Why you should consider a small-business blog--and how you can start one

In the last few years, blogs have gotten more popular than ever. According to the blog tracking firm Technorati, there are an estimated 175,000 new blogs and almost six million blog updates published daily. With blogs growing at this rate, why should your business start one?

Because blogs are a wonderful marketing tool, a great way to increase your company web site rankings with search engines and an excellent tool for generating sales leads.

Here are some suggestions to help you get started, plus some background information in case you might not be familiar familiar with blogging. More...

SharePoint is on fire across the country and across the globe. More and more organizations, especially in the Federal government and defense sector, are adopting or digging deeper into SharePoint implementations.

SharePoint has now made the vital jump to Microsoft Office interoperability and has been doing it for enough versions to have survived the "will it continue to be supported?" waiting period that many companies use as a measure of whether something is safe to adopt.

If you are not well versed in what SharePoint offers, it is worth your time to pay some attention, as it might well be in your future. The big draw is that SharePoint takes a big chunk of unstructured data off the file servers and puts it into structured SQL Server storage. A lot of really useful extra functionality comes with it, such as content-based search, user maintainable meta-data, versioning and powerful collaboration functionality for things like creating project Web sites. More...

Know your BITS and BYTES!

The amount of data being stored electronically has been growing exponentially. I had never heard of some of the new terms for the larger amounts over Gigabyte such as PB, EB, ZB or YB until recently. How many will you recognize?

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Searching the Internet returns a long list of cheap budget host providers, all offering hosting plans with prices ranging from free to under ten dollars a month.

The two most noticeable features of these plans are the large amounts of storage space and data transfer included in each plan. Consequently, these three items, price, storage and data transfer, then become the criteria the novice buyer uses to evaluate the various hosting plans; and they usually select the plan that provides the most storage and data transfer for the least amount of money.

What the novice buyer fails to realize is that there is another list of criteria that have far more impact on the true value of these hosting plans. These criteria are kept hidden deep inside these companies "Terms of Service (TOS)" and/or "Abuse of Service (AOS)" policies that greatly restrict how the storage and data transfer may be used, and greatly diminishing the value of the services offered at the budget price.

So what might the first-time buyer find if they were to search for and read the TOS or AOS? The two biggest restrictions usually imposed on these budget plans are the amount of computer processor time your site can use and the number of connections that can be made to your web site at the same time. More...

Here is an alternative to disabling UAC - an option some call "Quiet Mode" - and essentially leave UAC enabled but elevates the all administrator accounts to assume it is okay to run the item in question. Note, this will effectively disable the protection that UAC provides, but will not disable IE's Protected Mode.

UAC (User Account Control) is the 'feature' that causes those annoying Windows Vista pop-up warnings that present when you try to perform certain functions or start certain programs that tell you permission is required to perform the function or open the program. These pop-ups only happen when you have UAC  turned ON, which is the recommended setting to 'protect' your computer--or more precisely to stop you from installing anything onto your computer that has the potential to cause harm.

Advanced users can safely turn this feature OFF, as it is assumed that advanced users will know what should and should not be installed on their machines, and they know not to click on links in email from senders that they do not know, etc. So, it would seem simple enough for advanced users to just turn UAC off and not be annoyed by these warning pop-ups--but here comes the catch: There are some third party products that will not work properly with UAC turned off. One of these popular products is Intuit's QuickBooks. (I've written about this here.) More...