You know how you take a break from work to quickly check what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter and you end up wasting 20 minutes of your day? Multiply that several times a day and we’re talking about some serious productivity lost! But what if you could reply to someone’s post without actually going into the social network in the first place, thereby eliminating the temptation to hang out too long? READ MORE
Yesterday morning, many (though not all) Yahoo Mail users were getting a “Sorry, the page you requested was not found,” message when they tried to log in to their e-mail accounts. Many took to Twitter with a variety of complaints in a variety of languages, asking, as one Twitter user put it, “Why is yahoo mail so effed up?” Others reported they’d been unable to sign on for 24 hours or more. READ MORE
New Hotmail users had better be ready to don the ol’ thinking cap when it comes to their email account passwords: as part of a campaign to discourage hacking, common and/or “easy” passwords such as “123456,” “password” and “ilovecats” will no longer be accepted. In fact, it has been reported that Microsoft may actually roll the new rule over to existing users, forcing those with offending gate keys to switch to a more suitable string of letters and numbers. READ MORE
Times are tough, but you can save your company some cash by taking advantage of many free applications and services to help you remain lean and competitive. This includes many downloadable programs for your BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android smartphone as well as tools for PC productivity, such as online back-up options, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software, and no-cost office suites. Free apps are sought-after downloads today in business. It’s not just because it makes sense to those watching their bottom line, but the apps are getting a lot more robust instead of simply covering the basics, says Scott Steinberg, publisher of Digital Trends. “You’d be surprise what you can find today when it comes to free applications — and there’s plenty of free apps to choose from for your smartphone, PC, or a cloud-computing solution that bridges the two,” adds Steinberg. Steinberg says he’s most excited about the explosion in downloadable apps for smartphones. “The apps transform phones into notebook replacements, audio recorders, GPS navigation devices, note-taking devices, and even gaming getaways for those in need of an entertainment fix while traveling for business.” Speaking of travel, Chris Silva, an analyst at the Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester, the technology research company, says many of these free productivity tools have an inherent benefit compared to traditional desktop software: “On-the-go businesspersons want to be able to access their content wherever and whenever, and on any device — and while Microsoft recently unveiled a ‘cloud’ component to [Microsoft] Office, we’re finding people are turning to Google’s established and free Gmail for e-mail, file storage, document sharing, and so on.” Caveat emptor There’s little dispute that cost-cutting measures are critical — especially given the current state of the economy — but there are a few things about free software that businesses should be aware of. Silva reminds businesses that these free apps are still not as full-featured as paid versions. “Productivity suites might not have the 500-plus menus and tools built into Microsoft Office, for example, but most people don’t venture outside of ‘create, format, print and share’ anyway,” he says. “Many companies, especially small to mid-sized businesses, are finding these free alternatives to be good enough for their needs.” Silva also warns of two other possible downsides to free apps. “It’s no secret there are occasional Gmail outages, which means you can’t access your e-mail, or Skype congestion that can affect call quality, along with other issues associated with Internet-based solutions,” he says. “Plus, there are always increased security risks in allowing your employees to use any kind of software they want. You’ll need to take steps to educate employees about risks, about some company information that shouldn’t be shared with Gmail or IM, and mitigate these with policies.” Best bets for free apps If you’re looking for completely free apps for your smartphone or PC, consider the following recommendations: Skype – Available for PCs and select smartphones (iPhone and Windows Mobile), Skype lets you make free phone calls to any other Skype user on the Internet via VoIP technology. PC users can also chat using video, swap files, or pay a few cents a minute for “Skype Out” calls to landlines and cell phones. Gmail – Google’s free Web-based e-mail solution reliably keeps you in touch with others, regardless of the platform you’re using it on. Benefits include loads of storage, little spam, contact and calendar management, and support for Google Talk between multiple devices. OpenOffice.org – Sun Microsystems’s free Microsoft Office alternative offers a suite of productivity tools, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and graphics. It supports multiple operating systems and has a portable version that runs off a USB key. Documents To Go – With a free version included on newer BlackBerry devices, this clever app suite allows for viewing and editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It’s usually bundled with PDF To Go, as well, supporting Adobe’s popular Portable Document Format. Zoho – Free for individuals, Zoho’s range of productivity and collaboration apps include Zoho Mail, Zoho Chat, Zoho CRM, Zoho Writer, Zoho Discussions, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show, Zoho Creator, Zoho Docs, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Projects, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Reports, and others. Windows Live SkyDrive – Microsoft is offering up to 25GB of free online storage. Only a Windows ID is required (such as a Hotmail e-mail address) and this password-protected virtual drive can be accessed for virtually any online computer in the world. Some folders can be set up for sharing, while other are for your eyes only. Remote Desktop Lite – Use your iPhone or iPod touch to securely access a Windows XP Professional computer, anywhere on the planet. This software provides full access to your PC — via Wi-Fi or EDGE — as if you were in front of the machine you’re accessing. At the time of writing this, Remote Desktop Lite is the no. 1 free business app at Apple’s App Store. Call Time Tracker by momentum – As the name suggests, Redwood Technologies’ free app for Blackberry helps business professionals account for their time in order to bill hours and recover expenses. Ideal for lawyers, consultants, salespeople, realtors and IT professionals, this app pops up at the end of calls and you can easily mark it as billable time. Nice Office – BlackBerry users can manage their e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks from this one free suite of tools. Nice Office securely also grants access to forms and documents, lets you record sales activity while on the go and automatically logs device activity, and provides a detailed report on mobile interactions with your contacts, including calls, messages, and appointments. Google Maps – While it doesn’t provide audio-based turn-by-turn commands, Google Maps is a completely free and powerful tool for your smartphone that can help you find nearby establishments (such as restaurants, gas stations, or hotels), show overhead street views (even with satellite imagery), and give you accurate directions to a destination. It works via GPS or even cellular technology (though the latter isn’t as accurate).
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.
Given the state of the economy, many small and mid-sized businesses and small office, home office (SOHO) workers might be tempted to trim essential services, such as anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, firewall, spam detection, and offsite back-up. The question isn’t whether or not you can afford security software — rather, it’s can you afford not to? Don’t fret, there is an alternative. Free software exists Rather than putting your company’s data at risk by not doing anything at all, consider a handful of downloadable tools that offer protection for your PC, without costing your company a dime. “Free is the best four-letter word in the English language” for small and mid-sized businesses, says Steve Hilton, vice president for small and mid-sized business and enterprise research at the Boston, Mass.-based Yankee Group. “Try out free solutions and talk with someone who’s already used the product to avoid any gotchas.” What “gotchas,” you ask? Hilton says free software is free for a reason. “The vendor might support the free product, hoping you’ll upgrade to the pay-version, or some vendors rely on ad-sponsored revenues to support free products.” But in some cases the software might conflict with your operating systems or applications on your PC, adds Hilton. “Therefore, the best idea is to work with your tech advisor or IT department to make sure you won’t have any unfortunate surprises, because free software often doesn’t come with vendor-provided tech support.” Not everyone believes these free options are a good idea for your business. “While most of these tools, such as free anti-malware, are very good for consumers I don’t think they are a good idea” for businesses, says Peter Firstbrook, research director for information, security and privacy at Gartner, a Stamford, Conn.- headquartered technology market research firm. “They key requirement for business is centralized management and reporting and that is absent from these tools,” explains Firstbrook, and “in some solutions commercial use is specifically prohibited by the license agreement.” Recommended freebies Anti-virus software is important to safeguard your PC from the latest threats out there in cyberspace, which usually make their way into your e-mail inbox. Without anti-virus detection, all it takes is for you or an employee to click on an attachment, such as an .exe file, causing an immediate infection and perhaps propagating itself through your contacts list (and yes, your clients and customers will just love that). On a related note, spyware refers to other “malware” (malicious software) that can do everything from slow down your PC and spy on your Internet surfing behavior to causing inappropriate pop-up ads and hijacking your browser’s home page or toolbar. Some of the anti-virus software programs experts recommend include the award-winning AVG Free and Avast!, while competent anti-spyware tools include Windows Defender and Ad-Aware 2008 Free. On a related note, make sure you have a powerful firewall and intrusion detection to protect your PC from predators, such as Personal Firewall by Sunbelt or Comodo Firewall. Online storage Backing up important files is critical — but saving them to a local external hard drive, USB thumb-stick, or recordable DVD means they’re still vulnerable to theft, fire, or flood. It’s no wonder, then, why many companies prefer to upload data to a secure offsite location. An added advantage to these online back-up and storage solutions is the ability to access those files anywhere in the world you’ve got an Internet connection. While some services let you back a couple of gigabytes for free, such as MozyHome, Microsoft gives you up to 5GB of free storage per month with its Windows Live SkyDrive. All that’s required to use this password-protected virtual drive is a Windows Live I.D. (a Hotmail e-mail address will do). And if you need to send large files to someone — such as sending a huge PDF to a coworker or client — you can set up a separate folder on Windows Live SkyDrive only for shared files. Spam protection Spam, or unsolicited junk mail, isn’t just a productivity drain as you and your employees can spend hours deleting these unwanted messages per week, but often they contain viruses, spyware, or phishing attempts that try to lure you to authentic-looking websites to steal your identity for financial gain. If you use Microsoft Outlook, however, a free plug-in program called SPAMfighter dramatically reduces the amount of junk mail you get by segregating suspicious messages and dropping it into a folder. It catches quite a bit (with few “false positives,” meaning it thinks mail is spam when it’s not) and doesn’t slow down your PC. A word of warning: while free, SPAMfighter adds a “signature” to the end of your outgoing e-mails that is meant to spread the word about the software (and no, you can’t remove it), plus the company hopes you’ll upgrade to the paid version with additional bells and whistles.
Given the state of the economy, many small and mid-sized businesses and small office, home office (SOHO) workers might be tempted to trim essential services, such as anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, firewall, spam detection, and offsite back-up. The question isn’t whether or not you can afford security software — rather, it’s can you afford not to? Don’t fret, there is an alternative. Free software exists Rather than putting your company’s data at risk by not doing anything at all, consider a handful of downloadable tools that offer protection for your PC, without costing your company a dime. “Free is the best four-letter word in the English language” for small and mid-sized businesses, says Steve Hilton, vice president for small and mid-sized business and enterprise research at the Boston, Mass.-based Yankee Group. “Try out free solutions and talk with someone who’s already used the product to avoid any gotchas.” What “gotchas,” you ask? Hilton says free software is free for a reason. “The vendor might support the free product, hoping you’ll upgrade to the pay-version, or some vendors rely on ad-sponsored revenues to support free products.” But in some cases the software might conflict with your operating systems or applications on your PC, adds Hilton. “Therefore, the best idea is to work with your tech advisor or IT department to make sure you won’t have any unfortunate surprises, because free software often doesn’t come with vendor-provided tech support.” Not everyone believes these free options are a good idea for your business. “While most of these tools, such as free anti-malware, are very good for consumers I don’t think they are a good idea” for businesses, says Peter Firstbrook, research director for information, security and privacy at Gartner, a Stamford, Conn.- headquartered technology market research firm. “They key requirement for business is centralized management and reporting and that is absent from these tools,” explains Firstbrook, and “in some solutions commercial use is specifically prohibited by the license agreement.” Recommended freebies Anti-virus software is important to safeguard your PC from the latest threats out there in cyberspace, which usually make their way into your e-mail inbox. Without anti-virus detection, all it takes is for you or an employee to click on an attachment, such as an .exe file, causing an immediate infection and perhaps propagating itself through your contacts list (and yes, your clients and customers will just love that). On a related note, spyware refers to other “malware” (malicious software) that can do everything from slow down your PC and spy on your Internet surfing behavior to causing inappropriate pop-up ads and hijacking your browser’s home page or toolbar. Some of the anti-virus software programs experts recommend include the award-winning AVG Free and Avast!, while competent anti-spyware tools include Windows Defender and Ad-Aware 2008 Free. On a related note, make sure you have a powerful firewall and intrusion detection to protect your PC from predators, such as Personal Firewall by Sunbelt or Comodo Firewall. Online storage Backing up important files is critical — but saving them to a local external hard drive, USB thumb-stick, or recordable DVD means they’re still vulnerable to theft, fire, or flood. It’s no wonder, then, why many companies prefer to upload data to a secure offsite location. An added advantage to these online back-up and storage solutions is the ability to access those files anywhere in the world you’ve got an Internet connection. While some services let you back a couple of gigabytes for free, such as MozyHome, Microsoft gives you up to 5GB of free storage per month with its Windows Live SkyDrive. All that’s required to use this password-protected virtual drive is a Windows Live I.D. (a Hotmail e-mail address will do). And if you need to send large files to someone — such as sending a huge PDF to a coworker or client — you can set up a separate folder on Windows Live SkyDrive only for shared files. Spam protection Spam, or unsolicited junk mail, isn’t just a productivity drain as you and your employees can spend hours deleting these unwanted messages per week, but often they contain viruses, spyware, or phishing attempts that try to lure you to authentic-looking websites to steal your identity for financial gain. If you use Microsoft Outlook, however, a free plug-in program called SPAMfighter dramatically reduces the amount of junk mail you get by segregating suspicious messages and dropping it into a folder. It catches quite a bit (with few “false positives,” meaning it thinks mail is spam when it’s not) and doesn’t slow down your PC. A word of warning: while free, SPAMfighter adds a “signature” to the end of your outgoing e-mails that is meant to spread the word about the software (and no, you can’t remove it), plus the company hopes you’ll upgrade to the paid version with additional bells and whistles.
Many small and mid-sized businesses rely on Microsoft Exchange servers and services to manage e-mail and collaboration processes. But there are a growing number of alternative products on the market, each trying to chip away at Microsoft’s market share by delivering similar functionality for less money, making its software available on a non-Windows platform, or offering unique products and services not found in Microsoft Exchange. What Microsoft Exchange is Developed by the Redmond, Wash. software giant, Microsoft Exchange is the leading messaging and collaborative software solution, widely embraced by both small and mid-sized businesses and larger enterprises. Installed on a company’s premises, this server-based software is used for managing e-mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks — all part of the Microsoft Office suite on the client end. Exchange also supports mobile and Web-based access to company info. Additionally, Microsoft’s offerings offers data storage, shared folders, and unified messaging solutions — such as accessing your voicemail box via e-mail or listening to your e-mail over the phone. “I wouldn’t say it’s the ‘de facto’ server solution but it’s certainly the leader in both revenue and the number of organizations,” says Mark Levitt, vice president of collaboration and enterprise 2.0 strategies at the Framingham, Mass.-based IDC research firm. “Because Microsoft has established itself as a provider of many applications and products, companies see value for a single source that offers a variety of management solutions, all using the same underlying Windows platform,” Levitt says. “Plus all upgrades and patches for multiple products can be handled by one company, which is very appealing.” The trouble with trying to compete According to Gary Chen, a senior analyst for enterprise research at the Boston, Mass.-based Yankee Group, e-mail management is “pretty much a two horse race” between Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino and Notes. “Exchange is definitely the leader — they’ve come up a lot over the past few years — though [IBM] Lotus Notes has really put a lot of effort into making a resurgence, and they have some interesting things on their roadmap,” says Chen. “Exchange can be hard to manage and the alternatives are cheaper, so [competing products] may find a niche for themselves.” Along with IBM Lotus Notes, Chen says Novell GroupWise is also a popular alternative for mid-sized businesses. “There are clear advantages to going with an accepted platform like Exchange, though,” concedes Chen. “In terms of the skills, ecosystem, and add-on products that you can take advantage of, Microsoft applications dominate [small and mid-sized businesses] and mid-market, and Microsoft has been integrating heavily with Exchange and SharePoint.” For some companies, e-mail isn’t a top priority, adds Chen. “Many rely on advanced functionality, applications that might be critical to their business, like unified messaging and shared folders – something Exchange does well.” PostPath and others Levitt says there are many alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. Along with IBM Lotus Domino and Notes and Novell GroupWise, competing integrated collaborative environments (ICE a.k.a. “groupware”) include Oracle Collaboration Suite, Yahoo!’s Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and PostPath, “which looks just like an Exchange server to other Exchange servers and to Outlook clients,” says Levitt. Sina Miri, spokesman for PostPath, which Cisco agreed to acquire on Aug. 27, says their clients prefer PostPath to Microsoft Exchange Server for a few reasons. The most critical is PostPath performs better on all hardware, says Miri. “This is especially true with modest and even low-end hardware, plus it’s low maintenance due to its architecture and the use of the file system as opposed to Exchange and its Jet database,” explains Miri. Standalone e-mail server software competitors include Sun Mail Server, CommuniGate, Ipswitch, MailSite, Gordano, Mirapoint, Scalix, and the Unix-based Sendmail. Levitt says free hosted consumer-oriented webmail services are often used by individuals for business purposes — such as Yahoo!, Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail — or free mailboxes bundled into Internet connectivity services, such as AOL, Comcast, Earthlink, Research in Motion, Verizon, and so on. Linux, too Linux has grown to be a low-cost alternative to Windows, says Levitt, and so companies like IBM, Novell, and Sun “have embraced the alternative operating system with competitors to Microsoft Exchange, which operate on the Windows platform.” The open-source movement can’t be ignored, says Levitt, especially with relatively high upfront costs for Microsoft Exchange, “not to mention ongoing upgrades, some of which you have to pay for, as well a licensing complexities when you’re dealing with multiple computers.” On the flipside, however, it might be harder for IT people to manager alternative software, which might add to your bottom line. “Many rush to open-source products because there is no initial check to write, but you don’t get anything for free,” cautions Levitt. “There are always associated costs when you’re dealing with a product not as well established or supported as Microsoft Exchange.”
A computer hard-drive that dies or becomes inaccessible is cause for panic and despair when your small business depends on data, but all may not be lost. How much of the data you will be able to recover depends on how carefully you respond and how much you are willing to pay. Just because your computer can no longer read the files on a hard drive doesn’t mean that the drive has stopped to function or that the files are gone. Files that the operating system needs to boot properly may have been deleted or corrupted, or a few bad areas (or sectors) of the drive could prevent the drive from being recognized by your computer. Do-it-yourself recovery Drives that spin up but won’t boot can be installed as a second drive on a working computer. Another trick for drives that are performing erratically is to let the drive cool down or put it in the freezer, which could make the drive accessible long enough to extract the most necessary files, says Dave Methvin, chief technology officer of computer tune-up website PCPitstop.com. If the drive sounds stuck — known as stiction, a contraction of static and friction — or is making scraping or rapping sounds, tapping the drive with a pen could move the drive past a bad area in some cases. But this could also do further damage, Methvin warns. Getting outside help Computer electronics stores such as CompUSA and Frye’s as well as independent computer shops rely on disk utilities and basic hardware know-how to recover files. This may be a good choice for a small or mid-size business, depending upon the value of the stored data to the business. These companies tend to charge between $100-$300 dollars or more, depending on how fast the data needs to be recovered. More advanced (and expensive) services should be reserved for mission-critical data. Companies such as Ontrack Data Recovery, ACS Data Recovery, or DriveSavers charge from $500 to several thousand dollars to take malfunctioning drives and their supporting electronics apart. DriveSavers offers a priority service starting at approximately $1800 where one or more engineers will work around-the-clock until data is recovered or the drive is deemed useless, says John Christopher, DriveSavers’ senior data recovery engineer. Recovering the data Non-working drives are sent via delivery services to these data recovery experts, and the files that are recovered can be returned either online (through file transfer protocol, or FTP), or on a DVD, CD, or tape as requested. Depending on the service level, data recovery times can be one to several days, so companies should plan on temporarily functioning without the files. Companies that infrequently backup files might be better off turning to outdated copies of files rather than hoping that the most recent copy will be found, says Arun Taneja, the founder of consulting firm the Taneja Group, of Hopkington, Mass. IT departments could retrieve older copies of files on a tape backup system in a few hours or days, Taneja says. E-mail’s saving grace Before springing for an expensive recovery service, you may be able to retrieve recent copies of many files by mining e-mail archives. Internet-based e-mail services such as Hotmail or Gmail retain copies of e-mails and attachments that were received for a short period of time. Depending on user settings, they may retain sent files, too. Server-based e-mail systems such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes keep copies of e-mails and their attachments, as well. As a last resort, you can ask peers or clients with whom you’ve e-mailed if they have copies of some of your critical files. However, first consider whether the admission that you’ve lost valuable data will cost you their business.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine conducting business today without electronic mail. From the early 1970s, when an engineer, sitting at one computer, experimented by sending a message to himself on another computer right beside the first, email has become a crucial tool for communicating in the digital age. The equivalent of electronic letters, written without putting pen (or even printer ink) to paper, billions of messages traverse the globe daily from one computer to another in the same building, or across continents, almost instantaneously. Email use will nearly double in the next four years, as the number of active mailboxes increases from 1.4 billion users this year to 2.5 billion in 2010, according to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif. market research firm. Radicati estimates that 183 billion email messages were sent per day by the end of 2006. “There’s no doubt that email in the workplace is the electronic communications tool of choice,” says Nancy Flynn, director of the ePolicy Institute. How email works Early email involved sending monochromatic text from one computer to another, and evolved to allow communication using images, photos, and sound (via attachments). Once relegated to computers running an email application, email is now readily available via Internet browsers, and hence accessible via portable devices including cell phones. The way email works is simple: someone types the address of the recipient, a subject, and a message, hits send, and the message is routed to its recipient. When the recipient logs in to his or her email account, or the next time the application collects messages, the message will appear in his or her email inbox. But how does the message get delivered? An email address is similar to a physical address: it indicates the person and location where the message will be delivered. In the address user@domain, for example, “user” is the intended recipient of the message, the @ sign separates the individual user’s name from the name of the server or domain, and “domain” is the site where that user’s mail is managed, similar to the street, city, state and zip code in old fashioned “snail mail” (sent using the U.S. Postal Service). Transmission facilitated by protocols The message is transmitted across wires (or wirelessly) from the recipient’s computer or device, to a business’s server, for example, or a server run by an Internet Service Provider. Software protocols direct the mail to its destination. A protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) forwards or directs mail from the sender to the recipient. Another protocol called Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) in essence pulls the message down from the server to which it was sent and into the application or browser interface on the recipient’s desktop (or PDA or phone). Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) allows a local client to access mail on a remote server. Most applications support all three protocols, which do the background work to route messages to the correct destination. Besides an email address and email account, an email application is required for sending and receiving email. Writing a message requires an email application, like Microsoft Outlook, running on a PC or PDA, or an Internet browser that allows a user to gain access to email services running on a host — whether it’s a company’s mail server, or a free email service like Gmail or Hotmail. Regardless of the email application, one thing is for certain: email use has enabled small and mid-size businesses to better respond to customers, do business across long distances, and keep communication costs low.
