September 12, 2005

IRS Raises Mileage Rate

The IRS has raised the mileage rate to $0.485 per mile. If you keep track of your mileage, the IRS will let you deduct $0.485 per mile on your tax return.

Posted by Ted at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

What Kind of Backup Do You Have?

While watching the disaster from hurricane Katrina I would help but wonder about business and their IT departments. I think all my clients use tape to back up their data. What I wondered was, would tape have survived the floods.

One alternative or backup to tape is online backup. I friend has been using Data Deposit Box and likes it. In this instance you back up your data to their site. They charge you a monthly fee that, per megabyte, is cheaper for large amounts of data. 20GB of storage runs you a little under $70 per month.

In the case of New Orleans, many businesses may not be able to get back into their offices for several weeks at minimum. With an online backup system, you could set up in another office anywhere in the country, download your data and start operation.

I don’t know if this is a good solution for everyone, but I think it’s worth consideration.

Posted by Ted at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2005

The Thieves Never Rest

Here's something that happens that I never even thought about. Someone can hijack your web address. Here's a scenario that's very troubling . . .

you begin the day as an e-merchant doing business online at 'www.onlineseller.example.com.' At 2:15 p.m. that afternoon, your visitor traffic and merchant transactions disappear. You investigate and discover someone’s impersonated your company’s administrative contact, transferred your domain name to a different registrar, and modified the DNS. Visitors to your domain name land at a hoax Web site that impersonates your virtual store. Improbable? It happened to Hushmail in April of this year.

Here's the article in Information Week. They recommend how to protect yourself.

Posted by Ted at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2005

Microsoft Live Meeting

I attended a Microsoft Live Meeting last Tuesday. It was a webinar with Chet Holmes as the speaker about marketing. I found it thought provoking.

This post however is not to just tell you about the webinar, it’s to tell you that Microsoft archives its live meetings. Click here to view all the live meetings they have archived.

Although some are sort of self-improvement type. Many are business related. As far as I can tell they are free to view at your leisure. I see the one I attended is already archived.

Take a look and see what you think.

Posted by Ted at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2005

Copernic Desktop Search Engine

I few weeks ago I downloaded and installed the Copernic Desktop Search Engine. I will say that I’m very pleased with it.

I had previously used the Google one, but was unhappy that it would not search files on my server. I keep all important files on my server as it get backed up every night.

The Copernic engine allows me to specify which folders I want to index and later search. I am particularly pleased with its ability to search my Outlook emails.

I have about 20 folders in my Outlook that I route mail to. I don’t delete a lot of email. I have every Microsoft Great Plains tech support incident I ever had in my Outlook.

If I run into a problem that I think I have spoken to tech support before, I just pull up Copernic, specify the tech support folder and type in a word or two. It takes less than one second to find the relevant entries. Outlook’s search takes a lot longer.

The other day someone was asking for some documentation for a project we did with them in 1999. Using the Copernic search engine, I found the documents in about two minutes.

I am very pleased.

Posted by Ted at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

Is your Spam filter too agressive?

Information Week has a post relating that 42 percent of surveyed workers missed a deadline because their spam filter prevented them from seeing an important message. To wit:

The Infosecurity Europe conference partnered with Mirapoint, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor of e-mail server and security appliances for the survey, which noted that 42 percent of U.K. workers said they'd missed a deadline due to an e-mail message gone astray.

Two-thirds of them said that legitimate messages they should have received were blocked by their company's spam filter; two thirds of that number said the problem happened on a monthly basis, but a quarter said it occurred every week.

"The spam hysteria of the last few years has created the impression that blocking unwanted e-mail is the primary concern for businesses, with the result that some service providers and companies appear to have lost sight of their users' real needs," said Nigel Brooke, a vice president with the European office of Mirapoint, in a statement.

"Filtering unwanted messages ultimately serves no purpose if it undermines the effectiveness of the overall message network's responsiveness," he added.

Posted by Ted at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2005

Paying your bills early can pay

Information Week highlights one company (The Williams Cos.) that has discovered, surprise, surprise, that paying your bills early and getting a discount for doing it, can save a ton of money.

This company used to take 45 days to pay their bills. Now they have an online payment system in which vendors can log in, decide how much discount to give their customer and then get paid in time period related to that discount.

The first year in operation, they expect to save $1 million.

I don’t call the "chicken feed".

Posted by Ted at 08:12 AM