know | Future

Microsoft has released a bug fix for Office 2004 for Mac to fix problems with service pack 2 that could cause Entourage to nuke entire mailboxes off Exchange servers. Our friends at MacWindows have some more info on the problems.

If you have yet to take a look at Zimbra, an open source Exchange replacement, this may be a good time to take a peek.

Software publisher Extensis announced the December availability of a new version of their workflow/catalog system Portfolio. Though the web features have been extended to allow for custom searches to autopublish collections to the web, and support for SQL has been added, it is still essentially a client-server product.

The DOJ has approved Adobe’s the 3.4 billion dollar acquisition of Macromedia leaving European approval as the only hurdle to the transaction. What this means is that you can say goodbye to Macromedia’s Freehand and Adobe’s GoLive in favor of Illustrator and Dreamweaver respectively. Though the demise of Freehand will only be mourned by about eleven users in all, GoLive has carved a nice niche for itself. I suspect that the FUD seeded by Microsoft with its announced 2006 release of new web design and authoring tools to replace the almost forgotten FrontPage must have had something to do with this marriage. I also think that this consolidation and churn may open the door for more mature development and popularity of open source alternatives like Gimp.

More info on this story here…

If you felt a disturbance on the web this morning it is because there are big powers on the move. In a first step to eliminating the need to have multiple IM clients running just to keep up with your friends, MSN and Yahoo have announced yesterday that they will make their IM networks interoperable. Now this is a reversal of their previous (now musty old) deal to interoperate with AOL but MSN clains AOL was “difficult to deal with”. No surprises there though, when you are number one on your own you have little incentive to merge with number two. The biggest winner in all this though will be Google. Now AOL has to play ball with Google, Google needs AOL because they carry about a third of Google’s advertising traffic and Google’s IM is an afterthought and should be dumped in favor of AIM. Though today Time Warner is denying that there is a deal afoot, I still think that where there is smoke there is bound to be fire.
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This morning we have two interesting announcements from some important players in the creative Digital Asset Management front:

NAPC partners with Aprimo - This partnership between NAPC, probably the largest integrator in the DAM/Creative space and Aprimo, who just bought the old Doubleclick marketing workflow software, promises integration of DAM from Xinet with Aprimo’s workflow software. NAPC has been positioning itself as more of a developer and has expanded its own proprietary integration solutions such as overlays to make Xinet’s Webnative more powerful and accessible via an enhanced GUI. You can read the press release here…

Artesia announces integration with creative apps - Artesia’s Enterprise Content Management System is one of those DAMs that have until recently been a cumbersome fit with ad agencies and other creative shops. With their new version 6.5 though, they are adding tight integration with the Mac platform, Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. For the press release go here…

C’mon, I know you are out there lurking in the shadows feeling like total losers. Well, no need to feel so bad, according to Macplus.net(in French, but the babelfish can give you a hand with that), Le Figaro, France’s most respected daily newspaper has been caught using the venerable version of Quark.

The real irony of it is that the daily’s Editor had just announced that the methodoly and technologies used in the production of the new Figaro had been selected after very exhaustive testing and research. Macplus.net discovered the dirty little secret embedded in a PDF’s document info. So remember to cover your tracks or the french will call your mother a hamster and accuse your father of smelling of elderberries…

The Wall Street Journal writes on Friday that Microsoft and Time Warner are once again engaged in talks. Details are sketchy but it seems that they may be concentrating on consolidating their dial-up operations. If you remember, Microsoft considered buying AOL in the mid nineties but instead took a pass and developed MSN. If the deal deepens this may spell some problems for Google who derives between 12 and 40% of their ad revenue (depending on who you listen to) from AOL.

It is a milestone of sorts for the blogosphere when Google sets up an RSS aggregator. It is just out today and is uncharacteristically devoid of AdWords, but that will change I am sure. Some casual playing with it has left me unimpressed with the feed reader but the blog only search is sweet, as was to be expected. You can check it out here…

Are you sick of the continual problems in having to support Exchange, Outlook and Entourage in a mixed platform environment? Well, you owe it to yourself to at least test this. Ok, so it’s still in beta stage and only runs on Red Hat Enterprise or Fedora, but it is very promising. Zimbra is a new startup with some clever ideas about how an e-mail system should behave. The system is entirely server-based, provide email, contact/address book, group calendaring features, has a zero client footprint and matches exchange almost feature for feature. Through the use of a new web development technique called AJAX the system provides a very interactive session without full page reloads. Amongst the many clever features and innovations is the use of tags instead of folders so any message can live in multiple folders, clever hovers that show contact info, calendar info and other data as you hover over names dates and codes. For the administrators it has a completely web based interface, the ability to easily restore individual mailboxes, online archiving and even comes with an Exchange migration tool. It is open source and distributed under a derivative of the Mozilla Public License. What are you waiting for? go and download it already…

creativepro.com has an extensive review of the new version of Dreamweaver. They rate it very highly for it’s enhanced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XML (Xtensible Markup Language) capabilities, its improved ease of use and background file transfer capabilities.