The Road Ahead

Everything comes to an end, and after 12 years Microsoft will cease support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014. At first glance, this might not seem important. Computers running Windows XP will not magically cease to work on the 8th, but they will become progressively more vulnerable to attack and security breaches as Microsoft will no longer release security updates and patches.

If you are still using Windows XP, you now have less than a month to upgrade or replace your operating system.

Before purchasing the latest version of Windows, compare the system requirements of Windows 8.1 with that of your computer. Computer hardware has changed significantly in the past 12 years and upgrading to Windows 8.1 may not be possible with your current hardware.

If a Windows upgrade is not a viable proposition, then there are alternatives. One common route is switching from Windows to Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is free to download and install and unless you absolutely require Windows or Microsoft Office, it is a reliable alternative that includes the LibreOffice Suite. A guide on how to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu may be found in this month's PcPro magazine.

After 8th April, we will only offer support for customers still using Windows XP on a case-by-case basis.

Microsoft .NET Framework v4.5 is now available for all web hosting packages. Existing customers may use the framework by updating the compilation tag in your ASP.Net application's web.config to something like:

The Hosting Control Panel may not show ASP.Net 4.5 as a selectable framework within the Website Properties page. As long as you set the selected ASP.Net framework to version 4.0 and use the compilation tag described above, your application should use the new framework.

We do still support .Net Framework v1 albeit on a case-by-case basis. If you wish to use .NET Framework 1, please contact support for assistance.

If you require any additional information or have a question, please please contact support for assistance.

Microsoft Exchange 2013 is now the default messaging service for new customers. With Hosted Exchange 2013, you get the latest technology, a better way to share email, calendars and contact information and easier mailbox setup.

For existing customers, we can still add Exchange 2010 mailbox now and into the foreseeable future.

At the beginning of January we made a few changes to our spam or junk mail filters. Although there have been great strides in dealing with spammers, around 57% of messages received by our servers are identified as being spam.

Although we do intercept and delete a substantial proportion of spam before it is even delivered to individual customer mailboxes, there are some messages that do not quite meet the automatic deletion threshold. These messages are readily identifiable as our filters insert the text [SPAM] into the message's subject.

To make life a little simpler, we've made a small change to all mailboxes. From the beginning of 2013, any spam message that is delivered to a mailbox will now be placed within a new SPAM folder. As there is the possibility that a valid message may be identified as being spam - a false-positive - we recommend that all customers check the contents of the spam folder regularly.

This change only affects our standard mailbox customers. Customers with Hosted Exchange mailboxes have a different spam filtering system.

For more information, please read the knowledgebase article Where is my spam or junk mail.

We will be performing some maintenance work to our mail services from around 22:00 to 00:00 tonight (10th January 2014). This work will involve a short period of downtime for all mail services.

If you require any further information, please contact us at helpdesk.calzadamedia.com