photo credit: FontFont

Launching Google Chome, I was surprised to see that all text are now italic while Firefox shows text which are bold.

Initially I thought that this weird text behavior was caused by a virus. Luckily it’s not but rather caused by uninstalling a program called Left 4 Dead.

During the uninstall, it did prompt that it was trying to remove some system files which I clicked on No. Anyway, the uninstallation process messed up my fonts and now everything looks ugly. Definitely not the way I want it to look.

So I did a search in Google on “how to reinstall windows font on vista” and the first result was from Microsoft Support.

I looked through the page and this title caught my attention.

To reinstall the standard fonts included with Windows

Basically it’s saying that I need to run Windows Setup again which will replace missing or changed files. However, there was a warning which goes like this:

Warning If you run Windows Setup, you may lose programs and hardware drivers that you have installed since the last time Windows was set up on your computer

Hrmm.. I really don’t want to lose programs and drivers. There must be another way.

So I searched around further and finally found a solution from this forum. There are many suggestions on the forum which includes altering the registry, but this simple method worked for me.

1. Navigate to C:\WINDOWS\FONTS
2. Right click and select Install New Font
3. Browse to C:\WINDOWS\FONTS
4. Click Select All
5. Click Install (Be warned, if you have 100 fonts, you need to click 100 times!)
6. Restart your machine.

Once restarted, everything went back to normal. The text and the fonts now works fine. Phew! What a relief.

I guess the fonts were still there but somehow during the uninstall, the registry got messed up. So reinstalling each font did the trick.

Hope it helps anyone out there encountering the same problem.

photo credit: GrapeCity

The other day, a friend of mine asked if I know of any alternative to using Excel for budgeting and forecasting purposes.

Every beginning of the month, when it’s time to generate a budget and sales forecast report for the higher management, his IT staffs would panic because they had to consolidate many Excel spreadsheet data submitted by various branches from all over the country.

Having to open up Excel documents, then copying and pasting the data into a master Excel sheet can be very tedious. Imagine if they have 100 branches, the IT personnel needs to open up 100 documents. Never mind the work being tedious, it’s vital that he consolidates the data without any error. Otherwise, the stakeholders could be looking at inaccurate information simply because an IT staff had to work on too many Excel spreadsheets.

He asked if I know of any web based spreadsheet software which works just like Excel and allows the data to be entered directly by the users themselves into a database and once data is entered, the data can be analyzed by analysts and reports can be generated for the bosses.

I told him to check out this solution by Adaptive Planning – budgeting, forecasting & reporting made easy.

With Adaptive Planning, organizations can now have a better and more efficient way to create budgets, forecasts and reports.

It is SaaS based software, so we’re talking about the solution being web based and on demand, even your staffs who telecommute can participate.

Within Adaptive Planning are 4 main modules which  includes:

• Modelling and Administration
• Budgeting and Forecasting
• Reporting and Dashboards
• Private Team Collaboration Spaces

With these main modules, these are some features I like:

• Automated Consolidation (Yes! No more cut and paste)
• Multi-Dimensional Data Collection
• Dynamic Formulas
• Drill Down
• Workflow
• Drag & Drop Report Builder

Some sample screenshots:

Budgeting and ForeCasting

Reporting and Dashboards

Adaptive Planning comes in 3 different editions:

• Express Edition
• Corporate Edition
• Enterprise Edition

The Express Edition catches my attention because it allows us to download and use it for free. This edition is designed for small companies and provides the basic functions such as collaborative budgeting, forecasting which supports basic expense and revenue planning.

This is the link to download Adaptive Planning Express Edition (333 MB). Looking at the size of the installation file, you know that this is not a small and simple software. The database is running on Oracle Database 10g Express Edition and once installed, should take up at least 4GB of your hard disk space.

Another thing that needs mentioning has to be its pre-recorded training programs. If you’re someone who doesn’t like to read a lot of text, just like me, head on over the training programs page where you’ll find fast loading videos on what Adaptive Planning is all above. One video that I would recommend you to watch first has to be Adaptive Planning vs Excel.

So for those of you who are still cutting and pasting, consolidating spreadsheet data, stop doing that and check out Adaptive Planning, the alternative to using Excel for budgeting and forecasting, right now.

This is because each application platform requires skilled IT staffs to have unique and distinct technical knowledge pertaining to the application platform.

For example, an organization that prefers Microsoft products would probably have many IT staffs trained in .NET Framework and SQL Server databases.

Organizations that believe in the power and flexibility offered by Open Source applications would probably have IT staffs skilled in the LAMP Platform, PHP / Java programming and MySQL databases.

People generally talk about .NET, Java or PHP when it comes to application management and support. Whenever they need a new business application to support their business operations, they would seek for applications which are developed based on their preferred platform.

Today, I found out that Google Apps too could be an application platform. To me, Google Apps is considered a platform because it allows business users the ability to add new business features / applications on top of an existing Google Apps Account.

All these while, I thought Google Apps offer only the following:

• Docs
• Email
• Calendar
• Sites
• and Chat

What I didn’t know was Google Apps ability to allow its platform to be further enhanced through integration with 3rd party applications.

You can see a whole list of applications from the newly launched Google Apps Marketplace.

In Google Apps Marketplace, you can find the following types of applications / products:

• Accounting & Finance
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Document Management (DM)
• Project Management (PM)
• Sales & Marketing
• Business Process Management (BPM) & Workflow
• etc…

Some of the apps are free while some requires monthly fees.

This interesting post by Lifehacker highlights the Top 10 Google Apps Marketplace Apps.

Just to see how easy it is to integrate these apps into my Google Apps account, I gave one of the free apps a try, a social productivity, project management and task management app called Manymoon.

To do that simply head on over to the Google Apps Marketplace, click on the Manymoon link and you should see an Add it now button.

Clicking on the button, you’ll need to enter your Google Apps domain, in my case Wareprise.com. So yes, in order to be able to use the apps offered by the Google Apps marketplace, you will need to have a Google Apps account. If you don’t have one, sign up for a free Standard Google Apps account.

Once logged in, you’ll just need to agree to some terms and allow data access to Manymoon and in less than a minute, the application is active.

Once activated, you can see a link to Manymoon from your Google Apps dashboard.

Clicking on Manymoon brings us over to the Manymoon website.

With Manymoon, we can now create projects, milestones, assign tasks and manage project documents.

Overall, I find integrating additional features into Google Apps a good experience since it’s so easy to install and get started right away.

One notable advantage about all these has to be its single sign on capability. You just saw how I logged into Google Apps just once and from my dashboard, be able to access my emails, calendars and project management all from within one login attempt.

The days of having to remember multiple usernames and password will soon be over with Google Apps around.

In my future posts, I will definitely give more of these apps a mention / review. Two that I can’t wait to try out is RunMyProcess and Cordys Process Factory, both related to Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow.

If your organization is not focused on any specific application platform for now, do consider Google Apps as your organization’s application platform today!

photo credit: Little Yiye

The key feature of every POS system has to be its ability to record and track sales and inventory.

If you are managing multiple stores, web based POS systems can provide multiple benefits such as providing some real time information on the number of items sold, customer details, supplier info and many more.

A complete POS system usually includes the common hardware such as the barcode scanner, receipt printer, cash drawer, monitor, etc. Something like what you see below.

Besides the POS hardware, an equally important component has to be the POS software. Both the hardware and the software must be able to work together seamlessly to ensure an effective sales / inventory tracking.

In today’s post, I’ll be introducing a free web based SaaS Point of Sales (POS) software for retail stores which may benefit from implementing a POS system.

Do note that this web based POS software is hosted entirely by the service provider, so what you’ll need on top of the POS hardware is a stable Internet connection and a web browser (IE 7 and above).

The web based POS application that I’m referring to is called CashierLive.

CashierLive is an easy to use and innovative web based point of sale software which helps you run your retail store more effectively.

I gave the 30 days free trial a try and this is how it went.

The signing up process took less than a minute. and requires only basic information such as the name of your store and email address.

Another required detail is the type of your store which is listed below:

• Antique Store
• Arts & Crafts Store
• Bicycle Shop
• Book Store
• Clothing & Boutique
• Computer Store
• Cosmetic & Beauty Store
• Electronics Store
• Gift Shop
• Hallmark Store
• Hobby Shop
• Jewelry Store
• Mall Kiosk
• Pharmacy
• Skateboard Shop
• Sporting Goods
• Tobacco Shop
• Toy Store
• Others

Once submitted, you’ll be sent an email for confirmation purposes, after which you’ll be able to login to the web based POS software.

Launching the site for the first time, I saw a getting started checklist which provides a step by step guideline on how to set everything up.

The very first thing to set up has to the the store’s details:

Then you could add departments, categories and sales taxes if any.

Finally, the most tedious has to be setting up your store items. If you have more than a thousand types of items, you’ll need to add it in one by one.

Once everything is up and ready, you can now begin to use CashierLive by conducting a new transaction.

So you see CashierLive is a ready web based software which helps you get started right away.

One thing that I must highlight is that once your 30 day trial is over, you can either continue using for free or upgrade to a premium account (min $49 / month).

In order to continue using for free, you’ll just need to sign up with CashierLive’s merchant account partner which helps you process credit cards payments. Being able to accept payments from your customers via a credit card can be really handy and convenient for your customers. So this requirement shouldn’t be a problem at all.

For more details about CashierLive, check them out today!

photo credit: ksablan

Many celebrities use Twitter to keep their fans updated like where there are currently and what they’re currently working on, etc. Whenever they tweet a new message, their followers (fans) would be the first to know about it and get a chance to respond or even retweet the message to spread the word around.

In the corporate world, some organizations use Twitter to keep their stakeholders up to date with the latest events and announcements.

For example, a project manager could get his project workers to follow him via his tweets so that whenever the PM has something new to announce with regards to the project, he can just tweet the message and his followers (project team members) would know about it first hand.

It’s just like sending an SMS to all your team members but it’s a cheaper and faster alternative.

Another example would be a company keeping their potential customers updated via Twitter whenever limited coupon / discount codes are released.

Although some organizations use Twitter services to their advantages, some see Twitter as a general time waster where the IT team decides to block their Internet users from accessing Twitter’s website altogether.

The reason? Some employees may be spending way too much time tweeting personal related messages rather than for work related purposes.

If your organization has blocked access to Twitter and you have valid reasons to convince your boss that microblogging can help everyone in office to become more productive, you might want to suggest this free and open source microblogging software called StatusNet.

StatusNet is an open source microblogging platform that helps you share and connect in real time within your domain.

With StatusNet, the IT team can download and install this software in within the organization’s internal network domain.

This means that all messages and information resides within the internal network rather than being hosted by an external party.

StatusNet is still in beta version for now.

I’ve given it a try and this is how it went.

Firstly I downloaded StatusNet, and uploaded the files into XAMPP htdocs.

Ran the installation, created a database (MySQL) and in less than 2 minutes, StatusNet was installed without any problems.

Running it for the first time, this is what I saw.

Note that I named my installation as wareprise-twitter and as you can see the public timeline is empty because no one has posted anything yet.

So I went ahead by registering the very first user called Bob.

Once completed, I can now log in as Bob to post the very first message.

Basically StatusNet works about the same as any other micro messaging sites out there. I guess the only big difference is that StatusNet is open source and can be hosted internally within your network.

StatusNet’s platform also allows you to add on additional features such as posting messages from your phones and integrating with other sites such as Facebook and Delicious.

For organizations that require enterprise level support, customization and development, do check out the StatusNet Enterprise Network.

With this open source microblogging software, you can now convince your IT decision makers to host StatusNet so that everyone within the organization can begin updating work statuses, achievements, and where they are going for lunch.

From the above graph, it tells us that the term cloud computing emerged sometime late 2007 and from then on more and more people knew about it and began searching for more information about cloud computing.

Cloud computing, the way I understand it is a method which allows computing resources to be shared and utilized over the Internet.

At the moment, whenever the term cloud computing is mentioned, some would think about it being Software as a Service (SaaS) web applications while someone else might think of grid computing.

What exactly is cloud computing all about? photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Whether you’re an IT professional, a CTO or CIO of an organization, cloud computing is a term that will get mentioned a lot in the coming years.

Because of this, it might be a wise move to start equipping and educating yourself with the right training and resources in cloud computing.

If possible, obtaining a certification on cloud computing would be impressive as well. To do that, you can try to check out Cloud Computing Certification provided by The Art of Service.

As for Cloud Computing Resources, the following are some eBooks:

	Cloud Computing – The Complete Cornerstone Guide to Cloud Computing Best Practices: Concepts, Terms, and Techniques for Successfully Planning, Implementing and Managing Enterprise IT Cloud Computing
	Cloud Computing Best Practice Specialist Guide for SaaS and Web Applications: Software as a Service
	Cloud Computing Virtualization Specialist Complete Certification Kit – Study Guide Book and Online Course
	Cloud Computing: Managing Services in the Cloud Complete Certification Kit – Study Guide Book and Online Course
	Cloud Computing Foundation Complete Certification Kit – Study Guide Book and Online Course

photo credit: jesus_leon

1. The operating system installer CD and

2. The CD which contains all drivers for the machine.

Problem arises when they tell me that they don’t have the CD containing drivers for the machine.

This doesn’t indicate that their machine cannot be installed to its original state, but rather I need to find, download and update the machine with its latest drivers using the manual way.

The manual way here means having to find out the model of the devices and downloading the latest drivers from the Internet.

After I complete reinstalling the OS for the machine, the first driver that I’ll install is the wifi or the lan ethernet driver. This is so I could get access to the Internet. I usually get this driver by using another computer with Internet access to download, then transfer the installer to the new machine.

Once the machine has Internet access, this is what I’ll do. I’ll install this neat little application - Driver Robot.

Driver Robot basically helps us to automatically find and update our drivers. So instead of spending time trying to locate the right driver for your machine devices, driver robot does it for you, at a COST!

The following is my version of a Driver Robot Review:

After downloading and installing Driver Robot, this is what you’ll see when launching the application for the first time.

As stated, it will scan updates for video drivers, chipset drivers, ethernet drivers, windows system drivers, etc.

After clicking on Start Scan, it runs for less than a minute before showing you:

• The number of out of date drivers
• How many system devices were scanned
• How many up to date drivers there are
• List of devices which needs to be updated

Do note that I ran and installed Driver Robot on my current Dell Inspiron 1420 notebook. This is why it found only 26 new drivers. If it was installed on a Pentium 3 machine, it should be able to find even more drivers which needs to be updated.

So now that Driver Robot has found all the drivers, you can do 2 things:

1. Click on the Get Drivers button

This will bring you to a page where you’ll be required to register to be able to download the drivers for $29.95 a year. Something for you to consider on whether or not this investment is worth it.

2. Manually download the drivers by searching through Google

If you’re a little tight with cash, what you can do is to manually google for the drivers. If you look at the screenshot above, you can see that my network adapter requires a critical update.

So I’ll just google for “Broadcom 590x 10/100 Ethernet 10.9.0.0 driver” and find several links to download the drivers for free.

You just need to be careful where to download the drivers from. If you see sites like download.cnet.com or zdnetasia.com, then it should be safe and hassle free to download and install.

I hope the above 2 steps provide some solutions to your driver issues.

Another key feature about Driver Robot which I really like has to be the Driver Robot Exporter.

This feature is very handy for PC / notebook technicians where they can just install Driver Robot on a machine without Internet access and run the exporter to save all its hardware information to an external file.

From the external file, the technician can get the drivers easily just by running the html file from a machine with Internet connection and a valid Driver Robot license.

Definitely a time saver for many PC and notebook technicians out there.

So there you go, for more details on how Driver Robot can help with all your driver updates, check them out today!

photo credit: Saginaw Future

In the past, if you need capabilities from an ERP system to automate and streamline your business processes, you’ll need to purchase an ERP system, either as a package solution or built from ground up and implement it on premise / in-house.

If your systems are deployed within your office network, then it’s very important for the systems to be monitored and managed well to ensure business continuity.

The following are some important aspects to look into after deploying in-house systems:

• Network monitoring
• Backup
• Application management
• Server management
• etc…

To manage all those above, it’s crucial to have a good team of IT personnel to ensure that the base IT infrastructure which supports all systems work perfectly.

Sometimes, organizations struggle to manage IT systems especially after a system has been handed over by a 3rd party implementation team.

For example, an organization which is in the machine fabrication industry may not have the right IT staffs to management their ERP system, which is vital to the success of their business.

This scenario has prompted ERP system vendors to develop systems which are hosted and managed by the vendors rather than by the client.

There are a few advantages to this as the service provider does the following:

• Backup
• Network monitoring
• Software updates / patch management
• Availability management
• Service support
• etc..

Lately, the costs for storage, servers, computers and Internet bandwidth have gone lower. These technology are also getting more stable, reliable and secure.

It’s just a matter of time before critical business applications like ERP system gets adopted, migrated and hosted on the cloud through Online On Demand SaaS based ERP systems.

The following are a few SaaS based ERP systems:

Plex Online SaaS ERP focuses on the manufacturing operations which includes inventory management, production management, quality management and others.

Manufacturers from various industries such as automotive suppliers, F&B processors, industrial machinery have used Plex Online to connect and integrate the entire manufacturing process.

Plex Systems recently completed its annual SAS70 Type II Audit, demonstrating the organization has adequate control and safeguards in place to host and process data for manufacturing enterprises.

NetSuite is a SaaS business software that supports the entire company from Accounting, ERP to CRM functionalities.

NetSuite has three key components which includes NetSuite Financial, NetSuite CRM+, NetSuite Ecommerce.

One key highlight has to be the NetSuite OneWorld which is capable of delivering real time global business management and financial consolidation across different geographies and subsidiaries.

Openbravo is a leading web based open source ERP developed to help businesses improve overall performance.

Its key functionalities includes master data management, warehouse management, production management, business intelligence, etc.

One key highlight is its ability to completely and seamlessly integrate with Openbravo POS, an open source point of sales(POS) application with almost 10,000 installations per month.

Odoo.com is OpenERP software hosted by the service providers themselves.

OpenERP’s key modules include manufacturing management, warehouse management, financial management, CRM, etc.

With Odoo, you’ll just need to customize and activate the required features and pay for only what you use.

—————- End of online on demand SaaS based ERP systems list ——————–

If you know of any other web based ERP systems, kindly let us know in the comment box below.

photo credit: roland

Because of this, it is important to know exactly what each employee has worked on every single hour of the workday in order to calculate costs and earnings made for a particular project.

The best way for the accounts department to find out exactly what each employee has been working on every day is through TimeSheets – a method for recording the amount of worker’s time spent on each project / job.

With my previous employments, I’ve had several experiences submitting timesheets.

With one organization, we were required to submit a timesheet every month and with another, every 2 weeks.

Personally, I felt that it’s better if we’re require to submit every fortnight so that we won’t have much trouble remembering what we’ve done in within this shorter period.

The best practice for every employee is to record down what he has accomplished by the end of each day. But sometimes, we tend to procrastinate and leave things to the next day and so on.

If you’re like me, you would have difficulty in remembering what you’ve done in the last 30 days.

There are times when you would be working on the same project for 3 months. Your timesheet would be very easy to fill up. But if you’re working on different projects every single day, then it’s really important to log that down at the end of each day.

Some organizations would just provide a timesheet template in Excel format for all staffs to key in and submit by month end. The problem with this is the reconciliation by the accounts personnel becomes a hassle. Imagine having to open up 50 Excel sheets and summing up the total number of hours spent for a particular project. This process itself could take days to complete, depending on the number of employee and projects you have.

If your organization is still managing worker timesheets using Excel, then you might want to consider implementing a web based online TimeSheet Software.

One that I can recommend, which is free and open source is Achievo – a Project Management Software.

Achievo is not meant for just tracking time but includes other Project Management related features as well, such as:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Human Resource Management (HRM)
• Calendar of Events Scheduling

To allow your employee to enter their daily time registrations, you’ll first need to add in their details.

Once all employees have been added, you can now proceed to create all the projects that your organization is currently working on.

In case you’re wondering if the above 3 fields are the only fields to enter, well not really.

Before you add a new project, you can predefine a project template where you can set common phases to a project.

For example, if your project is related to software development, then you could define the following SDLC Phases:

• Planning
• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Maintenance

And within each phase, you could also define its activities.

Other common project phases includes

• Business Development (BD)
• Research and Development (R&D)
• Customer Support

Now that projects have been added, an employee can begin to log in the time spent on a particular project using this web based online timesheet.

At the end of each week, an employee would finalize and confirm his entries by locking the week. Once a particular week is locked, a manager can look through the details before deciding whether or not t0 approve the entries. So yes, there’s some sort of approval routing available within Achievo.

From the perspective of an accounts person, she can login to Achievo’s reporting functions to generate report showing the number of hours spent on each project so she could perform the necessary accounting functions.

Achievo is a web based software based on the LAMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment. If you have workers who are not based in within your office, then this open source software is great as it can be installed on the web and accessed via the Internet.

For more details on how to set up and give this free and open source web based online timesheet software a try, check out Achievo today.

photo credit: ScrumptiousSally

But before you instruct everyone to report to work 24 hours by 7, it’s best to plan and break your workdays into several shifts so that your staffs can get some rest and a life of their own.

To do that, you can utilize this free duty rostering software with shift scheduler to plan your shift and assign duties appropriately.

The software is called DRoster Employee Scheduling Software created by Kappix.

DRoster is a simple to use windows application which allows a shift manager or supervisor to manage staff scheduling.

Once installed, launching DRoster immediately allows you to define the following:

• Places (e.g Restaurant Branch)
• Shifts (e.g Morning, Afternoon, Midnight)
• People (e.g Names of your staffs)

Once all the above settings have been defined, you will be presented with a shifts planner.

This is where you can assign staffs on to specific shifts.

To do that, simply right click on any cells to assign a duty to a specific employee.

There is also an hourly planner capability in case you need to break down duties by the hour.

Note that the green flags indicate that the duty has been approved by all parties and work should commence according to schedule.

The other notable features include its Reporting which includes:

• Attendance Report
• Duties by Places
• Persons Duties
• Non-manned Duties
• Duties Calendar
• Person duties by day

With these reports, you can easily view at a glance who’s working on which shifts. It’s also easy to let a particular staff know their schedules so they know when to turn up for work.

For more info about this free duty rostering software with shift scheduler, check out DRoster today!