Web Worker Daily

Over the weekend, Adobe launched a revamped version of Acrobat.com, its web office and collaboration suite. This is the first major upgrade to the service since it left beta last summer (as covered by Thursday) and provides some much-needed productivity enhancements to this service.

An early concern of mine when Adobe made the leap to web services with Acrobat.com was that it was trying to be everything to everybody, but this latest version of Acrobat.com quells that doubt. Acrobat took the step of “crowd sourcing” its requirements gathering process for this new release, and incorporated over 35 ideas from Acrobat.com users into the latest version. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Apps is a favorite tool of many web workers, but soon it might be just as well-known to many of our cubicle-bound corporate colleagues. That’s because Google is making great strides into the enterprise, taking on the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino with the enterprise version of the product.

With its recent earnings statement, Google noted that growth in its enterprise business was accelerating. That acceleration includes some recent large wins with enterprise customers for Google Apps — with some big names in the bunch, including Jaguar Landrover (15,000 users), Rentokil Initial (35,000 users), Motorola’s handset division (20,000 users) and Konica Minolta (7,000 users), adding to some large customers reported earlier this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla has made beta 2 of Firefox 3.6 available. If you are already running beta 1, you can use Help->Check for Updates to get the latest version.

Running the release through the Sunspider JavaScript performance benchmarks shows that performance is virtually unchanged from beta 1, but according to Mozilla, this version fixes around 190 bugs so it is definitely worth downloading (although I have to say that I have been running beta 1 on both Windows and Mac machines for a week or so and have had no issues so far).

Are you running Firefox 3.6? Let us know what you think of it below.

If you’re concerned that Google is starting to know a bit too much about you, you might be interested to find out that Google has released Google Dashboard, a window onto the data that Google stores about your accounts. All you need to do is go to www.google.com/dashboard and log into your account. You’ll be presented with a list of all of the Google services that you use, and the data that is stored in them.

It’s interesting just browsing through the dashboard to see the Google products that you use. More than 20 products are covered by the Dashboard, although my account lists several products that I use that aren’t yet supported (including Feedburner and Google Analytics).

Do you think the Dashboard provides greater transparency?

Adobe has launched a new version of its web conferencing app, Connect Pro, that adds the ability to integrate existing telephony/VoIP solutions. (Adobe calls this “Universal Voice.“) This feature should make Connect Pro more attractive to organizations with existing telephony packages in place, as it won’t add to phone costs. As well as being able to use any existing telephony service inside the app, you can record audio from telephone-based participants along with your web conference, and stream audio from them to those using VoIP. Other enhancements in this release include improved security controls and an increased maximum number of conference participants (now at a mammoth 80,000 users).

Adobe also has announced that it is working on various native mobile apps for Connect Pro, with an app for iPhone and iPod due to be released first.

Does Universal Voice make Connect Pro more attractive for your company?

With the official release of Windows 7 on deck for later this week, Microsoft Press has released a free, 332-page downloadable e-book, “Deploying Windows® 7 Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine.” The book — which reuses material from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet — covers a wide range of topics related to deploying Windows 7, including:

• Deployment Platform
• Planning Deployment
• Testing Application Compatibility
• Migrating User State Data
• Deploying Applications

While primarily aimed at system administrators rather than home or small business users, if you’re looking to make the move to Windows 7 there will undoubtedly be some information in here that will help. The book is a free download (6.5 MB PDF) from Microsoft.com.

Are you moving to Windows 7?

(via gHacks)

If you rely on Google Docs for collaboration with colleagues, the new shared folders feature, announced by Google yesterday, should make life a lot easier for you. It enables you to share collections of documents with co-workers — documentation for an entire project, for example — rather than having to share each document in turn. Removing sharing privileges is then just as fast.

The new feature works as you would expect — put the documents you want to share into a folder, then hit the “Share this folder” link to invite your colleagues to share the entire folder, just as you can with individual docs. Google has provided full instructions on how to use the feature here, but it’s really very straightforward.

As Google notes, this is the most-requested change to Google Docs, and although it’s been a little while coming, this upgrade is a welcome one.

What do you think of the new Share Folders feature?

GooSync, a handy third-party service that lets you sync Google Calendars, Tasks and Contacts to your mobile device that we’ve covered previously, has announced that it will discontinue its free offering. Starting Oct. 18th, the GooSync Free service will be suspended and users will be migrated to a new plan, called GooSync Lite, that costs £5.99 ($10) per year. GooSync say that this change is the result of “exponential demand for GooSync over the last 12 months.” GooSync Premium users are unaffected by this news.