Although this board is used for making our product announcements, I could not help reacting to the news.

Steve Jobs departure from Apple is a well anticipated event since his leave of absense back in 2004. Although I do not personally own any Apple devices (except the company owns a few for testing purposes) and not too many of my friends do (yes I am branded out of fashion and opted for open android), I still could not part with my, now unusable, Newton Pad. I had hoped that Apple would bring back Newton after Steve Jobs came back as CEO and felt sad when he killed it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

It was revived many years later with iPad, which was a category creator, and I would say is "Newton done right". Then we saw the years of copycats (per Steve Jobs)! There were windows based tablets before iPad but nobody understood the opportunity of bringing it for masses for a resonable price before Apple (Microsoft failed a few times!). It was a combination of innovation, think different branding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different), vision of Steve Jobs and well executed marketing machine.

Now looking at how investor confidence showed up in the market post Steve's departure, it seems that Apple is under pressure to continue to innovate for the next few years to shift the brand focus away from Steve Jobs as continuous innovator and CEO. We all expect from Apple to come up with innovative products every two years or so. If they stay with +1 improvements it will create opportunities for other competitors to come closer.

Maybe HP killed their tablet too soon!

This week our IIS SMTP (Internet Information Server, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server was compromised and spammers were able to get control of it and started sending spams from all over the world. When the server started running low we found that there are around 100,000 spam mails in the SMTP queue (and similar numbers in the Bad Mail folder). Some of our customers did not get some of their mail delivered. We have since corrected the problem. Some of our customers are using SMTP in IIS to send their emails via OfficeClip Installed Version. I will relate some precautions to be taken in such a situation.

• Always enable the SMTP log in the IIS
• Create an alarm if the SMTP log is becoming too big, too fast
• Set the SMTP port to some higher port number instead of 25
• Make sure that you put the correct IP addresses of the machines in the SMTP Relay settings
• If the SMTP server gets compromised, check all the blacklists and work with your SMTP to get removed from the list.

All Employees (and consultants) of Government Contractors must comply with the DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) regulations and Federal Accounting Regulations (FAR). Failure to comply with such rules may result in penalties and/or lose government contracts.

DCAA requirements is about implementing procedures for time keeping (and accounting) in the organization to ensure prevention of fraudulent billing to the government. Note that this means that the submitted timesheets become legal documents of the company and need to be treated as such.

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Some of you have asked how we have created our video presentation on Extranet. We use Camtasia 6 to create our videos. I will provide the steps here with a sample video. I will not go into detail in Camtasia operations as they can be found from the Techsmith website. Any comments on this blog or any ideas for improvement will be appreciated.

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This will be the first part in a series on how to use LinkedIn for your business. We have been using LinkedIn here at OfficeClip to build brand awareness and create an online presence, as well as establish each of us individually as experts in the areas we work (such as marketing, software, development, etc.). There are several ways in which businesses can achieve these (and I must stress that it takes time and effort) and I am going to talk about a few briefly here as an introduction. Follow-up articles will discuss some of these techniques in more detail.

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Global Knowledge gives 10 technology skills you should acquire over the next 5 years. Some of them may be long gone before that so I will discuss a few that are relevant and will more than likely remain so for awhile at least.

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I watched a webinar from Hubspot today, presented by VP of Inbound Marketing Mark Volpe, that covered ways small businesses can can market and promote their business besides Google PPC Ads. The presentation covered things like blogging and publishing articles, videos and podcasts as well as Search Engine Optimization. Mark broke the process of optimization of the small business website into two main parts: On Page and Off Page SEO.

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I just wanted to write a little something about Microsoft's newest adventure. Also, we ourselves are considering advertising on Bing, so I though I'd share some of our research in case others are thinking of putting some ads there.

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As the recession continues on, many companies are looking for more beneficial ways to manage projects, employees and customers while saving some money at the same time. One way of doing this is through collaboration tools such as web based software. A new Forrester Research survery states that 70% of firms may adopt some form of collaboration tool in the next 12 months. Forrester analyst T.J Kiett says:

The tough economy is forcing companies to restrict travel while keeping distributed teams in touch. In addition, changes in the composition of the workforce mean enterprises must find ways to capture the knowledge of retiring Baby Boomers and provide Gen Yers with their favored tools to work efficiently.

Web management software, like OfficeClip, is a great solution to the current reductions in travel that businesses are doing, as it allows users to have access from anywhere and supports contractors and partners as well. Once businesses begin using collaborative web software, it will more than likely remain an integral part of their customer and employee management strategy even after the recession ends.

Online project management software such as timesheets, contact manager  and issue tracking can also be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis for hosted versions. According to Meridith Levinson of CIO.com, these tools will not require companies to make a large inital investment so the risk and the cost are less than if they were installing the web software on their own servers. Both types, hosted and installed, are still much more cost effective than traditional software, as they are online and collaborative, providing great flexibility and ease of use.

We all hope the recession ends soon, but there are ways to improve your business without spending a fortune and collaborative web software is one of those ways!