Internet Explorer 6 has been around for a while and its been a good browser. Since new alternatives like Firefox and Opera have come out we now know that, yes there is faster browsing out there. Internet Explorer can be as fast after trying out a few tips in this article.

Step 1: Default is your friend.

You heard it here first folks. (probably not) Generally setting the browser to its defaults will make it go faster. There are two areas in specific that will make the largest impact. Security settings and the advanced settings. To set these at their defaults go to Internet Explorer. In the browser go to the tools menu and select internet options. In the internet options go to the security tab. In the security tab set all of the zones to default. Then go to the advanced tab. In the advanced tab you will find the restore defaults button at the bottom of the window. Click o it and that’s it. Click on OK and restart your browser.

Step 2: Setting the Number of Connections per Session.

Internet explorer limits the number of connections it opens when you click on a link to open an new web page. Microsoft did this to comply with HTTP 1.1 standards but it also really slows down things when you open a new website and download the sites images. So to change that go to the start menu and select run. In the run command type regedit and click OK to open the registry editor. In the registry editor navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings. Here change the MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server to a number you wish. That’s it, once done restart windows and you are all set. Just a note that this will effect all windows applications that use the internet explorer api so if something else is not working right that is why.

Step 3: Keep less and save time.

Windows by default will automatically set your temporary internet files to a certain percentage of your hard drive. If you have a hard drive that is a 200 gigabytes your temporary internet files will be a couple of gigabytes in size. The more files that Internet Explorer has to look through the more time it takes to load a page. To change the size of your temporary internet files goto the tools menu in Internet Explorer and select internet options. In the internet options click on the settings buttons in the temporary internet files. Change the size to the desired amount (I usually use 100MB) and click on OK. Your computer might stall for a little bit if there are a lot of files to delete.

Its as easy as that. Three steps to speed up your internet browsing in Internet Explorer. I’m sure there is a whole lot more out there but these are the ones that will help you out the most. Till next time.

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Traditionally we were considering functionally rich systems, such as SAP, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards as the fit for large publicly traded corporation. There might be multiple opinions for the future corporate ERP/MRP systems. We would like to give you our prognosis: high-end systems will be losing market to generic granulated standard functionality systems. Customization will be in high demand – but it will be appropriate to go for light of medium customization versus purchasing high-end functionality system. It is not a secret, that nowadays multiple companies from Fortune 500 list use midmarket solution, such as Microsoft Great Plains as their corporate ERP. In this small article we’ll try to defend our position and give you highlights on deploying Microsoft Great Plains for large corporation.

• Computer Hardware Technology Breakthrough. Imagine you are back in old-good 1990th – high tech boom. If somebody would tell you that you can go to the store and purchase of the shelf 400GB IDE hard drive for $300 – you would probably laugh. We were used to 20GB hard drives those days and believed that such a high capacity devices attributable to mainframes. Another example – 1GB RAM memory stick for $100. Intel Xenon and AMD Optron based Servers are direct successors of IBM PC platform, designed in the 1980th as personal computer (PC). These are signs of the maturity in the industry and time to revise hardware pricing strategy – it should definitely drop.

• Elite DB Platforms Time is Over. Yes, it might be surprise, but Microsoft, which in the 1990th was targeting small business and developers community is now out there on the marketplace with Microsoft SQL Server, which is similar in its power and is a way more simple to support, than Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Progress, Ingress, SAP database and other “elite” platforms. Midsize companies switched to MS SQL Server and do their reporting, analysis and datawarehousing/OLAP on the Microsoft platform

• Custom Logic versus Functionally-Rich Module. The trends in the ERP/Accounting applications software industry ended up with required annual maintenance/enhancement program fee, which is usually close to 20% of the software list price. If you purchase expensive module and use 10% or its functionality, because the whole bundle has what you need among other features, then you are in trap of paying 20% annually for the logic you don’t need and don’t use. If you hire consultant to customize generic platform – you pay one time

• ERP Granules Standardizing. This should happen. We believe in this – seeing signs of maturing ERP software industry.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer

Forrester Research, a research and consulting firm in its report says that, jobs that are getting lost in the United States due to software outsourcing are basically low salary IT jobs such as software programming or computer support specialists or computer operators. However, on the other hand, high paying jobs like system analysts, network analysts and research analysts are continuing dominating the market. In fact, jobs in this sector are growing at the steadily rate of 4 to 5% every year. Normally, these jobs require excellent domain knowledge and idea about the internal working of IT systems and business process. In software outsourcing these qualities are difficult to find.

Jobs that not get affected by software outsourcing

Higher skilled jobs such as system analysis and application development are increasing at the rate of 6% per year. That’s because, their demand is growing continuously. Also, software outsourcing can be shifted to India or other offshore software development countries, where buyers need in-house workforce to customize and upholder software.

Reasons for decrease in Software outsourcing in future

Are you the one afraid from this boom of software outsourcing? If yes, there is news which can lower down your fear for a great extent. According to a report, attraction of cost saving in software outsourcing is yet very high and because of that, increase in jobs like software programmer will be very less. That further results into very low increase in software programming jobs, salary rise will also hardly 1% in next few years. In fact, salary of computer operators and database administrators will also grow at the minimal rate of 1%. However, salaries of computer research scientists and information system managers will have highest growth at around 3.5% every year whereas salaries of analysts and system administrators will grow at the rate of 2 to 3% every year.

Offshore software development

It is also predicted that the market of software outsourcing which has major costs saving today will decrease by 2008. The main reason behind this will be the decreasing gap between the US salary and the outsourcing countries such as India. As, it will lower the salary in US, while in India and other offshore software development countries, because of lack of availability of resources, salary rise will be very high. It will also decrease the costs saving. Finally, companies will prefer their in-house resources rather then offshore outsourcing.

Author is famous IT expert.

If you company is small or mid-size special products or materials exchange broker, you probably have custom in-house made exchange application. Nowadays exchange is done over the internet, so you might have advanced web-based exchange application. Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains could play the role of the backend: accounting, sales and purchasing ordering, backordering, allocation, collection. In this case we expect tight integration between your exchange application and Great Plains. In this small article we consider industry / market niche specifics and the ways to realize these requirements:

• Exchange Transaction. Exchange transaction usually has two parts: Sales and Purchasing. This transaction should be translated into Great Plains as Sales Order in Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order in Purchase Order Processing (POP). Assuming that you have web developers and C#, VB.Net programmers, you can deploy eConnect Distribution – this is Software Development Kit with sample codes, you can create or modify Great Plains objects, such as Sales Order, Customer record, Purchase Order, Vendor record. One warning about eConnect – it is designed based on general ERP application principles: you can create work transaction only – you can not post transaction, this is left for the Great Plains user

• Bill of Lading. In materials selling, when you order something you probably know number of packs or bundles, but you do not know exact weight or length. You get this information when you receive Bill of Lading. You need Bill of Lading automatic integration and qty update in Sales Order or Purchase Order. At this moment you do Sales Order allocation. eConnect, mentioned above should do the job

• Agent Commission. You could use Salesperson, associate him/her with items sold in Sales Order and then calculate and pay commission, using your own formulas.

• Reporting. In the case of integrated web application with Great Plains, we would expect heterogeneous sql queries and reporting, based on these queries and stored procedures. To produce nice and flexible reports – you usually deploy Crystal Reports and publish them in your web application.

• Transaction Posting. As mentioned above – this should be preferably done by Great Plains user with approval logic. However if you have thousands transactions per day or hour and it is physically not possible, you should go beyond eConnect functionality and post transactions automatically. You need custom stored procedures, posting and transferring Sales Orders. You can create these procedures yourself or purchase the ones, available on the market.

• Customization Tools: Great Plains Dexterity, Modifier with VBA, Transact SQL scripting to name the most popular.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer

Windows Defender (formally Microsoft Antispyware) Beta 2 has been released. Downloaded, installed, scanned with it, first impressions are it looks a lot nicer, cleaner simpler interface.

Windows Defender needs Automatic Update service running to get definition updates, and downloads them directly through the network connection for Generic Host Process for Win32 Services. Not sure if I like that. It scans a lot slower, especially when scanning archives. It took forever to get through my Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2 program folders. Those game installs are loaded with huge archive folders for maps. Only 8.4 gigs on this drive and it took 23 minutes to scan with a full system scan, spending like 22 and a half minutes on just this drive. It went through my other drive with nothing but 9.5 gigs of mp3 files very quickly. Windows Defender REALLY wants to run all the time now like an anti-virus. Even when I disable Windows Defender real time protection, which it has loads of check points for, and close the window, it leaves no icon in the tasktray, but still has two running process’s, (MSASCui.exe and MsMpEng.exe), one using 15 megs of memory and the other 5.

I, personally, don’t want it running all the time. I don’t need it running all the time. It didn’t find a single thing because I never get any spyware. I just want it to do the occasional full scan when I tell it to.

It took me a couple minutes to figure out how to shut Windows Defender down. It installs a whole new service, Windows Defender Service. Maybe if I just stop the service and set its startup type to Manual, and remove the startup entry it created too, ok rebooting to try it, ok not starting with system. Failing to start service when running it, must manually start the service. Ok I manually started the service, running ok now, must manually stop the service to shut it down again, and then end task on the 1 process it still leaves running (MSASCui.exe, using 5 megs of memory) even after shutting down its service.

I’m gonna have to manually start Windows Defender service everytime I want to use it, and then manually stop its service, and kill the extra process it still leaves, when I’m done. Cause I just don’t need it or want it running all the time if I’m gonna scan with it once a month at most.

It really wants to be integrated and run all the time. I don’t think I’ll mind when its preinstalled into Vista, but this aint Vista, and it should shut down when I want it to. Thats ok I know how to shut it down and how to get it started again when I want to use it.

Pretty impressed with Windows Defender even tho I don’t like how badly it wants to always run. Its Software Explorers thing in its Tools section, and also places a shortcut for in the windows control panel, is pretty impressive. Gives loads of info about everything, every startup item, every running process, every open network connection.

I like Windows Defender, now that I figured out how to tame it. It has no license expiration date anymore in its about box either.

Ken Savage is a Webmaster who writes about what is going on in the Tech industry usually days before it breaks to the rest of the world. He can be found at http://www.kensavage.com He’s also a leading writer within the technology aspects of Diabetes on http://www.battlediabetes.com

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains as new ERP for multinational corporation manufacturing facility in Brazil.

If your company plans to outsource manufacturing in Brazil by purchasing existing facility there, the first step would be to implant new management team and revise business processes and procedures. The way there comes through the new ERP/accounting system implementation from scratch. We’ll show you the way to implement new system on the base of Microsoft Great Plains. You may have two reasons to place Great Plains, first – you company has Great Plains implemented in the headquarters and this is worldwide policy, second – if you have high end ERP at the headquarters, such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft – it might be too complex/expensive for Brazilian facility. Looking at the Brazilian ERP software market you will find out that the leader there is local ERP application – Microsiga and it is relatively easy to implement it there, however you will have language barriers, plus differences in reporting and tax rules, when you consolidate the statements to the corporate report. Let’s review Microsoft Great Plains option:

• Licensing. You should consider two options. First, if you host your Brazilian company GP databse in the USA, Europe, Australia, or where your headquarters is located, you do not need to pay additional fee to Microsoft Business Solutions. You may have connection performance issues, but this is separate consideration. Alba Spectrum Technologies owns Great Plains Brazilian version through our office in Sao Paulo – Enterlogix.com.br. Second option and this is applicable if you have high end accounting application in the Headquarters – you can purchase Brazilian version through Enterlogix.com.br and in this case software price would be about half of what you would pay in the USA or Eurozone.

• Localization. Brazil is self-contained large country and people, including executives and accountants speaks Brazilian Portuguese there, not necessarily English. Plus all the local reporting and documentation, including expenses and invoicing should be done in Portuguese. You need localized version and in the case of Great Plains it is available.

• Implementation. Again, consider that Microsiga holds huge percentage of the Brazilian ERP market and the majority of local consulting folks are Microsiga gurus, you probably have to deal with the multinational consulting company with the presence in USA, Europe and Sao Paulo/Rio de Janeiro

• Customization. Microsoft Great Plains stays in the low end of the pricing pyramid and so, instead of long implementation cycle you should expect light or mid-level customization to meet your unique business processes requirements. In this case you need Great Plains Dexterity, Modifier/VBA/Continuum developers, who are working on the Brazilian market.

Final words: Brazil is excellent manufacturing place for beverage production, especially the one, related to fruit juice concentrates, food import to the USA, restaurants suppliers, automakers, especially in the Salvador area.

Good luck with implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call São Paulo 55-11-3826-3449! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Microsoft CRM Partner, serving clients in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Manaus, Lisboa, Coimbra, Porto, Cascais and having locations in multiple states and internationally

If your anything like the majority of society, myself included, you could probably use a little more info on certain aspects of computers. Here, I decided to take a look at "PHP". Yeah I know, that’s what I said, "Yeah right!", but it’s not so confusing when you look at it a little closer…

PHP is an acronym (One of those things smart people use to confuse us) which stands for "Hypertext Preprocessor". It used to stand for "Personal Home Page", but that must have been too easy. So after a little reasearch I found out just what the acronym meant. It is an open source, reflective programming language.

Apparently, all that programming language stuff is to develop "dynamic web content and server side applications". They have also found a new use for it in other types of software.

Once again, this stuff is pretty tricky, but take a look elseware! Maybe there is a "PHP for Dummies" out there. I would encourage any of you who have the slightest incling to find out more, to do so. It’s actually pretty interesting! The best thing to do for more information is to check out forums, blogs, or websites about PHP. There is also books and an actual formal development manual that you can purchase from a store or borrow from a library, that will be able to answer any of your questions about this particlular programming language.

Feel free to reprint this article as long as you keep the article, this caption and author biography in tact with all hyperlinks.

Tyler Brooker is the owner and operator of Hosting Php Tutorials - http://www.hosting-php-tutorials.com, which is the best site on the internet for all Php related information.

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is mid and even corporate market ERP and as being relatively complex and difficult to do self-support in-house, Microsoft Business Solutions requires you first to have so-called VAR of record, or your MBS partner and second – pay annual enhancement program, which is typically 16% of you software price list. Enhancement program allows you to get new version of the product as well as purchase and add new modules you might need. Plus you get discounts on the technical support cases placed to Microsoft Business Solutions technical support directly.

In the recession time of recession 2000-2004 – a lot of clients decided not to pay the enhancement program and save some money, needed for staying in business. Among them were mostly small and mid-size businesses, however we see corporate clients as well with 40 users Great Plains eEnterprise and more. In 2004-2005 the economic situation improved substantially and businesses are back to IT investments. In this small article we’ll show you your options to re-enroll into enhancement program and upgrade your system:

• Re-enrollment fee. If you need to get back to enhancement program, minimal re-enrollment fee is 35% of the software price list. This amount incorporate 16% enhancement program plan. So, the penalty of being out of the program is 19% - if you stayed without support all the recession years – say four – you saved some money and I don’t think you should be unhappy. Go ahead and re-enroll

• VAR of Record. Your company had tough time three years ago, your former Great Plains Partner had the same of even larger problems, trying to stay in business. Maybe it is not around anymore. Then you need to do research – who could be your new MBS reseller. Choose between local and nation-wide MBS partners. If you have a lot of customization and integration – you probably have to sacrifice local presence and seek somebody who has very good customization experience. The switch from your old partner to the new is very straightforward – you need to sign Change VAR form and fax it to MBS or your new MBS partner

• Upgrade. If you on MS SQL Server and do not have customization, only ReportWriter reports: SOP Invoice, POP Purchase Order, etc., then the upgrade should be simple. Great Plains Professional (high end, more than 10 users) and Standard (low end, up to 10 users) are still Great Plains Dexterity based applications and now they are on MS SQL Server only (Pervasive SQL and Ctree support and upgrade is discontinued). Upgrade should be done by outside consultant through Great Plains Utilities. If you have customizations, then your new partner should explore your Great Plains Workstation: DYNAMICS.SET (to identify Dexterity third parties, you use), FORMS.DIC (Modified forms: Modifier/VBA), REPORTS.DIC (Modified reports: Invoice, PO, or the like) plus if you have Integration Manager integrations (IM.MDB) and SQL custom stored procedures – if any. This might be paid assignment to estimate – and you will have the clear picture on what you have, and what you might need for the new version.

• Additional Considerations. Other custom pieces you might have could be: Crystal Reports, web applications, such as eCommerce – this is good candidate to be rewritten in Vb.Net or C#.Net with Great Plains eConnect

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Germany, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer

Data mining isn’t screen-scraping. I know that some people in the room may disagree with that statement, but they’re actually two almost completely different concepts.

In a nutshell, you might state it this way: screen-scraping allows you to get information, where data mining allows you to analyze information. That’s a pretty big simplification, so I’ll elaborate a bit.

The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data. People often do this to build things like comparison shopping engines, archive web pages, or simply download text to a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered and analyzed.

Data mining, on the other hand, is defined by Wikipedia as the "practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns." In other words, you already have the data, and you’re now analyzing it to learn useful things about it. Data mining often involves lots of complex algorithms based on statistical methods. It has nothing to do with how you got the data in the first place. In data mining you only care about analyzing what’s already there.

The difficulty is that people who don’t know the term "screen-scraping" will try Googling for anything that resembles it. We include a number of these terms on our web site to help such folks; for example, we created pages entitled Text Data Mining, Automated Data Collection, Web Site Data Extraction, and even Web Site Ripper (I suppose "scraping" is sort of like "ripping"). So it presents a bit of a problem–we don’t necessarily want to perpetuate a misconception (i.e., screen-scraping = data mining), but we also have to use terminology that people will actually use.

Todd Wilson is the owner of screen-scraper.com (http://www.screen-scraper.com/), a company which specializes in data extraction from web pages. While not scraping screens Todd is hard at work finishing up a doctoral degree in Instructional Psychology and Technology.

The world of small business accounting software can be a minefield for any business owner. However choosing the right package is one of the most critical business decisions you will make.

Here are the seven things you must consider before making a purchase that will help you achieve your businesses goals.

1. Scalability

Businesses change over time so it’s critical that the small business accounting software you choose can change too. Some things that often change are the number of products and services offered and the number of employees. When you choose your package try and imaging the business in 5 years or 10 years time and how different it will be. Use this information to guide your purchase decision. It may well be better to pay a little more now for the software knowing that it can be easily upgraded when needed with minimum disruption and cost to your business.

2. Support

It is important that any software has great support for when something goes wrong (and it always does). Most major companies offer support but you also need to think about support in your local area. It’s often much easier to have someone locally come in and do things you need done with your software than have someone trying to help you over the phone. Make some enquiries with other businesses about the package they use and who helps them.

3. Accountant Interface

It’s most unlikely you will handle every aspect of your businesses accounting. Your accountant is an important factor in making the right decision. What software are they used to working with and what do they prefer? Can you easily supply them data and reports from your package without the need for any extra work (which you’ll have to pay for). Don’t be afraid to ask their opinion as they live and breathe this stuff.

4. Best Value For Money

Once you have selected the right package for your business you may as well get the best value. Shop around as the price can vary greatly and the product is exactly the same. Online merchants such as Amazon may offer better pricing because of the sheer volume of products they sell. However price is only one part of the equation so if their is great merchant locally with support or installation assistance this may be far more valuable.

5. Major Brands

There are two major players in the small business accounting software market. They are QuickBooks and Peachtree. Microsoft is expected to enter the market soon. I recommend choosing a major brand so that you can get regular updates and you know the company will be around as long as your business needs them.

6. Ease of Use

Ease of use is a personal thing but it is worth trying the software before you buy it if you can. Remember to get the person who will be the main user to test the software as well. Also consider how well the package can interact with other software you use. This is an advantage the Microsoft package may have when it’s available.

7. Features Needed

I touched on this earlier when talking about thinking ahead as to where you business will be in 5 or 10 years time. Most accounting software packages come in several different versions. If you don’t need certain features now and can’t see a need for them in the future then don’t buy them. The major differences are usually - number of users allowed, inventory management capability and number of reports available.

To sum up think ahead when planning your purchase of small business accounting software. You will make a much smarter business decision that will save you plenty of trouble and money in the future.

Please visit us for more information and a feature by feature comparison of: Small Business Accounting Software