The provide of hosted Microsoft Exchange email, hosted VoIP phone service for small and medium businesses (SMBs) and Microsoft SharePoint collaboration services Apptix has announced the launch of voice access for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

Apptix has enabled the new service which is hosted Exchange Server 2007 customers. The new service is remotely access and interact with their email, calender, contacts, or voicemails using any phone-land line or mobile via touchstone or voice commands.

Also with this latest announcement, Apptix customer can easily get access to their Outlook calenders via a mobile phone or landlines. By the help of this service they can use voice prompts to reschedule or alert other participants that a meeting is delayed or that its also scheduled time has changed. Apptix customer can also reply to emails by attaching a vocie mail message to a distribution list in their Outlook Contacts list.

Officials at Apptix said the power of advanced text-to-speech technology together with a hands free device, make it possible to solve many safety and legal concerns while continuing to provide on-the-go business professional with a solution for their needs.

"From email and attached documents to calendar and contact information, Outlook has become a central repository for employees' critical information," said Rick Rumbarger, Vice President of Product for Apptix.

"Apptix Outlook Voice Access keeps busy, on-the-go employees - whether in a car or walking across their company's campus - in touch with their customers, colleagues, and critical information."

Apptix offers a variety of hosted communications and IT services including Microsoft Exchange; VoIP; Microsoft SharePoint; Web conferencing and secure Instant Message via Microsoft Office Communications Server; Online Backup by EMC's Mozy; mobile messaging (including BlackBerry and iPhone ), compliance and archiving; and a Web presence solution that includes domain
registration, DNS hosting, and Website hosting.

In this article you get a quick and easy way to filter your unwanted junk email, often referred to as SPAM (Self Promotional Advertising Message). Similar to junk mail that you find in your residential mailbox, you will probably receive unwanted junk mail in your email box as well. Below is a listing of general recommendations on how to handle Spam that should help in reducing spam.

1. Never send e-mail or reply to an e-mail requesting that you be removed or to unsubscribe unless you are familiar with the company. Some individuals and companies use this reply as a method of verifying the e-mail is valid and using this information to subscribe you to other mailing lists. If you do not know the individual or company simply delete the e-mail.

2. When filling out any type of form on the Internet, watch carefully for any type of check box that by default may be checked for you to receive a newsletter or share your e-mail with a a third-party.

3. When signing up for any e-mail list, see if the company has any type of SPAM or e-mail sharing disclaimer. See Computer Hope's Legal page for our example.

4. If you are concerned about a company sharing your e-mail address, register the site with a fake e-mail address.

5. Be careful who you send your e-mail to. Sites that require you to sign up or request an e-mail for free products, free services, or contests commonly share your e-mail as a method of generating revenue.

6. Don't send or recommend a friends or families e-mail address unless you are familiar with the service.

7. Never forward an e-mail that claims that it is capable of tracking the e-mail as it is sent or will help generate revenue for a certain cause to the more people it is forwarded to. These e-mails are commonly referred to as a chain mail and are commonly false and help individuals get additional e-mail address for SPAM.

8. Be careful where you post your e-mail address. In chat rooms or news groups, for example, anyone could quickly grab your e-mail address. We recommend that when you need to post or send your e-mail that you send it to a specific person or setup a temporary e-mail account as explained in number 4.

9. Send an e-mail with the e-mail header to the ISP or web host of the user who is sending you the spam. Below is a short list of some of these e-mails.

abuse@aol.com - File a complaint against an AOL users.
abuse@hotmail.com - File complaints for MSN and Hotmail e-mail addresses.
abuse@geocities.com - File complaints against Geocities users.
abuse@sprint.net - File complaints against Sprint users.
abuse@usa.net - File complaints against USA.NET users.
Yahoo abuse form or abuse@yahoo.com - File complaints against Yahoo users.

As can be seen in the above examples, it is common for the e-mail to file complaints to be "abuse", "postmaster", or "spam" @ the domain name. It is also important to realize that a spammer may spoof an e-mail address making it look as if it is coming from a domain that it really is not coming from.

10. Send a full copy of SPAM or deceptive e-mail including the e-mail header to uce@ftc.gov. The FTC uses the unsolicited emails stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam email.

11. Check with your Internet Service Provider for their SPAM policy. Many Internet Service Providers may already have SPAM blocking mechanisms in place and may even allow you to forward to them the SPAM messages you receive, helping prevent the same types of e-mail reaching you in the future.

12.Finally, consider changing your e-mail address and/or getting another e-mail address and only letting friends, family, or the people you want e-mails from know about the new address.

In 2008, the battle had raged between the two document formats like ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML Microsoft. The editor, after a turbulent and controversial, had obtained the standardization of its format.

In addition, Microsoft pledged to support in its Office applications, files saved in the ODF. In late April, the editor included this support in Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. However, the open format struggling to integrate the application of Microsoft because of some bugs.

Beginning in May, Rob Weir, in charge of ODF at IBM (a competitor of Microsoft), issued the first criticism about the quality of format support in Excel 2007 SP2. He is simply impossible to save a file in Excel 2007 ODF compatible with other applications that support the open format.

Then in the Open Document Format Alliance criticize support for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007 to SP2. The association notes and spreadsheets in ODF saved in Google Docs, KSpread, Symphony and OpenOffice do not open properly in Excel 2007.

The Open Document Format Alliance are several other shortcomings including lack of support encryption (password protection) ODF in Office 2007 files, and monitoring changes in the documents.

Finally, the association regrets that Microsoft has not included native support for ODF to earlier versions of Office, including Office 2003, the most popular among users. For these editions of the suite, interoperability with ODF requires installing a plugin (OpenXML / ODF Translator or Sun Plug-In 3.0).