012

"Hotmail is down again, just goes to show how out-dated they are and how poor there service is. Switching everything over to Gmail later," added @AshleyLLoyd5.

Microsoft's live status screen confirmed that Hotmail, Messenger and the firm's cloud storage service SkyDrive were experiencing unspecified technical difficulties earlier.

Meanwhile, according to a status report on website uptime monitor Downrightnow.com, Hotmail had been suffering problems since around 11am today.

At the time of writing, the problems appeared to have been fixed.

In a statement to IT Pro, Microsoft said: "Some Microsoft services experienced a short-term issue that caused a small number of customers not to be able to access their accounts.

"We worked quickly to resolve the issue, and service is now restored to normal. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers."

Microsoft has issued some further guidance to help ease Hotmail users through the transition to Outlook.com, after many admitted struggling with the switchover.

The firm announced Outlook.com as the successor to its consumer webmail service Hotmail last week, as it fights to win back users from Google's Gmail platform.

Since then, Microsoft has been encouraging Hotmail users to try a preview version of Outlook.com, with seemingly mixed results.

As reported by IT Pro on Friday, Hotmail users have been flooding the software giant's web forums with reports of problems they have encountered since switching to Outlook.com.

In the first few days alone, we've seen several million people upgrade to Outlook.com.

For instance, some users claim their accounts have been upgraded to Outlook.com without their permission, while others are struggling to access the new site at all.

Many have also reported losing access to their old Hotmail emails post-upgrade.

IT Pro has also been inundated with complaints from disgruntled Outlook.com users, with several readers calling on Microsoft to ditch the venture and keep Hotmail.

"Having used proper, professional Outlook I thought to myself, "what could go wrong?' Well, almost everything," claimed one reader, calling themselves Blue5creen0fDeath.

"[It] looks clunky, hides away the option to change back to Hotmail, keeps opening up new windows [and] causes confusion."

When IT Pro approached Microsoft for a response, the firm's press team directed us to a blog post, which contains a step-by-step guide to moving from Hotmail to Outlook.com.

The blog post was published on Friday afternoon and claims "several million" people have upgraded to Outlook.com since it was first unveiled.

In it, users are urged to think very carefully about adopting an Outlook.com address, with the software giant stating that it is a move that is difficult to undo.

End users are also warned that switching to an Outlook.com address means they will have to login with their new email address and password to use other Microsoft services, including Xbox and Windows Phone.

"If you use a Windows Phone, you will need to reset your Windows Phone to factory settings, and then set it back up with the new account name," the blog states.

"You will lose all [your] personal data when you do this, so make sure you have [it]backed up."

The blog post does not provide any guidance to users that may have encountered post-switch problems, much to the chagrin of some of the site's visitors, who have left feedback in the comments section.

However, Microsoft is encouraging users to give them direct feedback about the problems they may be having.

"We've built Outlook.com to be modern email for the next billion inboxes. We hope you like it, and we want to hear from you," the blog post concludes.

"Our product team uses your feedback to make the product even better. So, tell us what you think, and thanks for using Outlook.com."

Hotmail users have been left fuming at Microsoft after being automatically upgraded to an Outlook.com email address without asking.

There have been over 55 pages worth of complaints in the Microsoft Answers forum and IT Pro readers have also been in touch to confirm they are having problems.

There are four major issues being reported:

1) Some users have been upgraded without their permission. The "Go Back to Hotmail" option does not seem to work for everyone.

Microsoft has confirmed once an email is switched to Outlook, it cannot be changed back.

"Unfortunately there is no way to rename to an existing account. This is something we're investigating for future improvements," Microsoft said in the forum.

2) Not everyone has been able to upgrade to Outlook.com with some users being greeted with a blank screen and others with error messages.

3) Most worryingly, some users have been unable to see their old emails from their Hotmail account after upgrading.

4) Problems are also being reported with the Hotmail Human Interactive Proof (HIP) validation process. Errors are appearing saying the characters don't match with the ones in the 'picture'. Microsoft has recognised this problem in the forum and is working to fix this issue.

IT Pro readers have been complaining that there is no way to return to their old email.

"I tried backing out, but have found my old Hotmail account - which I have had for over twenty years - has been de-activated so that I can't send or receive email from it in Windows Live," noted Obray.

"Even after I clicked on Go Back to Hotmail, it has still left my Hotmail account email in a subfolder to the inbox. This is really disappointing. I think MS needed to think this out a bit more before sending people down this path."

Members of the IT Pro team have had similar experiences. Our Editor and Technical Editor had their Hotmail and Live accounts upgraded automatically. However, old emails have been transferred over to the new inbox and any messages sent to the old addresses do appear, which isn't the case for everyone.

Meanwhile, the News Editor's attempts to revert back to Hotmail resulted in her machine crashing. The Editor on our sister title Cloud Pro managed to log into Hotmail and was given the choice of whether or not to upgrade.

It appears that if you are logged into any of your Microsoft email accounts and go to the Outlook.com website, your ID will automatically be converted.

The safest way to keep your existing account appears to be to log out of all accounts, then proceed to Outlook.com to sign up as a new user.

Although, readers concerned about any of the issues raised above, might want to consider holding off on upgrading for now.

Microsoft has been informed of these issues, but is yet to respond.

Microsoft has revamped its webmail tool ahead of the launch of Windows 8. The Outlook.com preview comes with a number of notable changes.

What are the main changes?

The most noticeable change is the interface, which has been stripped back significantly. The standard menu options are found on the left and provide access to key folders such as Inbox, Drafts, Sent and Deleted.

A new addition is the "Quick Views" menu, which automatically collates emails which have document attachments, photos and shipping updates. This is a useful feature and will help to narrow down search menus.

Once you have clicked on an email context sensitive options appear along the top of the page allowing you to perform actions including Reply, Delete and Move.

Are Metro Tiles included?

Microsoft has added in Metro tiles, which will be found in Windows 8. Clicking on the arrow next to the Outlook.com logo in the top left corner will bring up tiles which provide access to Mail, People, Calendar and SkyDrive.

Can you preview documents within Outlook?

Yes. Users will be able to preview documents thanks to the integration of Office Web Apps. This will make it possible to view and edit Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote documents directly from your inbox.

How does the social networking interaction work?

It is possible to connect to the major social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. This allows you to import all your contacts and start conversations directly from within the Outlook pane.

It is also possible to tweet users or write on a Facebook wall directly from Outlook. Simply go to the People menu, click on a contact to interact.

What about Skype?

Skype integration is not yet available, but Microsoft plans to launch a plugin soon. The plan is to allow users to carry out video calling from within Outlook, even if they don't have the program installed on their desktop.

Are there any business benefits?

The webmail service will provide familiarity to business users who use the desktop Outlook client. For example it is also possible to set reading panes so you can preview emails.

The ability to sync contacts across social networking sites is valuable and Outlook's "Quick View" feature which pulls in emails will be invaluable for those who receive hundreds of emails per day.

Skype integration will be useful for those who work remotely or travel and need to contact family, friends or colleagues.

Should you upgrade?

In a word yes. The simple interface looks great and the integration of social networking means you can sync all your contacts easily.

Outlook.com is available to try now. Having been logged into our Windows Live account, we found simply typing Outlook.com into our address bar took us directly to the new client.

Hotmail users can click "Upgrade" in the options menu. Users should still be able to send/receive email from @hotmail.com or @msn.com or @live.com addresses.

Alternatively, it is also possible to set up a dedicated @outlook.com address.

UPDATE 03/08/12, 4.30pm: Some users have experienced issues with automatic upgrading or confusion around the changes as reported by IT Pro here. Microsoft has yet to respond to the matters raised in the story/related user forums.

Microsoft made a number of changes to the next version of Outlook, with early indications suggesting the email client has been optimised for use on tablets.

The changes to Outlook 15 will bring it more in line with its Windows Phone counterpart, according to Microsoft insider, Paul Thurrott.

"It's pretty clear that Outlook is being brought in line with Microsoft's other email and calendar clients, and with the mobile versions in Windows Phone in particular. The Contacts module has been renamed to the more consistent People, for example, and Outlook now connects natively to new calendar types," he noted on the Supersite for Windows blog.

A key addition is the a feature known as "Peeks", which is designed to lets users see more information from other apps in Outlook without having to leave the current page.

The Outlook component links (Mail, Calendar, People, Tasks) have been moved from the sidebar to the bottom of the page. When you mouse over a link, a pop-up window with a "peek" of the link will appear. The peek displays important information about that link. For example, the "calendar" peek would pop-up with a mini-calendar and an update on events for that day.

When emailing a particular contact, a "people" link will appear at the bottom of the window. This will allow a preview of that person's Facebook page as well as their Twitter or LinkedIn accounts.

Email replies are also set to be more touch screen friendly. When responding to an email in a previous version of Outlook, a new pop-up window would appear. In Outlook 15, replies are inline in the area normally reserved for the reading pane.

Both the inline replies and the "peeks" features are likely to benefit mobile users as changing between windows on a touch screen or tablet can be frustrating.

Other changes include the absence of the Outlook Connector. Hotmail accounts previously required this separate add-on while social networking integration required another add-on called the Social Connector. These features are now built into Outlook 15 and Hotmail and social networking accounts can be synched with Outlook via the accounts page located in the sidebar.

Another convenient addition to Outlook 15 is the weather bar that appears in the calendar view.

Overall the system still runs the same way, with users still have to sign into an email account and enter a password twice just like the older versions.

"It's an early hint that, for all the surface changes, not much has really changed," Thurrott added.

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

Email data leakage is a constant worry for businesses but TITUS Aware (TA) takes a refreshingly new approach to this problem. Instead of rigidly enforcing DLP (data leakage prevention) policies it engages Microsoft Outlook users in the process of reviewing their emails and rectifying those that violate security policies.

We found TA simple enough to deploy as you install a small MSI package on each client system which can be done manually or via an AD Group Policy. TA supports all versions of Outlook from 2003 upwards. For testing in the lab we used Windows 7 systems running Outlook 2007.

The only other requirement on each client is a couple of registry modifications to point it at the location of the TA policy files. We manually edited our clients' registries, but this can also be done via Group Policies for larger user bases.

An Administration Tool is provided to create and manage all policies. Each policy uses a proprietary file which contains settings that determine how the TA client component should behave and links to sets of XML content validation files.

The Administration Tool is where all policies are defined and you can apply an extensive range of content checks to users' emails.

All the control and XML files can be stored in a central location on the network. They are then tied to each client by their respective registry entries. This allows a variety of policies to be assigned to different groups and XML files can be shared where a base set of content validation checks is applied to multiple groups.

The XML files store a specific set of content validation criteria which makes TA very versatile. You can use them to store lists of restricted external mail domains and countries, permitted mail domains, attachment controls and mail content checks.

TA offers a good range of controls over mail attachments as it can apply size restrictions and only allow certain file types to be sent. More importantly, it can scan the message subject and body plus the contents of attachments looking for keywords and phrases.

The XML files are also used to maintain lists of unacceptable words or phrases and patterns such as social security or credit card numbers. If required, you can add advisory headers and footers to outbound messages along with metadata that may be used by security appliances to check that TA message processing has occurred.

The Administration Tool is simple to use and groups all policy components under a set of nested folders. The controls in the Global Options tab let you enable or disable TA and modify general settings such as loading a splash screen for Outlook users. A useful option is support for Outlook's calendar and tasks, so appointments and job assignments can also be included in DLP policies.

The Global Options are used to activate features for the TA Outlook agent and control how it behaves.

From the user's perspective TA presents a shallow learning curve. When we next loaded Outlook on our clients we found a new set of icons in the Ribbon with the first providing quick access to TA's content checker.

Users can classify messages from the Outlook Ribbon and if they infringe a policy plenty of remediation assistance is provided.

Selecting this applies the active policy and the user will be advised if the message fails. A pop-up window warns the user of a policy failure and shows the reasons for this. They can then opt to correct the message and TA provides a wizard showing them what needs to be done. Parts of the message can be automatically redacted so they can't be read. If the user chooses to send the message without verifying it first, it will still be subject to the same policy checks.

TA's justification feature can be used to give some users more leeway with their message content. If this is enabled in the policy settings, the user may ignore validation failures and sent the message anyway. If they do, TA loads a dialogue box asking them to provide a reason which will be logged.

TA could do with a central reporting tool to make it easier to audit user activity.

TA's one-click message classification gets the user even more involved in email security as they can classify a message based on who or where it's being sent to. If they class it as internal a base sets of content checks can be made, but if classed as external then a more rigorous set of rules can be applied. If one-click classification has been enabled, the Outlook Ribbon presents users with a choice of message categories. They can select one prior to sending their message and the category will be added to the message body and subject line.

If they receive a message that has a TA category already applied, say from another employee, you can allow them to change the category before forwarding it on. However, you can link justification with this process so TA will ask for a reason before permitting the action.

Wizards help resolve message issues and the TA's redaction feature can blot out unacceptable words.

TA offers a number of advantages over other, more expensive gateway DLP products. It enforces security policies at the desktop in real time so any messages that don't comply can't be sent. This also means there are no overheads on the company mail server. It'll also work with virtually any mail server including Microsoft Exchange and doesn't need any dedicated management platforms.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

Businesses that have standardised on Microsoft Outlook in the workplace will find TITUS Aware a simple and cost effective method of preventing data leaks. By actively involving users and helping them resolve policy breaches it can reduce support overheads and will also educate them about their responsibilities in protecting confidential information.

Hard disk: 5MB free OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7; supports Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010

Microsoft's desire to pitch Windows Phone 7 as a dependable mobile platform for business was given due attention at launch as the only smartphone operating system with Office and SharePoint support. Yet to maintain that strong footing it needs to adequately and quickly address any issues that exist as hurdles to productivity. To this end, there have been some welcome changes with NoDo (officially version 7.0.7390.0), but once you have downloaded and updated your handset via Zune Desktop, you will also realise that not every obvious issue has been resolved.

"What is present is the copy and paste function we've been patiently waiting for."

What is present is the copy and paste function we've been patiently waiting for. The function works well in the most part, and is on a par with Apple's iOS in terms of simplicity. One tap highlights a word, and non-blinking cursors appear at each end of it, which can then be dragged to a desired point in the text. Above the selected text a document-on-document icon appears. Tap this to copy, and this icon then appears in a bar just above the pop-up keyboard, to indicate available copied text for pasting.

Unfortunately, apps need to be updated to support copy and paste. The prime examples of this are the official Twitter and Facebook applications, where copying and pasting remains impossible. This is frustrating, particularly if you want to repost a tweet or comment, or copy an interesting bit of information or piece of feedback from those applications to a Word document or email.

We look at how Windows Phone 7's copy and paste functionality compares to Android and the iPhone.

This means that if your company uses a 2003 Exchange server as ours does and your username is, for example, "John Smith" with the space the format ours follow you couldn't previously synchronise your Outlook account, because you can't input a space into the Username' field of settings. With NoDo you still aren't able to, and this is a glaring omission from the update, particularly when care has been taken to properly display usernames that include square or curved brackets.

Fortunately, although that is really a rather big issue, it is the main bit of bad news for NoDo (apart from the amount of time it took to appear ).

On the plus side Microsoft has removed the limitation on remembered Wi-Fi profiles, and improved the boot time for phones that have many profiles remembered. It has also enabled the display of MAC addresses for those who need to access that information. Crucially, our test HTC HD7 handset was noticeably quicker in booting, loading up and switching between apps, and in general use. This makes the whole WP7 experience smoother, and can only help to put the platform on a par with both iOS and Android, although there is still some way to go.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

NoDo is a welcome, if tardy update providing a much needed copy and paste function and other speed and productivity improvements. However, for the time it took, we expected not only more features and updates, but slicker implementations of what we were given. It's a free update, so there's no reason not to get it, but we were hoping for so much more.

Windows Phone 7 handset required

Google has launched enhanced migration tools for companies looking to migrate over from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

The first is Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange, which comes with some performance improvements and supports a number of additional email clients, including Novell GroupWise, Cyrus, Dovecot and Courier.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook now adds support for the 2010 version of the Redmond firm's software and for 64-bit editions of the client.

New versions of the search giant's Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and Calendar Connectors for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes have also been launched.

"This year alone, customers have migrated over 3.5 billion emails to Google Apps, along with over 100 million calendar events and 25 million contacts," said Aditya Kulkarni, Google product manager, in a blog.

"But we're still working to make it even easier."

To the cloud

This week, IT PRO caught up with David McLeman, director of Ancoris a company that helps firms migrate over to Google's cloud-based operations.

He explained how companies had become increasingly interested in running their businesses from the cloud, with one of the main drivers being a desire for greater collaboration.

Addressing Microsoft's cloud computing efforts, McLeman said the Redmond giant had "the same challenge other on-premise firms have as their software is designed for on-premise [operation]."

"10 years ago you couldn't rely on the internet but now you are so seldom without internet access," he said.

"The argument that you have to have local data is becoming a dying issue."

Talking about security concerns surrounding the multi-tenancy model of cloud computing, something recently highlighted by Oracle head Larry Ellison, McLeman noted how firms had handed over critical parts of their operations to other companies in the past.

"We have trusted third parties for years, banks for example," McLeman said.

"The firewall is dead because we have pumped too many holes in it and many companies can't afford to fill the gaps."

Ancoris helped close to 30 companies migrate over to a Google-based architecture in the past 15 months, but McLeman said he expected this to double in the next year, highlighting the dramatic move to the cloud.

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

It's arguable that Entourage, the personal information management and email application introduced with Office 2001 for Mac, was superior to Outlook, it's Windows counterpart. Not only did Entourage look better than Outlook, but it had features like a Projects section that Outlook lacked.

With Office 2011, Microsoft has taken the opportunity to rethink Entourage, and has effectively binned it for a new, ground-up rewrite which it has named Outlook. Why? Because unlike Entourage, Outlook focuses much more heavily on connectivity with Exchange servers. It is still a more-than capable POP and IMAP client, but Exchange users will get the most out of the new application.

That rewrite is more than just cosmetic. Microsoft has taken the opportunity to use Cocoa, rather than Carbon, as the key API. This is sensible, given Apple's general indication that Cocoa is the future of Mac programming, and it also allows Microsoft to take advantage of new Mac OS X technologies more easily in the future.

Outlook doesn't completely abandon everything from Entourage. For example, the Mailing List Manager and Rules system are essentially unchanged. This is good, as both are excellent features. But almost everything else has changed, and some features notably the Projects feature in Entourage, which let you group together related contacts, tasks, meetings and mail messages, is gone.

The overall look and feel of Outlook is more consistent with the Windows version, and adopts the context-sensitive Ribbon that's now common across both Mac and Windows versions of Office. The Ribbon is the Marmite of the software world you either love it or hate it. Personally, we find it a relief from the old style of toolbar-mania. Even if you disagree at first, it's worth giving it a chance.

One thing that's likely to delight anyone who supports Macs is that Outlook doesn't store everything in a single database file. The monolithic database used by Entourage could grow into a multi-gigabyte file prone to corruption. Outlook uses a small database to index items, while storing the items themselves in small, separate support files. Not only does this mean there's no longer a single point of failure, but it makes Outlook's files much faster to back up using Time Machine than was the case with Entourage. However, unlike Apple's Mail program, Outlook doesn't have its own Time Machine interface for viewing and restoring backed up emails. You have to instead use the Finder's Time Machine interface to browse Outlook's support files which are stored in an obscurely named, nested set of folders isn't very easy to navigate.

Outlook's email capabilities are very good. IMAP and POP worked perfectly, and if you're using common email providers like Gmail or MobileMe Outlook does a good job of automatically configuring itself using just your email address. Annoyingly, though, some of the application's defaults can be set on a per-account basis, but not others. For example, you can only set the default format of your mail HTML, plain text, etc for all accounts. Composition in HTML mail is still limited, although Microsoft has at long last fixed the issues with forwarding HTML emails which had dogged Entourage since its first version back in 2000.

Exchange support is probably the biggest area of improvement over Entourage. Unfortunately you'll need Exchange 2007 or later. Exchange 2003 isn't supported, so Outlook 2011 won't work with it. This will be a problem for companies that have stuck with Exchange 2003 they'll have to continue using Entourage. Oddly, Apple's own Mail and iCal apps don't work with Exchange 2003 either, but iOS devices do.

This is a shame since Exchange-related tasks that never seemed to work particularly well, if at all, using Entourage just works with Outlook. Scheduling meetings, which was always a hit-or-miss affair using Entourage, works flawlessly with Outlook. Setup and auto-discovery also work properly, and the whole process of using Exchange feels more reliable and robust.

Contact management is similar to Entourage, including, unfortunately, one of the bugbears that annoyed us previously. Sadly, as with Entourage if you're using LDAP directory services, you can search for contacts but not browse for them. Having said that, searches are quick they feel faster than with Entourage which partially makes up for this odd interface design.

There is, however, no support for CardDAV, but you can at least synchronise your Apple Address Book contacts with Outlook. This process was a little slow when we tested with just under 1,000 contacts, but after the first sync it was reliable and fast enough.

Calendar support with Exchange worked flawlessly, but again Outlook is lacking in support for CalDAV. This means importing calendars from other applications is either painful or impossible, and there's also no support for using alternative calendaring systems like Google Calendar. Hopefully this will be something that Microsoft will address going forward.

One other minor calendaring change is support for two kinds of events: meetings and appointments. The only difference that I could see is that you can't invite people to appointments or rather, you can, but if you do it changes to a meeting! This artificial distinction is very puzzling.

Sadly, there's also no option to sync between Outlook and iCal at present since Microsoft has implemented support for Mac OS X's calendar Sync Services, Hopefully this will be addressed in a future version, but it's less important than it used to be, as most phones can sync directly to an Exchange server and don't need to sync with iCal .

Verdict

Judging Outlook is tricky. If Entourage had never existed, it would be an amazing product. However, compared to Entourage it leaves out a few key features while gaining better Exchange support. Overall, if you’re an Exchange user, and your company uses a compatible Exchange server, it’s worth upgrading immediately. If you don’t use Exchange, though, you may want to hang on to your copy of Entourage a little while longer.

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

Windows Phone 7 is about to hit retail and there has been a lot of talk about its potential as a consumer-focussed operating system with relatively little mention of its viability for business users. The whole look and feel of Windows Phone 7 is very different both from earlier Microsoft smartphone operating systems and from any other smartphone operating system.

There will be plenty of business users wondering how well Windows Phone 7 will work for them. Here, we take an overview of Microsoft's new operating system from a business point of view, pending a more detailed examination once we've got our hands on some hardware and given it a thorough testing.

We'll start by making one important point about Windows Phone 7. It is not backwards compatible with earlier versions. If your company currently use phones that run Window Mobile 6.5 or earlier, and you have a number of third party applications that you use regularly, upgrading to Windows Phone 7 models will prove tricky.

You may have to get your own developers to do some work, or it might mean finding suitable, replacement third party applications in the new Windows Phone Marketplace. At the launch event Microsoft was tight-lipped about how many apps will be in the store when handsets go on sale. If your own favourites have not been updated for the new operating system, you will have to do without them or postpone upgrading.

There are three important areas for any enterprise or business smartphone user email, calendars and productivity. Let's look at each of these in turn to see how Windows Phone 7 stacks up.

The home screen on Windows Phone 7 phones have tiles'. These are basically icons which are automatically updated with live information, reminiscent of the Today screen familiar to users of Windows Mobile 5 and 6. Some of these tiles take you to hubs' - groupings of information that can be drawn from different applications. There are six hubs Marketplace, Games, Music and Video, Pictures, Office, and People.

The Office hub is the one you'll use for many productivity functions. Within it you can get to the all important document editing and creation features. It is easy to create new OneNote, Word and Excel documents and see others that have already been created. Cutting, copying and pasting of text and images is currently not possible, although Microsoft has announced a software update, due in the New Year, that will add these essential features.

When it comes to PowerPoint, you can do some basic editing and the viewing experience includes support for animations in presentations. Presentations looked pretty slick on the demo we saw, though it remains to be seen how well Windows Phone 7 will cope with real world presentations. We don't think you can actually give presentations from a phone we've not seen any evidence of Windows Phone 7 devices with video-out ports for connecting an external screen or projector.

Most importantly for enterprise users, Windows Phone 7 integrates with SharePoint 2010 so you can access shared office files and keep them synchronised. For those who don't have access to SharePoint 2010, there's Windows Live SkyDrive which is Microsoft's consumer online storage service. Free space is limited to 25GB and can be used for a range of different files across a handset not just for work-related documents but for photos as well, for example.

An added advantage of having a Windows Live account is that you can perform some remote security functions that the small businessperson might find handy. You can, for example, locate your handset useful if you've left it somewhere by setting it to ring even if it is currently set on silent or vibrate. These things might help you recover a lost handset. If all else fails, you can remotely lock or wipe the handset, restoring it to its factory settings and thereby protect all your valuable data from prying eyes.

Email has its own tile on the main screen. Email support runs to both personal email accounts and Microsoft Exchange. There are different screens for all, unread, flagged and urgent messages, and you can easily delete individual messages from any list. Lists of messages show the sender's name in large text, then a preview snippet of the message content, with a colour change indicating if you've read a message or not.

Another central activity for enterprise smartphone users is calendar management, and here Microsoft has taken something of a leap forwards. You can have a calendar tile' on the main screen of the handset and this is a double width tile so that it has the space to show some information about upcoming commitments.

Ata-glance calendar information is not particularly novel, but Microsoft takes the idea a step further in that the lock screen on a handset shows your next calendar appointment, so that you don't have to go through the bother of fully unlocking your phone and opening an app to check where and when your next time commitment is.

A real innovation is that a Windows Phone 7 device can display data from two calendars at once showing the pair vertically side by side. This means you can match up a work and home calendar, or maybe a calendar for yourself and your partner in order to avoid any scheduling conflicts.

Verdict

From what we've seen of Windows Phone 7 so far, the new smartphone operating system looks like a mixed blessing for business users. The interface has been significantly improved over previous Microsoft smartphone operating systems, but users dependent on third party apps, as well as copy and paste, may want to postpone upgrading for now.

Next year, Microsoft will release a new version of its Office suite, which will imaginatively be called Office 2010. However, you don't have to wait that long the beta is available to download now.

Another version of Office? Really, another one?

You might have just got used to Office 2007 but hold onto your hats as here comes another one. It's not the final release though, which will actually will be out in 2010 as the name suggest, but it's beta, so at least you can try it for free now.

Where can I get the beta and how long can I use it for?

You can download the beta from here and you can use it until 31 October 2010 when it is set to expire.

What versions will be available?

There are three versions Office 2010 and each one will be available as a separate beta. Office Home and Business will include, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, Office Professional will add Publisher, and Professional Plus will further add InfoPath, Communicator, and SharePoint Workspace.

So what's new in Office 2010?

Every application has had some kind of work done but some have changed more than others. Highlights include Outlook now being able to handle more than one Exchange account and getting threaded messaging support. OneNote is now available in all SKUs and had enhanced sharing features for SharePoint users. Video now works properly in PowerPoint. Word and PowerPoint also now get a co-authoring mode, and image tools are enhanced so you don't need to leave word to work on pictures.

There's also an enhanced Backstage' the place across all apps where you click to do basic tasks such as printing but also to connect to web services and edit metadata.

Oh, and it looks prettier too. Visual tweakery includes an improved and updated ribbon interface, with enhanced colours to make things clearer to see.

For the full low-down, check out our review of the betahere.

OK, that's all fine but I thought all apps were online now?

While some organisations may have moved to cloud computing-style services such as Google Docs, Microsoft is only going to go that way fully when it's good and ready. In the meantime, it's got another client side application suite to sell you, and yes, that's Office 2010, also known as the Cash Cow.

However, it isn't ignoring the cloud - part and parcel of the new release are the new Web Apps, which are online versions of your favourite Office Apps. Well, Word, Excel and PowerPoint anyway. The main idea is that you'll be able to work on and offline more easily, share documents and collaborate with colleagues. The Web Apps will work in IE and Firefox, but not Chrome or Safari.

Will I have to upgrade my hardware?

Probably not. This is the first office suite to be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but all processors sold in the last few years are 64-bit compliant so that shouldn't be a problem. 500MHz and 256MB of RAM are listed at the minimum requirements, but we'd recommend at least a 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM to get the best out of it.

Can't I just stick with Wordpad?

Actually no. All new PCs will ship with a free, though ad-supported and heavily cut-down version of Office 2010, called Microsoft Office Starter 2010. It will look like Office 2010 with a Ribbon interface, but you'll be able to upgrade directly from it to full Office, in case you feel that Microsoft isn't rich enough.

A new edition of Outlook add-on Xobni is bringing in some enterprise-friendly features.

Xobni is a free add-on that brings better organisation and search to Microsoft Outlook's calendar and email as well as integrating social networking sites. It claims it saves the average user as much as half an hour a week.

The new service, Xobni Enterprise, can be managed and deployed by IT departments alongside Outlook. It includes extensions for Salesforce, SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics, and has a framework to create specialised extensions for intranets and other internal company data.

Xobni Enterprise includes a web-based portal to manage profiles and extensions, and a software development kit (SDK) so companies can develop their own. It's already integrated with SharePoint and Salesforce, and can use LDAP and Active Directory services, too. Xobni will be also offering enterprise-grade support.

"Xobni is used by employees in 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies," said chief executive Jeff Bonforte in a statement. "With Xobni Enterprise, companies of all sizes can dramatically increase the productivity of their workforces."

Alongside the Enterprise offering, Xobni announced it was teaming up with consulting companies and managed service providers to make the service available to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) through hosted email and SharePoint systems.

Xobni Enterprise is available now, with pricing starting from $30 per user, with volume discounts available.

Microsoft is to open up the data system for its Outlook email system, allowing third-party developers to create applications or services.

"Data portability has become an increasing need for our customers and partners as more information is stored and shared in digital formats," wrote interoperability group manager Paul Lorimer in a blog post.

"One scenario that has come up recently is how to further improve platform-independent access to email, calendar, contacts, and other data generated by Microsoft Outlook," he added.

To help this along, Microsoft has promised to release the technical specifications about how the .pst data is stored and accessed, as well as how the file structures work.

At the moment, .pst files can be used with Messaging API or Outlook Object Model, but Outlook must be installed on the computer.

By sharing documentation for the .pst Outlook data format, Microsoft is allowing developers to work with the data however they'd like, to use the data on mobile devices or other operating systems not running Microsoft products.

"This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice," said Lorimer.

Microsoft didn't specify when exactly this would happen, but said it was currently working on it.

Microsoft's interoperability move follows a similar one by Google, which unveiled the Data Liberation Front to help keep data free for users.

Microsoft today announced that the next version of its Office for Mac product will ship with Outlook rather than Entourage.

The new software, due out next year, will do away with the current email app in favour of the tool Windows users are familiar with.

Outlook for Mac will include a number of innovative features, such as improved integration with the operating system, a new super speedy file-based database and information rights management tools, according to Microsoft's Mac business unit (MacBU).

"It is an exciting time for the MacBU with updates to our current products and the first public announcement about the next version of Office for Mac. For several years we have focused on providing the best Microsoft Exchange client for the Mac, and the Web Services Edition delivers that today for Entourage users," Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the MacBU at Microsoft, said in a statement.

"Outlook for Mac will bring features our customers have long requested such as Rights Management that make working across platforms even easier. I think people will see that this move to Outlook for Mac is more than just a name change."

Microsoft also used the opportunity to unveil an addition to its existing Office for Mac product lineup in the form of a dedicated business edition. This will be available from next month.

This new version will include the usual Office suspects in addition to new data organisation and productivity aids. Users will be able to get their hands on this new product from 16 September at 439.99 and 269.99 for new customers and eligible upgrade customers respectively.

Google has fixed a bug in its Outlook linking tool, Apps Sync.

Released last month, the plug-in for Microsoft Outlook syncs Outlook with Apps. Google is likely hoping the tool will encourage businesses to use its own enterprise software.

However, initial bugs within Google Apps Sync, according to a Microsoft blog post, disabled the ability of Outlook to search the Outlook data. Additionally, because Outlook search relies on the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions were broken, leading to problems for Apps.

This week, Google announced that is has been working closely with Microsoft to remedy these problems.

"The Windows Desktop Search feature now works, so you can choose between the native Outlook search, which has been available since launch, and Windows Desktop Search to find information in Outlook," said Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps, in a recent blog post.

Adding further weight to claims that Google is attempting to take a chunk out of Microsoft's market shae is its website that advises businesses on how to make the switch from Exchange to Apps, promising reduced costs, greater efficiency, and better email solutions.

Google has its eye firmly on Microsoft's many enterprise users with a new sync tool that lets businesses use Outlook with Gmail.

The free plug-in means the IT department can roll out Google Apps across a company, but employees can still use Microsoft's Outlook to check their email, if they want. Because the email is in the cloud, it removes the need for an Exchange server.

"Many business users prefer Gmail's interface and features to products they've used in the past," wrote Eric Orth, Google Apps software engineer, in a blog post. "But sometimes there are people who just love Outlook. For them, we've developed Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook."

"It enables Outlook users to connect to Google Apps for business email, contacts and calendar. And they can always use Gmail's web interface to access their information when they're not on their work computer."

Aside from syncing email, contacts and calendar, the plug-in includes a migration tool to move current data over to Google's system.

Companies already using Google Apps Premier or Education can click here to try the plug-in. At the moment, it only works on Windows-based systems.

Click here for our review of Google Apps Premier Edition.

Microsoft's Outlook is set to offer a fuller feature set in rival browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox after an update to the webmail component of Exchange 14, the latest version of Microsoft's email client.

Previously, anybody who logged into Outlook Web Access through a non-Internet Explorer browser was treated to a simplified interface and limited feature set. Microsoft has now addressed this, meaning users of Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome will all receive the full Outlook experience.

Another notable addition to the service is the inclusion of Gmail's threaded view, which folds related messages into a conversation threads under a topic heading, rather than having hundreds of individual messages cluttering up the inbox. Instant messaging has also been introduced to the software.

Microsoft said it's been beta testing Outlook Web Access, to be dubbed Outlook Live, with around 3.5 million students and teachers at across 1,500 hundred schools.

There's no word yet on whether the desktop client will receive these features, but Exchange 14 is expected to appear either late in 2009 or 2010.

Visit the developer site to see Outlook Live in action.

Xobni, a smart email plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook, is now available for free download direct from the company's website.

The Xobni application, ('inbox' spelt backwards, pronounced Zob-nee), is designed to help over-burdened users effectively manage with the torrents of email that hit inboxes on a daily basis.

The program sits as a sidebar plug-in within Outlook and enables users to instantly search through their email using key terms and display all related information, such as emails, events, contacts, attachments and phone numbers.

In addition, the program lists details of all contacts associated with that email, a feature that led Bill Gates to describe the program as, "the next generation of social networking".

According to reports, Xobni hopes to eventually include other email programs such as Google Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail and applications such as Facebook and Linkedin.

To learn more about Xobni, you can read a full review over at the site of our sister title PC Pro.