Albion are delighted to announce the opening of their new iStore in Basingstoke.

Situated in Festival Place Basingstoke, Hampshire's largest shopping centre. The iStore from Albion is the perfect place to explore the full Apple range from Mac's to iPods and all those must have accessories. With everything on display and all staff trained to Apple Product Professional status you can be sure not only of excellent service but also expert advice.

The imminent release of the iPhone 2 has caused massive interest across the board but this time around Apple have placed a lot of emphasis on the features that make it great for business users.

Albion have announced the launch of iMail which is being made available at the same time as the iPhone 2 in early July.

iMail from Albion is a hosted service for business workgroups providing email, shared

calendar, shared contacts, shared documents and instant messaging for Mac, Windows and Linux users.

iMail allows the new iPhone to completely sync over the air remotely with email, calendars, and contacts that users normally access from their Mac or windows computers. Push email, remote shared calendar and contacts sync is now a slick and efficient reality across Mac, Windows and iPhone users.

Virtualization company Parallels has introduced Parallels server for Mac, software that lets users run virtual servers on any Intel Mac.

"Parallels Server for Mac opens the door for virtualization on Apple servers and represents an important step in delivering on our 'Optimized Computing' vision by adding hypervisor-based server virtualization," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "Parallels Server for Mac will be a catalyst in driving Mac server adoption in the enterprise, as it is the first product ever to enable IT professionals and developers to capitalize on the power of OS X Server while keeping the flexibility to run Windows and Linux workloads."

Looks like everyone is using modern technology to improve the backup process. For home users Apple's new "Time capsule" is a neat little box containing a WiFi base station and a hard drive. When used with "Time Machine" backup software found in the latest Leopard operating system users around the home automatically have their data backed up. For business users Albions internet based online backup has been well received over the past few months. Seems like everyone is taking data security seriously at last.

Office 2008 finally ships with a host of new features and templates designed to make life easier for users of this heavyweight application suite. There's also a special Media Edition which comes with Microsoft Expression Media - a digital asset management suite that will help media-crazed users import, annotate, organise, archive, search, and distribute their media files. The upgrade and transition path is as always a little complicated but there are some fantastic deals to be had by buying the old version and then upgrading. Call the Albion account team to get the details.

Apple have announced the world's thinnest note book including a full-size backlit keyboard and 13.3-inch widescreen display. On the inside, it boasts an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory and amazing wireless capabilities.

Weighting in at a mere 3lbs it should alleviate the chore of lugging a traditional laptop around for the more mobile among us.

At the IfraExpo Conference in Vienna in October Quark will launch a major update to it QPS (Quark Publishing system) collaborative workflow Êsystem. The software already in use by major publishers and newspapers will see a host of new and enhanced features aimed at improving production by streamlining editorial and creative workflow processes.

The software has been completely reengineered based on open standard technologies, such as Java and Service Oriented Architecture.

Apple's much anticipated new iPod range including the revolutionary iTouch has finally come into stock. The products are being snapped up at an alarming rate creating occasional shortages although it is hoped there will be a steady supply up to and through the holiday period to ensure few go away disappointed.

Realising the huge variety of ways in which businesses support their internal IT systems Albion have now released a modular support package enabling organisation to build a support package that exactly meets their needs whilst complementing any internal support a business may have. Customers can now choose a variety of support from a simple hardware fix contract right through to a fully managed services including all internet and telephony.

The free Microsoft Office competitor called Open Office is now very near it's release date. Whilst it may still lack some key feature the developers are hoping to include these in subsequent versions.

Not only is the product free it also hopes to offer a true alternative to those that feel they are bogged down by the Microsoft product's ever increasing feature set.

A new web site has been published by Microsoft offering Mac users a look at new features for Office 2008.

These include simplification and automation of common tasks in Word, new formatting options and a new publishing layout . Excel gets a boost with new chart building features and thereÕs a new diary function called My Day allowing users to keep on top of their list of Tasks.

Albion have recently launched the latest vision of its File Transfer solution offering a simple but effective method of transferring large files across the internet without the complexity usually found in traditional FTP servers.

At the heart of the new suite lies Logic Po 8 in itself an update to Apple's professional audio application. Other apps include Main Stage which aims to turn your Mac into a streamlined live rig, Apple's Soundtrack Pro 2 application, used to bridge audio to film and video applications; Studio Instruments, made up of 40 pristine quality instruments; Studio Effects, with 80 professional effect plug-ins; a vast Studio Sound Library; and a powerful set of production utilities.

Apples line is, "Logic Studio offers a comprehensive suite of professional tools for musicians who need to create, produce and perform in the studio and on the stage. For just £319, Logic Studio transforms the Mac into the most powerful musical instrument in the world".

Finally an online back up solution for business that ensures the companies data not only gets stored off site in a secure properly managed environment but also allows instant secure access from any internet connection thereby offering a truly efficient disaster recovery option.

Ensuring a regular, complete and uncorrupt back-up policy of vital data has always been a headache for many businesses and it's usually when the unthinkable happens organisation find that either the back-ups haven't been taking place quite as regularly as they thought or the tapes they were backing up onto were right next to the server that got destroyed in the flood.

Online back up simplifies the whole process and removes the human error factor. It has little effect on an organisations bandwidth requirements as most of the transfer takes place an night when all is quite anyway.