Small Business Computing Staff

TechWeb: How To Safely Manage Employee Identities Online InformationWeek offers 7 steps to better identity management, a primer on an important new security concern around protecting personal information about employees using online services and applications. “Managing employees’ identities, passwords, and access rights has always been a challenge. And now, increased use of outsourcing and software-as-a-service […]

ZDNet: Is HP Back In The Tablet Race? Apple’s iPad already has competition from the German company WeTab, but computing giant Hewlett-Packard will be a much more serious contender if rumors that it’s readying a WebOS-based tablet for as early as the third quarter prove true. “HP killed off development of its Slate tablet recently, […]

Entrpreneur: Moving Your Small Business Into The Cloud Pash summarizes the benefits of cloud computing, looks at strategies for moving quickly or slowly into the cloud and reviews the principal categories of cloud-based applications and some of the major products such Microsoft Office Live and Google Docs. “The internet has changed the way people do […]

PCWorld: Central Desktop Offers MS Office Collaboration Without Office 2010 The new Central Desktop service offers collaboration features similar to the soon-to-be-released Office 2010, but works with a plugin to Office 2003 or 2007. “The biggest selling point for the soon-to-ship Microsoft Office 2010 is its new features for storing documents online and editing them […]

PCWorld: Review – HP EliteBook 2540p Laptop With a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-640LM processor and 4GB of RAM, this new EliteBook has lots of pep and the battery life is respectable at 5+ hours. The only cons: slow graphics processing and poor 3D gaming performance. “A new HP laptop, the EliteBook 2540p assembles zippy components […]

InformationWeek SMB: How SMBs Can Increase Sales With Social Networking Business author Gwen Moran talks about using tools such as Foursquare, the location-based social media service, and Meetup.com, an online meeting organizer, to lure customers to their establishments. “When someone walks in to The Coffee Groundz in Houston and demands a free coffee because they […]

InformationWeek: Pervasive Integrates Salesforce, QuickBooks In Cloud The Pervasive integration platform, which works through Amazon Web Services EC2, connects Salesforce and QuickBooks for exchange and sharing of data, and can be used to integrate many other applications as well. “Pervasive Software, [a] 240-employee data integration firm serving small and medium-sized business, has built a data […]

InformationWeek SMB: SBA Teams With Google To Help SMBs With AdWords The SBA helped identify small business success stories on the Web and Google made videos with entrpreneurs talking about different aspects of building an effective online presence. The videos are accessible from SBA and Google sites. “Google and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) […]

PCmag@Work (Small Business): Big Business Storage For Small Businesses From Iomega The Iomega StorCenter ix12-300r Network Storage array goes beyond the capabilities of a typical network attached storage (NAS) device, providing up to 24 terabytes (TB) of storage. Prices start at $4,999.99 for a 4TB configuration. “Storage: As boring as it may seem, it is […]

ITBusinessEdge: CompTIA Says SMBs Relying More On New Technology To Gain Edge CompTIA’s Second Annual SMB Technology Adoption Trends report shows that a perhaps surprising number of companies with 10 to 499 employees are interested in joining leading-edge IT trends such as virtualization, managed services and open source solutions. “A new study released last week […]

ComputerWeekly: British SMBs Warming Up To Technology As the UK recovers from recession along with the rest of the world, small businesses are starting to spend more on IT – 63% of Microsoft dealers predict their SMB customers will spend more on IT in 2010, up from just 25% in 2009 – but the changes […]

PCWorld: Review – Dell Inspiron 14 (1464) Laptp Despite its 2.13GHz Intel Core i3-330M processor and 4GB of RAM, the Inspiron 14 “never shines,” the reviewer says, though it “will be sufficient for many.” “The chips inside the Dell Inspiron 14 (1464) should push this average laptop beyond midrange quality. A 2.13GHz Intel Core i3-330M […]