Microsoft has announced that it is shutting down its SharePoint Online Public Websites service, a free Website offering for small and midsize business Office 365 customers. Starting next month, the software company will no longer accept sign-ups for the service. This is a template-driven toolset that enables SMBs to construct a public-facing Website. Features include custom domain names, search engine optimization tools, social media integration and search-friendly URLs. Customers who currently use the feature will have access to it for a minimum of two years. Starting in January new customers will have to subscribe to third-party applications using links from Office 365, according to Microsoft.
Recently, Danny McPherson, the chief security officer of VeriSign, expressed concern about the future security of the Domain Name System, which his company helps to manage and secure. One risk he cited was the continued stability of DNS in an era where domain name collisions are growing. A domain name collision occurs when a publicly reachable top-level domain has the same name as a privately addressable name on a company or carrier network.
Recently, smartphone customer care specialist B2X Care Solutions conducted a survey of 2,500 smartphone and tablet users from the top five smartphone regions globally, including the United States, Germany, Brazil, India and China. It found that consumers in America and China wait less than 24 hours to have their smartphones repaired while in Brazil, India and Germany it takes almost 8 days for the same repair. It also found that customer support and after-sales service were considered very important and were the top criteria when purchasing a new mobile device, followed closely by brand image.
Chris Price, chairman of the technical steering committee for the Open Platform for NFV Project, said the panel is reviewing a broad array of project ideas to see what ones will be pursued by the committee. The project is a 3-month-old open-source effort to develop a reference architecture that will help accelerate the adoption of NFV. In addition, the wider OPNFV community will focus on establishing an integration and baseline platform while also creating several NFV-related projects that will find their way into the OPNFV’s second release of 2015.