With Technology Evaluation Center (TEC), you can be covered.

TEC’s RFP templates give you the most complete lists of software features and functions you’ll find anywhere for over 20 different kinds of software, including ERP, CRM, SCM, accounting, RFID, BI, and HR. Each template lists hundreds and most list thousands of features and functions, divided into the main areas of the software’s functionality.

What’s more, since TEC RFP templates come in Excel spreadsheet format, you can easily cut and paste them to create your own custom functional requirements list(s). Then it’s a simple matter of sending your requirements list(s) to the vendors you’re interested in, and having them indicate, right on the same spreadsheet, how well or poorly they support each and every function.

It’s easy, it saves you time and money, and it prevents any important functional requirements from slipping through the cracks.

To view a sample and to find out more about how TEC RFP templates make software evaluation a much easier process, follow this link to TEC’s RFP template web site.

Microsoft has a 2GB size limit on the Outlook personal folders (.pst) and offline folders (.ost) file types [for Outlook versions prior to Outlook 2003]. Once the folder size reaches or goes beyond that size limit the file will not be useable even if you delete items.

Apparently with this limitation, many are finding older versions of Outlook to be really troublesome when the limit has reached. If you’re seeking for an alternative to Microsoft Outlook, check out the recently lauched Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop.

Some cool features:

• It’s FREE with no missing features or catches
• Incorporate all accounts in one place. Zimbra Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, Outlook or any other work or personal email account using POP or IMAP
• You need not connect to the internet to read your mails. It’s a standalone installation just like any other desktop software.
• On modern Web 2.0 Ajax technology

Some disadvantages of Yahoo Zimbra Desktop:

• Still in beta version so no support available.
• Not recommended to run this beta version in production environment.
• This free version does not have a pst importer.

For those wanting to import your outlook pst into this free version, you can try to upload all your e-mail & folders via imap, export your calendar to ics, and contacts to csv and then import them into Zimbra Desktop.

I think this software is really a neat alternative to read your mails, manage calendars, contacts, document, tasks, briefcase. There’s no other free software which is able to go head to head with Microsoft Outlook. So head on over to Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop to download a copy today.

GuiXT is able to simplify your SAP user interface without Java or ABAP programming.

Standard features of GuiXT includes:

• Integrates with NetWeaver
• Supports Enterprise Portals
• Change SAP screens with No ABAP, No Java. No programming skills required
• Edit and combine SAP screens and transactions
• Create new and simplified transactions
• Web enabled, access simplified optimized UI through the browser. Includes iPhone support
• Create ‘offline’ transactions that works without SAP WAS and use them in areas without WiFi
• Zero footprint
• Access SAP through Mobile CE devices
• Create and maintain scripts. WYSIWYG interface, syntax checks and static analysis of scripts. Identifies precisely which line a variable is set or used.

Key customers using GuiXT:

• Shell
• Nike
• Canada Post

To get started with GuiXT, simply head over to GuiXT’s site where they have specified simple steps to start implementing their solution. You can also download a 30 day free trial to test and evaluate the software.

My two cents

I feel that SAP customizations and implementations are usually not as straight forward and can take up much time and resources to ensure successful and problem free implementation. With these solutions, it will probably help organizations to speed up any SAP processes and gain ROI quicker. After all, we just want our business processes streamlined to increase productivity and reduce any downtime. Check GuiXT out today!

Is this true or false?

After all, a safe environment from viruses is one reason why people generally switch from using the PC to Mac. From my research, I found that even Mac OS users can get viruses on their machine if one does not practice safe browsing, opens every single email attachments, or surf malicious sites.

Although there are fewer viruses written specifically to target the Macintosh OS, Mac viruses do exist. Cross-platfrom threats, such as many of the Office macro viruses, can also be a problem for Mac users. Because of this vulnerability, security companies have developed anti viruses for Mac users. As usual there are free and open source anti virus as well as those which you need to pay. The following is a list I’ve compiled:

Free and open source antivirus for Mac

• ClamXav - ClamXav is a free virus checker for Mac OS X. It uses the tried, tested and very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end.
• MPP Free Edition 1.2.113 - MPP Free Edition is a high performance application that provides virus and spam protection with ClamAV and SpamAssassin, with GUI management, optional end-user review of virus and spam quarantines and many extras like email signatures, max file size limits, extnstion bloking and more. Think of the MPP Free Edition as an ultra-fast alternative to open source tools such as MailScanner or AmavisD, with great GUI management, user-friendly installation for most Linux distributions, Mac OS X and FreeBSD, complete documentation and management. MPP requires no compiling or Perl expertise.

Not free antivirus for Mac

• Virus Barrier - VirusBarrier X5 protects your Mac from viruses by constantly examining all the files that your computer reads and writes, as well as watching for suspicious activity that may be the sign of viruses acting on applications or other files. With VirusBarrier X5 on your computer, you can rest assured that your Macintosh has the best protection available against viruses of all kinds.
• PC Tools iAntiVirus - With PC Tools iAntiVirus you are protected against the most nefarious cyber-threats attempting to gain access to your Mac and personal information. It also provides real-time protection and comprehensive system scanning to ensure your Mac remains safe and virus free.
• Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac - provides integrated cross-platform virus detection on Macintosh servers, desktops and laptops. The powerful Sophos virus detection engine scans all entry points, and also detects non-Mac viruses that could be harbored on Mac computers.

• Step 1: Download and install Movavi Video Converter
• Step 2: Run Movavi Video Converter and add original video file(s)
• Step 3: Choose a preset for converted video
• Step 4: Set up a proper video output file path and Convert video

Step 1: Download and install Movavi Video Converter

Installing spam filters at server stage and especially on Microsoft Exchange Server allows businesses to be more efficient in controlling spam and maintain the confidentiality of their mails without revealing it to external factors.

The unwanted commercial e-mail, known as Spam, is turning out to be an acute threat for the organizations and even individual users. In present time, spam, or the unsolicited junk e-mail, has become one of the biggest hazard intimidating the Web world, and removing this menace from the computers has become a task in itself. As per expert researches, worldwide, the cost of spam varies from millions to billions of dollars. All the security companies and researchers are working hard to find out ways to get rid of this ever-increasing giant and integrate spam filters into popular mail systems like Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, 2003 and 2007.

Filtering loads of messages to identify which e-mails are spam and which are not is an exhaustive process. Thus, the primary function of every server administrator who is accountable for the messaging and collaboration server system is to install a superior spam e-mail filtering system.

For several years, preventing spam at the connection stage has been considered as the ideal measure for organizations, as it prohibits entry of spam into the company’s network. This element works by simply assessing the incoming Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connections for probable spam that can be minimized if the connection SMTP host is a prominent Spammer.

To protect the business atmosphere, an anti exchange server spam is highly indispensable and should undeniably be incorporated in the network security strategy to save the company’s time, money and despair related to system failure. Installing suitable and advanced software to counter spam a complex task but is very necessary so that all the mails, data and online information received by the computers through the server are completely protected against spam.

Advantages of Exchange Server Spam filter

There are numerous benefits of installing spam filters at the Microsoft exchange server stage. The improved security ensures the immediate elimination of the spam mail before its entry into the users system which saves time, bandwidth, storage and money. Any SMTP or POP3 mail server is often also safeguarded by the server-based spam filter. Besides, this technology also notifies the sender if any valid message was acknowledged as spam.

Exchange Server filter operates from a central server, generally linked to several spam blacklists that spots the recognized spam senders while evaluating every e-mail on the basis of its individual features. The efficiency of these systems can be improved with Exchange Server’s ability to collect information by analyzing large number of messages. The perfect Exchange Server anti spam filter allows easy installation/administration and does not require any client side software. Features for reporting and statistics are also important for the system administrator.

Several anti-spam programs come with an alternative where recognized spam can be thrown to the junk e-mail box of a user, so that the computer can ensure that authentic messages have not been mistakenly acknowledged as spam.

Published At: www.Isnare.com

One advice given by our hardware guy would be to use Norton Ghost to create an image of the entire partition when the machine is in a clean state. With the image, we can easily just pop in the imaged cd and restore the entire partition back to the state when it was imaged. At that time Norton Ghost was a software every technical consultant needed.

Now that I’m out of the organization, I no longer have access to a licensed copy of Norton Ghost. It’s time to seek free norton ghost alternatives.

From my research, I found the following free to use imaging tools:

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition

A backup and disk imaging software program for Microsoft Windows developed by Paramount Software UK Ltd in 2006. It creates disk images and file backup archives using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to ensure point in time data accuracy. This means that you can create a full backup of your hard drive through imaging even when you’re logged on in Windows.

Standard Macrium Reflect features

• Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS).
• Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.
• Built in scheduler.
• 32 bit and native 64 bit versions.
• Industry leading compression levels and speed.
• Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size!
• Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista.
• HTML log files.

Partimage

Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem to an image file. Most Linux and Windows filesystems are supported. The image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2 programs to save disk space, and they can be splitted into multiple files to be copied on CDs / DVDs…

Standard Partimage features:

• Partimage will only copy data from the used portions of the partition
• Restore your linux partition if there is a problem
• Used to install many identical computers

Clonezilla

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Standard Clonezilla features:

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or MS windows. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost)

PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Several tools have been added and written, so to make this ISO the perfect choice to backup and restore whole partitions, an easy way. It sounds like Symantec Ghost(tm), but has even better features, and is totally free.

Standard PING Features:

• Probably the best available Linux toolbox for rescueing a system;
• Backup and Restore partitions or files to a MS Network Shared directory;
• Backup and Restore the BIOS data as well;
• Either burn a bootable CD / DVD, either integrate within a PXE / RIS environment;
• Possibility to Blank local admin’s password;
• Create your own restoration bootable DVD (see the Howto Documentation);
• Partition and Format a disk before installing Windows (so to make sure your unattended Windows installation will happen on the right partition);

DriveImage XML

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Standard DriveImage XML Features:

• Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
• Browse these images, view and extract files
• Restore these images to the same or a different drive
• Copy directly from drive to drive
• Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler

For those with high startup capital, choosing a POS system shouldn’t be a problem as one could easily go for branded and reputable ones such as IBM POS and Lightspeed POS for Mac OS X. But what if cost is problem? You’ve just paid for the renovation of the store and cannot afford to purchase high end POS system. There must be a cheaper solution!

What about an open source POS / Retail Management Solution? One such system is Openbravo POS, designed specifically for touch screens. Openbravo POS (previously called Librepos and TinaPOS) is a point of sale which supports ESC/POS ticket printers, customer displays and barcode scanners. It is multiuser providing product entry forms, reports and charts. Openbravo POS can be configured to work in any Point-of-Sale environment.
Openbravo POS features includes:

• Sales, refunds and cash management
• Master data management
• Warehouse management
• Restaurant module
• Reports and charts
• Security

Openbravo POS supports a wide list of POS hardware including:

• Touch screens
• Bar code scanners
• Scales
• Receipt printers (Epson TM88iV, Star, Ithaca…)
• Customer displays (Epson LD110, L200…)
• Cash drawers
• Magnetic card readers

Openbravo POS is developed using Java but you can run it on various types of Operating System.

Sample screenshots:

Openbravo POS is a system rich in features and is capable of challenging other POS systems for the retail industry. Since it is open source you can be assured of its quality. Even if the features does not suit your environment, you can always customize it or hire someone to do it for you since the software is open source. One day when I start my own retail store, I will definitely give Openbravo POS a try before even looking at any other systems out there. Download Openbravo POS

What makes this unique in the SAP world is that the vast majority of SAP applications get sold because there is an ERP instance somewhere in the organization to tie back to. Rarely if ever in the years of doing primary research on their customer base would I find a reference who had just come onboard for their channel management applications for example.

NetWeaver on the other hand is starting to show up as the architecture for future Web Services in some companies who were not multi-decade ERP customers for example. This finding contradicted many people’s perceptions (including my own) of just how SAP goes about selling their applications. I decided to go all out and complete a research study of SAP NetWeaver early adopters, mostly out of personal interest but also because I love doing primary research and wanted to see what could be learned from NetWeaver early adopters.

What I Found Out

It’s a good thing I started this project in August as a hobby of sorts because the effort to get people to respond to a survey on this topic takes a fair amount of work. Also I attended SAP user group meetings in my area and continued to work at getting the Zoomerang survey to people who were kind enough to provide their e-mail addresses. The big break in getting connected with NetWeaver users came from a friend at Disney who introduced me to several and the networking started working from there. From that point I was able to complete a decent sample size of 300 companies distributed globally, and visited many companies locally through user group meetings and buying lunches. The result is a report published in December titled Users Speak Out About SAP NetWeaver.

Here are some of the key take-aways from the research:

• The majority of manufacturing companies start out with the vision of unifying databases that had been siloed nearly out of existence in the past so channel strategies can be more aggressively pursued. This focus on creating competitive advantage through better integration pervaded the conversations with users.

• Integration to support growth strategies was by far the largest driver of investment. Companies are looking to turn their data warehouses into a competitive advantage outnumbered those looking to consolidate databases in general. There is a definite atmosphere of using NetWeaver as a platform to stimulate revenue growth over simply completing database consolidations.

• Consolidating portals onto a single platform is where Halliburton and others are both moving towards in their NetWeaver strategy. This is a common theme in many of the early adopters; they want to have a single portal for the majority, if not all, applications in specific business units.

• In manufacturing industries the challenge of handling Engineering Change Orders ECOs) and order change sequencing between Oracle and SAP systems is an area that causes shared customers much pain. Intermediating between both systems for their change order numbering sequence took custom development to resolve for example.

• One high tech manufacturer uses SAP NetWeaver as the integration hub for their order capture, order management and fulfilment systems, including integration to an Oracle supply chain system. The pay-off for this manufacturer is the elimination of manual product option updates that was previously done at the director level of the company as these senior managers are the only ones with the interrelationships of products in their heads. Instead of having to work one weekend a month to update the order capture systems, directors can have a Saturday off.

• One heavy equipment manufacturer did an ROI analysis for NetWeaver integration and built in assumptions of cost savings based on headcount reductions. As the NetWeaver integration project came online, it was apparent that more integration engineers were needed than budgeted, and the two engineers were re-assigned to those roles. This is a familiar situation in those companies that did do ROI on NetWeaver projects; they focused on headcount reductions and ended up re-assigning the engineers and staff they thought they would not need anymore.

• When those customers who came to SAP for NetWeaver were asked why they made that decision the two most common responses were integration experience and pricing or licensing. There were also an even mix of responses across industry expertise and ease of customization as well.

• When SAP customers with a median of 6 to 10 years of experience with SAP were asked what they would most like to change about the company, they asked for greater simplification and management of licenses. Specifically they asked for a portal view of all licenses so they could manage their entire SAP investment efficiently.

SAP Satisfaction Levels

The research shows that the majority of companies are either satisfied to somewhat satisfied with SAP and this is again a fascinating point. For the next survey the reasons why satisfaction is where it is need to be explored.

If you are any SAP customer, feel free to participate in the survey. I will provide a summary of the results next month.

Bottom Line

There’s not that much of a correlation between over-the-top enthusiasm on the one hand in the SAP base and NetWeaver adoption, or in other words the SAP zealots out there aren’t necessarily leading the charge to NetWeaver. What is leading the charge is the integration expertise that new customers are seeing and the ability to get clear licensing and pricing terms nailed down early in their relationships with SAP.
About the Author
http://WWW.LWCRESEARCH.COM

Apatar is an open source data integration tool capable of challenging some of the bigger players out there like Microsoft Biztalk and Oracle Business Intelligence 10G. With Apatar you can integrate your information between on-premise or on-demand data sources and applications. Meaning, data and information from the web can now be easily mashed up with internal data via this open source data integration tool. There is also an interface which allows you to migrate, synchronize, replicate and map data without the need for coding.

The key features of Apatar includes:

Some featured Apatar users include:

• Infosys
• Autodesk
• Arizona State University
• Alcatel-Lucent
• Credit Suisse

Without doubt Apatar is emerging as one of the highly reliable and trusted software utilized by large organizations to integrate and transform data and information. Give it a try today!