Small Business Computing Staff

by Angela R. Garber There’s a lot more involved in processing payroll than making sure that checks go out to employees on payday. There are taxes to be deducted, social security to be paid, commissions to be calculated, not to mention healthcare, 401k, and flexible spending accounts to be credited. And, let’s not forget, quarterly […]

by Cathy Brower A few weeks ago, i embarked on an interesting journey. I spent a week on a whirlwind tour of northern and southern California. Aside from discovering that people on the West Coast spend way too much time in their car, I met with many vendors who bring you products and services. Several […]

by David G Propson Just when you’ve got all this new economy jargon down, they throw new ones at you. XML? Isn’t that the new football league being started by the World Wrestling Federation? The one with Dick Butkus as a head coach? Nope — that’s the XFL. In fact, XML stands for eXstensible Markup […]

by Amy H. Blankstein It’s their world, you just do business there. In Cybershock: Surviving Hackers, Phreakers, Identity Thieves, Internet Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Disruption, author Winn Schwartau wants his readers to know that the Internet is not a nice neighborhood. Schwartau’s approach is that of the tough-talkin’, tell-it-like-it-is cop at a high school […]

by Doug Gatenbein FINANCIAL REVOLUTIONS DON’T COME along very often — or do they? After a 15th century Venetian named Luca Bartolomes Pacioli popularized the method of double-entry bookkeeping, the world waited almost 500 years for the next great advance. That was Visicalc, an accounting spreadsheet program that became the first “killer app” and overnight […]

by Jamie McAfee Waiting for the DSL technician is about as fun as watching cement dry, and it takes a lot longer too. DSL providers recognize the problem: Companies such as Verizon, the new entity born from the merger of local phone companies Bell Atlantic and GTE, and Covad, a leading broadband provider, are scrambling […]

by Robert J Wagman Who says government is inefficient? While the Federal Government is taking a break from the decision, some states are moving forward. The California Assembly, the state’s lower chamber of the legislature, recently passed a bill that eventually would require retailers who have brick-and-mortar retail locations or warehouses in the state to […]

by Robert J Wagman The Electronic Signatures law, finally passed by Congress this past summer, has now gone into effect. Most coverage of the legislation simply states that documents sent electronically will have the same force as documents containing physical signatures and signed documents transmitted as facsimiles. That’s not the whole truth, and businesses and […]

by Robert J Wagman The Federal Communications Commission is trying a new tactic to get the nation’s phone companies to provide better service and to be more responsive to consumer complaints. The FCC will try to shame them into it, and they want you to help. Beginning this month, the FCC’s new Consumer Information Bureau […]

by Deidra-Ann Parrish BY THE TIME LENA FERNANDEZ REALIZED that her company’s first CTI installation was also her VAR’s first venture into computer telephony, it was too late. “We were their guinea pig,” Fernandez says. “We had nothing but problems with that system. We had to have it taken apart and rewired.” Fernandez and the […]

by David Schloss For any business that gets involved in one, a merger means big changes: Corporate structures are changed, policies rewritten, jobs reorganized. Mergers can be particularly chaotic for businesses that rely heavily on voicemail, PCs, and other technology but lack the staffing or experience to ensure a smooth transition from separate resources at […]

by Amy H. Blankstein It’s Fall 2000, do you know where your Web site is? A series of Web site thefts this summer has made some site owners take another look. Unlike the perpetrators of denial of service or graffiti attacks, Web site thieves achieved their goals using plain vanilla e-mail and faxes. Web sites […]