There are a great number of sophisticated VOIP solutions out there. You can go the Microsoft route and implement a “unified communications” suite like Microsoft Office Communications Server. Similarly, you can go with a richly-complex Windows Server-based solution like ShoreTel. If you’re a true rogue, you can alternatively go the open-source route and opt for a Linux-based phone system like Asterisk.

Of course, there’s always an online solution that’ll save you from investing in either hardware or software. (For the most part, at least.) Enter Zaplee. Zaplee integrates with your existing Skype account(s) to provide you with an easy way to manage departments, extensions, greetings, forwarding, complex routing, etc.

Getting everything setup, at least according to the site, is a pretty straight-forward, 4 or 5-step process: download the software, setup the extensions, setup departments, record greetings and then, well, go live. Check out the Zaplee feature tour to get an overview of how the system looks and works.

As a side note, there are two flavors of Zaplee: the $5-a-month (for unlimited users) solution that you can manage from your desktop, alongside the Skype software. The other option, Zaplee On-Demand, at $10-a-month (also for unlimited users) is entirely Web-based.

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive, quick and easy way to get a phone system setup in your office. Sure, you might very well outgrow it eventually and you might decide that you’re better off with one of the aforementioned paths I mentioned above (OCS/ShoreTel/Asterisk) but, then again, Zaplee might just do everything you need… and at a ridiculously-low price.

What say you? What voice system have you decided upon/deployed for your office?

Well, it turns out that add-on synchronization isn’t isn’t here yet and keeps getting bumped from the official Weave roadmap. So, our plans for a completely synchronized Firefox experience among our PCs were somewhat dashed… until now.

(Still, Weave will synchronize just about everything else: browsing history, passwords, bookmarks, open tabs, etc. For those of you not wearing tin-foil hats, I highly recommend you check it out.)

Like I said, my hopes for that Holy Grail of browser synchronization, add-on sync, were unfilfilled until I discovered an entirely separate Firefox add-on designed to fulfill that purpose: Siphon.

Siphon’s purpose as of right now is to fill that missing link and ensure that your favorite browser add-ons are available on whatever computer you’re on: at home, at work, on-the-go, etc.

Simply install Siphon through the Firefox add-ons interface (go to Tools > Add-Ons and search for Siphon) and create an account through siphon-fx.com. Then, specify what add-ons you want to synchronize. Once you’re done, set Siphon up on your other computers running Firefox and let the beautiful act of synchronization occur.

The developer of Siphon, Ian Halpern, has big plans and doesn’t intend on stopping at add-on synchronization. Future features of Siphon include the following:

• Support for syncing themes and enabled/disabled properties
• Automatic Add-on download and install
• Configurable user specified server support
• Easier Add-on management
• Different user profiles
• Support for syncing extension settings
• Support for other mozilla applications

So, g’head and give Siphon a try… and then let us know what you think in the comments. If you like it, make use of the Mozilla Add-Ons “Contribute” function and donate a whopping $3 USD to assist with further development of what could potentially be a VERY useful add-on.

As if these weren’t enough, the open-source/freeware product Snarl exists solely to double your notification pleasure.

While providing you with some of the same notifications you already receive (battery is low, audio is muted, etc.), Snarl also enables even more notifications for those that either have OCD or just need to always be “in-the-know.”  Examples include notifications for: hourly time updates, timer countdowns, more-specific power/battery notifications and more. Plus, like any truly-great application, Snarl supports extendability. For those that like the concept of this application, this is where it really gets interesting. Developers (or even you) can even write their own Snarl applications so that you can be visually notified for every event imaginable.

Want to be notified of a recent Tweet? New emails (even Exchange emails)? New Google Wave messages? New weather alerts? Snarl has you covered.

Plus, if you’re a true nerd, you’ll certainly appreciate how much granular control over what you’re notified about and how exactly you’re notified.

G’head and check it out: http://www.fullphat.net.

[Source: downloadsquad.com]

That said, we typically opt for installer-free apps that we can just drop in a single directory to be synced on all of our machines. (I personally currently use SugarSync now.)

A standalone app to burn CDs or DVDs is just one example of what I’m talking about. No clunky installs of Nero (which I think weighs in at about 400mb now) or Sonic or anything similar… just double-click the portable app’s EXE and start burnin’. There are more than a few portable burning suites that we’ve encountered in the past but the following titles are some of the more solid entries.

First up is daBurner. Sure, it’s the youngest of the bunch but you shouldn’t let that fool ya… as it does exactly what you need it to do: burn stuff. Here’s the official description: “No advanced burning options and complicated configuration. No integrated backup-mediacenter-slideshow-virtual drive stuff. It’s just a stupid burner. For smart people.” This one is aces in my book if not only for that beautiful description but also for the fact that the software is genuinely insanely-easy to use… unlike many burning apps.

Next up is Infrarecorder. It’s definitely more feature-packed than DaBurner and offers up dual-layer DVD recording, CD/DVD-RW erasing, ISO & BIN/CUE burning, disc copying, audio track burning and more. Infrarecorder’s been around for a while so there’s definitely something to be gained from its experience.

Finally, we come to DeepBurner. This one isn’t as feature-packed as Infrarecorder but it’s got a pretty polished interface and it provides you with the basic functionality you need: burn audio discs, data discs, ISOs and bootable discs. The premium version of DeepBurner adds a few more options but there’s no portable version available for it.

There are some more (potentially more powerful) standalone burning apps listed on PortableFreeware.com but some of these require a little bit of manipulation to make them “portable.”

If, however, you do prefer the old-school method of running apps like these, i.e., by installing them, you’ll want to check out CDBurnerXP: a great, lightweight burning suite from the makers of Ketarin. In addition, the latest release of IMGBurn added a plethora of new features (no, seriously, go look at the changelog for ImgBurn 2.5) and it could potentially take my title for best free burning app available… period. It is, without a doubt, definitely worth the measly $2 donation that the author is kindly asking for on the app’s homepage. Do it. Be a hero. Donate that $2.

Did we miss any? (I can guarantee we did.) Let us know what your favorite portable burning app is in the comments below.

I’ve found many MySQL backup solutions but none of them seem to be perfect in my eyes. (Hey, what is perfect these days?)

DESKTOP APPS

There’s Backup Watcher for MySQL but a) it costs $$ and b) you have to “activate” the software in order to use it. For someone like myself – who is constantly reformatting the various machines on which I work – that’s far too annoying given that you have to wait for a new activation code from the company. Of course, if you’re just gonna set this up on a server or desktop that you touch maybe once every three years – it may very well be worth it. Setting up automated backups is fool-proof and the interface isn’t too archaic. Plus, support usually responds within one business day – even if they aren’t that fluent in the English language.

One benefit to the above app is that it runs on Windows. For me, at least, that makes administration much easier. Another such app is Auto Backup for MySQL. (I’ll try and download and install this to post a review here soon.) This one also costs money (still less than $100) but the fact that it appears to be continually updated – it’s now Windows 7 and Server 2008 compatible – puts my mind at ease.

For more advanced MySQL DB management, you might also look at Navicat for MySQL – an all-in-one mgmt app that not only enables scheduled database backups but also provides you with options to interact with the data itself as well as the overall structure of the database. Pricing is much better than I remember. You can probably stay close to the price-range of the apps mentioned above and wind up with many more features at the same time. Plus, the interface is quite a bit more polished than the other apps.

WEB-BASED SCRIPTS

A more universal option (for those on different platforms beyond Windows) is a self-install script like Backup2Mail… which costs absolutely nothing. (The song “Born Free” from the last episode of the first season of Dexter is now running through my mind.)

Scripts like this one reside on your server, alongside your MySQL install, and regularly emails you backups of your database(s). The company recommends that you use a secure email environment given the risk involved in sending potentially-confidential data through email.

AutoMySQLBackup is a free script that’s been around for a while. Much like Backup2Mail, this script enables scheduled backups via the web but, with this one, you can not only send backups by email but also dump them to a directory on your web server. That way, if you’ve got the available space, you never need worry about the size of your DB backups.

What backup solution are you using/do you recommend? Let other readers know in the comments below.

For the latter and the former, one of the best ways to keep up is to follow the employees of your favorite news-makers… to get an insight into what’s currently happening at the companies for which they work.

Take Microsoft for example. As you might expect, there are a ridiculous number of Microsoft employees currently tweeting their thoughts and insights relating to their daily work. I stumbled upon a compiled listing of Microsoft Twitter users a while back on RedmondPie.com but that site has since gone inactive. Fortunately, I discovered a cached version of the page. So, here’s a listing (incomplete, I’m sure) of MS Twitter-users:

• @liveframework
• @livemesh
• @zunemarketplace
• @ch9
• @ch10
• @ch8
• @adCenterBlog
• @asktechnetuk
• @bing
• @bingcashback
• @bizspark
• @codeplex
• @continuumshow
• @fixit4me
• @ie
• @live_at_edu
• @microsoft_green
• @microsoft_xbox
• @microsoftpress
• @microsoftstore
• @microsofttag
• @microsoftup
• @micrsfttech4all
• @mixonline
• @msaccess
• @msadvertising
• @msdn
• @msexpression
• @msftresearch
• @mslearning
• @msmyphone
• @msofficereskit
• @mspartner
• @msrobotics
• @mssurface
• @mswindows
• @mvpawardprogram
• @officelabs
• @office_live
• @projectrosetta
• @sharepoint
• @silverlightnews
• @sitenameddesire
• @tnedge
• @windowsblog
• @windowslive
• @wlmessenger
• @wmdev
• @xamlevents
• @xnacommunity
• @zuneinsider

I’ll try to be compiling similar lists in the near future.

Now, I think OL2K7 was a significant improvement over 2K3 but that’s not really saying much. I am, however, stunned to see (with the Office 2010 technical preview released this week) that Outlook 2010 has not made the leaps and bounds it truly needs to make in order to remain both relevant and competitive.

What has improved?

Well, the Outlook interface is finally in sync with the rest of the Office platform. Meaning, of course, that the infamous “Ribbon” is now all throughout the application instead of just within new message windows as it was in 2K7. (I read an article on BetaNews.com by one Carmi Levy stating that they wish Microsoft would do away with the Ribbon altogether. I wholeheartedly disagree and think that the Ribbon is a great way – especially for touch displays now and in the future – to quickly find what you’re looking for.) In addition, the overall appearance is very bright and refreshing. There are still some theme options in place but the default is great in my humble opinion.

Conversation view has, at long last, been added to Outlook. It’s still a tiny bit quirky but it acts pretty much the way you’d expect it to. If a message comes in that’s a reply to an existing message, any related messages to that particular subject line are displayed with it.

The startup process, while unfortunately lengthy (see next section), is a bit less annoying. The improvement comes with the new animated launch screen – it stays up until Outlook is fully ready to be used. Previous versions of Outlook were a bit of a tease in that the window would launch but you’d be waiting about 5 seconds for each element of the application to appear: 5 seconds for add-in toolbar A, another 5 seconds for add-in toolbar B, 5 seconds for the To-Do bar to appear, etc. I find I have more patience with the animated splash screen… and patience is a rare commodity these days.

Message clean-up is ever-so-slightly enhanced. You’ll notice in the first screenshot above that Microsoft has finally embraced the concept of “tagging” in Outlook but only barely. In the screenshot above, there’s an area of the first Ribbon section called “Tags.” However, all that area presents is a drop-down allowing you to use the previously-existing “Categories” functionality of Outlook to file a message to categories of your choice. This is exactly what the previously-reviewed Outlook add-in Taglocity does but Taglocity still does it alot better. The aforementioned add-in allows you to jump to a tagging toolbar, begin typing tag/category names (it finds as you type), hit enter and your message is tagged. Hit the escape key and you’re back to your message. The process with the now-slightly-more-visible button is still very much mouse-driven and just doesn’t make sense with frequent Outlook power users.

In addition, there’s a new “Clean-Up” drop-down button in that same section of the Ribbon that allows you to quickly get rid of insignificant, older messages in either the conversation that’s highlighted or all of the conversations currently in your inbox… or even all of your subfolders.

Quick Steps represent a fantastic new feature in Outlook 2010. As you might guess from the name, Quick Steps allow you to create shortcuts for various actions like forwarding to a specific person or department or automatically reply to a selected message and delete the original – all in one action. You can even assign a keyboard shortcut to your quick step. A number of Quick Steps are included by default but it’s insanely-easy to create your own.

Forwarding a message as an attachment now has a designated button in the primary tab of the ribbon. Hit the button and, as you’d expect, a new email comes up with the selected message already as an attachment. This also works with multiple messages… very cool.

What hasn’t improved?

Filing and organizing messages. To my knowledge, there’s still no easy and fast, find-as-you-type way to move a message to a specific folder without a 3rd-party Outlook add-in like SimplyFile. We reviewed TechHit’s SimplyFile (from the makers of QuickJump and TWinbox) way back when and it offers a very Gmail-esque way of moving messages using the keyboard while remaining in your inbox. It’s a beautiful process and while I’d hate for TechHit to lose a revenue stream (still plenty of other great features in SimplyFile), this is functionality that should already be in Outlook… especially when this sucker is released in the year two-thousand and ten. C’mon, Microsoft. Seriously. Gmail also has this with the new “Move To” (keyboard shortcut “V”) and “Label” (keyboard shortcut “L”) features.

It’s most likely due to the fact that it’s a technical preview but Outlook’s performance over that of Outlook 2K7 w/SP2 has TANKED. The migration process was a lengthy 10-20 minute process… and I’m on a dual-core with 4gb of RAM so resources aren’t scarce by any means. Any subsequent, routine launches also take more time than 2007 required.

The reply process still inserts your own email address when clicking reply on an email you sent. Technically, that makes sense since you’re replying to an email that you sent. Intuitively, it makes absolutely no sense at all. In 99.9% of all cases, I’m just going to want to follow-up with someone on an email I already sent them – I’m not following up with myself. Gmail does this correctly. There, you hit reply on an email you sent and the email address of the original intended recipient is automatically inserted in the “to” field.

In addition to bare-minimal support of “tagging,” Outlook has still yet to present us with an option to add notes to an email. Sure, with the 2010 Office suite, OneNote will be included and it’s pretty easy to send a message to OneNote from within Outlook. However, that involves and entirely separate program and is entirely unintuitive… as well as a waste of time. C’mon, Microsoft… you already have a “notes” section inside Outlook… just find a way to marry messaging and notes and give us the option to add a freakin’ note to a message without having to modify the message itself.

What’s regressed?

3rd-party add-ins have taken a significant hit in Outlook 2010 as a result of the ribbon. The one solitary problem with the Ribbon is that it takes the place of loads and loads of various toolbars that previous versions of Microsoft Office required. Instead, each toolbar is replaced with a “tab” on the ribbon. The problem here is that many Outlook add-ins require visibility in order to maintain full functionality and to be as effective as possible. For instance, with the SimplyFile add-in within Outlook 2007, there remained a toolbar at the bottom of the window with a drop-down of folders and a SimplyFile button (among other items.) With a highlighted message, I could hit that button and my message would automatically be filed to the correct location. Now, there’s an extra click in the process as I have to navigate to the add-ins tab on the ribbon to get the button… which really disrupts the natural flow of that process.

Overall

Sure, the list of items under the “What has improved” section of this post is longer (mostly minor items) than the other sections but I’ve been genuinely let down by this version – as it stands now in a Technical Preview. I have absolutely no idea how Outlook will remain relevant over the next few years as Gmail & Google Apps both continue to grow exponentially while we wait for Office 15. Plus, Google has Google Wave coming down the pipeline which, according to pretty much everyone (I seriously have yet to read a non-Microsoft, negative opinion on Google Wave), will be the end-all, be-all of productivity apps. Good luck, Microsoft. You’re gonna need it.

What about you, readers? Have you had a chance to play around with Outlook 2010? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

Earlier this year, we noticed that the number of people we were following on Twitter was consistently rising. Here’s the problem with that: only one person manages that account, yours truly, and I wasn’t following these people.

So, a support ticket was made on Twitter’s support site and 2 quick, um, weeks later, we had a response waiting for us: it’s a bug… sorry about that.

Anyway, that left me with hundreds of people to unfollow. (Sorry but I actually pay attention to my Twitter stream and following masters of MLM doesn’t help me out at all.)

Regardless, this might normally entail navigating through pages and pages of people and manually unfollowing each of them if it weren’t for Twitter’s abundantly-used API. Here’s what I did:

Using My Tweeple, I exported an entire list of those I was following and those following me, pulled it into Excel and removed everyone with whom I was unfamiliar.

Once I had the list, I took it straight to the recently-released Nest.Unclutterer, added the entries to the whitelist option and proceeded to unfollow everyone we needed to. Of course, we could only unfollow dozens at a time but it certainly took less time than doing each individually.

Random Twitter app to the rescue once again.

Online invoicing systems, while not always compliant with an accounting system (if you use one), can provide you with access to invoice review/creation from wherever there’s a computer as well as an easy-to-use interface that’s far better than any of the aforementioned methods.

There are four different invoicing systems I wanted to briefly cover so you can quickly get an idea for which one is best for you.

First up is Blinksale. Blinksale is actually the invoicing system I started off with when a slew of Web 2.0 invoicing apps first emerged. Sign up for a free account and you’ve automatically got an easy-to-remember location at which you can manage your invoices: yourname.blinksale.com. With the free account, an unlimited number of employees can send 3 invoices a month. I know… that seems 100% backward but it’s worked for me until now. (Step it up a notch to the $12 plan and the same number of employees can send out up to 50 invoices per month.) In fact, the free plan has you covered with all of Blinksale’s features with the exception of SSL encryption and the ability to send invoices as PDFs.

Blinksale offers almost everything you’d come to expect from an online invoicing suite including the ability to create draft invoices, send invoices by email or export those invoices to PDF (the two premium plans allow you to send the PDFs directly from your site), mark collected invoices as paid, etc.

As of May 2009, BlinkSale’s pricing structure and overall feature listing is as follows:

(click for full-size version)

Next up is FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the big dog of this group, no doubt. They offer pretty much everything you’d need coming from Blinksale in addition to tight integration with a number of different payment authorization companies including 2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc. Plus, while Blinksale only grants participants of their free plan the ability to send a measly 3 invoices per month, FreshBooks allows you to send unlimited invoices… but also throws in the following 2 conditions: only 1 employee can access/send invoices and you can only manage 3 clients.

That’s only on the free plan, of course. If you’re willing to shell out some dough every month, those numbers increase. As of May 2009, FreshBooks’ pricing structure and extensive feature listing is as follows:

(click for full-size version)

Now we come to the entry with the sweetest name (hey, that counts): Ronin. RoninApp.com probably offers the most flexibility in terms of pricing options. They, of course, have a free plan (quite similar to FreshBooks’ free plan – only you can manage just 2 clients instead of 3) as well as four other plans starting at $6/mo. The $6/mo plan, dubbed “Solo,” allows you to create an unlimited number of invoices, recurring invoices and open projects for 15 different clients. Of the three systems mentioned thus far, this is probably the best-priced option for freelancers with just a few clients under his/her belt. Of course, you’ll have to jump up two plans to get integration with a payment auth service… which, in this case, is PayPal Express.

As of May 2009, Ronin’s pricing structure and overall feature listing is as follows:

(click for full-size version)

Alright, the last one in the showcase today is the one with the weirdest name: CurdBee. Of all the apps we’ve explored, CurdBee is probably the most friendly to penny-pinching (those who are forced to bee and those who choose to bee – delicious pun very much intended) freelancers. CurdBee, unlike the others we’ve covered, offers just two plans: a “standard” (or “free”) plan and a “pro” plan priced at a very pleasant $5 per month. Both the free plan and the pro plan enable you to create an unlimited number of invoices for an unlimited number of clients – which is something we’ve yet to see anywhere else with a no-cost plan.

Like all of the others we’ve covered, CurdBee offers a great and intuitive interface with a great set of customization options available on either plan. As of May 2009, CurdBee’s pricing structure and overall feature listing is as follows:

(click for full-size version)

In addition, CurdBee allows you to extend your plan even further using $5/mo “modules.” For instance, a freelancer or small business offering monthly, quarterly or yearly web hosting services can purchase a “recurring billing” module at an additional $5/mo. This module, according to the site, “allows you to specify the amount, frequency, duration, and payment method of your recurrent invoice, letting you forget about it.” In addition, you could purchase a 2CheckOut module for an additional $5/mo to supplement that recurring billing feature. That is, of course, if the built-in integration with PayPal Payments and Google Checkout doesn’t suit your fancy. (The latter two merchants are enabled on BOTH the free and pro plans… yet another way that CurdBee stands apart from the pack.)

I’ve personally always been a big fan of the add-on/module structure of paid sites (it’s the same reason I prefer Firefox as my primary browser) which is yet another reason this particular company rose the ranks to become my favorite online invoicing system. So, for those of you just getting started with online invoicing, I definitely recommend CurdBee.

Indeed, the world of online invoicing systems is vast and we couldn’t cover all of them in-depth so we just picked the four that impressed us the most. Here are some others that you’ll want to check out if you plan on signing up for an account in the near future: SimplyInvoices, Tick, Harvest and SimplyBill.

Know of some others we should have covered? Let us and your fellow readers know about it/them in the comments.

The list of feedly’s features, like many of today’s niche applications, is short but sweet. In essence, the Feedly add-on for Mozilla Firefox "weaves Twitter and Google Reader into a magazine-like experience."

For example, the Google Reader interface is clean and to-the-point but it’s certainly not exciting to look at. feedly, however, can take your existing GReader content, which looks a little like this:

…and turn it into something like this:

Now, I love Google Reader and the simplicity it brings to the table (something that’s necessary when dealing with hundreds of RSS feeds) but if I’m just checking in with my feeds for a few minutes or so – just to see what’s breaking, I’d much rather look at what feedly has to offer me. The spacious, image-assisted layout has definitely been saving me some time.

In addition to the display options in store for your feeds, the feedly Firefox add-on also brings you the “feedly Mini.” For a detailed rundown of what the Mini has to offer, check out the following post on the official Feedly blog: “Launching Feedly Mini: Twitter and FriendFeed on the Go.”

Basically, though, the Mini acts as a miniaturized, ever-so-faintly-visible toolbar at the bottom of pages you visit. This toolbar quickly tells you how many people have shared the page you’re viewing within feedly/Google Reader as well as how many times it’s been discussed in Twitter & FriendFeed. Not only can you see who’s sharing the content of the page you’re on, but you can immediately do so yourself from the same toolbar: share in Reader/FriendFeed, Twitter it up, email, etc.

(Source)

Overall, feedly’s benefit comes with how well it integrates into existing services. For instance, there are plenty (read: PLENTY) of aggregation services out there but most of them don’t have the option to tie in with other services similar to its own… and for good reason in most cases. With feedly, I have a choice of how I can read my RSS feeds. If I choose to read an article or multiple articles in feedly, those articles are automatically marked as read in Google Reader so that I’m not doubling up on work when I head back to GReader for some in-depth feed scanning.

feedly is a product of DevHD (not much there, yet) and is 100% free. I’m not entirely certain how they plan on surviving (that same question can be asked of so many of today’s “free” applications) unless they plan on selling the product off eventually.

Anyway, if you’re already a big Google Reader user, give feedly a try.