Palm Pre continues to impress

It has certainly been a busy few weeks, but now the IT Blog Awards are out of the way we can get back normal, and more importantly get back to business. I finally got my hands on the Palm update to WebOS 1.3 and it seems to have had a mild effect on the device (it only took about 10 minutes to download and install over the air) – and the applications in the App Store are growing in number so it looks pretty rosy on the Pre front at the moment.

The unified email section showing unread emails from my ever-growing number of email accounts is becoming a life saver (though I am now using my mobile devices much more than ever) – I can imagine this mechanism becoming an important tool when tied into network management for receiving infrastructure alerts.

Talking of network infrastructure management, for getting a good overview of the network, and monitoring its behaviour, I have been taking a look at the beta release of Spiceworks 4.5, which adds a number of new features including a speed increase as well as taking the first steps to adding that all-important green IT functionality through the PC power consumption plug-in (such as being able to schedule network devices to shutdown). I have been a keen follower of Spiceworks since its early version 1.5 and it has come a long way and proving to be extremely helpful when dealing with network issues.

Network downtime can lead to critical issues, and can be caused by critical issues, so it is well worth including in your business continuity plan. Getting information out to people during critical times is still not as easy as it should be but hopefully with the Microsoft Vine project we are starting to see the first early steps towards providing an information communication system that will really help during times of emergency. The ability to post reports and send and receive alerts in a consistent way with emergency contacts could be a real time-, and life-, saver so I can't wait to see the beta version become available in the UK.