Technology News You Can Use
APRIL 2007 – Issue XXV
In This Newsletter
Greetings & Happy Fiesta
As San Antonio comes alive with the sights, sounds, and flavors of Fiesta, I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on the North Chamber Technology Council's upcoming events. I am very excited to announce that the Government Affairs and Technology Councils are hosting US Congressman Lamar Smith. His topic is: "Piracy, Patents and Copyright: A Technology Update". This informative program will take place on Monday, July 2, 2007 at Oak Hills Country Club. There's still time for your company to sponsor the event or buy a table - sign up today! Also, members of the Technology Committee are sharing their knowledge in a new program designed to give a high level briefing on the best IT practices for businesses. The first program, scheduled for June 13th, will specifically target small businesses (those with 25 or fewer employees) and will take place at the North Chamber. Registration is only $10 - and that includes lunch. Seating is limited -- you may want to reserve your space now by registering on the website or calling the North Chamber.
Thanks for your attention; now enjoy the rest of the newsletter!
Zandra Pulis
CPS Energy
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Welcome back to part II and latest saga in the Ink War’s between Hewlett Packard and Eastman Kodak. If you missed last month’s piece, visit www.northsachamber.com , then go to http://www.northsachamber.com/etech_news.php . From this page, you can read any article from previous publications.
So, with the Kodak market entry, it will be interesting to see how the major players in the market will respond. It is rumored that the industry giant, HP, who held 41% of the worldwide $12B inkjet industry in 2005, has already taken steps to strengthen their market share position, but is doing so by taking quite a different approach than Kodak.
Journal Magazine’s January 2007 edition of www.hardcopysuppliesjournal.com reported that Staples confirmed they would be taking their refilled Staples brand name cartridges off the shelf. Speculation is that Staples was being pressured by HP to do so. www.hardcopysuppliesjournal.com quoted Owen Davis, Staples spokesman, as saying this about the move: “Hewlett-Packard continues to rapidly advance its technology in printing systems and ink toner.” Mr. Davis added, “This decision (to remove Staples brand cartridges from stores) offers the best solution to customers and allows Staples to focus its resources on the many other product categories where we can innovate with Staples brand products.
Following that, and in a February 8, 2007 Businessweek.com article2, it was reported that HP was approaching retail chains such as Staples, OfficeMax, and Office Depot and offering them incentives to end selling their lower priced, refilled store-brand products.
Is it true? Well, Look around. We don’t have a Staples store here in
San Antonio
, but we do have Office Depot’s. I visited a number of Office Depot stores last month and found that the Office Depot brand of inkjet and laser toner cartridges have been removed from their shelves. When I asked store managers why they no longer sell the Office Depot brand cartridges they have consistently replied: “It’s an experiment”. I’ve been told that the Office Depot products have been moved to a store location in the southwest part of town until the “experiment” is over. When it is, the store managers I questioned did not have an answer as to what may result.
Well, there you have it. Two, very different responses from Kodak and HP in the inkjet wars. Kodak reducing prices and HP providing incentives to their retailers to remove lower priced, competing product from the retailer’s shelves. What is a consumer to do? I always offer this: “do a little math and save a lot”. Learning what the expected page yield for any given cartridge and then dividing this figure into the purchase price of the cartridge, after tax, gives the buyer a cost-per-page for the ink or toner. You can find the expected page yield on the manufacturers website and it is often listed on retailers’ website such as www.staples.com.
For instance, the most common HP black inkjet cartridge is their #56, which either new or refilled is expected to yield about 450 printed pages with 5% page coverage. At a retail price of $24.86 after tax for a new HP cartridge, this equates to a cost-per-page of $.055 ($24.86 / 450 pages). A refilled cartridge offers a cost-per-page of $.0288 or half, which is the same as the Kodak claim of $.03 a page. If you’re having difficulty imagining what your out of pocket costs may be, think of a ream of paper, which is 500 pages. To print a ream of paper at 5% page coverage, it would require $27.50 of ink used in a new HP #56 or $14.40 of ink in a Kodak refilled HP #56 cartridge. As they say, cavaet emptor!
1 Wall Street
Journal,
February 7, 2007
: “ Kodak’s strategy for First printer: Cheaper Cartridges” by William F. Bulkeley
2 Businessweek.com,
February 8, 2007
: “Rivals Say HP Using Hardball Tactics”, by Steve Hamm
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The stories are all too familiar. Some tragic event takes place and anywhere from a single building to an entire city is decimated. Businesses are then faced with the dubious task to rebuild…or suffer the dire economic impact that results.
No one will ever forget 9/11. Not likely that anyone will ever forget
New Orleans
, post Katrina, either. These are horrible stories that have enormous lessons to be learned. As it pertains to our discussion, the great lesson is to have a Disaster Recovery Plan. I don’t want to take us too far down the road on disaster planning, but we all need to understand that a disaster doesn’t have to be some cataclysmic event. A fire, a failed air conditioner, an ice storm, a street flood – These can be disastrous to a small business.
The business data of small to medium businesses is absolutely critical to the survival of the business. If this data is lost, businesses fail and people lose jobs. A colocation facility can be a place to keep your computer systems, data and servers online and up to date at all times. Dividing your risk between your primary business location and an off-site location, using a colocation facility, means that you will be up and running soon after the emergency passes. We’ve all heard the cliché about keeping all of your eggs in one basket. Don’t be lulled to complacency because you’ve been lucky so far.
Would you wait until after a car accident to buy insurance?
Water and heat are computers worst enemies. Computer systems generate a lot of heat, and without adequate cooling air, they will overheat and crash (data potentially lost!!). If your computer equipment is sitting in a closet somewhere (yes, we know it's you), and you don’t provide adequate cooling in the summer (and adequate colling in winter when everyone has the heat running full tilt), then a colocation facility is worth considering since it has redundant air conditioning… and the power to run it.
So, if your computer equipment is sitting low to the ground, if your office or store is located in a flood plain zone or your location is susceptible to frequent power outages and failed air-conditioning, a colocation facility may be just the solution your business needs to ensure your equipment and data remain safe.
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Continued from last month’s E-Tech News
In today’s modern times, you have likely made one or more purchases online for any number of products. You have also read and watched news programs talking about the sharp rise in credit card fraud, data breaches and data theft of confidential information nationwide.
To combat the rising trend in identity theft, the credit card brands have banded together to create the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). When you company comes in direct contact with credit card data, you must comply to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard to meet the “PCI Compliant” guidelines.
Merchant Levels (Visa)
• Level 4 merchant - anyone who processes less than 20,000 online transactions or less than 1 million “other” transactions
• Level 3 merchant - anyone who processes more than 20,000 online transactions per year
• Level 2 merchant - anyone who processes more than 1 million transactions regardless of channel
• Level 1 Merchant - anyone who processes more than 6 million transactions annually or anyone who has suffered a breach that resulted in loss of cardholder data
The Roadmap to Compliance
I. Start with education
Educate your senior management, your IT and line-of-business management, and your technical staff on how PCI affects them. At the senior management level, PCI has the potential to affect the daily business operations, although in reality, only minor adjustments are required in your customer-facing operations.
II. Measure your current state to determine what work is left to do
Conduct this analysis as a project within your IT department. Using accurate interpretations of PCI, make a determination as to how much work there is to do. Misinterpretation of any of the requirements could result in spending more than is necessary in remediation, or worse, a false sense of compliance. Most PCI auditors have a Gap Analysis (or similar) service to help you determine where your gaps are and create a list of projects that should be executed to remedy those gaps. The service is typically reasonably priced and consists of interviews, documentation reviews and other less-burdensome (when compared to the annual audit exercise) activities to measure your current gaps. Consider this money well-spent as you will be assured of a “right-sized” remediation plan.
III. Execute each project
It is recommended to have high visibility for the compliance effort, meaning senior management oversight or at least Sr. Director-level visibility within the IT department.
IV. “Care and Feeding”
PCI will adapt to new threats and otherwise evolve. It’s important to stay abreast of the latest happenings and to have an on-call resource that can answer your PCI questions.
V. Validate compliance
Last but not least, validation is an ongoing effort with quarterly and annual tasks including onsite audits, self-assessment questionnaires and quarterly security scanning of all Internet-accessible systems and applications.
PCI Compliance is YOUR Responsibility
When it comes to PCI compliance, the ultimate burden rests on the merchant or service provider. If your web site is sufficiently complex or includes any custom code, challenge your Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV) to make sure they’re performing application-level tests. Work to instill the “audit atmosphere” in the IT department. This includes knowing what an auditor will look for, ensuring that the evidence they request is immediately at hand (often before the auditor even asks for it).
A rough timetable for implementing your PCI compliance program follows:
• Quarterly scanning should commence as soon as possible
• Start your gap analysis as soon as possible
• Get plugged into your ongoing PCI support infrastructure as soon as possible
• Begin the annual audit once all of the issues in the gap analysis have been fixed
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Every day small business budgets get stretched thinner and thinner, and often times it is the IT budget that get stretched thinnest. But there is hope! There are low-cost or no-cost business quality alternatives to the painfully expensive software solutions all of us can use to help operate our companies…and within our budgets.
Open Source Software was created in response to high-priced, proprietary, operating systems and applications. What started as a small movement has now become mainstream and mature. The Open Source Software model is based on the notion that the underlying programming for any program should be freely available and distributed. Whether the software is a complete operating system, an office suite or a game; people should be allowed to use, review, correct and make suggestions about how that program works. The advantage is that most open source applications are better reviewed and tested than most commercial applications. When problems are found they are corrected, and corrections are often times distributed more quickly than their counterparts with commercial applications.
One great example of a successful Open Source endeavor is Linux. Linux is an operating system based on UNIX. Linux was released as an Open Source solution and has been in use since its humble beginning’s in the late 1960’s to mainstream use over the past 15 years. In fact, there are many versions of Linux tailored to certain purposes or uses, they are called distributions. Red Hat, Suse and Mandriva are some of the best known and most popular. Over 60% of the web servers in the world run on Linux using Open Source web server software called Apache (source: Serverwatch.com), and it’s not limited to small companies either.
Toyota
and Macy's and other large companies use Linux and Apache to serve their web pages.
On a closer-to-home note, Linux and it’s other available Open Source applications, can be seamlessly integrated as a file server into a Windows domain with no license cost for the software. Yes, that is $0 for software licensing to add a file server to your network regardless of the number of users. There are similar low-cost or no-cost applications such as mail servers that will emulate virtually all the functions of the Microsoft Exchange mail server, (some will even work with Outlook for a truly seamless migration). In addition there are excellent Open Source applications for CRM (customer resource management), PBX (telephone switches), business graphics, backup, office productivity, engineering, and many more.
There are other benefits of using Open Source as well. One is that you won’t be tied to complicated and risky licensing conditions. There have been several cases where companies have been successfully sued over inadvertent violations of software license agreements. For one of the most well known cases, read about what happened to Ernie Ball Guitar Strings when they left copies of licensed software on hand-me-down PCs that went from Engineering to Administration ( http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html ). Even though the ‘illegal’ copies were not being used, Ernie Ball paid $100,000 in fines and legal fees. As a result, they went totally to Linux as have governments and school systems in
Switzerland
,
Australia
,
India
,
Brazil
,
China
and other countries.
You can take a small step into Open Source with virtually no risk and potentially big savings. Some of the most expensive software used in business is the Office Suite. Almost all of us use word processing, spreadsheets or presentation packages every day; and we pay a hefty bill every time we add more users or upgrade the ones we have. One of the best money saving Open Source applications that you could want is Open Office. It is completely free for any purpose. Both Open Office and its low-cost cousin Star Office are owned by Sun Microsystems, one of the largest computer and software companies in the world. These office suites are complete and almost completely compatible with Microsoft Office files. They have word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications like Microsoft Office, and you can save $75 to $400 per user by using Open Office or Star Office instead of Microsoft Office. Open and Star Office even have features that Microsoft Office doesn’t. For example, they will save documents in PDF read-only document format for distribution, without the need to buy Adobe Acrobat at $100 to $400 per copy. So, go to www.openoffice.org and download Open Office. Give Open Source a try and your wallet or purse a break.
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To start out, let me say this series of articles is not meant to bash Blackberries, Palm OS Treo phones or any other device labeled as a Smartphone. What I am going to do is explain what Windows Mobile is and how it works on many of today’s cellular phones. I will explain what they can do for you and how they may fit into your current mobile life style. After these explanations I hope you will understand why I think your next phone should be a Windows mobile phone.
First, let me define what Windows Mobile is, it is an operating system Microsoft makes available for mobile (cellular) phones and PDA’s. There are over 140 devices on the market that use Windows Mobile today. In the world of computers you have companies that make the hardware (Desktops/Laptops) and these hardware manufacturers need an operating system for their computers; this could be Windows, Linux or Apple’s Operating System. Typically (by market share) this is the Windows Operating System, Windows 98, Windows XP or the new Windows Vista. In many ways the cellular phone manufacturers Samsung, Palm, HTC and others must do the same in the world of Smartphone. A Smartphone in the cell phone industry is defined by a phone that does much more (e-mail, music, contact management…) than your basic phone functions. Microsoft has a little different definition of a Smart Phone, I will discuss that later.
Windows Mobile is the Operating System that many cell phone manufacturers are choosing to use on their phones. The current Windows Mobile OS is V5 but you have V6 coming out very soon. Microsoft has developed this Operating System, Windows Mobile, specifically for phone manufacturers to use in their cell phones. This Operating System is meant to function like your Windows based Desktop or Laptop computer. They are by no means identical but the similarities are obvious when you start to use these phones. Here in lies one of the first benefits of a Windows Mobile Device, consistency. We have all had to change cell phones and we have had to learn how to use the new phone which can be very frustrating as you move from one manufacturer to another, for example, Sony to Nokia. With Windows Mobile based phones you get a new phone that works almost exactly the same way as your old Windows Mobile phone. It will probably have some enhancements and new features but the basics work the same, a much smaller learning curve.
What does the Windows Mobile Phone Operating System have that makes you want to invest in one? Much like its big brother Windows XP or
Vista
, it has some basic applications to help you be more productive. These applications include mobile versions of Microsoft Office, Web browser, contact management and many more. I classify these applications into categories of which I will go into details in future articles.
§ Messaging (Email, SMS, MMS)
§ Internet (Browsing, Favorites, IM)
§ Office (
Mobile
Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
§ Organization (Calendar, Contacts, Tasks…)
§ Synchronization (Information exchange with desktop and servers)
§ Entertainment/Education (Music, Video, Books…)
§ Phone & connectivity (Speed dial, WiFi, Bluetooth …)
One misunderstood aspect of the Windows Mobile OS is that there are two versions, one for Microsoft Pocket PC phones and one for Microsoft Smart Phones. The Pocket PC Edition has all the bells and whistles of the Windows Mobile OS. The Microsoft Smartphone version is a subset of the full Windows Mobile OS. The simplest way to tell the difference between the phones is that the Pocket PC Phone uses a touch screen with a Stylus and the Smartphones don't have a touch screen. That difference has to do with the way you interact with the phones. One of the key software differences between the Pocket PC phone Edition and Smartphone Edition is the Mobile Office applications (Mobile Word, Mobile Excel and Mobile PowerPoint). The Smartphone do not ship with these Mobile Office applications. Note, you can add software to Smartphones to allow for similar capabilities.
To conclude, here is a break down of the many styles of Windows Mobile Phone choices that are available to you.
§ Pocket PC Phone with qwerty slide out keyboard
§ Pocket PC Phone with front qwerty keyboard
§ Pocket PC Phone with no keyboard
§ Smartphones with qwerty keyboard
§ Smartphones with phone keypad
§ Smartphones with phone keypad and qwerty slide out keyboard(coming soon)
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Great Googl[e]y Moogly (Part 1), Johnny Harvey
In part one of this two part series, we’ll explore the many facets you need to understand to get your website into a respectable range of search results when people search for your website on Google, Yahoo or any one of hundreds of other search engines available on the Internet.
Making your site search engine friendly
Have you ever asked yourself, “Why doesn’t my site show up on Google?” If you have, take solace in knowing you are not alone. Estimates place the number of pages comprising the Web between 20 and 29.7 billion, of which search engines have indexed only about one-half. Dire, indeed, but not all is lost. There is something than can shift the odds in your favor: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is an amalgamation of techniques that when applied to a web site, can improve the likelihood that the pages contained therein will be indexed and more favorably ranked by major search engines. Seeing your web pages highly ranked on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN is more than vanity, it’s vital. Here’s why. Search engines are the primary means end-users navigate the Web. Put another way, of every ten visitors to visit your site, seven found their way because it turned up on a search engine results page (SERP).
Keywords
Builders and owners of web sites often think of the meta keyword tag when the term arises. However, keywords are elsewhere, everywhere in a web page. Succinctly, keywords are the terms end-users search on –used in the title tag, meta keyword tag, meta description tag, hyperlinks, and body text. Ironically, the meta keyword tag has depreciated secondary to unscrupulous purveyors abusing the meta tag with the intent to mislead searchers and search engine spiders and bots (a.k.a. software agents or indexers).
Using keywords beyond the meta tag is a decidedly recommended, but don’t be overzealous. Keyword stuffing, or the overuse of keywords, to gain favor by search engines by making your page appear more relevant than competitors will work to your detriment. Search engines will delist your site on the grounds of abuse. A number of reputable sites report limits to place on the use of an individual keyword within a page, but I prefer another measurement: quality content. Well-written documents will include keywords in good measure. If your visitors enjoy the content, then software agents will not find issue either. Nevertheless, if a keyword seems overused despite the page being a good read, try using synonyms or visit http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php to measure the keyword density for your site.
URL, Title, and Description
The URL, title, and description are the pieces of information appearing on SERPs. This is what searchers use to determine whether the associated page is relevant to their needs. As such, each should be concise and relevant, reflecting what end-users will find should they click through to the associated page.
When possible, a page address should be static. Dynamic URLs containing “?,” “=,” and “&” symbols lack the value needed by humans to make informed decisions about the relevancy of search results. Using keywords (e.g., www.northsachamber.com/technology_council.php) to ensure URLs are descriptive of the underlying content help not only searchers, but also enable indexers to parse the addresses when discovered on other sites linking back to yours (from blogs, forums, comments, etc). As well, the parameters used in conjunction with dynamic addresses can prove to be a roadblock to search engine spiders and bots trying to index your web site.
The title (tag) serves as the anchor text for the link to your site. It should contain keywords or phrases end-users would conduct searches against, but remaining descriptive of the page’s subject matter. Lead with the content relevant terms, in a hierarchical fashion if the page is part of a subsection of your site, and follow with the name of the site (e.g., Microsoft Begins Push Into Adobe’s Flash Stronghold | Web Development | InformationWeek). Try to keep the length below 65 characters, unlike this example, to prevent truncation on SERPs.
The description is a summary of the page’s contents. It too should include keywords, of course, but not for the search engine, but rather for the searcher. This is where you sell your site; searchers will be intently reading the description to decide whether going to your site is worth the effort. What you say here is particularly important for searchers looking for very specific information. As with the title length, there are limits to the characters displayed for each result. The numbers vary, but keep safe by going with the shortest at 165 characters.
If you don’t have a description meta tag in the head of your page, ensure the initial content of the document provides adequate information for the potential visitor to know what you offer, as search engines will use this text as a surrogate description.
Join us again next month when we will discuss your web pages page structure and content, placement of content, CSS…and how all of these components influence and improve your chances for being placed in a higher ranking on major search engines.
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