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• Your first task in preparing for a BPOS deployment is to ensure platform compatibility with all client devices. On the software side, the operating system is simple enough: Windows XP (Professional or Tablet Edition, both SP2), Windows Vista (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, or Home, all SP1), or MacOS X 10.5. (For those curious about domain attachment under Vista Home, BPOS doesn’t sync its login and password with the Windows Domain, keeping authentication separate from the OS.) You’ll also need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 on Windows systems and Java client 1.4.2 or newer on Macs. For browsers, Microsoft recommends at least Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3.1.2 (on OS X), or Firefox 3, although Firefox won’t support the Microsoft Online Services Sign In tool. Email clients must be Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008, and the platform supports Windows Mobile 6, Nokia E and N series, and iPhone (firmware 2.0) handsets. For hardware, practically any system made in the last five years will do. All you need for Vista is a machine with at least a 1 GHz Pentium and 1GB of RAM, and for Windows XP you’ll want at least a 500 MHz Pentium and 256MB of RAM. That’s the easy part. Now, if your company employs a firewall or proxy server, you’ll likely have some port tweaking to do, so we recommend you consult the TechNet document. Scroll down this page and you’ll also find a description of how to compute the network bandwidth required by different BPOS applications. For medium or larger companies, this can be a serious consideration since all of the network traffic for messaging that had previously been confined to the high-speed LAN is now going to flow through gateways and over slower conduits into the Internet cloud. The good news is that you probably don’t need to assess your full bandwidth needs right out of the gate. Very few businesses decide to turn their entire operation over to BPOS en masse on day one. A more likely course would be to take a large workgroup or division and start them on BPOS, learn from their deployment and usage, then expand the installation base in stages.  If you’re still undecided about BPOS and what it will require from you in terms of management, give the 30-day free trial a spin. You can get a full-featured, 20-license, totally no-charge eval from mocp.microsoftonline.com.

• There are various options under the FreeAgent product line: Pro, Desktop, Go and Go Small. The Pro offers up to 750 GB capacity, modular exchangeable interfaces, a synchronization solution and a six-month free trial for 500 MB of additional online backup storage. Pro is a desktop version, which cannot be upgraded with Firewire and doesn't carry eSATA. The FreeAgent Go Small is based on a 1" hard drive and offers 12 GB. Seagate's FreeAgent Go, which we received, is a stylish new 2.5" based external hard drive. It comes with a USB 2.0 interface, using a Momentus 5,400 RPM hard drive. There is not much to say about the hardware: It's a plain, straightforward 2.5" storage product with a USB 2.0 cables that offers two connectors for the sake of providing sufficient energy to the drive. A single 500 mA USB 2.0 connector might not be capable of supplying enough power to spin up the drive. Seagate applies a real-time 256 bit AES encryption and provides a whopping five-year warranty on all FreeAgent drives. The enclosure is black with an orange bottom and Seagate logo and it is stylish enough to attract attention at your next business meeting. The stand-out feature is the FreeAgent technology, which is based on what you might already know as U3. FreeAgent, however, is based on Ceedo. It is designed to install applications onto the external storage device (not onto the host PC), so they can be available on every host PC. In other words, FreeAgent is all about "portable software." The FreeAgent manager program is located on a separate partition on the drive, which mounts as an optical drive (read-only). The manager starts automatically as soon as the storage device is plugged into a free USB 2.0 port. It requires Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4, Windows XP or Windows Vista, but you need a rather recent Ceedo version in order to run it on Vista (our FreeAgent Go 160 GB worked fine with Vista Enterprise). Software has to be compatible to work with FreeAgent devices. This means that applications need to be designed to write their program information into the Windows registry, and to clean up their traces when the FreeAgent device is removed. Ceedo can also be purchased separately on the Ceedo Website at http://www.ceedo.com/.

• We all know that in The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader 'freezes' Han Solo in a block of carbonite. Beyond being a storage method for bounty hunters like Boba Fett, Carbonite apparently can be used for PC storage too - that is, if you use the Carbonite service. Carbonite is a backup online storage service, plain and simple; it's not for sharing or media streaming. Though there is an online account area on the Carbonite website, it's mostly for basic account management tasks. The real magic of Carbonite, and the bulk of all backup and restore functionality, resides in the downloadable client application. Carbonite offers an easy setup after downloading. Instead of forcing its defaults on you automatically, like IDrive, Carbonite gives you a choice of backing up My Documents and Desktop, or a manual selection. Thanks to integration with the Windows shell, manual selection is very intuitive: Carbonite lets you back up any file anywhere on your PC simply by right clicking the object, selecting Carbonite, and clicking on Back This Up. Carbonite also adds colored dots to your files and folders to indicate their backup status: a green dot means it's backed up, yellow means it is pending, and no dot means no backup. The Carbonite backup is intended to be synchronized with your local PC, meaning that the service keeps the latest version of a file and not multiple copies. Also beware that if you delete a file from your system that had previously been backed up on Carbonite, that file will be deleted on Carbonite after 30 days. Though Carbonite does not offer true continuous data protection - in the sense of backing up files as soon as they are modified - it can come close. Carbonite may back up a file as soon as 10 minutes after it was created, though as a matter of policy, Carbonite claims that they will only pledge to back up data once every 24 hours. Unlike IDrive-E, there isn't any granular bandwidth throttling option. The only option you get is to set Carbonite for 'Low Priority', which is supposed to use somewhat less than your full upload bandwidth capability. For folder and file restoration, Carbonite doesn't leave you blind (that's another Han Solo reference, by the way.) The mapped Carbonite drive shows what folders and files you've backed up, and you can simple drag and drop to restore. The Carbonite service is linked to an individual PC license, so if you want to back up more than one PC, you'll need to pay more. It also does not enable you to back up networked drives, so if you've got a backup USB storage device and you want to back up your backup, you're out of luck. Also, unlike all of the other services tested in this review, the free trial is time limited: you only get 15 days to use the service for free. Carbonite also does not include a proper uninstall option, so if you decide against Carbonite, you'll have to use the Windows Add/Remove program to get rid of the application.