Tag Archives: Microsoft Word

About 2425 days ago Business Software

Choosing a Content-Management System

TicketsNow, an online ticket portal based in Crystal Lake, Ill., needed to streamline the way its growing volume of content was uploaded to its website. A content management system was in order for the growing business. “Because it’s important for TicketsNow to provide customers with the best experience possible, we needed a content management system to continually update our site quickly and provide relevant, persuasive and personalized content,” explains Frank Giannantonio, the company’s chief technology officer. As its name suggests, a content management system (CMS) can best be described as software designed to help companies store, organize, and share content anywhere and anytime via the Web — be it documents (such as sales materials), artwork (e.g. a company logo) or any other content that requires attention. If your site is anything more than a simple brochure, you may want to consider a CMS to help you manage the adding and updating of pages and sections to your site. Giannantonio says his company went with CMS technology provider Interwoven, “because it eliminated IT bottlenecks and put the ownership of the site’s content in the hands of the content creators.” Interwoven has nearly 3,700 customers worldwide, including prestigious accounts such as Hilton, British Telecom, and Adidas. One system, one version of content One reason why fast-growing companies need to consider a CMS is to make sure that everyone is working from the same version of content — whether it’s in Microsoft Word or Adobe PhotoShop. Say a company is e-mailing around a press release to staff for approval.  Each executive is editing the copy, adding notes and then sending it onto to someone else to sign off on it. What if somewhere in the process, the wrong version is saved as “final”? The next thing you know, the document — with incorrect information — is posted to the website for all the world to see. “The idea is to streamline the entire system, to provide a single source of truth for managing and delivering information,” says Eben Miller, director of product marketing for Web content management at Interwoven, a Sunnyvale, Calif. CMS vendor. “Content is king, and a CMS owns this content assembly line from creation to management to approval to delivery.” Tips on choosing a CMS The following are a few tips on what to look for in a content management system: A CMS must be easy to install, learn and use. “Even a non-technical person should be able to publish content through the system easily,” says Miller. Look for open standards in your CMS. An open platform that integrates to your existing system with creative tools will help your content creators keep your site fresh. A good CMS should work with all popular content creation programs, such as adding the option to “Publish to Web” after clicking on File within Microsoft Word. Find a CMS that has security features for content storage and access. A CMS system can help customers help themselves via the Net instead of using expensive call centers. Using Interwoven’s CMS, British Telecom successfully “e-shifted” more than 12 percent of its call center traffic to the Web for self-service support. For the customer, it means an easier, faster, and more convenient way to find the info they need. A CMS helps the info to be itemized, tagged (with keywords) and implemented into the central database. A CMS should enable multi-channel publishing. The content may be designed for the Web but may evolve into other channels, such as print or wireless. CMS solutions need not be expensive, although it depends on your needs, such as whether it’s for departmental use or for global collaboration. On the flipside, a CMS will help your business be more productive, will cut costs, can help efficiently manage your brand and speed up your time to market for launching new products, services or campaigns. “Companies cannot compete on price and location alone these days,” says Miller. “You need accurate and up-to-date content to compete in today’s world.” And to help a company comply with the growing number of regulations impacting financial reporting, customer privacy and other aspects of business, an IT department needs a CMS that offers a full audit trail for all types of content.

About 2425 days ago Setting Up a Website

Building Applications with AJAX

Running a business on the World Wide Web can be a source of frustration if you don’t have the right tools. Many business owners continue to expect their customers to wait what seems like an eternity for an entire webpage to load if a customer changes what they want to see or buy. But a wait of even a few seconds can be more than a frustration to a customer. It can convince them to shop somewhere else. To avoid such lost sales, businesses that sell goods online need to become familiar with AJAX, a development tool that can be used to create interactive Web applications without requiring a new page to load. What Is AJAX AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In layman’s terms it works like this: Say a custom shoe company wants to make it easier for customers to create their perfect pair. On an AJAX-designed site, each time a customer clicks on a new color, it simply pulls up a new image or object, instead of loading an entirely new page. How does it work? Asynchronous applications are, basically, those that can do more than one thing at a time. We’ve come to expect this from most programs. For example, you don’t expect your screen to go blank whenever you hit the save button in Microsoft Word, but in Web-based applications it’s always been a case of having to wait for an entirely new page every time you perform any operation, regardless of how small. AJAX performs this function by using a bunch of already popular technologies such as XML, HTML, JavaScript, and the XMLHttpRequest object to make quick updates to the user interface without having to reload the entire webpage on a browser. AJAX Behind the Scenes With AJAX, JavaScript code embedded within webpages runs when a user performs an action. That JavaScript makes a request from a host typically running some sort of application server. The host returns an XML-formatted message containing some information. That information is then processed by more JavaScript code to dynamically update the page being displayed, showing the retrieved information. The important point here is that only the information that has changed is sent back from the server, not the entire page. Think of a photo browsing page that displays 20 high-resolution pictures at a time. The page gives the user the ability to select and zoom in or out on any of those pictures. Even with browser-based caching it would be inefficient to refresh the entire page and all its pictures whenever the user selected one to take a closer look. With AJAX the page can request that single image in whatever size is required then display it without reloading the page. Benefits for Your Business The obvious benefit for your business of using AJAX on your website is performance. Webpages are much more responsive when they don’t need to be completely reloaded after every click. Responsive webpages are more effective and will make customers stay longer and, hopefully, buy. On the server side, AJAX has huge benefits for websites that have sporadic traffic patterns. MacRumors.com, a website that sees a huge influx of traffic when Apple Computer is making product announcements at Macworld, uses AJAX to limit its bandwidth usage. “The setup was designed to offer unlimited scalability and tailored to provide live text updates to a large audience of people,” the website says. The website goes on to say that it uses AJAX to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to individual viewers. “If not for the efficiency of the MacRumorsLive AJAX update system, the same webcast would have required approximately twice as many servers and would have had to transfer almost 6 times as much data,” the website says. Other AJAX proponents define the business benefits in terms of time savings. Ajax Info, a website that compares traditional Web applications with those created with AJAX, concludes that “a business can save between 500 and 2,800 man hours per year on a 10-step hypothetical process, saving roughly four seconds per step (a between 30 percent and 70 percent reduction in labor costs).” Challenges Remain At the same time, business owners need to be aware that while as many as 93 percent of Web browsers used by the general population are AJAX-compatible, there are other users who will be excluded from accessing these applications, according to a May report from Forrester Research. Those excluded users include the following: Those who use screen readers. Web users who rely on screen readers – a software application that helps blind users or people with vision problems — may be disadvantaged by Ajax because screen readers rely on being alerted that a page has been updated or changed and AJAX applications may not trigger those screen readers that a change has been made, according to Forrester. While the number of computer users reliant on screen readers is small, there are laws on the books in the U.S. requiring reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. Those who use mobile devices. While the Web browsers on cellular phones with Internet connectivity are becoming more sophisticated, many still don’t support AJAX. Those who use employers’ computers.  Some companies disable JavaScript on sites outside the intranet in response to security fears or other concerns and that means employees will not be able to take advantage of the AJAX-enhanced site, Forrester says.

About 2425 days ago Wireless Networks

What Is a LAN?

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A local area network (LAN) is a collection of computers and other devices connected to each other to enable communication and sharing. Small and mid-size firms that outgrow a few PCs and the physical sharing of disks often upgrade to LANs in order to facilitate collaboration and the sharing of business tools. LANs started in the early 1980s as a way to share documents and printers easily. On a LAN, not every worker needs his or her own printer — one printer can serve a workgroup or office. By hitting “print” from within Microsoft Word, for instance, the print request travels across the network to the shared printer. In the same fashion, an application running on one computer — dubbed a server — can be shared among computers,  sometimes called clients. The server becomes a location where files are stored, applications are centrally managed, and access to files and resources is granted only to those who have the proper rights. A LAN has the distinction of being in a smaller area — hence the name local — and that makes it ideal for a small business. When a computer network extends beyond a building or a campus or a small area via telecommunication lines, it becomes a wide area network (WAN).  How LANs work Before wireless technology made untethered communication possible, LANs were created by using cables to connect computers to each other.  Now, LANs are often a combination of wired and wireless connections. A LAN comprises the software that allows the sharing of applications and devices, and also the hardware, meaning  the physical connections. Most networks are linked using Ethernet cable, which operates at various speeds, from ten megabits per second to up to ten gigabits per second. Other hardware components of a LAN are hubs, bridges, and routers. A hub consolidates the connection of various computers into a central location. Ethernet cable has physical limitations — the signal traveling over the wires can lose its integrity if the distance is too far. Bridges help extend and segment the network. And routers determine where requests are going and speed them to their destination. Why LANs work for small business More than 53 percent of small businesses have adopted some form of a LAN, says Laurie McCabe, vice president of AMI Partners, a New York-based research firm. Of those small businesses that are using LANs, 76 percent are using a server-based network, as opposed to a peer-to-peer network, where PCs are connected and share resources without a central server. At some small businesses, a LAN is built the way it has been for decades: a server or servers run software and manage user accounts. But the notion of a LAN is changing, says Michael Dortch, principal business analyst with the Robert Francis Group. Businesses are considering moving away from physically running and managing applications on a server in the office, and instead paying someone to run the applications for them. The concept of a server is still there, only the server may be in another city or country. The connections from desktop PC, or client, to the server are Internet connections, not wired ones. “SMBs don’t want or need LANs, any more than they want or need PCs,” Dortch says. “What they want and need is simple, consistent, affordable access to the IT-empowered tools and resources that help them to do business effectively and successfully. Growing numbers of SMBs are looking to hosted services as alternatives to physical LANs they have to implement and manage themselves.”

About 2455 days ago Data Security

What are Macroviruses?

A few years ago, macro viruses were one of the most common categories of computer predators. Instead of targeting programs, they infected documents and templates, most notably programs such as Microsoft’s Word or Excel. The most notorious macro virus was the Melissa, a combination virus and worm, unleashed in 1999 by a New Jersey man who named the virus after a lap dancer and wound up confessing in court later that he caused $80 million in damage to U.S. businesses. The virus traveled via e-mail, targeting Microsoft Outlook users, and eventually forced such companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Lockheed Martin to shut down their e-mail gateways for a spell. At one time, macro viruses comprised an estimated 75 percent of the viruses in circulation according to Webopedia. Then they dropped from the headlines as software makers improved anti-virus programs and other computer threats became more prevalent. But anti-virus software vendor Kaspersky Lab in May revealed the discovery of a new macro virus that targets open-source applications, such as OpenOffice and StarOffice. (OpenOffice.org, the group that released the open source office program, disputes applying the label “virus” to Stardust, the exploit discovered by Kaspersky Labs.) Assuming that macros may make a comeback, here is what you should know to protect your business: What are macro viruses Macro viruses are written in the internal macro language of an application. A “macro” is a sequence of commands that allows users to customize certain tasks with a single click. Among other things, users can use macros to format text, log in, and check mail accounts, copy data between applications. and generate reports. Macro viruses infect computers by replacing the normal macros that handle these tasks with a virus. That’s why Microsoft Office products — such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint — were their most frequent targets in the past. Method of infection Macro viruses spread through e-mail attachments, CD-ROMS, networks, modems, and the Internet. When you open a file containing a macro virus, it can infect your entire system, embedding itself in other documents and templates already stored on your machine, as well future ones. If you share an infected file with someone else, it will invade their system as well if they don’t have anti-virus software installed. By this method, it can quickly spread and overwhelm a network. Signs your computer is infected While your system may function at normal levels even with a macro virus present, there are ways to detect its presence so that you can stop it before it gets too far. Consider these: Unexplainable behavior. You may be prompted for a password on a file that is not password-protected, or a document may unexpectedly be saved as a template. Strange error messages. Past examples include “Just to prove another point” or “ROBERTA, TI AMO!” or “STOP ALL FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTING IN THE PACIFIC!” Unexpected text appears in a document. The Melissa virus, for example, inserted quotes from the animated television series “The Simpsons” into Word documents. Macro viruses will run on any operating system that uses susceptible applications. If you are familiar with the macros on your machine, glance through them periodically to check for any you don’t recognize. Some examples of past macro names include AutoOpen, PayLoad, and AAAZAO. How to protect yourself Microsoft Office can be set to display a warning message whenever a document is opened that contains macros. To make sure this option is enabled, open the application’s preferences file. Under the security tab, check the “warn before opening a file that contains macros” box. Always choose “disable macros” when asked, unless you are sure of the function of the macro. You’ll still be able to open the file and read its contents. Microsoft Office won’t scan your hard disk, removable media such as CDs, or network to find and remove macro viruses. For that level of protection, you need to buy anti-virus software. Once it’s installed, check frequently for new virus definitions and scan your system on a regular basis. Microsoft Office won’t scan your hard disk, removable media such as CDs, or network to find and remove macro viruses. For that level of protection, you need to buy anti-virus software. Once it’s installed, check frequently for new virus definitions and scan your system on a regular basis.

About 2486 days ago Computer Security

How to Wipe Your Hard Drive before Junking Your PC

For many companies faced with aging computer hardware, the attitude is: out with the old, in with the new. But there is plenty of sensitive data on the hard drives of those old models that could potentially hurt a business if it fell into the wrong hands. Whether your company is dumping a series of aging PCs or simply want them to run as smooth as they did the day they arrived in the building, there are certain rules to follow when wiping your hard drive before tossing your PC. Some companies make the mistake of simply trying to uninstall their problems and manually delete important or confidential files. But be forewarned: there’s always a way to retrieve data. This following guide will help you wipe your hard drive clean and install a fresh copy of Windows XP before you donate it to a charity, relative or coworker. Step 1: Back up your important information Be sure to back up your most important (and irreplaceable) files before formatting your hard drive. Usually, these are files such as documents (e.g. Microsoft Word files), spreadsheets, presentations, address book entries and calendar appointments, important email messages, Web site bookmarks and personal digital photos. If your computer has a CD or DVD writer (a.k.a. “burner”), then you can use the disk copying software built into Windows XP, or pick up more sophisticated programs to copy this content to the disk. Important: make sure your burn onto a new disk was successful before formatting the hard drive. Better yet, make two or three copies. Alternatively, you can copy data over to a USB memory stick or upload it to a “virtual” drive on the Internet for a small fee. Step 2: Prep for the format Unlike past versions of Windows, which had you create a start-up disk to reformat your hard drive, Windows XP handles this in an easier fashion, providing the disk when you purchase your computer. But there’s one caveat: you’ll need to find your Windows XP disk. The good news is you’ll need it anyway to reinstall the operating system after the format. Before you begin, make sure your computer is set to Boot to CD. You can see if this is the case by looking into the BIOS (basic input/output system) settings when the computer starts. Tap the F10 key when your computer is starting and you’ll see the BIOS settings; under Boot Order, make sure the CD-ROM is set to “boot first.” Save settings and exit. Step 3: Format the hard drive With the Windows XP CD-ROM in your drive, restart the computer. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should be prompted as follows: Press Any Key to Boot from CD. During this setup process, you may be asked to delete any partitions on your hard drive (if you have any). Follow the instructions and eventually you will have just one option: Unpartitioned Space. Press Enter to install Windows XP. When asked how you would like to format the partition, choose the command “format using the NTFS file system.” After this partition is formatted, Windows XP will begin to install itself and will reboot the computer until the operating system is finally installed.

About 2486 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

How to Wipe Your Hard Drive before Junking Your PC

For many companies faced with aging computer hardware, the attitude is: out with the old, in with the new. But there is plenty of sensitive data on the hard drives of those old models that could potentially hurt a business if it fell into the wrong hands. Whether your company is dumping a series of aging PCs or simply want them to run as smooth as they did the day they arrived in the building, there are certain rules to follow when wiping your hard drive before tossing your PC. Some companies make the mistake of simply trying to uninstall their problems and manually delete important or confidential files. But be forewarned: there’s always a way to retrieve data. This following guide will help you wipe your hard drive clean and install a fresh copy of Windows XP before you donate it to a charity, relative or coworker. Step 1: Back up your important information Be sure to back up your most important (and irreplaceable) files before formatting your hard drive. Usually, these are files such as documents (e.g. Microsoft Word files), spreadsheets, presentations, address book entries and calendar appointments, important email messages, Web site bookmarks and personal digital photos. If your computer has a CD or DVD writer (a.k.a. “burner”), then you can use the disk copying software built into Windows XP, or pick up more sophisticated programs to copy this content to the disk. Important: make sure your burn onto a new disk was successful before formatting the hard drive. Better yet, make two or three copies. Alternatively, you can copy data over to a USB memory stick or upload it to a “virtual” drive on the Internet for a small fee. Step 2: Prep for the format Unlike past versions of Windows, which had you create a start-up disk to reformat your hard drive, Windows XP handles this in an easier fashion, providing the disk when you purchase your computer. But there’s one caveat: you’ll need to find your Windows XP disk. The good news is you’ll need it anyway to reinstall the operating system after the format. Before you begin, make sure your computer is set to Boot to CD. You can see if this is the case by looking into the BIOS (basic input/output system) settings when the computer starts. Tap the F10 key when your computer is starting and you’ll see the BIOS settings; under Boot Order, make sure the CD-ROM is set to “boot first.” Save settings and exit. Step 3: Format the hard drive With the Windows XP CD-ROM in your drive, restart the computer. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should be prompted as follows: Press Any Key to Boot from CD. During this setup process, you may be asked to delete any partitions on your hard drive (if you have any). Follow the instructions and eventually you will have just one option: Unpartitioned Space. Press Enter to install Windows XP. When asked how you would like to format the partition, choose the command “format using the NTFS file system.” After this partition is formatted, Windows XP will begin to install itself and will reboot the computer until the operating system is finally installed.

About 3825 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Working Smarter With Microsoft Office

A decade ago, it was very difficult to complete a mail merge between applications from different vendors’ software packages. Don’t miss out on one of the most compelling benefits of Microsoft’s stronghold over desktop office automation software. Be sure to take advantage of the tight integration across Microsoft products. Don’t Retype It. Merge It! What are some easy ways you can begin putting this integration to use? Two examples immediately come to mind: mail merge and financial statement tables. Do you need to create automatically, some customized mailing labels, envelopes or form letters, but often end up settling for some low-tech, tedious, scissors-and-glue approach? The Mail Merge Helper wizard in Microsoft Word makes it very easy to pull in address lists, or similar data, from such programs as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Access. Don’t even think about having your clerical staff retype the information! Preparing Tables: Just Say No to Spaces and Tabs Another small-business redundancy has to do with preparing financial statements within documents. In most companies, a CFO, accounting manger or controller prepares various financial statements in Microsoft Excel, and then passes the information over to an executive assistant to incorporate into regulatory documents, lender and investor updates, and annual reports. Make sure your company isn’t falling into this huge productivity trap. Be sure your executive assistant, or whomever is charged with pulling together these documents in Microsoft Word, is aware of simple, enormous timesaving shortcuts such as the Paste Special command on the Edit menu and the Object command on the Insert menu. All too often, I see the executive assistant retyping these financial statements from scratch in Microsoft Word, either by using the Insert Table feature or, even worse, by aligning text by using spaces and tabs. Ouch! Be Diplomatic and Tread Gently at First Not all companies will suffer from these same redundancies. But someone needs to take the time to go on a fact-finding mission in your organization to spot and remedy at least some of these inefficiencies. Because of the sensitive nature of this, you may be better off leaning on your accountants or auditors for this task. In other cases, there’s no reason a PC savvy office manager, controller or CFO can’t preclude or successfully manage this exploratory work. Discussion Points Do you have a hunch that employees are retyping the same information over and over again? Do your administrative staff members know how to fully exploit the mail merge features in the Microsoft Office suite? Does your financial and publications staff understand how to easily take data prepared in Microsoft Excel and seamlessly place it into Microsoft Word documents? Is there anyone in your company who’s in a natural position to spend some time with each department or job function and look for opportunities to streamline workloads through more efficient use of Microsoft Office applications? Joshua Feinberg (joshua@smallbiztechtalk.com) helps small businesses save money on computer support costs. His latest book, What Your Computer Consultant Doesn’t Want You to Know ($19.99, Small Biz Tech Talk Press), exposes 101 money-saving secrets of expensive techies. To order Joshua’s new book, visit www.SmallBizTechTalk.com or call 866-TECH-EXPERT (866-832-4397). © Copyright 2002, Joshua Feinberg Small Biz Tech Talk is a registered trademark of KISTech Communications

About 4646 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Tomorrow’s Workforce

Cover Story How one inner-city program is trying to give kids the skills they need — and the ones you need, too Washington, D.C. One evening in June, 17-year-old Vincent Hawkins was clicking through a Web site he had constructed, which was devoted to two of his passions: professional wrestling and an animated television show known as Dragon Ball. Nothing unusual for a teenager, except the setting. He was sitting at an IBM PC with a Pentium II processor in the Perry School Community Services Center, located in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C., known as Northwest No. 1. The area’s grim moniker is one of the legacies of a 1960s urban-renewal plan that had the unfortunate but not uncommon result of rendering the area economically desolate, making it the second-poorest area in the nation’s capital. The center is housed in a former public-school building that had been abandoned for more than 25 years before a consortium of community organizations reclaimed it. In 1998, the Perry School began offering health care and then in 1999 added social services, job training and placement, day care, and after-school programs, including computer instruction at its Networked Learning Center. The school is just around the corner from a block of 29 newly built owner-occupied town houses, one of two affordable-housing projects in the predominantly black neighborhood. The Perry School and the new houses are the exceptions, however, in an economic backwater just five minutes from the Capitol, an area where the median income is $12,400 a year. There are more than 1,500 units of public and subsidized housing within half a mile of the center. There’s not a major supermarket or drugstore nearby. Hawkins, a handsome, soft-spoken youth with a powerful athletic physique, was dragged into the center by a friend earlier this year when high school football season was over. Hawkins didn’t have a PC at home and had little exposure to computers at school, although he had tried surfing the Web at a public library. That lack of computer literacy had already affected his job prospects. “When I applied for a job at Blockbuster last summer, they asked me, ‘Can you use a computer?” he recalls. “I said, ‘I can type my name. That’s about it.’ No one would hire me.” Since then Hawkins has attended an after-school computer-learning program at the Perry School. But the aim isn’t simply to help him qualify for a job at a retail store, although that could well be an option. This summer, after several months in the program, Hawkins was teaching younger grade-school-aged children at the center. A few weeks earlier he’d made what was for him an unheard-of $10 an hour helping to inventory all the PCs in the community center. With several other teens, he checked available memory, hard-drive space, and network cards to see whether the machines could be upgraded. “We were competing with each other to see who could do a PC the fastest,” he says. “I finally learned all those things people were talking about with computers.” A talented football player at Dunbar High School in the district, Hawkins still hopes for a potential college-sports scholarship or a career in acting. But just in case those shoot-the-moon dreams fail to pan out, dabbling with his Web site and creating digital movies with his classmates are helping him acquire the knowledge that might open up broader opportunities, ones that will allow him to leave the neighborhood that the Perry School serves. “We’re bringing technology to areas where people don’t have access to it,” says Networked Learning Center director Kelly Gainer, a compact and energetic young woman who speaks passionately about the program. “And they’re not just learning computer skills. I expect them to go beyond that so they can have the confidence to go beyond the average job.” “They’re not just learning computer skills. I expect them to go beyond that so they can have the confidence to go beyond the average job,” says Kelly Gainer, director of the Networked Learning Center. Gainer had been working as a manager at MCI for five years when she read an article in the Washington Post with the headline “Sometimes Money Is Not Enough,” which featured an inner-city high-tech program called Martha’s Table. She quit her MCI job and worked at Martha’s Table for two and a half years before leaving to head up the Perry School program in 1998. With two assistants and 15 PCs, Gainer runs a program for children ages 6 through 13, heads a program for teens, and oversees an adult job-training workshop. “This is my calling,” she says simply. Gainer isn’t merely a gatekeeper of information and knowledge. She’s more like a coach, urging students to figure things out, work with others, make decisions, try, fail, and succeed — whether the subject is building a Web site, editing digital photographs, or creating an animated story. “The learning is so much richer and so much more real because this is how you participate in the world,” says Candy Taaffe, learning program specialist at the Morino Institute, the lead organization that helped create the Networked Learning Center under a two-year pilot program. “You ask questions, you create, you’re critical of images that are put in front of you. This type of learning is very different from a kid sitting in front of a computer with headphones on.” It also provides the kind of critical knowledge that is in high demand in the new economy, not least of all among fast-growing start-ups. Those companies want employees who can take initiative, work well in teams, attack problems, make decisions, and accomplish tasks. In short, they want workers who know how to learn. “There isn’t a digital divide; it’s a cognitive divide, between those who can solve problems and those who cannot,” says Jane M. Healy, author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds – and What We Can Do About It. “There’s a schism as the workplace demands more complex cognitive skills for the jobs of the future.” According to the Department of Education, there are 257 federally funded community-technology centers in the nation. Even so, President Clinton has requested $100 million for fiscal 2001 to fund 280 more. The Perry School’s center didn’t start out with the express goal of changing the way its students thought. Rather, Paul McElligott, the executive director of Perry School Community Services Center Inc., says it began with a simple request by community members to help them learn computer skills. But two years ago, as the Perry School began talking with the Morino Institute about a technology center, it became clear that the facility would become more than a bunch of PCs, printers, and part-time instructors. While researching her book, Healy found that technology-education programs that simply offered computers were wanting. Educators were often enamored of glitzy technology but too often failed to integrate it into the school curriculum in a meaningful way. Part of that had to do with the educational software that companies were developing. Students were often reduced to pointing and clicking through less-than-inspiring exercises with the real goal of “winning” the chance to play a computer game at the end. Robert Price, a former elementary-school teacher from Brooklyn, N.Y., also works with school districts and nonprofits, including the Morino Institute, to incorporate technology into their learning programs. He too has found that schools often fail to consider the way that computers will be used within the curriculum. “The biggest debates in school districts are over whether to buy Macs or PCs,” he says. “What they aren’t talking about is what they’re going to use the computers for.” The Morino Institute, based in Reston, Va., was founded by former software entrepreneur Mario Morino, who wanted to fund inner-city after-school programs to test a different approach to improving computer literacy: Could the Internet be used both to make a nonprofit organization more effective and to improve its after-school learning activities? “We want kids to be gaining experience and skills so they can participate in the new economy,” says Candy Taaffe, learning program specialist at the Morino Institute. The institute chose the Perry School and three other nonprofits for its two-year Youth Development Collaborative Pilot. The organizations would be linked by electronic mailing lists and Web-based communications so that all four centers could share experiences, lessons, and problem solving. “It’s clearly enhanced the capability of all the organizations,” says McElligott, who had not used E-mail himself until 1998. The institute also helped design the actual centers, spending $175,000 to $200,000 on each for the first-year start-up costs, which included hardware, networking, high-speed Internet access, and software. Many of the instructors in the after-school program didn’t have the educational skills to develop lesson plans or even deal effectively with the kids. So last year the institute spent another $30,000 to hire educational consultants from the Bank Street College of Education, the Center for Children and Technology, and the National Urban Alliance, all in New York City. The consultants focused on helping the instructors improve their educational techniques and also provided examples of the ways that computers could be used in project-based learning. “Before they arrived, we would spend about two weeks on a lesson plan,” Gainer says. “Now we can create one in 20 minutes if we have to.” Price, the educational consultant from Brooklyn, for instance, ran workshops that included ways to use digital cameras and animation programs in projects. But he also focused on skills, such as how to foster group dynamics or manage the creative chaos of a classroom without stifling it. Gainer then put the lessons to work at the Perry School. Children used a digital camera to take photos of one another, edited them using Adobe Photoshop, and created captions for them on the computer. They then printed out the results and plastered them across their schoolhouse walls. In another instance, the older-teen workshop made a 30-second film on playground violence, first deciding on the functions they needed to fill (such as director, writer, and actors) and then collectively working out storyboards and a production schedule for the short drama. Students also learned to use a program called Kid Pix to create animated stories, which they did last winter for a monthlong Christmas project. They’ve used Microsoft Word to write reports and Excel spreadsheets to graph out classroom opinion polls, such as “Which cookies are most popular?” “They really liked that one because they also got to eat the cookies,” Gainer says. “We’ve been thinking about computers as a tool, in the same way we think about a pencil, a crayon, and reading aloud,” Taaffe says. “The computers are not the center of the activity; they kind of fade into all the activities the kids are doing there.” Nurturing that philosophy is crucial if a computer-learning center strives to offer students more than just the technical nuts and bolts of working on the machines. “You can use technology to support a kind of drill-and-practice learning that will raise standardized-test scores among students who really do it a lot,” says Cornelia Brunner, associate director of the Center for Children and Technology, in New York City, who also worked as a consultant for the Morino Institute. “The problem is, they haven’t learned a whole lot.” Brunner argues that such a rote, skills-based approach will actually increase the digital divide because it fosters a more rigid type of learning. Students who learn within this model won’t develop the ability to work with others, think critically, and expand their creativity, she believes. Instead, they will be trained for the repetitive tasks — like data entry — generally found in low-wage jobs. A more holistic approach, however, is harder to teach — it’s more time-consuming and more expensive. It’s also more difficult to measure. Donors or parents looking for concrete results might not be able to assess group interaction, problem solving, or research skills as easily as multiple-choice tests measure rote skills. “You have to be more patient,” Brunner says, “because it’s part of a larger developmental process rather than a single result tied to a single intervention.” But the prize, proponents believe, is also that much greater. The process of a child’s creating and revising a project amounts to “huge ownership of the learning process,” Taaffe says. “They’re getting opportunities to have opinions and make those opinions known to their community and outside world.” To be sure, a teen like Hawkins who can now build a Web site, create a spreadsheet, and use E-mail to communicate has the skills to work in a good-paying job, let alone at a Blockbuster outlet. And in a neighborhood facing the daily challenges of poverty and crime, the value of those skills cannot be emphasized enough. “We want kids to be gaining experience and skills so they can participate in the new economy,” Taaffe says. “But I also want to see kids having experiences where they are gaining self-esteem and confidence. Here they’re actually creating something, teaching others, and thinking about the ways they can become productive citizens.” Samuel Fromartz is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4738 days ago Business Software

Bidding on Linux

The Linux operating system is hot. It’s cheap. And it works. But can you run your company on it? Wearing a blue windbreaker with a James G. Murphy Co. logo on it, Julie Murphy stands in the company’s muddy auction lot in Kenmore, Wash., just north of Seattle. As she looks on, men in flannel shirts and logging boots inspect the tires and climb into the cabs of the used backhoes and dump trucks that will be going on the block shortly. Each year Murphy’s company auctions off some $30 million worth of this sort of heavy equipment, along with used police cars, tools, and even the contents of an entire restaurant or sawmill. But today’s auction is different. For one thing, nearly 1,500 bidders have registered, far more people than the monthly auctions usually attract. And there’s more than the average air of expectation in the auction yard. That is largely because of just one item: a one-of-a-kind, baby blue 1971 convertible Plymouth Hemi Barracuda “muscle car.” Seized by police in Everett, Wash., in connection with a drug arrest, the car is in mint condition. No one knows how much it will go for when the bidding starts at noon, but it won’t be small change: the city of Everett has suggested that the minimum bid be set at $250,000. One fellow has flown up from Phoenix to try his luck. Other bidders are on the phone from places like Blue Springs, Mo., and St. Paul, Minn. “This is one of the most exciting things we’ve ever sold,” says Murphy. In a previous life, Murphy was a certified public accountant at Arthur Andersen. Now she is chief financial officer, controller, and office manager of James G. Murphy Co. The company was founded in 1970 by her father, James. Murphy’s older brother, Tim, is CEO and head auctioneer. Along with her many other duties, Julie Murphy is responsible for the company’s computers. Not every small business will be able to (or should) jump on Linux immediately. And this auction, like all the others her father and his fellow auctioneers have held for the past four years, will run on Linux. In the company’s cramped mail room, Murphy proudly points to a metal rack sitting in a corner behind the copier. It holds two computers that run Linux, the software program that has taken the computing world by storm. Since 1996 — long before most people had ever heard of it — James G. Murphy Co. has been using Linux to run its auctions. Today the company uses the program to run almost its entire business. Linux, a computer operating system, is essentially a version of Unix, the software that runs powerful workstations sold by companies like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. It has two big advantages over competing operating systems (like Microsoft Windows NT, for one), says Bill Campbell, the Seattle computer consultant who installed the Murphys’ Linux system: It is dirt cheap. And it is incredibly reliable. That reliability is important if you’re in charge of a 30-employee family business running auctions that sometimes draw more than 1,000 bidders. This morning, while most of the crowd is jockeying for seats in the indoor auction hall to get the best view of the bidding on the Hemi ‘Cuda, others are lining up in the office to pay for the heavy equipment and trucks they acquired during the morning’s auctions. Using computer terminals and PCs hooked up to the Linux server, 10 cashiers are taking payments. All the information they need is already in the server: descriptions of the items to be sold were entered before the auctions began. Prospective buyers received bidder numbers when they arrived this morning. During the auction itself, workers frantically typed winning bids into the system, so when bidders come in to settle up, says Murphy, “you just punch in their number, and it tells you what lots they bought and how much they paid.” Just to be on the safe side, Murphy still uses every auctioneer’s favorite manual backup system: slips of paper. That’s how the business handled payments before buying its first computer in 1986. What would happen if the company’s computer system were to fail during a huge auction like today’s? It wouldn’t be a pretty sight, says Murphy. “I would probably just jump out the window.” Fortunately, the system has never crashed. That sort of reliability is typical of Linux computers. “Some of our clients have Linux systems that have been running for a year solid,” says Jim Capp, president of Keystone Programming Inc., a computer-consulting company in Harrisburg, Pa., that sells a lot of Linux systems. Linux holds another attraction for small businesses: it is essentially free. That’s because it was developed completely by volunteers, led by Linus Torvalds, arguably the world’s best-known computer programmer after Bill Gates. Torvalds, who started work on Linux in 1991 while he was a student at the University of Helsinki, distributes the software free on the Internet. It takes patience and Web know-how to download it, however. So most people pay a modest price — typically $30 to $59 — to get Linux from companies like Red Hat Inc., Caldera Systems Inc., and Corel Corp., which provide it on a CD-ROM, along with manuals, tech support, and other applications. Linux can also save small companies money because it runs well on older, less powerful machines. When Campbell installed E-mail and a firewall — a security gateway between the company’s computers and the Internet — at James G. Murphy Co., two years ago, he used an old 486 computer that Murphy was preparing to jettison. “I could have sold them a new computer,” Campbell says. “But Linux runs just fine on that computer, so why sell them hardware they don’t really need?” Linux also runs well on laptops, says Campbell. That’s useful to Julie Murphy, because most of her company’s auctions are run on location, sometimes at customer sites as far away as Texas or Virginia. Last November, for example, Tim Murphy and three employees headed off to the small logging town of Philomath, Oreg., where they auctioned off the saws, conveyor belts, and other equipment at two lumber mills. They took the auction software with them on an IBM ThinkPad 560 notebook computer running Linux. As with the computer system in the company’s home office, the auction cashiers used computer terminals networked to the laptop to take payments. Two years ago few people had heard of Linux. Then its impressive reliability and low cost started attracting attention. Now major computer companies like IBM, Dell, and Gateway sell it. It is widely used on the Internet — 31% of Web sites are powered by Linux — and Linux companies have pushed aside Web start-ups to become the hottest items on Wall Street. The initial public offering last December of VA Linux Systems Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that sells computers with Linux preinstalled, shot up 698% on the first day. That set a record for the highest gain made by a new stock offering. As Linux has become more widely accepted, several large companies — such as Burlington, N.J., retailer Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp. and New York City’s Cendant Corp., which owns Ramada hotels and inns and Avis Rent A Car — are starting to use it. Now small organizations as well are discovering that Linux may be a good choice for them. Sam Brown, a private investigator in San Francisco, uses three Linux computers to do research on the Internet and to pick up E-mailed reports from his six investigators. And the Paducah Sun — a 135-employee newspaper in Paducah, Ky., with a circulation of about 30,000 — bought a Linux system last fall to archive stories and photographs. The newspaper considered buying an archiving system running on a computer from Sun Microsystems but decided to go with Linux instead. “It was significantly cheaper,” says publisher Jim Paxton. Both Brown and Paxton were introduced to Linux in the same way that the Murphys were, through a computer consultant. That’s now happening a lot, as folks like Campbell begin using Linux more and more. James G. Murphy Co. was the first of Campbell’s customers to begin using the system. Now nearly all the computers he installs run Linux. “In the last year I’ve put in 3 systems on SCO Unix,” Campbell says. “In the same time period I’ve installed at least 30 new systems running Linux.” Not every small business will be able to (or should) jump on Linux immediately. One problem: many software programs still don’t run on the system, says George Weiss, a research director at the Gartner Group, in Stamford, Conn. Campbell’s three customers who are not using Linux, for example, are running an accounting package from RealWorld Corp., in Manchester, N.H., which doesn’t work on Linux. And Microsoft, which views Linux as a threat, has yet to issue such software mainstays as Word or Excel for Linux. The lack of Microsoft Office apps isn’t necessarily a showstopper, however. Julie Murphy, for example, is using an office suite for Linux called Applixware, from Applix Inc., in Westboro, Mass. “If someone E-mails me a Microsoft Word file, it converts it cleanly,” she says. “You don’t know you’re not on a Windows system.” Weiss also suggests that support can be a crucial issue. “Linux is no simpler than any other version of Unix,” a notoriously complicated system, he warns. Small organizations that don’t have a trained programmer on staff should make sure they have a Linux-savvy computer consultant to install and support it, he says. Murphy was confident that Campbell knew what he was doing when he suggested switching to Linux. She’s been relying on Campbell’s computer know-how since 1988. “I don’t care what the computer is running,” she says, “as long as it works.” The bidders packed into the auction hall this morning don’t care either. Not with that one-of-a-kind Hemi on the block. At a few minutes past noon, the crowd falls silent as the bidding begins. The first bid is immediately doubled to $200,000. A man seated high up in the bleachers waves his hand — he’ll pay $225,000. That figure is immediately raised by a bidder on the phone from San Mateo, Calif. In less than five minutes, the price has jumped to $350,000. The man in the bleachers drops out. It’s now down to two: the bidder on the phone and a guy on the floor, who’s practically holding his breath as he stands next to the car he hopes to take home with him. There is a pause while the bidder on the floor converses on his cell phone and considers what to do. At last he bids $380,000. All eyes are now on the auctioneer holding the phone. Almost immediately he stabs the air with his hand, signaling yes — the bidder on the phone will go higher. The man on the floor shakes his head. He’s done. The car has just been sold to the bidder from San Mateo for $400,000. For that amount of money, you could buy a lot of Linux systems. Dan Orzech is a freelance writer in Philadelphia. For more about Linux, see “Good Stuff Cheap” in Book Value. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4830 days ago Data Security

It’s Midnight. Do You Know Where Your Tech Support Is?

Resources Finally, a new breed of tech consultants provide affordable, timely help to growing businesses No computer comes worry free. Despite all the advances in computers, software, and networks, our wired universe, sadly, often becomes tangled. And since the pace of business has revved up to Internet speed, random crashes and network traffic jams are becoming more taxing than ever. Of course, if your budget has room for a full-time tech-support team, kinks like these are mere headaches. Pop an Advil and call the help desk. But what about the smaller and solo businesses that can’t afford to devote precious resources to computer support? What about people like Andy Schilling? Schilling, who is president of Tangent Fund Management LLC, also wears the hat of “technology decision maker” at the private-equity-fund -management firm in San Francisco. Since Schilling joined the 15-employee company 11 years ago, Tangent’s computer arsenal has grown in much the same way that most other small companies’ do — one PC at a time, when a new employee is hired or a creaky computer dies. As Schilling bought new computers, he’d pass the old ones down the food chain. Tangent chose its tech support, too, as most small companies do — -by proximity. When the company decided to network its PCs, Tangent hired a local computer-consulting outfit, which installed, configured, and maintained the new network. When the business decided to add more PCs to the mix, though, it went to a local branch of a computer chain that provided basic maintenance for its machines. That worked fine — until the branch went bankrupt. So Schilling figured he’d devote more of his own time to the company’s tech decisions. But since his expertise is in finance — not in computers — he found himself at a disadvantage. Back in 1990, Schilling had purchased what he thought would be adequate hardware and software to network the office. But as time went by and Tangent added more users, the network constantly crashed. So he brought in new consultants, who advised installing an Ethernet local area network along with more-powerful computers. “We had to rip the whole thing up to put in the Ethernet,” says Schilling. Then he hired another local computer consultant just to wire the LAN, which added to the bill. “It would have been cheaper to install the Ethernet LAN from the beginning,” he says. For computer emergencies, Schilling depended on the same consulting company that had advised him to install the Ethernet network. Although he found its service useful, Schilling says he had to wait for the consultants to respond to his pages and then to travel to his site. Meanwhile, Tangent waited in limbo. “When they got here later in the day, the clock was ticking,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘How many hundreds of dollars would it take to get our printers to print?’ It gets expensive.” Sometimes very expensive, says Mark Margevicius, a senior research analyst at the GartnerGroup. The average large company spends between $8,000 and $10,000 a year just to install, maintain, and support one corporate PC. Those costs are even higher, he says, for small companies, which often can’t afford an in-house tech staff. As a result, they suffer from significant downtime when faced with a computer glitch. Schilling was hardly alone in his frustration; most small businesses have never had much in-house IT help. According to Eric Klein, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group, 53% of networked very small businesses — those with between 2 and 19 employees — don’t have any full-time tech staff at all. Of networked companies with 20 to 99 employees, only 32% have a full-time IT staff. “The bottom line is that businesses are continuing to adapt to PCs and the Internet. The fact that they don’t have a tech staff points to an obvious hole in their support system,” Klein says. Moreover, because of the high hourly rates of most computer consultants (between $40 and $70 for those who offer both time and materials) and the time spent waiting on the phone for help from software and hardware vendors, many small companies don’t seek outside IT help unless they have a major crisis on their hands. Fortunately for companies like Tangent, a growing band of support warriors have spotted this hole and are rushing to fill it with affordable, timely help. By providing standard sets of PCs, software, and networking products — and, in some cases, by requiring lengthy subscriptions — these new businesses can keep their costs so low that even soloists and two- and three-employee companies can have full-service tech support at their beck and call. Some of these technology soldiers configure, install, and regularly monitor individual companies’ systems in an effort to spot problems before they turn into crises. Just call it Fortune 500 service for mom-and-pop shops. CenterBeam When CenterBeam Inc., a start-up based in Santa Clara, Calif., approached Schilling, last July, the Tangent president was grappling with yet another set of tough technology decisions. He was ready to set up an officewide E-mail system and scrap the multiple E-mail accounts that Tangent’s employees had been using to communicate. And he was thinking about registering a domain name and putting up a company Web site. CenterBeam not only offered him E-mail and Internet access but also promised new PCs with 128MB of memory and 17-inch monitors. The company would also provide printers, a wireless LAN, a local server, a software suite that included Microsoft Office 2000, a professionally managed firewall, nightly data backup, and 24-hour tech support. All this would cost Schilling only about $165 a month per user. Because CenterBeam bills its customers on a subscription basis, those costs would be fixed for three years — the life of the contract — no matter how much tech support Tangent might need each month. Some of these new businesses can keep theirs costs so low that even soloists and two- and three-employee companies can have full-service tech support at their beck and call. Just call it Fortune 500 service for mom-and-pop shops. Schilling scribbled out a back-of-the-envelope cost comparison between CenterBeam’s tech services and the system he had pieced together himself. CenterBeam was only slightly less expensive. However, Schilling found the notion of going with a service like CenterBeam attractive because of its consistency. “Now I know what the budget is,” he explains. “Before, it would go in cycles. I’d have some big problem and would have to get new software or buy new PCs. This is a lot more predictable.” CenterBeam cofounder Sheldon Laube hopes his service’s predictability and reliability will speak to small-business owners. “The whole idea is to not ever worry again about this stuff,” he says. As chief technology officer at Novell Inc. and cofounder and CTO of USWeb Corp. (now USWeb/CKS), a San Francisco-based E-commerce consulting business, Laube spent much of his career worrying about technology. And he’s still a worrywart: he and the CenterBeam staff regularly fuss over the health of their customers’ PCs. Laube’s employees use the Internet to peek into the inner workings of their customers’ computers across the country. They hunt remotely for potential problems — and, using the Internet, they upgrade customers’ software without leaving their desks. But even the folks at CenterBeam can’t solve every problem, like the mystery glitch that murdered a PC in Tangent’s accounting department. “One PC just died,” Schilling remembers. No bother. Schilling opened the storage closet and grabbed his “emergency PC,” an extra machine that had come with the CenterBeam package. Schilling called CenterBeam’s office and had all the old computer’s files transferred to the new machine. Because CenterBeam had backed up Tangent’s data nightly, transferring the information was a breeze. “The new computer was up and running in 45 minutes,” Schilling says. “Things like this were a real headache before.” Now headache free, Schilling liked the service so much that at press time he gave CenterBeam a ringing endorsement: his company invested an undisclosed sum in the computer start-up’s second round of financing. Everdream CenterBeam isn’t the only full-service, subscription-based tech provider vying for the small-business market. Everdream Corp., based in Mountain View, Calif., is aiming at soloists and small and midsize companies that would normally purchase inexpensive, so-called white-box computers from local resellers. Everdream manufactures and brands its own PCs before shipping them off to customers, who end up paying about $150 a month per computer. Everdream, like CenterBeam, provides software, hardware, and networking components, as well as Internet access, Web hosting, nightly backup, and round-the-clock online and telephone IT support. In addition, Everdream builds into its machines a simple, commonsense security feature: it divides the hard drives into two parts in an attempt to safeguard business applications from viruses brought in over the Web. One part of the hard drive houses business applications, and the other plays home to programs and games that users download. It would seem that tech-savvy companies — especially new dot-coms — would hardly need outside tech support. Not so, says the Everdream team, which is betting that many high-tech start-ups would rather develop their own technology than worry about day-to-day glitches. Such is the case of Tom Jones. As CEO of Stratasource Inc., a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif., that provides automated systems management, Jones wanted his software engineers to spend all their time creating Stratasource products. Sure, the engineers could troubleshoot their own PCs. But the rest of the staff would still need occasional help. Last October, Jones signed up as a beta tester for one of Everdream’s PCs before committing his support staff to the system. This January he became a paying customer. While testing the gear, he hadn’t needed much support, but when he did need support, he got it right away. “I was working in Microsoft Word and just got hung up,” Jones recalls. When he called Everdream, a technician “entered” his computer remotely — so that both Jones and the technician were looking at Jones’s screen — and quickly showed the CEO how to solve the problem. That said, there are a few drawbacks to CenterBeam and Everdream’s services. Both companies are subscription based and require long-term contracts. Everdream’s customers are obligated for 30 months — a subscription only slightly shorter than CenterBeam’s aforementioned three-year deal. And then there’s the issue of privacy. Both companies tout nightly data-backup services and the ability to enter any subscribed PC through the Internet with permission. Schilling says that although allowing an outsider full access to his files is troubling, the trade-offs are worth it. “We have more up-to-date methods of communication,” he says. “And it’s clear to me that CenterBeam can provide us with much better firewalls than what we were going to be able to afford on our own.” Finally, these kinds of standard services may not fill the needs of small-business owners who require custom configurations or who are devoted to particular brands of computers not offered by the service provider. And they certainly don’t erase the need for customers to ask for written “service-level agreements,” which describe the time frames in which consultants answer service calls, deliver hardware and software, upgrade equipment, and solve problems. More to Come CenterBeam and Everdream both call California home and at press time had only just begun to expand nationally. By the time these pioneers provide services nationwide, they could be facing fierce competition from large computer companies like Micron Technology Inc., which already offers a subscription service for small businesses. Meanwhile, a potential rival, Dell Computer, recently invested in CenterBeam’s second round of financing, and CenterBeam has an agreement with Dell to supply its customers with the computer manufacturer’s PCs. Competition, of course, usually brings lower prices and better-quality service, which is good news for small companies that until now were unable to afford the kinds of services that their larger counterparts benefited from. For people like Andy Schilling, Tangent’s formerly frustrated president, these new services couldn’t have arrived on the scene soon enough. Anne Marie Borrego is a reporter at Inc. The Nitty-Gritty Company: CenterBeam Inc. Location: Santa Clara, Calif. Founders: Sheldon Laube, CEO, former CTO of USWeb/CKS; Glenn Ricart, CTO, former CTO of Novell; Marc Epstein, executive vice-president of product management and development, former CTO of Quarterdeck; Thomas Twietmeyer, CFO, former Autodesk executive Employees: 70 Funding: $55 million in equity financing from Crosspoint Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Microsoft Corp., USWeb/CKS, New Enterprise Associates, Intel Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Impact Venture Partners, and Tangent Fund Management LLC Buzz: $165 a month per user gets you Dell PCs, printers, high-speed Internet access, E-mail, a wireless LAN, Microsoft Office 2000, regular software upgrades, firewall protection, and 24-hour tech support. Dell recently announced an investment in the company, complementing a deal to supply CenterBeam customers with its own PCs. Fine print: You have to make a three-year commitment to the service. If you’re a hot dot-com, three years probably feels like a lifetime. Also, the CenterBeam monthly cost per user of $165 only applies to companies that need 10 or more machines. Prices are higher for companies with fewer users. Finally, you have to feel comfortable letting other eyes peer into your hard drives. Company: Everdream Corp. Location: Mountain View, Calif. Founders: Russell Rive, CTO, and Lyndon Rive, vice-president of partnership development. The brothers Rive hail from the Republic of South Africa, where Lyndon established a successful catalog business when he was 17. Before founding Everdream with Lyndon, Russell picked up computer and sales experience at Zip2 Corp., an online city guide that Compaq Computer Corp. snapped up last year for about $341 million. Employees: 70 Funding: $18 million from Canaan Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ricoh Silicon Valley, and others. Investors include Jack Kuehler, former president and vice-chairman of IBM; and Stanford University. Buzz: Like CenterBeam, Everdream operates on a subscription basis. Customers pay about $150 a month for their Everdream-branded computer, 24-hour IT support, a choice of dial-up or DSL Internet and E-mail service, business applications like Microsoft Office, nightly backup, online training courses, and virus protection. Everdream splits the hard drive into two parts — one “locked down” part that handles the business-critical applications and another that’s open to Internet downloads. Fine print: As with CenterBeam, Everdream’s technicians will have access, albeit limited, to your hard drives. You have to sign up for a 30-month contract — that is, if you can get one. The company hasn’t rolled out nationally just yet but plans to offer service outside California by the second quarter of 2000.