Special report: Web-hosted office suites, it appears, are here for good. Some customers have benefited greatly from them already. “Thousands of organizations, large and small, are researching and implementing hosted office suites as alternatives to pricier, traditional options, like Microsoft Office, designed to live in PC hard drives,” Juan Carlos Perez of the IDG News Service reports. “While ‘fools rush in’ mistakes are bad, an even worse decision regarding the SaaS model is ignoring it.” And as SaaS keep catching on, the same goes for Microsoft, according to executive editor Eric Knorr in Indecision in Redmond as Web apps charge. “If Microsoft fails to act decisively much longer, some Redmond careers might be shortened.” The package Web apps lock horns with Microsoft Office also includes a review of eXpresso, a hosted service for Excel file sharing. Notes from the field: Online dating has gone spammy, Cringely declares in reference to Quechep.com. The U.K.-based dating/social networking site has been “surreptitiously squeezing” email addresses out of visitors by forcing anyone who signs up to share their address book and then promptly and without requesting permission sending “an invite from you to everyone in your book — making you look like a nasty purveyor of pork.” From the Test Center: Dell adds the MD3000i iSCSI storage array to its lineup this week. “Setting up the array didn’t take long,” Mario Apicella writes. It’s got some “smart features,” but the management GUI, “while helpful, doesn’t cover all the possible administrative tasks.” And it doesn’t have load-monitoring applets, though it does bring “1GB of mirrored, battery protected cache that helps to boost performance and shelters data from sudden power shut-offs.” Read the full review. Gripe Line: Restocking fees for returned items are typically a nuisance, but little more. “A reader recently encountered an unpleasant variation on that theme. In order to get an RMA number to replace an in-warranty Sapphire video card, he was required to pay an RMA ‘processing fee’ amounting to more than a third of the original purchase price,” Ed Foster reports in this entry. “If you can charge an RMA processing fee of $15 for a $40 product, how many customers are actually going to bother trying to get a warranty replacement? And perhaps that’s the whole idea from Sapphire’s point of view.” Software Development