UNIZO is an organization that represents self-employed independants in Belgium. One of its goals is to inform Belgian self-employed independants about new and interesting concepts available in multiple domains : networks, informatics, law, etc.

One of the main characteristics of a self-employed independant is that he doesn’t have the time and money to invest into complex and expensive IT systems. That’s why cloud computing is an excellent alternative.

Today, ContactOffice and UNIZO launch a large partnership by providing to all UNIZO’s members, an online collaborative environment : ContactOffice’s virtual office system. With this system, users will be able to create groups in which they will be able to share ideas, information, documents, etc. Users will be able to manage a personal calendar and contacts and share them within groups they created. They will benefit from ContactOffice’s global e-mail service who allows to users to consolidate multiple e-mail boxes into one single interface accessible from any computer, smartphone or GSM with a simple browser and Internet connection. Finally, UNIZO’s users will have the opportunity to enlarge their business and network skills by using ContactOffice’s documents storage space, bookmark manager, tasks and notes system and wiki in a 100% SSL secured environment.

The UNIZO portal : http://www.unizo.be/virtueelkantoor

Search in Messages and Documents has been redesigned. This is a first step to a series of new features that will be available in a near future. The “contains” criterion replaces the “all text fields” option. If you want to narrow your search, you can use other criteria such as document name or last modification date in Documents, or sender or subject in Messages. You can use the * character to search on words starting with the letters you entered. Example: “contactof” for “contactoffice”. You can’t use the * character in the first four positions because this would create too wide queries. Example: you can enter “conta” but not “co*”.

Overview of pending meeting invitations You receive meeting invitations from ContactOffice users and then accept or refuse them. As these invitations are sent by e-mail, you might forget to handle them. The list of pending meeting invitations is now displayed in your private calendar, in the “Invitations” section. Meetings occurring in the past are not displayed though.

Free, busy, tentative and of out of office Each event now has availability options:

Free: This means you are still available, despite the event. For instance, you have created an event to remind you that an item will be delivered between 2 and 4 but you are not actually busy waiting for it and unable to do something else. “Free” is the default status for “all day” events because you are at work although it is John’s birthday (or even yours). Busy: This is the default status for normal events, meaning that you are actually busy because of this event. Tentative: This status is for unconfirmed reservations in your calendar. Meetings invitations that you haven’t accepted (or refused) yet appear with a tentative status; when you accept them, they switch to the busy status. Use the Tentative status when you create an event which is not sure yet. Out of office: This status means you can’t accept events because you are not at the office, for professional or personal reasons. If you want a day off because it’s your birthday, create an all-day event and apply this status, instead of the default status (which is “Free”, as explained before).

You can change the availability status of any of your events by editing its properties. You can’t change the status for layered external calendars though. These options are standards. You will find them in third-party software, such as Microsoft Outlook. Note that Apple iCal only supports 2 of them: Free and Busy. In next releases, we will improve the display of events according to the availability status.

Quotas moved to the Account menu Quotas are now located in the Account menu, which now appears in every tool. You can view the Quotas for your private environment as well as for each group you belong to.

ContactOffice is always present at every good CloudComputing or collaborative solutions event in Europe. Once again, ContactOffice will be present at one of the largest Collaboration events in France on 5 and 6 mai 2010: “Salon Intranet” in Paris. Working remotely, share, collaborate, federate employees, inform, promote learning and innovate… Intranet becomes a necessary business enterprise tool for indivitual and collective performance. Intranet became a collaboration, work and productivity tool , even for SOHO/SMB. Program of these two days:

10 conferences led by experts 24 workshops and demo’s driven by exhibitors 1 show with the best players on the market

Everything will be set up so you can find technological tools, tips, methods and services that will help you improve the effectiveness of your corporate Intranet and its management in order to enhance the performance of the employees and business productivity. The Salon Intranet: CNIT - Paris La Défense 5 may 2010 (9:00 - 18:30) & 6 may 2010 (9:00 - 18:00)

Get your entrance badge now:

The “Paul-Henri Spaak” higher school has selected ContactOffice as messaging and collaborative solution. Leader on the French higher education market, ContactOffice now enters the Belgian market with this first higher school located in Brussels. Administrative staff and teachers have been using their new collaboration platform for a few weeks. Thanks to their customized virtual office, they now benefit from shared calendars, contacts and documents. Because of the reorganization of higher education in Belgium, the customer needed e-mail addresses on two domain names: each user has his primary address on the main domain and an alias on the secondary domain, all messages being delivered to a single mailbox. The higher school’s head of IT department comments on the quick adoption by end-users: “Everybody here likes this new tool. It’s very easy and straightforward. We plan to capitalize this enthusiasm and bring new ways of collaborative work that most will abide by.” Other higher schools in Belgium have already shown interest in a ContactOffice customized version because it allows smooth electronic document distribution and easy communication with students and staff members, for instance.

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface version 1.8.003, currently available on ContactOffice servers. This is a minor version, containing only bug fixes:

Wiki: Pages were not displayed immediately anymore; you needed to refresh them. Groups: Search had disappeared in the Groups tool. Groups: In the member list, you could not display the details of a member anymore. You can do that again by double-clicking on his name or selecting “Properties” in the contextual menu.

All French-speaking ContactOffice Education customers were invited to participate to the 2010 edition of the ContactOffice Education Days, on March 24th and 25th in Paris. The meeting gathered representatives from 16 education entities (universities, high schools, secondary schools) at the Belgian Embassy, just a few steps away from the famous Arc de Triomphe. This annual event is very important to us, because it is one of the opportunities we create to get feedback from our customers and users. Our CTO Luc Claes presented the latest features but also the features we are currently working on. Most of them will be available by next September. He also presented the ideas we have about future developments. Customers were asked to vote for each of them. They were also given the time to give us feedack about existing or lacking features. In other words, ContactOffice customers do have a real impact on the roadmap. For our customers, this event is also a perfect occasion to meet other ContactOffice users and exchange ideas, tips and solutions. Some of them had prepared a presentation on an aspect of their ContactOffice usage: specific developments we have made for them (example: automatic layering with the classes agenda generated by a third-party application), developments they have made themselves using the powerful ContactOffice API (examples: writing holidays in the staff agendas from the software managing holidays requests, publishing the list of most group documents stored in ContactOffice on the university portal), the way they use the various ContactOffice tools to ease collaboration and communication inside their organizations and with the outside world.

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface version 1.8.001, currently available on ContactOffice servers. “Quit” button now appears on the right The “Quit” button has not disappeared, you will find it on the right, in last position.

Use this button to leave your virtual office in a secure way: just closing the browser window does not end your session. Lighter menu bar Because some features are not used every day (such as Preferences and Filters for Messaging for instance), we grouped these in a new menu bar item called “More”. Just click on it to display its contents.

Messages: bye bye winmail.dat files Some Microsoft Exchange servers or Outlook clients send e-mails in a proprietary format. In this case, you get the message contents in a “winmail.dat” attachment that you can’t read. ContactOffice now converts such files and display their contents immediately. Other improvements:

Messages: Printing problems with Internet Explorer are solved. Messages and Documents: In search results, you can now move or drag an item to the Trash. Calendar: When you refuse a meeting, the event window will now close automatically.

One important aspect to think about when choosing cloud applications is reversibility. One does not want to be stuck in a proprietary format with no possibility of recuperating one’s data. We are aware that every person wishing to opt for a cloud based collaboration solution already has a calendar, emails etc. Thus, every person wants to be able to import his information into any new solution he might opt for. ContactOffice’s virtual office allows you to import your existing data into its virtual office from any standard format. Obviously, if you wish to change solution afterwards, the same export possibility must exist. With ContactOffice you’ll be able to export your data to the standard file types compatible with most applications on the market. Below you will find a table containing different file types in order to import or export your data:

Function Import Export

Mail .eml IMAP POP3 .eml IMAP POP3 MBOX

Contacts vCard (.vcf) Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm) .csv Gmail LDIF vCard (.vcf) Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm) .csv

Calendar vCalendar (.ics) Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm) vCalendar (.ics) Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm)

Documents (in native formats) Manual upload WebDAV CIFS/SMB Manual download WebDAV CIFS/SMB

Bookmarks .html .html

Tasks Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm) Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm)

Notes Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm) Synchronization (Outlook, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm) vNote

Note that as from now, you can synchronize with your iPhone, Outlook, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Palm. See our last article on our blog regarding synchronization.

The SynchroExpress software synchronizes ContactOffice with your computer. Your computer can then synchronize with mobile devices. This way, you can synchronize ContactOffice with mobile devices. The latest SynchroExpress version (3.0 - build 3052) has been released and allows synchronizing ContactOffice with:

Outlook (all versions, including 2007) Devices running on Microsoft Mobile (via Outlook) Synchronize your mobile device with Outlook. Then, synchronize Outlook with ContactOffice. Apple iPhone (via Outlook) Choose “iPhone” when setting up Synchro Express. Then, set-up Apple iTunes so that it synchronizes your iPhone with Outlook. Unfortunately, it is not possible to synchronize with iTunes directly. BlackBerry (without Outlook) If not installed yet, install BlackBerry Desktop Software. Choose “BlackBerry” when setting up SynchroExpress. You don’t need Outlook to synchronise ContactOffice with your BlackBerry. Palm (without Outlook) If not installed yet, install Palm Desktop Manager. Choose “Palm” when setting up SynchroExpress.

Please note SynchroExpress is available for Windows only. The installer is Windows 7 compliant. To get this new version, log in your account and go to the Synchro page. Before installing it, read the documentation and limitations in the online help. In a few months, we will offer alternatives such as SyncML to synchronize :

with other platforms (Mac, Linux) “over-the-air” (ie. without connecting the mobile device to a computer, the device will be connecting directly to ContactOffice through the Internet).

Here are the release notes for Advanced interface versions 1.7.003 and 1.7.004, currently available on ContactOffice servers. Display most hours of the day in the Calendar We received feedback about the Advanced interface calendar displaying “less content” than its Classic interface counterpart: some events are not displayed in the visible part of the Calendar. Of course, you can display them by scrolling up and down. In other words, events taking place in the first or last hours of the day are not displayed immediately. This is because of the calendar grid resolution. The “60 minutes” option was lacking in the Advanced interface Calendar preferences and is now available. Using this setting, each calendar cell will cover an entire hour, whereas the default setting is 30 minutes. Take a look at the screenshots below. They belong to the same ContactOffice account. Calendar with 30 minutes grid resolution (default setting):

Calendar with 60 minutes grid resolution:

Improvements to the “Infos” tab “Infos” is a special tab that you can see just after logging in. It appears only if you belong to at least one group. Its purpose is to allow group administrators and co-administrators to display a message to group members. We’ve fixed a bug preventing the Infos content to appear when the account was member of a large number of groups. Besides, if a group has no Infos available, it is now completely hidden in the Infos tab in order to gain space.

More languages for Contacts The Advanced interface is available in English, French, Dutch and Portuguese. You can now select not yet translated languages (Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Finnish) when you create or edit Contacts. As system-generated e-mails (meetings and meeting polls invitations, reminders, etc.) are already translated, these contacts will get the e-mails in their own language.

The “Messages” tool centralizes e-mails (including e-mails from third-party servers using our POP3 and IMAP clients), SMS and faxes. To get access to this tool and its numerous features (such as powerful antispam and antivirus, tags, protection against scripts, POP3 and IMAP servers, etc.), you need to create your ContactOffice e-mail address first. This following domains are now available for your ContactOffice address:

contactoffice.com contactoffice.ch contactoffice.es contactoffice.us

The following extensions were already available:

contactoffice.be contactoffice.ca contactoffice.co.uk contactoffice.de contactoffice.fr contactoffice.it contactoffice.net contactoffice.nl

If you haven’t created your e-mail address yet, do it now to discover all the exciting features! You can also use your own domain name instead.

It is not always easy to stay connected to the Internet when we travel and there is not always a wifi connection available. So, sometimes it might be difficult to access your online agenda and work with it. But since ContactOffice is an IMAP server as well as a CalDav server; in addition to map your ContactOffice mailbox in a heavy e-mail client like Thunderbird, you can also map your ContactOffice Calendar with Mozilla’s Calendar extension called Lightning. Lightning is an extension offering a fully configurable calendar that also allows to map external network calendars through CalDav protocol. During the calendar’s configuration, you can activate the “cache” feature that copies locally your calendar from Thunderbird’s Lightning Addon to your computer making your calendar available in offline mode.

You can thus have access to your ContactOffice’s calendar at any moment even when you are not online. The only restriction for the moment, according to Mozilla’s development team is that it is not possible to update ContactOffice’s calendar offline and get it synchronized through Thunderbird once you get online again.

After 10 years of good service, the previous version just retired today as ContactOffice launched its new website. So long old chap, you did a good job. From now, users logging on http://www.contactoffice.com will be prompted the Advanced interface, now selected by default. The Advanced interface benefits from all the new features while the Classic interface doesn’t. In addition, the Classic interface is not maintained anymore and will disappear one day. So now, use the Advanced interface instead. If you can’t get rid of the classic interface, just check “classic interface” under the “ENTER” button on the login page. We look forward to your feedback on facebook, twitter or on our blog. CO

CloudStorm is a new style event launched in 2009 where visitors receive in 100 minutes, an update of the latest trends and products in Cloud Computing by innovating cloud companies, followed by a small expo and networking opportunities. Each event covers different topics like: Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Cloud Platform as a Service and certainly Cloud Software as a Service! This year, ContactOffice will be present at two different locations: London (UK) and Dusseldorf (Germany). Don’t hesitate to register now for these two exclusive dates:

CloudStorm London - 22 february 2010, 17:00h local time

Sponsors 5 minute Pitches:

Patrick De Schutter, CEO ContactOffice Wim De Wispelaere, Sales & Products Amplidata Arvid Fossen, Product Management Director A-Server Chris Boos, Founder Arago Andrew Slater, Cloud Infrastructure & Security Quantix Owen Garrett, Product Management Zeus Rackspace

CloudStorm Dusseldorf - 09 march 2010, 17:00h local time

Sponsors 5 minute Pitches:

Patrick Crasson, Strategic Business Development SUN Microsystems Patrick De Schutter, CEO ContactOffice Wim De Wispelaere, Sales & Products Amplidata Arvid Fossen, Product Management Director A-Server Thomas Rulmont, CTO CloudSphere

CUME (Club des Utilisateurs de Micro-ordinateurs dans l’Education), founded in Rennes (FR) in 1984 is a computer users association which aims to gather people working in IT departments in schools and universities. The activities of CUME are oriented towards three main themes:

New hardware and software platforms (Windows, Unix, Linux) Educational use of networks, Internet, … Educational use of information technology and communication (multi-media, self-training, distance training, …)

On 19 and 20 january 2010 CUME organized a national day with the subject: “Outsourced Services” and invited big market players such as ContactOffice in order to present its Virtual Office solution to an interested public. The programme of the days can be found here. If you missed our presentation or if you simply want to see it again or save it, please visit slideshare: ContactOffice Presentation “journée CUME Externalisation de services” January 2010

View more presentations from pdeschutter.

Creation of EuroCloud Belgium On January 12th 2010, ContactOffice became founding member and administrator of the newly created EuroCloud Belgium association. EuroCloud is a European network of local SaaS and Cloud computing communities, launched at the end of 2009 by Pierre-José Billote, President and founding member of the ASP Forum. EuroCloud is present in all over Europe: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, Austria, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Turkey. The EuroCloud community includes software vendors, integrators and industry experts. As the whole industry is shifting to cloud computing, EuroCloud’s goals are to become the first European cloud ecosystem to boost Cloud development across Europe, while becoming the strategic European platform for business exchange with other continents. ContactOffice will actively participate in the growth of the EuroCloud community and is represented by Patrick De Schutter as Administrator of EuroCloud Belgium. If you are interested in the EuroCloud initiative and wish to promote Cloud Computing in Belgium, contact us at EuroCloud Belgium: http://www.eurocloud.org.

Current members of EuroCloud Belgium: Odyssee - http://www.odysseemobile.com Charles Convent  SigmaConso - http://www.sigmaconso.eu Annie Frère ContactOffice - http://www.contactoffice.com Patrick De Schutter ABE - http://www.abe.irisnet.be Serge Kalitventzeff  Freemind - http://www.freemind-group.com Angelo Santoro Kaukana - http://www.kaukana.be Gabriele Bozzi Efficy - http://www.efficy.com Cédric Pierrard Lorenz Law - http://www.lorenz-law.com Marlies Maes STS Group - http://www.group-sts.com Alain Blaise Download Dutch and French version here.

Using multiple email accounts at the same time Almost everybody has at least one private and one professional email address. When you use ContactOffice as default professional email address (ex: me@contactoffice.com), you can also consolidate your other private (and professional) email accounts in ContactOffice’s interface in order to have all your mails in one singe interface. This can be done either by downloading your external emailaccounts in Pop3 or viewing them through our IMAP client. In addition, for each email account created, ContactOffice allows to set up a different signature. Finally, ContactOffice will automatically select the correct email address used in any discussion when you reply to an email.

Contextual help for each function There are two user modes: “Beginner Mode” and “Expert Mode”. They can be defined in the general preferences. The “beginner mode” shows for certain functionnalities a question mark button with some extra information about this functionnality which is visilble through ‘mouse over’. This ‘Contextual help’ option can be activated or de-activated at any moment.

Writing emails, checking your calendar and uploading documents at the same time Sometimes you want to suggest a meeting when writing an email to someone and you don’t remember your available time slots. In addition, you might want to upload a document into your private or group storage space but you can’t because you are busy in the email tool. Tip: press “ctrl+t” and a new Tab will appear in your browser. Open your virtual office by typing its URL (ex: http://www.contactoffice.com). Because you are already logged in in the first tab, your account will open automatically in the second tab. There you will be able to open other tools: your calendar for example. Using such Tabs allow you to have several tools open at the same time within the same browser and will allow you to switch easily from one tool to the other one.

Dear all, We had to perform an unplanned maintenance on our servers Wednesday 13th of January between 00:03 CET to 07:35 CET. All services were not accessible during this maintenance, except the SMTP services that were still accepting incoming emails. Sorry for this inconvenience, Arnaud

If you want to share your agenda of the day or of the week or even of the month, you can do it thanks to ContactOffice’s RSS feed: select your personal agenda, give view rights on public access and share the RSS link to your contacts.

Dear users, You might experience difficulties in reaching http://www.mail.be and http://www.contactoffice.be. Our domain hoster (www.hostbasket.com) apparently had a Domain Name Server configuration issue on both mail.be and contactoffice.be. Unfortunately, this problem is completely out of our control and responsibility. Although the right configs have been re-setup this morning around 08:30 am CET, the propagation of the right settings will take some time (from 1 hour to several hours). You can try forcing to reload the correct DNS parameters by doing the following : in Windows, click on ‘Start’ then select ‘Run’ , type ‘cmd’. A black window will appear. Type then ‘ipconfig /flushdns’ and then press ‘Enter’. This will clean your DNS cache and force to reload the right DNS params. Open then your browser and enter http://www.mail.be or http://www.contactoffice.be. It will not work for everyone as some DNS are not yet up to date but might help. Alternatively, - for the contactoffice.be users, you can try accessing the service via http://www.contactoffice.com - for mail.be users, you can access the service via http://mailbe.contactoffice.com/ Sorry for this inconvenience but (as said, this is out of our control). Arnaud