Sometimes in business the cause and effect of expenditures are not as direct as buying gas, but they are still there. For instance, many small businesses are tempted to use the least expensive phone service available. The problem is that an undependable phone connection can cause you frustration, lost customers, and give your business a poor reputation. All it takes is one or two clients turning away from you because you are hard to get hold of or the connection is always scratchy to more than offset that savings you gained by using a cheap service.

Another example is the purchase of equipment such as computers, faxes, or printers. Too often the price of the machine is the overriding factor in what is bought. What is left out many times is the needs assessment. If you invest in a new computer without looking at the requirements to run your software, the environment that it will be running in, the number of users it will have, the expected life-span and so on, you will end up either having to buy additional equipment or you will find your operations hampered. If processes take too long to complete, can’t be done, or must be out-sourced, this can result in lost customers, employee frustration, and direct additional expenses.

Finally, and an often neglected area, is training. When you or someone on your staff is not up-to-speed on the software you are using, tasks take longer, errors are introduced, and poor job satisfaction follows which can result in turn-over and poor customer service. Sure training costs money, but I have seen many an example where simply taking a one day class would give a person skills that enable them to shave hours per week off their work. Those hours can be spent doing additional work, building strong customer relationships, or even just enjoying life! Here, a class that cost perhaps two-hundred dollars can pay for itself in time and productivity within a few months. In more than one case I have seen days cut off monthly procedures and outsourced functions brought easily back in-house.

The key to all of these is to think beyond the immediate outlay of cash to what that purchase is really providing to your business. Every expenditure you make is an investment for your business. If using a cheaper alternative costs you even one sale, is it worth it? In some cases the answer may be yes. But in other cases, when you really look at how much it costs you to drive across town for that gas, the more expensive option may be the one that provides the greatest return.

The first is CometDocs which will convert documents from one format to another. The most powerful conversion in my book is the conversion of PDF files to Word or text documents. Not only does this make all those frustrating read-only files editable, but it maintains the formatting and is far less prone to error than OCR. I have tried this conversion on multiple documents and have had consistent success. Beyond converting PDFs, CometDocs can transfer between all sorts of Office and Graphics files. The utility is quite easy to use in that after the free sign up, all you do is upload the file to the service and it is email back to you.

Another on-line utility that I use all the time is WordOff. When you generate html files for a website with Microsoft Word, Word puts tons of extra code in the document that not only bloats the file, but can also mess up the formatting. WordOff just strips all that extra Microsoft Formatting out. Just the kind of utility I like – a one trick pony that does that trick to perfection.

Finally, a service called DialMyCalls is excellent if you need to keep groups of people updated by phone on news, events, or statuses. After signing up, you can record short phone messages of up to 30 seconds and the service will then broadcast that message out to the list of phone numbers you establish. DialMyCalls is free for one message per day to up to 25 people. That would roughly cover a small office or youth soccer team. If you need more people or messages, you can sign up for the pay service at rates of 7 cents per call or less. A great time saver if you have lots of calls to make and also don’t want to get caught talking to lots of people because you have work to do!

So there you have some useful tools that can help solve that one particular problem you might be having. Bookmark them and store them away under “Web Tools” and just pull them out of the toolbox when needed. And don’t forget about DropBox for online file storage and sychronization and Mozy for backups. All free, and all great.

Soghoian being the author of this book is significant for two reasons. First, he is the product manager for AppleScript. He has been using and working with AppleScript for years. Simply put, nobody knows more about what AppleScript can do that Sal Soghoian. Second, he is a great teacher. If you have ever heard him speak at a conference or maybe seen one of his podcasts on MacBreak Work, you will already know this. If not, you are in for a pleasant surprise. His style is light and friendly without being causal and silly. He has the rare ability of making technical subjects easy to read – and not a cure for insomnia.

AppleScript 1-2-3 is a large volume of nearly 900 pages that is broken down into three broad sections. Starting with the absolute basics in the first section, Sal and his co-author Bill Cheeseman, take you through the fundamentals of scripting with plenty of examples and explanations. The second section takes what was gone over in the first section and expands on it. This second section goes into more tools, tips, and methodologies to make your scripts both easier and more powerful. Finally, the third section of the book takes you through specific examples of fully working useful scripts that you can use, modify, and make suit your own purposes. This section give you a strong toolbox to start you on way scripting.

Many people who move to the Mac lament the fact that they can no longer use their trusted MS-DOS batch files. The truth is that Apple’s AppleScript is much more flexible and powerful. The problem is, as with using VBScript in Windows, there is a bit of a learning curve to unlocking the real power. This book is the answer to that problem. From automating repetitive actions to performing complex series of actions, the power you need is there. This book can help you harness that power.

They will provide tips, tricks, news and reviews relevant to the most up-to-date storage, backup and archiving systems. The goal is to help you take care of, manage, access and safely store/backup all your precious homework assignments, videos, photos, databases, music files and more.

Managing Your Digital Life is a highly recommended site, so check them out!

When Microsoft published the beta of Windows 7 they obviously underestimated how interested people were in their next move. Within hours the servers hosting the files and generating the license keys were overloaded and went off-line. Many pundits thought this was a first sign of bad things to come. But within a day the servers were back on line and offering up the files and keys without problem.

The disk image to install the OS is approximately 2.4 gig – much smaller that the equivalent Vista image. The first thing you notice as you go through the install is how quickly it moves. There are none of the long pauses between questions that seem to make up so much of the time of previous installations. And in fact, there are far fewer of those questions. The Windows 7 installation intelligently inquires of the hardware and makes assumptions so that the user doesn’t have to answer a litany of prompts about hardware and location. These setting can be fully configured once the system is up and running, but the bar to getting to that running state is much lower. Whether on older hardware or virtual machines, the entire installation seems fairly consistent at about 30 minutes in length, and not once did the installation fail.

Once the installation is complete and the desktop presents itself, the vision is striking. Simply put, it is a very clean interface. The ability to have desktop widgets and status bar menus is there, but over and over the phrase I keep hearing evaluators use is “clean.” The ribbon toolbar of Office 2007 has now been implemented in tools like Paint and Notepad, but that is just the tip of the unification. There are less interruptions from security messages and confirmations and the layout just makes sense. Now some of that is due to our increased familiarity with the Vista style interface, but much of it is due to subtle tweaking and tuning. In that way Windows 7 could almost be seen as a maintenance release of Vista.

But under the covers, it is obviously much more than a simple update. The speed at which programs open is detectable even without a stop watch. Many of the benchmarks I have seen place the speed of Windows 7 as better than that of XP. Not a lot of programs have been broken either. From anti-virus to office software and multi-media tools, most of the applications I installed worked without flaw. The few exceptions to this were program such as Google’s Chrome browser and a few games. Sometimes this can be fixed by running the program in XP compatibility mode, but in others the program just refuses to launch. We have to remember though, this is a beta that is designed exactly to weed out those kinds of glitches and allow developers time to fix them.

All signs are pointing to a Windows 7 released late in 2009 or early 2010. The betas are set to expire in July of 2009, about the same time as Microsoft’s big Tech-Ed conference, so a safe bet might put the release date around then. Perhaps there will be a second beta period that would cover another six months from the middle to end of 2009. Of course much of that will depend on what problems are discovered during the beta period. Currently there don’t appear to be many.

Microsoft has received so much bad press for Vista, coming from their own users to rivals such as Apple, that they have to prove that they deserve their place at the top of the personal computer food chain. No one doubts that they make great server applications and operating systems, but recently Apple’s OSX has put Microsoft squarely on the defensive. Couple that with the rise in netbooks that stress the browser implementation more than the OS and even some inroads from Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. This means Microsoft has a lot riding on their next operating system release, and from all indications, Windows 7 will succeed on all counts.

The first tool we come to is actually called “Friend of Follow”. This site will show you a simple but visually appealing tabbed overview of those people who you are following but who are not following you back, those who are following you but that you don’t follow, and those that are both followed and following. While the display is nice, and by mousing over each user you can get some basic information, Friend or Follow doesn’t really provide enough information for my to find it to useful for most uses. What I do find useful sometimes is that I can put the people listed in order by location or number of followers. This is perfect for when I want to know if there are people local to my area I’m not following.

Next up is “MyCleener”. Ever wondering which of your friends are deadbeats? Or which of your friends just isn’t keeping up? MyCleener will pull the list of people you are following and then put then in order by the last time they tweeted. I was actually surprised to find out that one of the people I was following hadn’t tweeted in over a year. While technically there is nothing wrong with following someone who doesn’t tweet often, it does inflate your following to followers ratio. And many people, myself included, use that ration as a kind of rule of thumb to your legitimacy.

And finally, we come to the newest of the group, “Tweepler”. Tweepler, which is still officially in beta, not only shows you who is following you who you are not following yet, but it also shows you stats about them. So, in addition to seeing how many people they are following you can also see how many people are following them. And Tweepler also displays a ratio of the two making it easy to not follow those people who have a 31 to 1 ratio of follows to followers. And yes, there are those people. All of this is displayed in one cohesive interface, and you can even follow the people you chose or move them to an ignore column as you look at the stats. For my, free, buck Tweepler is the Twitter management app to watch.

A word of caution! Because all of these helpful websites work via the Twitter Application Programming Interface or API, they require your Twitter username and password to work. And, as we all know, giving out your password to anyone, especially on the Internet, is a bad thing. So my recommendation is that just before you use any of these site that you change your password to something bland, like “password”, use the site, and then log off and quickly change your Twitter password to a new and much more secure one. By doing this you will allow the programs to do their work, but you will leave no trace as to what your actual password is. From what I have seen all of these sites are legitimate and above board, but you are better safe than sorry.

In a future article I will talk about finding people to follow on Twitter, getting people to follow you, and different ways to have your blog entries automatically twittered. But in the meantime, for another great site with lots of Twitter tips, check out Twitip.com. And, make sure to follow me if you haven’t already! Just go to http://twitter.com/carnellm.

What is my secret painless backup method? One word, Mozy. Mozy is a remote backup service that works on Windows or Mac. Basically it backs up your data to the cloud. Yes, the famous Internet cloud we all keep hearing about. The software is a quick download and is simple to install and setup. And here is a real cool thing – it is free for up to two gigs of data. Yup, if you are just going to backup a subset of your files, it is free! And if you want to backup more or even all of you data, it is only about $5 per month for as much space as you need.

There are both pro and home versions of the Mozy software, so if you are looking at backing up an office environment they have you covered. And, heaven forbid, if you ever need to do a restore you can do it over the Internet to the same machine or to a different machine. If you have backed up a huge amount of data they can even just send you a physical copy of the data instead of having to download it all.

I’ll tell you the truth. I use Mozy because it works and it is kind of just a “set it and forget it” solution. I don’t have to swap tapes. I don’t have to worry about taking something off-site, and I don’t have to fear that the backup media or disks might get stolen and compromised. Everything is stored securely far away from here so I just let it run.

Again, there is a totally free version for up to 2 gig of storage, meaning there is no reason not to try it. So please, backup your files. If you don’t use this, use something. There is absolutely nothing worse than losing your work, your taxes, your financial records, or your prized family photos and knowing that you could have prevented the loss.

Oh, and if you want help with all those other lifestyle issues… check out ZenHabits.

Doing things such as ensuring that you use secure passwords and are not clicking on unknown attachments in your email will help reduce the risk of attacks from malware. But, there still a real need to run third-party security software. Not only will that software help to protect your machine and its data, but it will also aid in preventing your machine from becoming a carrier and infecting other machines.

The first form of protection you need is an anti-virus program. Good AV programs, as they are called, will scan you email, your disks, and even the websites you visit. One very good AV program, with a free starter version, is AVG by Grisoft. You can easily download it from their website and have it scanning within a matter of minutes. I have used AVG for a number of years and it will often catch threats that the big boys won’t. Additionally, since you can try it out for free, it is basically a no lose proposition. If you don’t like the way it performs, you can always turn to the programs from TrendMicro or McAfee.

The second type of protection you will need is something to protect you from spyware. Spyware is slightly different from a virus in that it usually doesn’t do your machine harm, but it can compromise your security, record passwords, and steal information. Windows Defender is built into Windows Vista and is a free add-on for Windows XP. While it is a good start, it is not nearly as powerful as either SpyBot Search & Destroy or Ad-Aware by Lavasoft. Either of those two programs can, again, be downloaded for free from the Internet. Although it is not a good idea to keep more than one anti-virus or anti-spyware program running at the same time, you can switch between them from time to time to make sure you catch everything.

There is a lot of debate on whether or not Macintosh owners need to run anti-virus software. Due to the nature of the Mac OS X operating system and the complete lack of viruses out for it at present, I do not recommend running anti-virus software. I do however recommend making sure that some filtering is done on email, either locally or by your provider, to make sure that viruses are not simply passed on to other users. This is especially important for people who exchange files with Windows users on a regular basis. If you insist on using one, give the freeware ClamXav a try. Of course this situation may change in the future.

Next time we will talk a little about the reverse side of security – making sure that users, be they young or old, don’t use your computer to access Internet sites or other resources that may be inappropriate.

I was personally debating whether I was going to put MS Office on the new MacBook I am buying. This answers that question. In addition to the normal Office features, including Entourage which is the basically Outlook for the Mac, this special media edition includes Microsoft Expression Media. Expression Media is the program that used to be known as iView Media Pro before Microsoft bought them. It is an excellent document and imaging cataloging and retrieval program. Think of it as iPhoto on steroids.

So, there you have it. So far our of all the Black Friday previews I have seen, this is the big winner. And, by the way, Happy Thanksgiving!

[Update: 12/01/08] Please note that this deal has now ended. Sorry!

Ok, so now on to the list…

On the Macintosh

• Email – GMail and iMail
• Browser – Firefox. Still can’t get used to Chrome.
• Office – iWork and Google Docs on web so no location worries
• Twitter – Tweetdeck or Tweetie – depends on how much “work” I am doing.
• Contact Management – Apple Address Book, mainly for the sync to iPhone
• Calendaring – iCal with Google Calendar, again, mainly for the sync to iPhone
• Music – iTunes (of course), Pandora, Last.fm
• Remote connect – CoRD internally, for external support GoToAssist Express
• Backup – TimeMachine locally, Mozy to off-site
• Newsreader – Google Reader
• Text Editor – Smultron
• Photo Editor – Photoshop Elements
• Utility – Parallels so that I can run Windows.
• Diagraming & Flowcharting – OmniGraffle
• Instant Messaging – Adium
• Database – Filemaker Pro

On Windows

• Email – GMail and Outlook
• Browser – Firefox and IE a far distant second
• Office – MS Office 2010 and Google Docs
• Twitter – web client, no 3rd party software
• Contact & Calendar Management – this is really a Mac task, but if I have to, Outlook
• Music – iTunes, Pandora, Last.fm
• Remote connect – RDC internally, external is GoToAssist Express
• Backup – Backup4All, Mozy to off-site
• Newsreader – Google Reader online.
• Photo Editor – not using one at the moment
• Diagraming – Visio
• Instant Messaging – Pidgin (used to be called GAIM)
• Database – Microsoft Access
• Antivirus – Microsoft Security Essentials

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for other programs to use please let me know!