Small Business Software

"If you aren't paying attention, this could be you." is the tagline of FiltrBox. What is FiltrBox?
Filtrbox helps us identify changes in the market that are key indicators of potential business so we can more accurately focus our business development efforts. Filtrbox G2, designed to deliver critical market intelligence to executives, sales professionals, investors and marketers. Filtrbox G2 delivers more value and performance than ever before, providing unlimited usage for half the price of previous versions.

You can read more about what can FiltrBox do to help Small Business Owners here --> Filtrbox Provides Market Intelligence for the Rest of Us!

Just about the biggest small-business news out of Apple at Macworld Expo - which opened today in San Francisco - is a whole lot of improvements to its iWork software suite.

iWork '09 is a set of integrated software applications that's the main commercial competitor to Microsoft Office on the Mac. If your business' focus is seamless compatibility with Microsoft Office for Windows, then you'll want to stay with Microsoft 2008 for Mac. Although iWork '09 offers file format compatibility with Microsoft Office, in a mixed company, it's best to use the same applications cross-platform as much as possible.

However, if you're looking for the best darned business productivity apps for the Mac, bar none, then you should take a serious look at iWork '09.

Now, considering that I've only seen iWork '09 - but haven't use it personally - what I'm going to describe is based on Apple's documentation. (There is a free trial available, and I look forward to testing it out.) The price of iwork remains really low, compared to Microsoft Office: $49 when if you buy it along with a new Mac, or $79 otherwise. That's an incredible bargain for a commercial-grade application suite.

The three main applications in iWork are Pages (which is a cross between Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher), Numbers (similar to Microsoft Excel) and Keynote (similar to Microsoft PowerPoint).

Source: bMighty.com

Liz McCann have written about this Sneakernet and I was intrigued what this sneakernet all about.

'Sneakernet' is a term that I was first introduced to during a conversation with one of our customers - Ed Metz, vice president and director of technical services at Robert Berning Productions, a creative communications and marketing solutions agency. As he explained, back in 2003 the company with a total of 13 employees at the time was suffering from 'sneakernet'.

So what is it? In Ed's words it was the very manual process of walking down the hall to pick up a form, fill it out, go downstairs, deliver the order to the production staff, and then walk back upstairs, bringing one copy to the department supervisor and finally one copy to bookkeeping? You get the point.

You can read more about this post after the jump. Read more.

Tomoye Communities for SharePoint helps to break down content silos sometimes found in Sharepoint through publishing content into cross-enterprise communities. Organizations can also more easily leverage SharePoint content beyond the walls of the enterprises. You get the social view of content rather than the data view. Their Community Taxonomy allows for thematic based navigation to aggregate all of the different people, knowledge and conversations within an enterprise. You can look across themes rather than repositories.

Tomoye provides a question and answer feature that can be used to generate ROI evidence as well as stickiness in communities. People can ask questions and about the depth and breath of the impact of enterprise 2.0 implementations and document the results. These Tomoye questions and answers are available by mobile, email and within the community itself.

Check out more of Bill Ives post after the jump. Read more.

I found this SAAS post by Anita Campbell in TheAppGap and I find it really interesting. Below is the excerpt of about the Jing Project Screencast.

I've been using one service, Jing Project, to record small bits of information and instructions for my virtual staff, who are scattered in remote locations. Sometimes you just need to "show" someone how to do something, especially anything that involves computer software or websites. It's easier to demonstrate what to do, all the while talking verbally, using your cursor or tools to highlight, and explaining what you are doing real time. After all, show-and-tell is most likely how you would train an employee if he or she worked in your office.

Read more about Using Jing Project Screencast for Training and you'll surely get valuable inputs from there.

Here's an alarming news brought to us by Anita Campbell, one of the contributors of TheAppgap.

I don't know about you, but I'm a big user of free online applications - everything from Netvibes, to GMail, to FeedBurner to Twitter. You could say that I run a significant chunk of my business on free apps.

So it was with a twinge of horror that I read this piece by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal about having his GMail account disabled today with no advance warning:

Google, I am a very lucky American who is living the dream of owning or being a partner in several small businesses. Each of these businesses utilize Google's GMail and Google Docs, in an effort to cut down on infrastructure costs and keep an open stream of communication between all employees, contractors and clients.

Since Google has decided to take my account away from me, the nucleus of our company communications has been taken away and now is replaced by a black hole. My small business communications are now ruined until my account is reestablished.

An even bigger problem is that Google now combines all the Google services you use under a single account. That means that more than his email is affected. Loren is not able to use his Google Analytics account nor his Google AdSense account, either, while the account is disabled.

You can read more about this news from TheAppGap

Bangalore: US computer giant International Business Machines Corp said on Wednesday it has opened a cloud computing centre in Bangalore that could be used by its customers to run pilot projects.

IBM sets sights on smaller firms

The company said if any of the customers wanted to build cloud computing capability after the pilot project, IBM would set up the infrastructure.

IBM unveils new software

In India, the targeted sectors for this technology are government organisations, large educational institutions and the communications industry, which includes content providers, Internet service providers and telecom companies, IBM said.

More India business stories

Cloud computing allows better provisioning, monitoring and reporting of IT resources, said Pankaj Sinha, Program Director, Lab Services and Solutions, IBM Software Group.

He said to have an application running, one must have the right operating system, middleware and the right application configured, which is generally done manually. In cloud computing, the entire software stack is installed and configured through automated means.

Cloud computing also provides real time monitoring on how resources are being used, he said.

It also enables better server utilisation because it helps to manage the capacity much more efficiently. Also, because it is automated, system administration task is made easier, he added.

P. Gopalakrishnan, Vice-President, India Software Labs, said cloud computing could be used by small and medium businesses as well as larger enterprises.

He said for the smaller businesses, it would break the affordability barrier. As they would get into the software as a service model, they would not need to invest heavily in technology.

He said the larger enterprises at times retain some of their core applications in-house. He said even the applications retained in-house could benefit from cloud computing.

Looking for partners

Gopalakrishnan said the company are looking to partner with IT companies who would be using IBM's platform to offer software as a service. He said IBM would work not only with large IT companies but also with smaller vendors who have small and medium customers.

IBM said it would work closely with an ecosystem of partners. The company said its core strength lies in its technology base, and some of the domain knowledge would come from the partners.

More India business stories

Gopalakrishnan said the cloud computing market is in early stages and it is difficult to say how big it is. He said large scale of usage is yet to come, but added that the ramp-up would be rapid in the years to come.

At the sidelines of the press briefing, Shanker Annaswamy, Regional General Manger, IBM India, said the company has not seen any slowdown in its business in India so far.

Source: IBM opens cloud computing centre

Announced in June, the T-Suite platform was pilot-tested with a few customers in July and Telstra says it will launch a beta by the end of the year.

T-Suite will offer a range of SaaS-style software, including email, customer relationship management, collaboration, financial applications and security products, as well as online storage.

Small businesses were the target market, according to Telstra Business executive director Charles Agee, a former IBM executive brought in by Telstra chief Sol Trujillo to drive the program.

Mr Agee defined small business as between one and 200 employees and said there were about 1 million businesses in Australia fitting that profile.

"We see the sweet spot for T-Suite as businesses with between five and 20 people," he said.

SaaS-style software has been around for a while in Australia from outlets such as Salesforce.com, SAP and local operators such as PK Business Advantage, but has yet to achieve mass penetration, especially in the small business sector - the natural market for online software. Mr Agee said poor distribution was the factor holding back SaaS and Telstra's wide-ranging distribution was the driver that would differentiate T-Suite. Telstra has not yet locked in its SaaS suppliers and will conduct a pitch fest over the next couple of months.

SaaS pioneer Salesforce.com was in discussions with Telstra, according to marketing vice-president Andrew Knott.

A number of revenue models are under consideration, including Telstra taking a slice of the profit margin, revenue sharing and advertising deals.

It is likely there will be a wide range of products including several customer relationship management packages, and that Telstra will provide unified billing for everything on offer and a concierge-type call centre service for solving problems.

"Telstra will front-end all the problems for the business customers," said Mr Agee, at the Mediaconnect Influence Forum 2008, held over the weekend in NSW's Hunter Valley.

Software suppliers and price lists were still to be decided, Mr Agee said, but a single CRM seat would cost about $14.95 a month.

The beta was designed to bring on about 100 pilot customers, Mr Agee said, leading to a customer base "in the thousands" in the first 12 months of operation.

T-Suite will sell over the web and through the T-Suite suppliers' existing sales channel structure. Mr Agee expected some sales coming straight from the T-Suite web page, but more from the channel.

Stuart Kennedy traveled to the Hunter Valley as a guest of Mediaconnect

Source: Australian IT News

Sage Group plc. should be thankful because I'll be featuring them here for FREE. Well, why? Simply because they already have made really good reputation in providing business solutions.

Here's a wiki information about SAGE.

Sage is a leading supplier of business management software and services to 5.7 million customers worldwide. From small start-ups to larger organisations, we make it easier for companies to manage their business processes.

Our range of business software and services is continually evolving as we constantly innovate. The range includes software to manage your businesses finances, run the payroll, manage customer and supplier relationships, plan the business and support your HR function. In the UK, we provide software and services to over 760,000 small and medium-sized businesses.

This software ranges from accounts, payroll, forecasting and business intelligence to customer relationship management, e-business and help for start-ups.

Our services include Excel Support, HR Advice, Health and Safety Advice and training courses. In addition, our award-winning SageCover service provides help for customers when they need it.