News

Small companies demand better IT-solutions

There are approximately one million small businesses with up to 9 employees in the UK. You'll find them in all kinds of industries. Common to them all is that they use IT in their daily work as much as larger companies - or at least they would like to.

Some people say small businesses have other needs but in reality they can't afford to invest in firewalls, switches, e-mail and virus filters and collaboration tools that the larger companies use within their well protected networks. It's simply too expensive and too complicated.

The argument that is often used is that small businesses are less demanding. But would a small business suffer less from an attack on its network or loss of critical files or documents? Of course not! Probably quite the opposite.

Truth is that it hasn't been profitable enough to offer small business's solutions that are flexible, scalable and secure at the same time until now. Historically, it appears to have been uneconomic to put the smaller business's needs above those of large corporations. This in turn has led software giants, which are the only ones capable of creating and distributing such technologies, to only address larger companies needs.

Today we can change this. The UK is a forerunner within the "Software-as-a-service" arena and it is now possible to make available such software directly in the web browser. The dream for any small business user would be not to have to worry about their IT systems and run everything remotely on secure servers for a small fee. That way they can focus on their core business and let someone else take care of the technology - the way it's done in larger companies.

However, you still need tens of thousands of paying users in order to keep the price low enough for your service to become interesting. The larger vendors who have servers capable of delivering this have typically not been interested in this customer group.

Why? Mainly because of an unwillingness to change what already generates money today. Vendors that actually do address small businesses are quite content with selling cut down versions. Thus one million small companies are stuck with both bad and insecure solutions.

It is time for the big dragons to realize that small businesses demand the same power and security as anyone else - but are unable to acquire and run it on their own. The one who realizes this first has pole position - the UK market alone has one million possible customers.

Translation of Swedish Debate Article
By Tore John Helle
Published in Computer Sweden




SecureOffice joins with IBM

In January 2008, SecureOffice became a business partner of IBM, solely focussing on providing the small business owner with the security and productivity services previously only afforded by very large companies with large IT organizations. This is now a unique partnership as we are jointly developing a Lotus software product into a SecureOffice format which allows collaboration and messaging across company boundaries …

Thank you, Royal Mail!

August 8th, 2007

SecureOffice has attracted a number of new customers lately thanks to the recent UK postal strikes. For the past few weeks, irregular mail deliveries have been playing havoc with businesses which regularly send or receive data on CD or DVD using Royal Mail. No such problems for SecureOffice though. One particular new customer from the printing industry was delighted to learn about SecureOffice just in time … the print deadline was fast approaching but the artwork was still stuck in the sorting office! The relief was doubled when the customer was assured that SecureOffice is web based and not FTP, or "F'ing Total Pants" as he put it.

We're doubling storage!

June 25th, 2007

From the 1st July we're doubling the amount of storage included with each new package from 500MB to 1GB at no extra charge. You won't be missing out if you're already a customer as we're also going to give you 500MBs of additional storage for free. If you still need more, extra storage can be purchased in 500MB increments to suit your needs. Refer to the pricing page for more information.

Drag and drop file uploads

June 22nd, 2007

Very shortly we'll be adding 'drag and drop' file uploading. Instead of browsing for each extra file you want to upload to a SecureOffice folder, you will be able to drag multiple files or a folder full of files from your computer to your SecureOffice site. As with the current upload functionality, drag and drop will support a maximum size of 2GBs per upload and feature a progress bar. This new feature will be powered by a Sun's Java technology so it's worth checking you have the latest Java Virtual Machine installed on your computer (check here at Sun's website). We will continue to offer the existing file upload method for customers who don't want to use drag and drop.

FolderGuests

June 18th, 2007

Have you ever wanted to make a file available to download to more than just a few users? Our new FolderGuest feature, coming in the next few months, could be the answer. When you activate FolderGuest on a folder in your SecureOffice site, you can send invites to multiple email addresses giving the recipients access to download any of the files in the selected folder using a shared FolderGuest username and password. In common with user accounts, FolderGuests can also receive alerts when files in the folder are added, updated or deleted. However unlike standard users FolderGuests are limited to downloads only. The FolderGuest feature can be activated on any folder in your SecureOffice site for a one-off cost of just £18 per year!FolderGuest is subject to a 'fair use' policy and limited to 1,000 sessions per folder per month. Price excludes VAT.

Safari for Windows

June 15th, 2007

Apple has released a beta version of its Safari web browser for Windows XP and Vista. Until recently only available on Mac OS X, Apple claims the browser is twice as fast to load web pages than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. However, early users of the Windows beta report frequent crashes and page rendering issues. Hackers have also found some vulnerabilities, which Apple has been unusually quick to patch. Could it be that Apple rushed the beta release because they needed to seed the market with an free and easy way for developers to test iPhone web apps without the much hyped hardware? One thing is certain; Apple will be including Safari in future releases of iTunes for Windows, as they currently do with QuickTime.

New Linux releases

June 13th, 2007

Linux distributions Fedora and Ubuntu have both released new versions of their operating systems in the past month. Both come with OpenOffice 2.0, a free open source alternative to Microsoft Office, and the Mozilla Firefox web browser which works perfectly with SecureOffice sites. In addition either distribution can be evaluated by running it direct from CD without installing any new software on the computer or affecting your existing operating system.

How secure is your computer?

June 11th, 2007

We all assume that hackers live thousands of miles away and attack computers over the internet, but did you know that anybody with physical access to your computer can probably also access your data? Most operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista, Apple OS X and most Linux distributions, can allow you access to users' data without knowledge of either their username or password by booting the computer from the operating system install CD or DVD. It can be even easier with Windows XP. The Administrator account password is blank by default, so if you double Ctrl-Alt-Del at the login screen and enter 'administrator' in the user field and leave the password field blank, you have complete access to the computer.So what's the solution? Here's a few suggestions:

  1. Consider disk encryption, available as part of most operating systems.
  2. Lock down the BIOS, EFI or Open Firmware so that the computer cannot be booted from a different drive or media.
  3. Limit who has physical access to your computer … not always easy!
  4. Better still, store your data in an environment where physical access is strictly controlled, such as a server in a secure server room or SecureOffice.

How to link to your SecureOffice site

June 11th, 2007

The FAQs page on our website details two sample code snippets which allow you to add links direct to your SecureOffice site from your website. The first sample adds a simple text link, 'Login into my SecureOffice'. The second sample shows how you can add a SecureOffice login form to any page on your website.

Multiple file downloads

June 8th, 2007

Using the Mozilla Firefox web browser and a fantastic free add-on called DownloadThemAll! you can automatically download all the files in a SecureOffice folder. Here's how.

  1. Download and install Mozilla Firefox if you haven't already.
  2. Visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201 using Firefox and click the 'Install Now' link to install the DownloadThemAll! add-on.
  3. Restart Firefox and login into your SecureOffice site.
  4. In SecureOffice click on a folder icon or name to view the folder's contents
  5. From the Firefox menu choose Tools > DownloadThemAll > DownloadThemAll!...
  6. In the DownloadThemAll! window choose a location to save the files.
  7. Click the icon next to Fast Filtering and enter filedownload in the field that appears.
  8. Click the 'Start' button. The window will display the file downloads in progress. When all the files have been downloaded the DownloadThemAll window can be closed.
  9. The downloaded files can be found in your chosen save location.