Skype News & Articles

Skype fans, we have something to tell you and you’re not gonna to like it: your Internet telephony service of choice may soon be defunct.

Why would a platform with twice the number of Facebook users (480 million and counting) go kaput, you ask? Well, because along the way a lot of lame stuff happened, and now eBay is being sued for breaching the licensing agreement for the peer-to-peer technology at the heart of Skype, which was not included when the auction king bought it back in 2005.

We’ve exhausted our clever browser wars word play, so we’ll just come right out and say it: Firefox 3.5 was released for download today. 

The anticipated release comes one year after the launch of Firefox 3, and is being described by its creators as “the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released.” While that may be true—and has certainly got us geeks excited—those seeking one single rock-your-socks feature will be sorely disappointed. It appears that Firefox 3 isn’t about pulling ahead with fancy new functionality, rather, it’s about catching up.

Code and Visual hits all the right keywords with its new web content management solution. Rainbow Live offers the ability to manage XML content for Flash-based websites. It's a simple Web CMS, supported by their Rainbow XML editor, for those who don't want to be weighed down by hefty back-end systems.

We've said it before so we'll say it again: Everybody's getting into the multi-platform chat game. The most recent solution to hit our radar is a little known application called imo.im, a Web based service that mimics popular alternative, Meebo.

The coolest thing about imo.im? It's one of the only multi-protocol services to offer Skype support. Oh, and it was co-founded by Georges Harik, an ex Engineer for a company you've probably heard of called Google.

IBM has announced a new suite of collaboration services straight from the cloud. LotusLive is their new portal offering a number of collaboration and social networking services. With integration from some solution providers like Skype, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com, IBM customers will be happy to go cloud-jumping.

The race for enterprise 2.0 stardom is on. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe,  Amazon and Skype have all been in recent news regarding the topic.

Sadly,  SuiteTwo, an Intel-backed enterprise 2.0 suite, is dropping out when competition is tough and the economy is even tougher.

Skype has released a new version of a VoIP client for the Apple Macintosh platform that adds some new and unique features. Version 2.8, which was released in beta, adds two major new features including the ability to share your screen with other Skype users and access Boingo's global hotspot network on a per-minute basis.

The Skype user community was surprised by the new, unique features to the Mac client. In the past, the Mac client has lagged behind the more widely used Windows client in functionality.

iSkoot, a provider of mobile VoIP solutions, announced its acquisition of Social.IM, a social network IM client. This step positions iSkoot to grow beyond mobile VoIP and “create a compelling and valuable consumer solution” in the days of growing demand for integrations between mobile industry and online social media.

Swedish Web CMS vendor, ElektroPost, today announced the addition of a Skype-based visitor interaction module for their popular Web Content Management product. The new module, the EPiServer Webchat will be sold as an add-on base content management system.

From IT-Analysis.com

Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services became generally available last month. Both represent a significant change from the earlier versions of the respective products.

The position used to be that SharePoint Team Services provided a set of collaborative departmental and similar services as an extension to Microsoft Office, while SharePoint Portal Server was a separate product. The two products had a number of overlapping capabilities and weren't really designed to work together or, at least, they didn't do so as well as might have been expected. In addition, the architecture of SharePoint Portal Server was such that it didn't support load balancing and other scalability features which would be regarded as standard in any enterprise portal deployment.

As a result of this approach, neither SharePoint Team Services nor SharePoint Portal Server, whether taken separately or together, could be considered as a reasonable contender to support an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP). Some of the technology was there, but not enough.

This has all changed in the most recent releases. SharePoint Team Services has been stripped out of Microsoft Office, had its name changed to SharePoint Services, and has been embedded into Windows Server 2003, where it is a free add-on.

Secondly, what were duplicated facilities in the previous release have now been separated, or nearly so. Exceptions include such things as simple indexing and search within SharePoint Services, so that you can build a simple, small portal solution by just using SharePoint Services.

Going beyond this, SharePoint Portal Server makes direct use of the facilities in SharePoint Services. Thus it can leverage the latter's check-in, check-out and versioning, for example. The other change is that SharePoint Portal Server is now wholly based on SQL Server (though you can use MSDE if you are not a SQL Server user). This means that the product can exploit the database's load balancing capabilities, support for clustering and so on, which were not previously available and prevented large enterprise-wide deployments.

Read.