Susan Kuchinskas

Salesforce.com users who logged on late last week might have noticed a new link. Clicking on it automatically added a Salesforce.com menu to Microsoft Office 2000 or 2003 Word, Excel and Outlook. Salesforce.com’s Office Editions integrates the company’s hosted customer relationship management (CRM) application with Microsoft Office 200 and 2003. The menu options deliver key […]

Microsoft gave its aging operating systems a reprieve today, announcing that it won’t end extended support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition (SE) and Windows Millennium Edition (ME) as scheduled. Users of these elderly, but still useful, operating systems will be able to get paid support and critical security “hotfixes” until June 30, 2006. […]

Thanks to constant phishing expeditions in which evil-doers spoof the e-commerce sites of major retailers, consumers have become much more aware about the dangers of offering up personal information online. That’s a good thing for consumers, but it may be bad for online merchants, especially those who haven’t become household words. According to a survey […]

Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2003 is designed for the approximately 40 million small and medium businesses in the world, and a new report from Jupiter Research said that’s a smart move on the part of the Redmond, Wash., software company. According to Jupiter (which is owned by Jupitermedia, as is SmallBusinessComputing.com), only 51 percent of […]

New estimates released from the Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce show U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the second quarter increased significantly over last year and from the previous quarter. The chart of retail e-commerce sales shows a series of waves and troughs, with a steady ascent to last quarters’ $12.477 billion in […]

On Sunday, a piece of e-mail purporting to be from Citibank was released into the spam-o-sphere. It notified the recipient that he or she needed to visit the corporate website and agree to new policies. While Citibank has been criticized for lacking a standard naming convention for its uniform tesource locators (URLs). For example, Citibank […]

Intuit is bolstering its electronic tax preparation offerings with the acquisition of Income Dynamics, maker of ItsDeductible. The all-stock transaction, worth about $10 million, closed on July 11. Last year, TurboTax users were offered help figuring out how much they could deduct for all those stationary bikes, t-shirts and sweaters they donated to charity. The […]

A new law taking effect Tuesday asks U.S. merchants to pay the European Union’s (EU) version of sales tax on digital downloads. But word hasn’t gotten out to a whole bunch of e-tailers, while a lot more are asking, “How’s the EU gonna find me to collect?” The new regulation, passed in May 2002, radically […]