Small Business Tech

By James E. Gaskin

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James E. Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles, and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area. Gaskin has been helping small and medium sized businesses use technology intelligently since 1986. Contact him.

This column is also available as an e-mail newsletter.

My commands as 'Small Business Technology King for a Day': 10/28/09; Not long ago, someone asked what I would do if I were a government czar on small business, like the czar on the auto industry. I'm taking this further and proclaiming myself Small Business Technology King for a Day. While I wish my edicts were the law of the land, sadly, I am without the dungeons necessary to enforce my rulings. So take these "edicts" as free consulting for best practices in how small businesses can get the most value for their technology dollar.
Can't We All Just Get Along and Collaborate?: 10/21/09; Mindjet's new Catalyst application turns your browser into an all-hands meeting place, and once the brainstorming stops, LiquidPlanner's project management tool helps turn ideas into reality.
Clouds Now Strong Enough To Support Your Business: 10/07/09; Technology makes life easier for small businesses, even if you can't see that while cursing your personal computer for some problem or another today. Not only have hardware costs dropped by an order of magnitude over the past two decades, you can now run your business quite well without any hardware beyond one laptop or netbook for every employee. The fuzzily-named “cloud” can support your business without any local hardware. And when you do want local hardware appliances, they should be tied into the cloud as well for disaster recovery support.
Backup Here, Backup There, Backup Everywhere: 09/29/09; Nag, nag, nag is what I feel like sometimes when talking about backups, but I'm compelled to help people in spite of themselves. The bottom line is simple: lose data, lose dollars. When you talk about some type of disaster, such as fire or theft of your computer hardware, the survival rate for stricken companies without disaster recovery tools and good backups drops into the “hope and prayer” realm of IT management. So lets talk about ways to insulate your company from disaster by playing like the Boy Scouts and being prepared.
PBworks puts the Wiki in the office and the courtroom: 09/23/09; The last time I mentioned PBworks, the grown up version of early wiki pioneer PBwiki, it had just released some task management tools. The company, still busy, has added two major improvements in the last few months: tools for lawyers and their support teams, and another that amounts to the first intelligent use of social networking for inside businesses.
Getting meetings right: 09/16/09; Bad meetings kill efficiency and morale. TimeBridge's promise to transition from a meeting coordination service to helping “busy professionals run great meetings” might be a step in the right direction
Wi-Fi Fans Have Their Say: 09/09/09; So many people commented and sent e-mail about last week's column on Wi-Fi I had to check and make sure I didn't accidentally insult Apple or claim Linux was better than Windows. Nope, I just said Wi-Fi wasn't always the best way to network. Nobody disagreed with my assertions that Wi-Fi runs slower and is less secure than wired networks, but many readers suggested the Wi-Fi train is the way to the future, so I should hop on. All aboard?
The Wacky World of WiFi: 09/02/09; In honor of the 802.11n WiFi standard getting close to arriving after wandering through the desert for 40 years, let's look at wireless. Our focus today is on helping you WiFi better, even if it means doing less WiFi.
Technology Tuneup for Fall: 08/26/09; The fall season for making the green starts now, particularly if you're in retail or connected in a big way to retail, which the majority of small businesses are. So let's check out your backup, your collaboration abilities with customers and suppliers, and any new equipment you may need. Oh, and don't worry about Windows 7 yet.
Three tips for more effective e-mailing: 08/19/09; E-mail leads the deluge of information for most workers. So let's deal with the deluge, use addressing fields correctly, and look at e-mail writing from the bottom up.
Paper, Paper, Everywhere, Nor Any Piece to Trash: 08/12/09; According to Parade magazine, paper consumption in the US peaked in 1999. But although paper use may be trending down, most companies still deal with pounds upon pounds of paper every day. Let's look at three ways to better create, send, receive and retrieve paper and the information thereon.
Three Software As A Service Resellers: 08/05/09; Some people complain because SaaS (Software As A Service) applications can't be customized to suit their needs. Of course small businesses have never had the ability to change applications like Microsoft Office, but help abounds for companies wanting installation and configuration support. Now a growing number of SaaS resellers and consultants offer the same level of support for hosted applications. Let's look at help available for Google Apps, HyperOffice and InfoStreet's StreetSmart.
To Tape or Not to Tape, That Is The Question: 07/29/09; Mention Shakespeare and everyone spouts “To be or not to be.” Mention backup, and the question becomes, “To tape or not to tape?” Is tape dead, or do tape-based backup systems still have a place in the modern small business?
Data Leak Prevention On The Cheap: 07/22/09; You may wonder if DLP is the updated version of RUN-DMC, but what it really stands for is Data Loss Prevention. Some call it “Data Leak Prevention” to emphasize that important company data often “leaks” away through no malicious action. But as compliance regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and FRCP multiply like acronym rabbits, more and more companies must take steps to stop data from leaving their business, whether it's lost, leaked or stolen.
Seven Ways to Improve Your E-mail Messages: 07/15/09; You are judged by the writing style, tone, language, and mistakes in your e-mails every single day. We're all so optimistic we believe people will overlook our e-mail typos and mistakes, while at the same time we privately label those who send us sloppy e-mails as careless, confused, or ineffective. A free e-mail service, GMX, did a survey and found the majority of Americans (58 percent) think less of people based on their e-mail content. Let's look at seven ways to help your e-mails label you as smart rather than stoopid.
Less venture capital and more 'mentor capital': 07/08/09; Growing companies need many things, including passion, drive, focus, money, and luck. One of the other things they need is guidance from an experienced advisor or three, for help avoiding potholes on the road to profit and success. Finding successful executives with relevant expertise isn't easy, however, which prompted a group named SageCreek Partners to offer what it calls "mentor capital" rather than venture capital.
Choosing Between Netbooks and Notebooks: 07/01/09; What goes up must come down, and lately what's coming down are netbooks, as more and more articles talk about the compact computers disappointing customers. However, we can't blame netbooks for that. We can only blame vendors who overhype and customers who underbuy. Before you buy a smaller, cheaper and less powerful netbook, determine if you need a notebook instead. If so, you can spend about the same money and get more power, albeit in a larger package.
Do Telephone Calls over the Internet Still Confuse You?: 06/24/09; VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is a terrible acronym but a great technology. But the industry thinks many people still believe many “myths” about running telephone traffic over the Internet. If Internet telephones don't work in your situation, that's one thing, but don't let old information keep you from leveraging new services and cost savings.
Why Is the PC vs. Mac war still raging?: 06/17/09; Macs vs. PCs vs. Linux arguments are dominating two mailing lists I'm on. The vitriol may be slightly less than in the past, but many of the same attitudes exist with subjective arguments trumping logic on both sides.
Digital Literacy: Buzzword or Job Requirement?: 06/10/09; Graduation season just finished and the air still rings with bad advice given to bored students. Calls for “digital literacy” filled many auditoriums as speakers unclear on the concept tried to hype technologies such as Twitter without understanding the technical details they struggled to explain. That made me wonder what people mean when they say digital literacy, because I can think of a dozen definitions. So I asked around, and my suspicions were confirmed: if you demand digital literacy for your employees, be prepared to define exactly what you expect.
Project Manager Gets Social, Social App Gets Organized: 06/03/09; LiquidPlanner is adding more collaboration tools to its online project management application because people, not tasks, create most of the problems in project management. And PBworks is adding task management tools to its wiki (originally PBwiki) because when people collaborate, they usually have shared tasks to accomplish. It looks like these Software-As-A-Service companies are meeting in the middle, but really they are just pulling good features from each other's bag of tricks.
Transferring Files Without E-mail: 05/27/09; E-mail and the Mazda Miata are both great examples of successful products, but they share a similar weakness: neither can carry much baggage. If you want to carry two people in a Miata, you're good. But if each of those folks has a big suitcase, you’re in trouble. And if you want to send a file via e-mail that's more than a few megabytes in size, you also need another option. Say hello to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and the new ways you can use one of the oldest Internet protocols.
Adventures in e-mail marketing: 05/20/09; A writer's group I belong to wants to put on a conference this summer. Since I've written about two of the leading e-mail marketing services, Constant Contact and VerticalResponse, I volunteered to manage the messaging process and send out the e-mails. It's been interesting, meaning there's both good and bad details to report, but mostly good in that the messaging part of my job was pretty easy. The non-technical parts got a bit wonky, however, and I have three lessons to pass on.
Full Disk Encryption Comes to Workgroups: 05/13/09; Losing your laptop can be expensive in three ways. First, you'll spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to replace the hardware. Second, you'll suffer the time and aggravation of restoring your data, all the while hoping you have everything backed up properly. But most expensive? Surviving the backlash and legal consequences of losing customer data, financial records and private company information.
More e-mail for less money: 05/07/09; There is no recession if you're a certified and experienced Microsoft Exchange administrator. Headhunters tell me these techs are earning up to the $100,000 in some parts of the country. So if you or your management have been avoiding hosted e-mail because those services cost money and the belief around your shop is e-mail is free, think again. Then take another look at hosted e-mail services in general, and hosted Exchange services in particular.