TechShortcut Blog » Business Applications

Free Software Part 1 – Office Suite/Productivity Applications

Jeff Keihl — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:33:10 +0000

Here are three free office suite/productivity applications for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Locally Installed Applications
Robust functionality similar to Microsoft Office applications.
OpenOffice.org

Web-based Applications
The functionality is not the same in some areas compared to locally installed office applications but you will be able to access your documents from anywhere you have an Internet connection and collaborate with others.

Solution Overview
Office Suite/Productivity Solution Overview

More Information
Research Helper – Free Office Suite Productivity

How to Run Your Software? In-House vs. Online vs. Outsourced

Jeff Keihl — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:09:06 +0000

Solution options have virtually doubled thanks to Internet-based applications for virtually every type of traditional/in-house solution. For example, you can run Microsoft Word in-house or use Google Docs online. You can run Quickbooks locally or you can use NetSuite online.

While all the choices can be difficult to navigate, these options allow businesses more flexibility than ever before to meet business needs. But which option should a business choose?

Check out our guide How to Run Your Software: In-House vs. Online vs. Outsourced for a list of the pros and cons. Because how you run your software is such a fundamental decision, you will find that each of our solution overviews will present both in-house applications and online applications (where appropriate) for each solution. However, implementation shouldn’t be your first consideration, check your business needs first.

Can You Beat 99.9% Uptime For The Price?

Jeff Keihl — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:22:22 +0000

Google’s email service “Gmail” recently experienced an outage that lasted for about 100 minutes. Should you reconsider using online applications in your business?

As Google’s Gmail blog pointed out, the Gmail service still adhered to being operational 99.9% of the time. Do you think you can do better in-house for the price?

To put 99.9% uptime in perspective, the approximate downtimes for 0.1% are listed below.

Week	10 minutes
Month	43 minutes
Year	8 hours and 45 minutes

A Few Questions to Ask Yourself

How much will an outage cost my business?
How can I get work done when there is an Internet or Internet application outage?
Do I have a copy of my data for reference when there is an outage?
Do I need more uptime?
How can I get more uptime and what is the cost?

You can read Google’s response to the outage here.
More on today’s Gmail issue

Additional Info
Source: Wikipedia Uptime

Source: Lifehacker Back up your Google Apps data

Related TechShortcut Info
How to Run Your Software? In-House vs. Online vs. Outsourced

Research Helper–Outage