Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud.

According to Google’s Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There’s even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there’s too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition.
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Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series shares one trait in common with Apple’s iPhone: It doesn’t support full multitasking.

While the iPhone does allow some limited multitasking (the phone and iPod apps can run in the background) many critics have knocked the iPhone for its inability to run third-party apps in the background. If you want to write an e-mail while listening to music in the Pandora app, for example, you must first quit Pandora. The only way to enable full background processing on an iPhone is to jailbreak (i.e., hack) the device.
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Ready for another long, drawn-out copy and paste controversy to overtake your every waking moment for a year or two? Good: Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won’t be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series…

so that’s that. Kind of ironic considering that the WinMo of old has been enjoying the functionality since time immemorial, isn’t it? Of course, anything is possible going forward — they’ve said on several occasions in different talks and sessions this week that they’re already looking at a number of enhancements that were scoped out of the initial release of the platform — but for the phones you buy this holiday season, don’t expect to be copying anything between apps.

The racks and racks of servers in Internet data centers are about to get more efficient. Intel is launching a series of new server chips today that deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The new Intel Xeon processor 5600 series chips have as many as six cores, or computing brains in a chip.  They have other features that, taken together, allow a server with just one Xeon 5600 chip to replace 15 single-core servers from five years ago. The investment in the new chip can pay off in as little as five months if it is used to replace five-year-old servers, said Boyd Davis, general manager of data center group marketing at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel. The new chips are also setting performance records in server benchmark tests.

These chips are arriving at the right time. Gartner estimates that about a million servers that should have been replaced have not been replaced during the recession. Intel itself estimates that about 80 percent of existing servers should be replaced because they’re wasting energy and money in comparison to the new server chips. Intel says that the cost of not replacing 50 single-core servers with three Intel Xeon 5600 servers is $10,000. continue reading