Archive for July 27th, 2006

The Best Free Software

Posted on Jul 27th, 2006

Software Wants to Be Free…

…but users want it to be safe. Free software is everywhere, which makes it incredibly difficult these days to find the best of any particular kind. And then there’s the fact that "freeware" is not always free. Some freeware is just poorly written and may cause your computer to crash. Some are a conduit for spam and other system invasion techniques. Others are illegal copies of commercial software that can land you in legal trouble.

Nevertheless, there are several excellent software packages that are truly free, high quality, and useful. For general computer tasks and other fun stuff, here are some of my favorite sources:

  • OpenOffice: If you are not addicted to every whistle and bell associated with the Microsoft’s Office products, you might find this multi-platform, multilingual office suite exciting. The OpenOffice word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation modules produce files that are compatible with their popular commercial counterparts, and are built on Open Source ideas, making it part of a larger community of quality software that grows better through collective use and development. You can find it at OpenOffice.org.

  • Free Anti-Virus Protection: Get inoculations without the pain of paying — it’s becoming more commonplace for ISP’s such as AOL to provide free anti-virus protection. But for those willing to look, you can find some stand-alone options. Grisoft.com offers its AVG Free Edition without charge to private, non-commercial, single-home users. You can also get a free one-year trial of the eTrust EZ Anti-Virus package (my personal favorite) from Computer Associates and Microsoft.

  • Universal IM: If you’re into instant messaging (IM) but your friends all use different IM tools, then GAIM is for you. It is compatible with AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, and numerous other systems, allowing you to have conversations with many different folks without running multiple IM programs. GAIM is cross-platform, with versions for Windows and Linux.

  • Graphics: IrfanView is a great freeware graphics program. It’s a fast, small graphic viewer and editor for Windows that tries to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals. In addition to supporting many file formats and languagesm there’s a thumbnail option, slideshow creation, batch conversion, a multimedia player, screen capturing and a host of graphic editing features.

  • Entertainment: Free, legal music and film is still available, news stories and lawsuits not withstanding. Betterpropaganda.com is one such San Francisco-based site for music news and freebies for independent tunes and upcoming talent. But there are actually many others worth checking out such as Garageband and AtomFilms. You can also find games at Happy Puppy and FilePlanet, which often have other free downloads too.

    • Practice Safe Computing

    Here’s some advice to keep in mind when looking for good freeware downloads:

  • Research before you download
  • Ask your neighbor (or an expert)
  • Stay out of bad neighborhoods

    • Elaborating on that last point, there are some rogue sites in cyberspace that appear to offer free software, but the downloads contain spyware, adware, trojan horses and viruses. Here are some dependable freeware sites you can trust:

    www.download.com

    www.pcworld.com/downloads

    www.nonags.com

    www.majorgeeks.com

    One final tip: Add to caution a dose of prevention. Make sure your system is up to date and keep it free of malware. See my article How can I avoid computer viruses? for details on how to protect yourself from viruses and other nasties.

    BOB RANKIN… is a tech writer and computer programmer who enjoys exploring the Internet and sharing the fruit of his experience with others. His work has appeared in ComputerWorld, NetGuide, and NY Newsday. Bob is publisher of the Internet TOURBUS newsletter, author of several computer books, and creator of the http://LowfatLinux.com website. Visit Bob Rankin’s website for more helpful articles and free tech support.

    Microsoft Great Plains Implementation: Verticals - Wholesale Order Entry center - overview

    Posted on Jul 27th, 2006

    Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains has substantial market share and strong support by Microsoft on the US market. Currently we see the trend in the vertical markets when companies with custom-built accounting application, usually written on legacy platform are switching to standard and proven ERP solution and customize or tailor it to fit their vertical market requirements. We’ll be publishing series of vertical articles: Logistics, Distribution Centers, Warehouse Management, Barcoding, Shipping/Receiving, eCommerce, EDI, Wholesale. Today we’ll give you Wholesale tailoring scenario

    Sales Order Processing improvements to work with large number of wholesale order takers:

    1. Sales Order Processing stand alone Great Plains Dexterity application, which works with Microsoft Great Plains SQL databases to feed in orders. This application, written as from scratch Dexterity application doesn’t requires hundreds of Great Plains user licenses and will work with SOP tables with improved functionality

    2. Online Sales History by Customer. If you are order taker and this is wholesale business – each customer has certain level of negotiated price, which it is comfortable to pay. Also this customer is ordering known set of products from you. It is nice to have list of historical items he ordered in the past several months and their negotiated prices

    3. Recommend Items to your customer. You can easily design items to recommend logic, when you link your new items or related items with the items your customer is usually ordered. This is how Amazon book sale works!

    4. Sales People Competition. In addition to the above online sales tools you can have average profitability of the item per period and by sales person (assuming negotiation scenarios). Here you can have logic implemented allowing certain level of negotiation room and variable commission, related to strong negotiation and sales skills

    Considering Microsoft Great Plains – majority of the logic above is implemented and could be implemented in Great Plains Dexterity. Alternative platform would be Microsoft C# or VB.Net ASPX web programming with Microsoft Great Plains at the back end. You can use such tools as eConnect to work with Great Plains object creation and retrieving or go ahead with direct SQL Stored Procedure. To certain level you could use legacy technologies, such as Great Plains Modifier with Continuum for VB, VBA scripting, etc.

    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