Windows vs. Ford
 
For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on.
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,

"If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, Ford issued a press release stating:

If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part):

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash.........twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask, "Are you sure?"before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and
   grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
......  

Ok, so nothing is free!  Your taxes paid for it.   But, if you are looking to find out ways you can make your organization more secure, I suggest checking out the FCC Cyber Planner tool that they released.  The Small business Cyber planner is an online resource that will enable any small business to create a customized guide tailored to its cybersecurity needs. 

To use the planner, all you need to do is go to http://www.fcc.gov/cyberplanner and follow the prompts to determine what information you wish to include in your plan and then the system walks you through and produces a plan that you can use to help secure your business. 

Businesses will see value in Google+ in the same way they did in Facebook, by creating a Page that highlights their business. To do this, all you need to do is the following:
 

• Sign-up for a Google+ Profile by going to https://plus.google.com.
• Click on Create a Google + Page.
• Choose a category to begin. Local businesses is good for smaller, less well-known businesses. Product or brand would work for companies and larger known businesses. Company, institution, or organization is mainly for businesses that don’t directly sell something, mostly not-for-profits.
• Personalize your page with a photo/logo and tagline. You can continue with an introduction, information, and contact information, and finish with a photo strip of five different photos.
• It’s time to start engaging with the Google+ community. For your business Page, you can create circles (networks), start posting information and news through your feed. You can also add your Google+ Page details to your existing website and share it via other networks.
   

For those of you in the DC area (or the East Coast) on August 23, 2011, you probably experienced something you had never felt before, an earthquake tremor.  While some of us had experienced little tremors in the past, this tremor shook buildings, cracked walls and sent things flying.   While our first and most important goal is to make sure that we are all right, what are business doing to make sure that their business is ok after an earthquake?  Are they checking their hard drives?  Are they making sure their backups are up to date?  What should you do? 

If you do one thing and only one thing, make sure your backups are being done and that they are TESTED.  We test our backups for our client every quarter because we want to make sure that when it comes time for that disaster, we are able to recover.  Otherwise, I would suggest scanning those hard drives to make sure they weren't damaged. 

If you haven't heard, Microsoft recently launched it's latest cloud offering to the general public and it's called Office 365.  So what is Office 365? 

Office 365 is the next version of the BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) collaboration and communication suite. Among the main improvements in Office 365 is that its applications, including Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, are based on the 2010 version of their on-premise counterparts, while BPOS' were based on the 2007 version. Office 365 also comes with Lync Online, which is an upgrade to Office Communications Online.

Also significant is that Office 365 offers customers the option to have Office productivity applications like Word and Excel either through Office Web Apps -- the online version of Office -- or through the full-fledged, on-premise Office Professional Plus 2010 delivered via a subscription model.

So what does this mean for the small business? 

For those businesses who are already using online services, it provides a little more flexibility and updated components.  For those customers using Small Business Server, it brings a whole onslaught of questions without any answers yet from Microsoft. Until now, SBS provided all of these components to the small business.  With the release of SBS 2011, they released a package called SBS Essentials which provides the authentication but not the exchange, so that you could connect it to the online version. However, Essentials is only for businesses with up to 25 users, meaning that larger organizations have to make changes. 

So what does this mean?  It means that when you look at future plans, you need to talk to your IT provider about the best way forward.  It also means that your choices of going to the cloud might be limited.