Gerry Blackwell

At a golf club, communicating with members is a vital task. Lose a member and you don’t just lose a single sale, you lose a whole year’s worth of sales. And if you lose one member, you risk losing more. They’re the life blood of the business. The Ames Golf & Country Club in Ames, […]

Major league baseball may be big business, but running a major league farm team, even a successful one like New Jersey’s Trenton Thunder, a Double A, New York Yankees affiliate, is a lot like running any small business. Too few employees, all of them stretched thin, and no full-time IT people. “We have kind of […]

The smartphone, a cross between a cell phone and a portable digital assistant (PDA) is rapidly becoming an essential piece of business equipment, not just for corporate salary types, but for small business people, too. If you need to keep up with e-mail when you’re away from the computer, if you need your full contact […]

We’re writing this introduction to the Zoho suite of online, browser-based office productivity tools using, appropriately enough, Zoho Writer, the word processor module. Hey, it works; and quite well, actually. Zoho Writer even boasts some nifty features you don’t find in more advanced word processors. If you detect a note of surprise here, it’s because […]

One of the many cool things about IP-based soft phone technologies like Skype is that they make it easy to record phone calls to an MP3 or WAV file on your computer. It’s a useful capability. How many times have you forgotten exactly what was said in an important phone conversation? If you do interviews […]

If you’re a small business looking for computer technical support, your first thought is probably to find a company that offers on-site service. Think twice, though. If a technician has to come out, it means you’ll wait. And you’ll also pay for travel time. Remote support from a service provider – a good one – […]

For many of us, Outlook, the e-mail, contact, calendar and task manager module in Microsoft Office, is a crucially important organizing tool without which we’d be lost. Mess with our Outlook and you mess with something very personal to us, a virtual extension of our brain. If you’ve been following this ongoing series of reviews […]

At first, it seemed like a throw-back to an older era of computing, to the age of mainframes and dumb terminals, but no matter. PC-based terminals from NComputing Inc. were exactly what the doctor ordered, when lead physician Alberto Sobrado of Community Medical Professionals (CoMedPro) in North Andover, Mass. went looking for a computing solution […]

Our look at changes, good and bad, to major components in Microsoft Office 2007 continues with a look at PowerPoint 2007, the latest version of the popular business presentation program. Like Word 2007 and Excel 2007, which we reviewed earlier, PowerPoint uses the new Office user interface, which the company is now calling the Microsoft […]

United Parcel Service, more commonly known as UPS, opened a new front in the war of technological one-upmanship with other national couriers recently when it introduced Delivery Intercept, a Web-based service that allows customers to put a stop on a delivery and change the destination or have the shipment held or brought back. They can […]

Excel 2007, the second application in our ongoing series reviewing the major components in Microsoft’s new Office 2007 suite, is in some ways, a radical re-making of the office productivity application used by millions around the world. As with Word 2007, which we reviewed last month, Excel features the new Office user interface, which replaces […]

The beauty of Web-based software is that even very small businesses can use programs with features that — in the past — only big businesses could afford. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that manage all or most aspects of a business are emerging now in virtually every major vertical market — even private practice medicine. Dr. James […]