Tag Archives: HyperOffice Inc.

About 1569 days ago Business Software

Cloud Computing: Freedom to Be Productive

Technology is one of the fundamental reasons why today’s small businesses can break through with innovative products, compete head to head with large corporations, and even change the very rules of the game. The modern paradigm of entrepreneurship — fueled by inexpensive and available technology — emphasizes flexibility, responsiveness, and cost effectiveness, enabling small businesses to contend for market position in a way that was not even thinkable just a few years ago. Software provided as a service via the Web — or in the “cloud” — is the quintessence of what small businesses need for their information workers: cost effective, flexible tools that free them from physical dependency and allow for location independent operation and wide scale collaboration. The most common tasks performed by small business employees are definitely related to basic office communications and productivity. Such tasks can now be performed through and incredible array of choices that leverage the software in the cloud model and take advantage of the inherent collaborative nature of the Internet for very low cost, or even for free, offering strong alternatives to traditional desktop computing. E-mail, communications, and personal information management Web mail has been available for many years, but in the recent past has become a complete alternative to traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook, Eudora, or Thunderbird. Web 2.0 technologies have allowed in fact for such tools to offer very rich and complete user experience. Gmail is an appealing solution with its widespread adoption among consumers, more storage than you’ll ever need, full integration with traditional clients, and the unbeatable price — it’s free. Its true power though becomes evident when used in conjunction with the other Google applications, such as calendaring, contacts management, instant messaging, Google Docs and Google Sites. A premium, paid option called Google Apps integrates all these applications around your own domain name and allows for true workgroup functionality, plus extensive customer support for $50/year per user. Microsoft’s Hotmail has been around for as long as I can remember, but in the last few years it has turned into a communication platform actually usable by a small business with success. Now part of Office Live Small Business, it integrates with services such as online storage and your own website. Starts for free and you can add services for tiered fees. The best e-mail based tools though are the ones that allow you to get the best of all worlds: Web mail and client-side e-mail download and fully synchronized, together with online and offline calendars, contacts, tasks, and workgroup-level collaboration.  In this domain, Yahoo!’s Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange can now be purchased as online services with absolutely no technical knowledge required for setup. They’re both fantastic tools, but outsourced MS Exchange services are definitely the most mature and available. The domestic leader in the Exchange as a service offer for small businesses is Intermedia with robust and reliable hosting, full customer support starting at about $10/month per user. Less expensive, but more consumer oriented providers include 1&1 and mail2web that include a free Web-only service with no workgroup features. Office productivity suites In the past few years a new breed of online applications that perform most of the tasks that we are accustomed to perform with Microsoft Office have reached business maturity and are getting ready for prime time. The one that I find to be the most reliable and well featured online alternative to Office is ThinkFree. It has been around for many years now and it offers both a Web-based office application and an identical companion for the desktop that requires no connectivity. The Web offerings are rounded by documents storage services, great workspace collaboration, and smartphones integration. Basic service is free; premium services and products can be added for modest fees. Google Docs is clearly becoming a strong contender. Free, well integrated with its other services, it provides extremely simple interface with native collaborative features: multiple users can concurrently work on the same documents with no chance for confusion. Don’t expect too many bells and whistles though. It’s a solid, collaborative office suite at no cost with essential features. A recent entry in the Web productivity market that has made very good inroads is Zoho. While its services go well beyond the basic productivity suite and extend into teleconferencing, project management, e-mail, and customer relationship management (CRM) and are accessible mostly for free, their products are not exactly ready for robust applications yet, but they are certainly moving in the right direction. Definitely worth take a look.   A number of other Web-based applications designed to make small business more collaborative and flexible are finally reaching maturity. Some examples include file transfer (YouSendIt), intranets and collaboration (HyperOffice, Web Office), and project collaboration and management (Central Desktop and Basecamp.) With the emergence of more and more applications leveraging the low development and distribution costs afforded by the software-as-a-service model (SaaS), small businesses are going to see a growing number of offerings tailored to their needs and responding to their functional requirements much better than what is available today on desktop software. In my next column,, we will explore options for Web-based accounting and financial management. Stay tuned. Andrea Peiro is the Small Business Market Expert at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Founder of the Small Business Technology Magazine, a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses, he has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. You can reach him at us.andreap@gmail.com.

About 1997 days ago Setting Up a Website

2008: What a Mashup!

This is the time of year when all sorts of predictions appear on old media, new media and not so new media alike: from what’s going to happen in the Presidential elections to what energy sources will replace oil and how much closer mankind will actually be to getting to Mars. Not to disappoint all my wonderful readers, here are the technologies that will be hot for small businesses in 2008. Writing about the future of technology is actually a cozy tradition for me, and this year it is my privilege to do it on IncTechnology.com. 1. Web 2.0 collaborative applications Small businesses need better, low cost and easy to manage tools to work collaborate within the company and to pool together resources across multiple businesses to better tackle large jobs. In 2008 you will see a proliferation of online tools that will make things a lot easier. Web 2.0 based applications are software tools accessible via any internet browser and are natively well suited for collaborations. A new crop of developers is taking full advantage of this capability to create great things, sometimes even offered for free! Office productivity suites that allow multiple users to work together, share information and collaborate in real time such as ThinkFree and Zoho. Project management tools such as Basecamp Messaging, communications and collaboration environments such as Zimbra and HyperOffice Don’t you think for a minute that the big guns like Microsoft and Yahoo, that have steeply increased their attention for the needs of small businesses in the past few year (see Yahoo! acquisition of Zimbra and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Live Workspaces) will just sit there and watch.  So expect a lot of competition for your attention and lots of low cost ways to leverage the web to collaborate. 2. Cached Web applications Ok, so what happens to all these wonderful Web tools if you cannot connect to the Web? Expect many of these applications to launch an offline “companion,” software that runs on your computer and replicates the online functionality. Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Software goes online and online applications go offline? Yes, that’s right. Traditional software is here to stay, but the new demands of the market are imposing more and more to make software available concurrently as a service and as a locally stored application, frequently with automatic synchronization of data files between the online and local storages. In a sense, Microsoft pioneered the concept at a Local Area Network and VPN levels with MS Small Business Server and Web Outlook . Now the concept is going mainstream and “on the Web cloud.” Expect tons of Web applications to come with offline companions or to work in “cached mode” without requiring Web connection; and expect more and more desktop software to become available as a complementary service, part of the software licensing fee. 3. Mashups Mashups are Web applications that derive data from different sources into one integrated tool. A popular example of a mashup, cited by Wikipedia, would be to combine the cartographic data from Google Maps with real-estate listing from Craigslist to get a new Web service that provides location information to those listings. Consumer mashups are becoming quickly popular, like iGoogle, mapmyrun.com or housingmaps.com. Expect the development of business applications that leverage this concept and bring you the best of all worlds. Currently the most common type of business mashup is the dashboard. There are tools like Serena that allow building mashup-based applications on the fly. Yahoo! has Pipes and Microsoft and Google are in beta testing with Popfly and Mashup Editor, respectively. Expect in 2008 many pre-developed mashup services bringing together your most commonly used business Web services. 4. 3g network connectivity Wireless operators are in full swing with the deployment of their 3G networks, offering data and voice connectivity almost anywhere at the sped of entry-level DSL. 3G data cards are almost free with contracts, all-you-can-use plans are as cheap as $30 per month and reliability has gone up to very acceptable levels. Watch for more and more laptops to come outfitted with wireless WAN cards. The technology is ready, the price point is affordable and the convenience is unparalleled for mobile workers. 5. Online data backup Internet connections are becoming faster everywhere and backup software is becoming smarter and cheaper. A new set of inexpensive online backup solutions that really work is emerging targeting small businesses. Some even have unlimited storage for a fixed fee. Online backup maybe a bit more cumbersome to setup and manage, but ensures a very high level of data protection. Check out some of these: Live.Skydrive.com, Xdrive, Carbonite, MediaMax, eVault, and Box.net. Surely one of them will meet your online backup needs. 6. Biometrically protected notebook computers Fingerprint readers and data encryption software will become very popular in 2008, as the technologies are mature and the costs have gone down. Look for tiny fingerprint readers on laptops and keyboards that unlock the computer instead of passwords. Also look for full hard disk encryption to become much more popular to safeguard the privacy of your data: Microsoft has made available BitLocker on Windows Vista Business and Premium versions. A good, easy to manage alternative is PGP. And what after that. Other technologies that in the next few years will land on the lap of American small business include: 4G mobile telephony Fully IP switched data/voice wireless networks that will deliver ultrafast connections to any mobile device. That is how small businesses will go online in a few years. Keep your eyes on Google. In-text advertising The new frontier of contextual advertising is in-text. Vibrant Media is the leader in the space, but look for more to start playing. RFID It is taking time for this new and initially costly technology to take foot, but the pressure of large supply chains, such as Wal-Mart Stores is forcing the adoption. Watch for RFID tags to appear on all sorts of retail goods. We’ll see at this time next year if I’m right! Andrea Peiro is a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses. He has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. He can be reached at us.andreap@gmail.com..

About 2362 days ago Computer Security

Renting Your Software Online

A few weeks ago, I did a technology experiment. I used a Web-hosted software application to collaborate on a document with two colleagues of mine. Now, I admit to being a total geek. As for my colleagues, let’s just say they are more uncomfortable with using new tools. But after I convinced them to give Google Docs a try, we were all able to quickly and easily edit the document, track changes, and work together to produce a better product. In the past, we would have had to e-mail the document back and forth and use track changes. It would have been time-consuming and, frankly, a pain. The success of the experiment only served to embolden me to consider new delivery systems for my other business software applications. As a business owner, you, too, should be investigating the benefits and drawbacks of new Web-hosted applications. I’m seriously considering moving to a hosted solution for e-mail, for example. The market for Web applications directed at the small business market is exploding. Over the past few weeks, Google has been aggressively launching online applications for business users. These services include document collaboration, corporate e-mail and website hosting, and more. Although Google has only recently launched business applications, other companies such as BlueTie, HyperOffice, and WebExOne (formerly Intranets.com), among others, have been in the market for a longer time. Google’s biggest competitor, Microsoft, also launched a full suite of online applications from beta Nov. 15, Office Live 2007. Baris Cetinok, director of project management and marketing for Office Live explained to me that there are three things MSOL helps small businesses do: Establish a Web presence (many smaller businesses still have none) Find more customers Manage the business (from anywhere) Add company branded e-mail accounts Allow you to chat online via text, voice or mobile phone with employees, customers or colleagues using your company domain name with Windows Live Messenger. What this means for your business Traditionally, you have purchased software and it was delivered via CD (or some other media) or downloaded via the Internet. The software was then installed on individual computers for everyone in the office to use. If you only have three computers, it’s not very difficult or time consuming to get the software loaded. But if your growing business has 30 computers, it takes a lot of time (and money if you are paying a consultant) to install the software on all those machines. Sometimes installing the software is only one part of the problem. When the software is installed it might conflict with previously installed software. The benefit of hosted applications is that the hosted application is online, therefore there is no installation on your part and you and your entire team can access the software and data anytime and from anywhere. Software that resides on your local computer (or server) means that you can’t easily access it when you are traveling, unless you setup a remote access solution (which means more time and money) to do so. If you have two sales representatives in Maine, three in Maryland, and a main office in Michigan, you have to ensure the computers in all three locations have the same software (that equals even more time and money — are you getting the picture?). When you buy traditional software you are encumbered by license agreements and their associated costs. Using a hosted application you pay a monthly fee per user which can be an ease on your cash flow. Traditional software vendors often update their software annually, or release patches throughout the year. Using a hosted application, the service provider continuously updates the software and each time you login you have the most recent version. One of the side benefits of a hosted application is that your data is always backed up. If you lose your notebook, your data is not lost as it resides on the servers of your service providers. Before switching to a hosted application, be it a collaboration tool, e-mail, database, or one of the hundreds of other solutions on the market, carefully consider the pros and cons. The risks include that if you don’t have Internet access for some reason, such as your Internet provider going down, what do you do? There is also the risk that something will happen to bring down the system of your hosted application provider. Again, this is something that is out of your control, but would have a potential impact on your business. Weigh your options and choose the solution that’s best for your business. For me, I have decided to look for a hosted e-mail solution that is both local and hosted, providing me with the convenience of a hosted application but the security of having the data also housed locally. Fortunately, there are dozens and dozens of great e-mail hosting services provided by such companies as Webmail.us, MI8, Blue Tie, and Microsoft’s Office Live. Ramon Ray is an author, speaker, technology writer and former small business technology consultant. He publishes Smallbiztechnology.com, a website that helps small and medium-sized businesses strategically use technology as a tool to grow their businesses.

About 2576 days ago Computer Security

Service, Not Servers

Don’t tell Joe Walker that lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. The headquarters of his company, Elcometer, a manufacturer of testing equipment for paints and coatings based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, was hit by lightning three consecutive years starting in 2001. In the first two cases, the resulting electrical surges knocked out the building’s power and completely fried every electronic device–including the company’s computer servers, which stored critical information such as inventory numbers and customer contacts. Both times, business ground to a halt for 10 days as the company’s tech team scrambled to restore the systems. In August 2003, yet another fierce electrical storm roared through southeastern Michigan. Once again, Elcometer’s electricity was out for days. But this time, commerce continued without a hitch. What was different? Six months earlier, Elcometer had gotten rid of its computer servers and instead began accessing all of its sales, inventory, and accounting data online. As a result, employees were able to work from home or from terminals at a nearby Kinko’s. “It was a huge difference,” says Walker. “All I had to do was get my Internet connection back up and running to get back in business.” Walker is on the leading edge of one of today’s most important technology trends–the transformation of software from a product to a service. While computer software has been growing faster and smarter, the industry’s business model has been pretty much stuck in about 1990. Developers ship out disks and CDs encoded with their latest release or upgrade, often charging hefty licensing fees. Customers install the software on their local servers, which must be constantly maintained and upgraded to run this ever more sophisticated software–a vexing game of catch-up that usually means keeping a team of tech pros on staff. And when the server goes down so does business.  But that process is becoming as outmoded as VHS recorders. Instead, software makers are making their tools available on the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis for a monthly subscription fee. Known as on demand, or software as a service, this model has long been familiar to customers of companies such as NetSuite and Salesforce.com. But now nearly all software makers are offering on-demand versions, making it possible for businesses to abandon their servers and instead keep all of their data–from e-mail to e-commerce to human resources–on the Web. In 2005, companies spent more than $4 billion on hosted software, a number that is expected to grow to more than $10 billion a year over the next two years. While those numbers represent a small portion of the $190 billion global software market, the Yankee Group, a research firm in Boston, forecasts that more than 50 percent of the software purchased by small to midsize companies in 2008 will be from software-as-a-service providers. “This is an evolution in how companies use software, especially small and midsize companies that finally have access to applications they couldn’t afford before,” says Sanjeev Aggarwal, a senior analyst with Yankee. The key benefits of working with these on-demand providers are high speed and low cost. To buy and install a traditional accounting or customer-relationship-management system often means waiting months and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. With software as a service, you can be up and running within days, or even hours, of signing a contract. Since the vendor is hosting both the application and the data, getting started can be as simple as typing in a username and password. What’s more, on-demand customers generally pay monthly subscription fees, rather than large, one-time licensing fees. A Yankee Group study found that the total cost of operating an on-demand software package is less than half that for an equivalent traditional system. In 1999, before the company experienced its first lightning strike, Elcometer used Great Plains, now owned by Microsoft, as its in-house accounting system. But with Y2K looming, Great Plains was requiring its customers to spend $1,500 for an upgrade. Elcometer also needed to upgrade its servers to handle the new software and hire an IT manager to manage it. “I was looking at spending $130,000, plus license fees,” says Walker. When he factored in the need to safeguard his company’s data from future lightning strikes–or other unexpected events–the decision became obvious. He switched to NetSuite, which charges an up-front fee of $5,000 plus $99 a month per user. “Now, we don’t have any servers, we don’t have to download the latest updates, and NetSuite fixes any bugs while I’m asleep,” Walker says. On-demand software is especially useful for companies that have computers and data spread out among multiple locations, since everyone from salespeople to CEOs can access their systems from any broadband Internet connection. Businesses that operate in different time zones or countries no longer have to worry about supporting their traveling employees around the clock. Managing an e-mail server, for example, was particularly troublesome for Fred Aryan, president of LaserShip, a delivery company in Vienna, Virginia. With 150 employees spread out among 15 locations along the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Atlanta, keeping everyone’s computers up to date with the latest patches and spam filters was becoming a nightmare. That’s why he switched to HyperOffice, an on-demand provider of e-mail and collaboration software based in Rockville, Maryland. By adopting HyperOffice, which charges about $7 a user per month, Aryan figures he’s saving $80,000 a year between software license and hardware maintenance costs. “And that doesn’t count getting rid of all the service headaches,” he says. The downside of on demand, of course, is that your business becomes dependent on access to the Internet. Aryan says he struck a deal with HyperOffice to compensate him if his system experiences any downtime (see “What to Ask For in an On-Demand Software Contract“). Security is another concern. Keeping servers in-house may be a pain, but it also means that sensitive accounting or HR data can be locked down behind a firewall. Can the Web offer the same assurances? On-demand vendors insist it can. NetSuite and HyperOffice, for example, either maintain or partner with deluxe data centers complete with the latest in data security and backup technology. Employees can gain access only through secure logins. Elcometer’s Walker admits that he was nervous about keeping his data on the Web. But he’s thankful that the decision has saved him from worrying about the nagging problems of maintaining his hardware–not to mention the weather. Resources The consulting firm ThinkStrategies offers tips on making the switch to hosted software, as well as a list of vendors, at saas-showplace.com. The consultancy OpSource offers white papers, an ROI calculator, and other resources at opsource.net.