The last year was a slow year for business IT, with most of the significant developments coming towards the end of the year. Like Mary I’m going to pick a list of my favourite technologies, tools and themes from 2006.

Mobility Tools:

Mobile application development has been constrained for a long time by the number of different implementations of Java ME. 2006 saw JME become the first version of Java to be fully open-sourced. Surprisingly this looks likely to bring all the different versions of JME together - and ending the fragmentation of mobile Java. It’s an approach that should increase the number of mobile applications by finally delivering a consistent platform, and at the same time bring enterprise applications down from relatively expensive BlackBerry smartphones to common low-cost Java-featurephones.

Network Tools:

Cheap gigabit switches finally reached the channel this year, and with unmanaged switches costing not much more than the equivalent 100base-T equipment, there’s really no excuse for avoiding upgrading. We’ll be shifting more data around in 2007 (a lot of it to NAS boxes and network backup devices), so make sure your network cabling is CAT 5e or better, and swap out your old switches for a big time speed boost that’ll rejuvenate your network. Most new motherboards already support gigabit, and low-cost PCI network cards can upgrade your desktop PCs (so no need for a complete desktop refresh just yet!).

Enterprise Server:

It’s time to sing the praises of the appliance. Small NAS boxes are cheap enough, and reliable enough, to replace those old file and print servers that hum away on your network. Get rid of those old NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 boxes, and replace them with something along the lines of Buffalo’s TeraStation Pro. It’ll give you one or two TB of raw disk space, which can be configured as RAID 5.0, and its embedded OS uses less power than an equivalent small server. You can even manage them with Active Directory, and most will even hook up to USB printers, making them a network resource.

NAS isn’t the only appliance that’s caught my attention this year. I’ve been tracking Azul Systems’ network processing hardware for a while now, and their new Vega 2 chipset takes them to 48 cores (beat that, Core Duo!), and more than 180GB of managed heap. If you’re running hefty Java applications and you’re finding you’re running out of threads on your existing application servers, Azul’s boxes are well worth considering. They’ll even give you deterministic garbage collection - so you can finally work with as much in-memory data as you want. Azul’s kit may not seem cheap at first glance, but one 5U box can out-perform an entire server farm for less than a third of the price - and you won’t need to buy a new server room…

Enterprise Application:

While the 2007 Office system will get rave reviews from most people (despite its pricing), I’m going pull out one part of the package, and make SharePoint 2007 my application of the year. It’s key to Microsoft’s Software as a Service strategy, and is the basis of Office’s collaboration tools - and of its integration with the Dynamics suite of business applications. With built in blogging and wiki tools, Microsoft has given SharePoint the social media makeover its collaboration and document management features needed, and with the .NET 3.0 framework, it’s also added a powerful set of application integration and workflow features that mean you can finally use SharePoint to manage key business processes. Add in the ability to turn Access databases and Excel spreadsheets into online applications, and it’s clear that Microsoft has found a way to free data trapped in desktop and departmental applications, making it available to the entire business.

Software as a Service:

2006 saw SaaS applications finally get the recognition they deserved, and two of the front runners began to turn into platforms. Both Salesforce.com and NetSuite unveiled programming tools that let anyone build applications using their back-end databases and UI builders. Not only that, but they also added tools to help third-parties sell applications - building the ecosystems their new platforms need to grow. There’s still a long way to go before they can rival the power of desktop and custom web application development, but this is certainly a big step on that road.

–Simon Bisson

Surrounded by Christmas cheer, crumpled wrapping paper and adverts for the January sales, I’m thinking back to what I liked most in 2006 to recommend to friends and relatives to look out for at bargain prices. For the individual business user (Simon will be blogging about his favourites for the IT admin), or the home user with a pro setup, 2006 was the cheer when you could finally pick the smartphone you wanted by keyboard, OS or connection, because we’ve had so many different QWERTY designs, EDGE and HSDPA, for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian. I’ll go on record as hating the Nokia E61/62 for the dead feel of the keyboard and the unhelpful soft button commands: you’re writing an email, with only two immediate commands assigned to the soft buttons and one of them is Menu – what would you like the other one to be? What is the one thing you’re most likely to do when you’re writing a message? Send, surely. No, says Nokia; how about Cancel? You’re reading a text message and again, of the two soft keys, one is devoted to Menu and the other, the one thing you’re going to want to do most when you receive a text message. I’d plump for Reply. In a less communicative mode Nokia has again picked – Cancel. Insert your own sarcastic comment about calling this a messaging device here; I was going to, but I hit Cancel…

I liked the BlackBerry Pearl for the shiny sleekness. I liked the HTC TyTan in its many operator versions for the keyboard and the macro lens. I liked the HTC Artemis for the built-in GPS. But my hardware and gadget pick of the year is a device I spent months waiting for and still liked when I finally got my hands on, the Windows Mobile Palm Treo 750v. It’s not just that it’s HSDPA, or that it has a QWERTY keyboard or that Windows Mobile lets you file incoming email so you don’t have to do it when you get back – you get that with plenty of devices now. What makes the difference is the extra software Palm has put on. The search bar on the front screen, so you search Google by typing what you want rather than opening the browser, loading Google and then typing in. Mobile search is all about instant gratification. The voice mail integration; instead of remembering what number to press on BT’s answer phone service, Vodafone’s message service and the Yac voice mail service that comes with my personal number, I get player controls like a DVD (I’ve resolved to stop calling them VCR controls as video tape fades into a tangle). And my very favourite feature, the one that sends me back to the Palm after every other phone I try, despite the abysmal email search: instant dialling. From the front screen, without having to click into the Contacts or fiddle about with menus, I just start typing the name I want and I get the list of matching phone numbers ready to dial. If I phone your office number and you’re not there, when I press the green dial button I get a list of recent numbers to dial again – with a flyout listing your home and mobile numbers so I don’t have to go look them up.

After a certain amount of discussion, we recently upgraded from a 512Mbps DSL connection to ADSL Max, which is averaging out at 5Mbps download (and around 400kps upload, which improved VPN and push email). This doesn’t make a great deal of difference for individual websites but it’s very welcome for downloading the ISOs of 2007 Office, Vista, Exchange and everything else Microsoft has come up with in the last few weeks. If you’re tossing up about upgrading to what I’d call real broadband, it’s well worth it. There may not be many Web 2.0 services that are actually useful for business yet, but when there are you’ll want a good fast connection to make the most of them.

There are several software programs I use all the time and they’ve had useful updates this year. ClipMate (www.clipmate.com) stores everything I copy in case I forget to paste it straight away. I like WinZip 11, because I can preview images inside compressed files. But it’s the new features in Outlook 2007 that I’m picking as my software of the year; colour categories, right-clicking on messages to assign to-do dates, the To-Do bar that shows upcoming meetings (including ones I haven’t accepted yet so I don’t miss them while I’m trawling through my inbox) and – finally – being able to pick timezones for the start and end of a meeting. That will be handy for our trip to Las Vegas for CES, where I’ll be looking for my gadget of the year for next year.

- Mary Branscombe

Like many small businesses, Mary and I keep our email and files on a small server running Small Business Server 2003. It’s a useful little OS, and its built-in backup tools simplify archiving your data and your email. We’re also backing up volume shadow copy data, so lost files can be retrieved from Windows’ often ignored file system snapshots.

(If you’ve not turned it on Shadow Copies yet, go do it now. Yes, you’ll lose some free disk space, but you’ll gain a lot of peace of mind. Right click on a volume, and open the properties dialog. In the Shadow Copies tab, click “Enable”. Shadow Copies may not be as pretty as Apple’s Time Machine, but it does the same job, and it’s here now. If you’re trying out a business edition of Vista, you can turn it on there too…)

We currently do nightly backups onto a NAS appliance, a Buffalo Terastation Pro, shifting around 50 GB from the server to the NAS store. With 2 TB of disk space, configured as RAID 5, there’s plenty of space for several days worth of backups. There was only one fly in the ointment: the backup was taking far too long.

That fly was down to our network. 100 base-T Ethernet is fine for most purposes, but 50 GB of backup took just under nine hours every night. That’s a significant amount of time, and the more data being backed up, the longer it would take - and the process was already beginning to eat into the working day.

I’m in the process of upgrading our network from 100 base-T to 1000 base-T. With gigabit Ethernet prices plummeting, it’s becoming easy to justify the upgrade. The Buffalo Terastation Pro has on board gigabit, and more and more motherboards come with built in gigabit networking. We’ve started the upgrade by removing our venerable Allied Telesyn FS716 switch, and replacing it with a D-Link DGS 1024D 24-port gigabit unmanaged switch. We’d already moved much of the cabling to CAT 5e and CAT 6, so it was ready for gigabit speeds.

The first machine to get an upgrade was the server. Its motherboard Ethernet needed to be disabled in the BIOS, and I dropped a D-Link DGE-530T PCI gigabit network card into a spare PCI slot. Reassigning IP addresses didn’t take long, and the server was soon reporting a 1GBps connection to the network.

Last night the backup ran as usual, but this time it took a lot less time - more than three hours less. The previous night’s run took 8 hours 52 minutes, post upgrade dropping to 5 hours 44 minutes. Perhaps not as much of a change as I’d have liked, but the actual process of building the backup set and verifying the data still takes a while. Certainly it’s still a substantial improvement.

It’ll be interesting to see the effects of the next stage of the network upgrade - a new server built using an Intel Core Duo Core VPro motherboard and running a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. We’ll report back on that upgrade early in the New Year.– Simon Bisson
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One of my favourite things about Windows Vista is its ReadyBoost disk cache technology which uses off-the-shelf USB flash drives to speed up operations and extend laptop battery life.

One of my least favourite things about Windows Vista is trying to find a USB flash disk that will actually work with ReadyBoost.

Microsoft has given ReadyBoost some very strict performance requirements, and many USB flash drives fail to meet them (even many of those claiming high speed USB 2.0 support). Plug in any old flash drive, and Vista’s built-in test tools will tell you if you’ve been lucky or not…

I was lucky to be in the US when trying to find a compatible drive. The Frys on Hamilton Avenue in San Jose was very helpful, letting me change devices more than once, without any quibbles - service that I’d be unlikely to get anywhere in the UK.

I finally found a drive that worked, Patriot’s rubber-coated 2 GB Xporter XT, for less than $40. But my task would have been a lot easier if I’d found a compatibility chart to help me find the right drive without several journeys to and from the store.

At least you won’t have that problem, as Grant Gibson’s ReadyBoost Compatibilty Chart grows by leaps and bounds. People from all round the world have rated over 250 different drives, showing those that work, and those that don’t. If you want to get ReadyBoosted, then this has to be your first stop.

– Simon Bisson

Declare war on spam? I’m with Rene - spam is a menace. But I think it’s time to declare war on users.
A woman in Denver had her door battered down by four armed police officers in flak jackets because she wasn’t using a firewall and her PC had been turned into a zombie (it was being used to buy things with a stolen credit card but zombies send a lot of spam; the undead are chatty but have no eye for a bargain). The reason she doesn’t run a firewall? It’s an old PC and the firewall makes it too slow. She surfs more quickly - and everyone else suffers for it.
But it doesn’t matter how fast your PC is - or how up to date your OS is; you’re going to turn off safety features to make it faster or easier to use. For years we’ve been complaining that Windows isn’t secure and that Microsoft doesn’t take security and that users are put at risk by inadequate technology. Nonsense! Users are put at risk by behaving badly.
Google for Vista and User Account Protection and you won’t find people talking about how they can finally run as standard user so that malware has more hoops to jump through; you’ll find people saying they’ve turned it off because they didn’t want to have to click an extra dialog to confirm that yes, they did want to do something administrative. That’s like duct taping the latch on your front door so you don’t have to remember to take your front door key out with you.
Businesses spend thousands on security appliances, scanners, firewalls, spam filtering services and the other necessary protections. Sensible users get their own security software or install free protection and browse sensibly. But some people deserve to be on the Internet equivalent of those car chase shows, driving the wrong way along the Information Superhighway with a trailer of unwelcome visitors throwing garbage at everyone they drive past.
Turns out people don’t write down passwords because they’re complex or hard to remember. They are and we need something different, but a recent survey revealed that even if you let people make them memorable and short they still write them down. The average user will give away their password for a free pen or a Starbucks voucher. Replacing passwords with a security dongle like RSA’s SecureID would be fine except we’ll end up with fifteen of those too; that’s why we need an interoperating identity metasystem where you control what you use to prove your identity and who you prove it to. We also need a bit more common sense.
Vista hasn’t even shipped to the mass market but if you Google for ‘turn off UAP” you get 104,000 hits. Tweaking guides suggest you turn off the services that power Windows Update along with Error Reporting, Help and Support, Performance Logs and the Task Scheduler  (so no automatic spyware scans or System Restore points – but the guides often suggest you turn off System Restore too).  They suggest you use ‘cleaners’ that delete keys from the registry – some of which disable help and Support or break applications. Some suggest turning off the phishing filter in IE 7 to make pages load faster. You’ll find guides telling you to run utilities that force Windows to retrieve memory from running applications just so you can have a warm fuzzy feeling about having ‘free’ memory. The average user would get far more impressive performance improvements by fitting an extra gigabyte of RAM, which is the best £100 you can spend on your PC. It might even give you the patience to click through the occasional UAP dialog and make it harder for zombies to take over your PC – and they don’t do much for performance wither.
Wise up! Maybe security isn’t as convenient as walking out of the house and leaving your front door open, but it’s not just your own PC you’re putting at risk either.

-Mary Branscombe

The new figures for smartphone sales in Europe and the Middle East give Nokia - and Symbian - the usual enormous lead. Canalys says Symbian had 78.7% market share at the end of Q3 this year (Windows Mobile had 16.9%). Nokia alone had 75.2% market share, with Sony Ericsson’s 3% market share making up the difference (although not all Sony Ericsson phones run Symbian and there are some other Symbian licensees finally shipping phones).
HTC is really shaping up; the nearly 300,000 phones the company has shipped is  40,000 more devices than RIM shipped in the same year. That’s 280% more phones than HTC sold the previous year - put it down to more models, better models, more operators than just Orange selling HTC devices (they’ve noticed people do more and make mroe cals with a Windows Mobile device) and more people buying phones for the features rather than the familiar Nokia interface and brand.
Even HTC’s huge success still can’t match Nokia’s business as usual 5,500,830 devices. But the vast majority of Nokia’s devices are Symbian 60 phones sold to consumers who are using them as mobile phones first and smartphones a very distant second. Nobody is going to buy a Windows Mobile smartphone just as a phone; you buy it because you want the extra features.
These figures predate the BlackBerry Pearl, which is why RIM stays the same; growing 10% when the market grows 11%, staying at 3.5% of the maket and generally treading water with the same customers. The Pearl should make a big difference. Sony Ericsson is still behind RIM but that 3% share is double what it had a year ago. And HP has had a very bad year; sales are down by nearly 40% and market share has halved to 2.5%. The Mobile Messenger is an excellent device - GPRS, GPS and Wi-Fi as well as actual phone calls, a good QWERTY keyboard, a nice screen. But not many operators have picked it up - which means that the smartphone market may be behaving like the rest of the mobile phone market, with what you can get from your network mattering more than what you’d want if you were free to choose.
And PDAs without the phone built in? Dead as a doornail with a sprig of holly stuck through it and boiled like Scrooge’s Christmas pudding before being buried for the Ghost of Christmas Past to grieve over. Down 42%. Palm is nowhere in the top five.
This spring I was looking for an iPAQ power supply in California - because it’s the same as a standard GPS power supply. Did I mean iPod? asked the assistant in Frys. Because he’d never heard of an iPAQ. Maybe HP should leave the handset market to HTC (who built most of the iPAQs and recruited the abandoned Jornada team) and pick up Intel’s ideas for an Ultra Mobile PC with a 4″ screen. An iPAQ with a Core 2 Duo chip running Vista? You wouldn’t care if it couldn’t make phone calls, would you?

- Mary Branscombe

I’ve been using Vista on one of our main machines for some time - having switched to it as my default Tablet OS back around WinHEC 2006 and beta 2. It’s been an interesting experience, and one that had one perpetual bugbear - I couldn’t get access to many of the hardware-specific features I’d become used to in Windows XP.

It was all down to lack of hardware-specific drivers from my laptop’s manufacturer. Quite a lot was missing: no tablet buttons when in slate mode, no auto-rotation, no accelerometer, no function key brightness controls. Yes, I could get access to much of what I wanted by tapping buttons in Vista’s Mobility Center, but it wasn’t the same, having to go into an application to do something that had been just a keypress or button push away.

Technically, of course, I shouldn’t have been looking for specific drivers for my machine. After all, Toshiba had said that the M200 series tablets weren’t going to be supported under Vista. However, quite early on, when the first M400 drivers appeared on Toshiba’s web site, a few brave souls in Microsoft’s beta test newsgroups installed some of the M400 drivers on their M200’s. They quickly discovered that they worked just fine.

Encouraged by their success, I installed the beta drivers on my tablet, and got most of the functions I was missing, including automatic screen rotation when I flipped the display from laptop to slate mode. The upgrade to the final RTM code ended all that, as key drivers were disabled by Vista as they were incompatible with the release code. We’d just have to wait for the final drivers.

This week Toshiba finally delivered its first tranche of release drivers and utilities for the M400, and like the earlier batch, they turned out to work just as well on the M200. Toshiba has also gone some way to take advantage of Vista’s new UI tools to give some of its tools a new look and feel. It’s an impressive move, and something that other driver developers should take a look at.

Some of the utilities take advantage of Vista’s new features. The accelerometer built into Toshiba’s tablets is now used in an extension to the Windows logon process, using it to set off an alarm if a locked tablet is moved. There’s even a Toshiba tile in the Vista Mobility Center.

Download Toshiba’s Vista drivers from their US support site. M200 users will want to install the Tablet PC Extension drivers and the Toshiba Value Added Package utilities from the M400 section. The Toshiba Extended Tiles for the Vista Mobility Center can be found on the same page.

With Nvidia tweaking its Go5200 drivers to add shared memory support (breaking them out of their 32MB ghetto and into the realms of Aero Glass), and now Toshiba’s Vista utilities and drivers, a nearly 3-year old machine is getting a whole new lease of life.

Vista isn’t just for new hardware. It may take a little trickery to get the features you want working, but the result can be just what the doctor ordered.

–Simon Bisson

I was up late last night slaving over a hot SharePoint site, wondering furiously and profanely why the new slide libraries weren’t working. The idea is excellent; instead of having to mail a presentation to a colleague who wants to use those great slides I had on consumer takeup of VOIP, I can upload the presentation to a slide library and have it sliced into individual slides which he can pick and choose from. As I get new figures and update my presentation, the slide he’s using will tell him there’s a newer version so he can replace it or have both versions one after another to show growth. The interface looks easy; click on Upload in SharePoint or choose Publish Slides in PowerPoint.

Except I haven’t got a Publish Slides button and Upload gives me an error message saying this only works in PowerPoint Professional. But I’ve got PowerPoint Professional (I say at length and again with some profanity; it’s really late now). I must have PowerPoint Professional. After all, I installed Office Professional 2007.

You’d think, wouldn’t you. You’d think that the Professional versions of the desktop applications that support IRM, slide upload, kicking off workflow from the app rather than from the SharePoint and all those handy professional-sounding tools would be in the Professional edition of Office. Actually, as far as I can tell, they’re only in Enterprise, Ultimate and Professional Plus.

Which are of course, more expensive.

It’s the same with Vista. That nice image-based backup? Costs you more. That secure whole-volume BitLocker encryption? It’s a sweetener for SA customers (or possibly the EU made noises about it; if so, it just proves that the EU are out of touch with what paying customers who want more for what they pay are actually after). Fancy trying those new Expressions tools for building Web and windows applications side by side with your designers? They’re not in MSDN because they’re only for designers.

I’m sure it’s all a valid marketing strategy to realise Microsoft’s enormous R&D investment and not overload customers who don’t need extra features. But at dark o’clock in the morning it’s infuriatingly penny pinching.

-Mary Branscombe

3 has announced the prices for its flat rate 3G data service, X Series. It’s even less than the rumours at £5 a month - £10 if you want to use Orb and your Slingbox to get video and files.
It’s not that this is the perfect service by any means. It’s limited to a handful of handsets for now and only Symbian handsets initially. It’s the rather slower 3G rather than HSDPA. And it’s the usual industry definition of ‘unlimited’ meaning ‘actually quite a bit limited’. 1GB of data a month is a lot better on a mobile where the small screen limits what you want to do than it would be for a connected laptop (and you can’t use the phone as a modem); 10,000 IMs and 5,000 Skype minutes a month are probably enough - and if you tried to watch 80 hours of Slingbox TV or Orb remoting to your PC on a mobile screen I think you’d go blind.
But this puts the mobile Web on a par with any other phone tariff; these are mass market not business prices. If it takes off, watch the other networks drop their data prices too.
So - will you sign up?
-Mary Branscombe