Let's talk business

OfficeTalk 4.5 beta 1 now available

We are pleased to announce that OfficeTalk 4.5 beta 1 is now available for you to download and try. A list of the new features and fixes may be found at http://www.softalkltd.com/support/release_notes_beta.asp?beta=73.

For more details, please see http://www.softalkltd.com/officetalk_existing_customer.asp.

We are interested in your feedback with regard to this version, so feel free to email us or post a comment back to this posting and let us know what you think.

New standard symbol for RSS web feeds

The confusion over how to identify an RSS feed on a web page looks like it might finally be over. Microsoft has announced that it will be using exactly the same icon as is currently used in Firefox. Microsoft will use it in the forthcoming releases of both Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 12. I've updated the Softalk blog to use the new icon.

If you want to use it on your own blog or web page then Matt Brett has created a vector graphic version that you can download to scale as you need. Matt suggests that you change the colour to match your website. I'm not so sure about that one as I think orange has already started to symbolize a feed - most RSS and XML buttons are orange. At the moment I've left the Softalk one orange rather than changing it to red or blue, but I'll monitor what other sites do.

Hopefully overtime this means all the RSS and XML icons will change and we'll have a single icon that works in any language. Once people start to see it in Explorer and Outlook they'll more quickly recognize it on web pages.

A Happy New Year for Small Business Owners

It's good to see that with the New Year approaching, small business owners around the world are feeling optimistic about their prospects in 2006!  In a survey by MasterCard International 60 per cent thought their business's outlook was promising despite mixed views on the global economic outlook and rising business costs. As reported by smallbusiness.co.uk.

The main challenges for the year ahead for small business owners include sales and business development, followed by increases in costs and fierce competition.

90 per cent recognize technology as being important, and although most recognize that it can give them a competitive edge and create opportunities for their businesses, amazingly, 60 per cent planned to spend less than 10 per cent of their budget on upgrading their technology.

Christmas is the time for family business feuds

An interesting story on BusinessWeek warns of the dangers for family run businesses of family members getting together over Christmas and then spending the time talking about work. Don't fall into the trap of allowing your family Christmas to turn into a board meeting. Take a break from what you do for 70 hours per week, let your hair down, relax and have a great family Christmas.

Did you know: Free/busy information

Did you know that you can use WorkgroupShare to organize meetings in Microsoft Outlook? Our WorkgroupShare product lets users of Microsoft Outlook share their calendars, contacts, tasks and email folders with other Outlook users without needing Exchange Server, but it also contains a free/busy server. This means that you can use it to find out whether or not those people that you want to invite to a meeting already have something scheduled in their calendar at the time of the planned meeting.

Outlook's meeting scheduler lets you enter the email address of those people that you want to invite to the meeting. It then passes this information to the WorkgroupShare free/busy server. WorkgroupShare looks up this information and returns it to Outlook, causing Outlook to block out the time that is already marked as busy. 

For more information, see Organizing meetings with WorkgroupShare.