Newsletters made easy

January 2006 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Electronic newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your customers, prospects and referrals. But there's a technology component that you need to master if you don’t have ready access to an IT department. Once you have the software and have set up the newsletter, it’s easy to change the content every month. Be careful, though: the newsletter should be sent only to those who want it. Otherwise you will be blacklisted by the spam fighters. You need to get permission and make it easy to opt out.

There are many ways to prepare and distribute a newsletter. Here, I will share with you some tricks of the trade. First, maintain a database of contacts in a customer relationship or contact management system. I use ACT! Version 8, which is fine but will require more computing power than previous versions. (I actually needed to upgrade my computer to accommodate Version 8.) CRM or contact management systems allow you not only to store contact information in the database, but also to manage it. You could use something more rudimentary but you will lose out on all the other advantages associated with contact or CRM systems.

Second, you have to develop content. For my monthly newsletter, I use articles I have either written or read. During the month, I save articles about technology, business processes and risk management that I think would be interesting to my contacts.

Third, you need to publish the newsletter. Many companies use Adobe Acrobat to generate a pdf file that can be read by their clients. Recipients of the newsletter just need Adobe Reader, which can be easily downloaded at no charge. Other companies publish their newsletters on the Internet using tools such as Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver. In April 2006, I tried something new — a blog (short for weblog). One big advantage is that a blog is interactive: your readers can post comments. Another advantage: it could attract new prospects to your website. I use blogger.com, which was acquired by Google in 2003. It’s easy to update the blog. The only hard part is incorporating it with the rest of your website to give it the same look and feel. You will most likely need a firm that specializes in developing websites to accomplish this.

Last, you need to distribute the newsletter. There are plenty of alternatives. Your objective should be to personalize it and send it out in bulk (hundreds or thousands at a time). That eliminates Outlook. Many customer relationship management tools include marketing automation, which will allow you to do an e-mail blast. As ACT! does not include marketing automation, I chose GroupMail from Infacta, which works really well for me. I import contacts from ACT! and blast them out with GroupMail. With GroupMail, you can quickly and easily import contacts, send professional messages that are personalized for each of your recipients, and let it run while you are doing something else on your computer. There is a free version of GroupMail that allows you to send to a maximum of 100 users at a time.

My contacts are busy so I try to make it easy for them to scan for anything that might be interesting. I make the e-mail very brief, including only the headings for the articles. Readers can then click to access my blog for the details. The blog contains comments about the article and often my view or opinion. This gives some value added beyond the article itself. Readers can click again to see the whole article.

Free ERP

December 22, 2006 from E-Business News – “Sourceforge.net is a repository of free open source software, and a lot of it applies to e-business. We've compiled this list of free enterprise resource planning (ERP) products. One of them might be appropriate for your small business. Click on the product name to get more information and download links straight from Sourceforge.

Compiere: "Smart ERP+CRM solution for Small-Medium Enterprises in the global market covering all areas from order and customer/supplier management, supply chain to accounting. For $5-500M revenue companies looking for "brick and click" first tier functionality..."

180 View – There are 17 more “free” ERP systems discussed in the article. We especially liked the name of one of the systems called WyattERP. On a more serious note, the question is whether it makes sense to implement one of these systems. We believe that ERP systems are mission critical to any business and you don’t want to take any chances with relatively unknown developers or systems that may require a lot of fine-tuning to work for you. You may find that the cost of services (internal and external) makes these “free” systems more costly than the systems you can purchase/license or rent (via an Application Service Provider). However, we admit that we don’t have any personal experience with these systems, and that our fears may be exaggerated. If anyone has experience with one of these systems, we would love to hear from you. Please post a comment. Thanks

The Power of Process

December 18, 2006 from Business IT Alignment News and Analysis – “As of late, the IT industry has been peddling various solutions to understand, monitor or optimize that nebulous beast called “process.” So what is a process and why should every CIO be focused first and foremost on business process?

Most of us have seen the now overused IPO diagram: the three boxes arranged in a line, and connected by arrows like the boxcars in a train. The first box contains “Inputs,” which move into the next box titled “Process,” which subsequently flows into the final box, titled “Outputs.”

This diagram is a model of simplicity, yet exposes a flaw in current thinking. Two thirds of the diagram is concerned with inputs and outputs, placing priority on “stuff” rather than how we actually change one form of “stuff” to another. While a simplification that fits neatly into the world of flowcharts, in the real world we often focus too narrowly on moving and changing “stuff” versus why we are changing inputs to outputs, and determining how to efficiently and portably change that “stuff.”

Process is the “why” to any business problem. IT has embraced process more than most other business units, at least on a superficial level. We are familiar with how to diagram a process, and nearly all of the project methodologies provide a provision for capturing, diagramming and understanding the “as-is” process, or the current state of affairs, before we seek to intervene and bring about a new state of affairs.

We also have myriad tools at our disposal for improving a process, either by increasing its speed, efficiency, accuracy or repeatability, in the form of powerful technologies from ERP systems to entire process management toolkits and software.

What we often lack however, is the ability to separate content, the inputs and outputs, from the process itself, which has hampered the ability of IT to implement successful projects that deliver the business benefit they initially sought.

IT has been built around content, both in terms of hiring and developing its staff, and in how it approaches IT projects in cooperation with a business unit. We hire and evaluate people that are experts in a particular technology, which is just another content area. We then approach a particular business problem as an issue of content. Why are our competitors more efficient? It must be due to their ERP system. Why did a new entrant to a market outfox us? They must have better decision support systems, etc.

We see a business problem as one of bolting new technology onto existing processes, wrongly assuming that by changing the content of the process, the process will change as well. This can only be expected when we have built organizations around experts in a particular area of technical content, and business experts familiar with the rules and nuances (more content) of a process, experts in the "how" rather than the "why”…

180 View – IT does typically suggest new technology as the solution unless they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It would be great if IT also considered business process improvement as a way to enhance efficiency or effectiveness. But let’s not forget about human resources (how do organizations structures, job definition, and skills impact the process?), policies and rules (such as the approval process), and facilities (workplace design, infrastructure, computers…).

Justice, SEC actions backpedal a bit on post-scandal rules

December 18, 2006 from Associated Press – “They were two early Christmas gifts for corporate America -- with potentially far-reaching effects for investors and the financial landscape. At the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, separate actions last week both had the effect of easing landmark rules laid down in response to the 2002 crisis of corporate malfeasance.

Culminating an intense months long lobbying campaign by an array of companies, the five SEC commissioners voted at a public meeting Wednesday to propose a plan giving corporate managers more flexibility in assessing the strength of internal financial controls. It would especially benefit smaller companies.

The sweeping anti-fraud law known as Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in 2002 amid the wave of scandals that engulfed Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other big corporations. The law contains a key section requiring public companies to assess the strength of their internal safeguards to ensure that their financial statements are accurate. Companies have complained to the SEC that those rules are overly burdensome and costly, especially for smaller businesses…

Some business-friendly Democrats who are assuming power positions in January have expressed support for Sarbanes-Oxley relief for companies -- and their preference for the SEC to wield its regulatory scalpel as opposed to Congress' heavier hand of legislation.

The SEC move was a "reasonable approach" in light of the disproportionate burden of the financial-control rules on small companies, said James Cox, a professor at Duke University who also is a securities-law specialist.

Still, he said, with more leeway under the SEC plan -- allowing, for example, less stringent testing of internal controls for some companies, "Those (financial) numbers are going to be less trustworthy than they would be otherwise. ... Investor protection's going to suffer."

SEC officials insisted that would not happen. Agency Chairman Christopher Cox called the new plan "making Sarbanes-Oxley work for investors at the right price"…

180 View – We thought that the article was vague so we went to the source at http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2006/33-8762.pdf released by the SEC on December 20, 2006. We have highlighted what we believe are the key points.

“The proposed guidance is organized around two broad principles. The first principle is that management should evaluate the design of the controls that it has implemented to determine whether they adequately address the risk that a material misstatement in the financial statements would not be prevented or detected in a timely manner. The guidance describes a top-down, risk-based approach to this principle, including the role of entity-level controls in assessing financial reporting risks and the adequacy of controls. The proposed guidance promotes efficiency by allowing management to focus on those controls that are needed to adequately address the risk of a material misstatement in its financial statements. There is no requirement in our guidance to identify every control in a process or document the business processes impacting ICFR. Rather, under the approach described herein, management focuses its evaluation process and the documentation supporting the assessment on those controls that it believes adequately address the risk of a material misstatement in the financial statements. For example, if management determines that the risks for a particular financial reporting element are adequately addressed by an entity-level control, no further evaluation of other controls is required.

The second principle is that management’s evaluation of evidence about the operation of its controls should be based on its assessment of risk. The proposed guidance provides an approach for making risk-based judgments about the evidence needed for the evaluation. This allows management to align the nature and extent of its evaluation procedures with those areas of financial reporting that pose the greatest risks to reliable financial reporting (i.e., whether the financial statements are materially accurate). As a result, management may be able to use more efficient approaches to gathering evidence, such as self-assessments, in low-risk areas and perform more extensive testing in high-risk areas.

By following these two principles, we believe companies of all sizes and complexities will be able to implement our rules effectively and efficiently. As smaller public companies generally have less complex internal control systems than larger public companies, this top-down, risk-based approach should enable smaller public companies in particular to scale and tailor their evaluation methods and procedures to fit their own facts and circumstances. We encourage smaller public companies to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of this approach to conduct an efficient evaluation of internal control over financial reporting. Further, we believe the proposed guidance will assist companies of all sizes in completing the annual evaluation of ICFR in an effective and efficient manner by addressing a number of the common areas of concern that have been identified over the past two years.”

Did Sarbox Make Companies Cleaner?

December 13, 2006 from CFO.com – “On the eve of a highly anticipated Securities and Exchange Commission meeting that could bring about looser regulations for small businesses that have yet to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a new study credits the 2002 law with cleaning up larger companies' internal controls and reducing the number of errors in financial statements.

In fact, the Glass Lewis & Co. report — released on Tuesday — says the number of restatements by larger companies fell 26 percent during the first nine months of 2006. The report's authors attribute this decline to the most contentious provision of Sarbox, Section 404, which requires management to attest that their company has adequate internal controls.

180 View – That’s good news. But the question still remains whether the benefit exceeded the cost.

How Secure Is Your Wi-Fi Connection?

January 4, 2006 from New York Times – “Long-time readers know that I’m not exactly one of the privacy paranoid. I’ve accepted that we all live in thousands of databases. The state of New York knows where and when I drive, thanks to my E-ZPass (electronic toll-booth badge). Stop & Shop knows what I eat, thanks to my grocery discount card. Blockbuster knows what kinds of movies I watch. Verizon knows whom I call, MasterCard knows what I buy–it’s just hopeless.

Frankly, I consider the details of my life so boring to other people that I really couldn’t care less. I’ve got nothing to hide, so why not accept it?That attitude spilled over to a “From the Desk of David Pogue” e-column I wrote in 2004, in which I attempted to throw water on scare-tactic computer-magazine articles that said, in effect: “Ooooh! If you use your Wi-Fi laptop at public Internet hot spots, the bad guys will see everything you’re doing and rifle through your files!”I’m back again today to throw that water right back into my own face.

On this topic, my eyes have been opened.It came about like this: I recently filmed six episodes of a new TV series (”It’s All Geek to Me,” which airs in February on The Science Channel, Discovery HD and Discovery Europe). In one of them, I wanted to get to the bottom of this Wi-Fi snooping business. I wanted to see exactly what is, and is not, possible for the bad guys to intercept when you’re sitting there in Starbucks or the hotel lobby.I put a note up on my blog, seeking a guest who could appear on the show and show me the hacky ropes. I found John Baer, a technical consultant who seemed just right for the part.

We met (John, the camera crew and I) in a Manhattan Wi-Fi coffee shop. Turns out there was absolutely nothing to it. John sat a few feet away with his PowerBook; I fired up my Fujitsu laptop and began doing some e-mail and Web surfing. That’s all it took. He turned his laptop around to reveal all of this:

• Every copy of every e-mail message I sent *and* received.
• A list of the Web sites I visited.
• Even, incredibly, the graphics that had appeared on the Web sites I had visited.

None of this took any particular effort, hacker skill or fancy software. Anyone could do it. You could do it. All John needed was a “packet sniffing” program; such software is free and widely available. (He used a Mac program called Eavesdrop.) It sniffs the airwaves and displays whatever data it finds being transmitted in the public hot spot. Now, the fact that it’s so easy to intercept your Internet signals in a public hot spot doesn’t mean that somebody is *doing* it. In fact, of course, most of the time, nobody is. Nonetheless, John’s little demonstration made clear that somebody *could* intercept your transmissions extremely easily.

So are you supposed to crawl into a hole, turn off your Wi-Fi, and go back to dial-up?Not exactly. You can take steps to protect yourself:

• If you see the little padlock in the corner of your Web-browser window (or if the Web address begins with “https://” instead of “http://”), you’re connected to a secure Web site. Your transmissions are encrypted in both directions, so you have little to fear from casual packet sniffers. Banking and brokerage sites, for example, are protected in this way.
• You can sign up for encrypted e-mail services or programs, too, if avoiding e-mail eavesdropping is that important to you.
• You can connect to your company over a VPN (virtual private networking) connection, which encrypts *all* data to and from your laptop. This is something a network geek would have to set up for you.
• Otherwise, you can just conduct your online transactions with the awareness that a stranger could be “overhearing” them. Wait to visit Web sites, or to send e-mail messages, of a delicate nature until you’re on a wired connection or a private wireless one.

Truth be known, since my eyes were opened, my Wi-Fi habits haven’t actually changed much. I still open the laptop in the hotel lobby, exchange e-mail with readers, editors and friends, and check a few news sites or blogs. None of it would really mean anything to an evil eavesdropper nearby. But at least I’m aware that I *could* be observed. And isn’t it always better to know than not to?

180 View – We have replicated the article in its entirety. We think that many people share the concern expressed in the article and this article is short, well-written and informative. The author, David Pogue, “writes a technology column that has appeared each Thursday in The Times since 2000. Each week, he also writes the Times e-mail column "From the Desk of David Pogue," creates a short, funny Web video for NYTimes.com, and posts entries to his Times blog. In his other life, David is an Emmy-winning correspondent for CBS News, a frequent contributor to NPR's "Morning Edition," creator of the Missing Manual series of computer books, and father of three.”

IT Security Survey

January 5, 2007 from Canadian Technology News – “More than 1,600 North American IT managers (including over 1,000 Americans and 550 Canadians) were asked to rate the importance of security against seven different security threats, including security policy user compliance, internal user malfeasance, generic external threats (like viruses), random attacks (like password crackers), targeted external attacks, and protection of the physical server room or data centre.

The results, which were calibrated from the respondents' ranking of certain kinds of threats as “very” or “extremely” important, showed that Americans' and Canadians' attitudes toward IT security seem virtually identical, never straying farther than a few percentage points' difference.

The No. 1 concern was generic external threats, with more than 70 per cent of both Canadian and American IT managers calling it “very” or “extremely” important. This didn't surprise Brian Bourne, president of security consulting firm CMS Consulting and a member of the steering committee of the Toronto Area Security Klatch, an IT security user group. “Everyone gets spam and viruses, and it's a very visible problem. Its impact on security is easy to understand. But what most people don't understand is that when you do security really well, nothing happens. It's hard to understand the value of nothing happening,” he said.

Bourne has found that companies tend to get worked up over spam and viruses because it has an easily identifiable impact on productivity. Said Bourne: “When it comes to a leakage of information, which could also obviously have an effect on productivity, they really don't seem to worry that much.”

They're not blind to the data-leakage problem -- the second-most feared security threat is random attacks, which 60 per cent of Canadian IT managers and 56 per cent of American IT managers rated as “very” or “extremely” important in the battle against IT breaches (the fear of targeted attacks came in second-to-last, with half of the American respondents, and just over half of the Canadians, saying it was “very” or “extremely” important). Bourne said that this concern isn't even close to the fever pitch it should be hitting, in spite of the threat's easy understandability: “password cracking is happening on a mass basis.” He estimated that issues like server vulnerability are resulting in even small businesses getting five to 20 attacks daily, while larger companies get many more.

180 View – We think that the survey asked the wrong people. The CEO and CFO will be a lot more concerned.

Is XML Past Its Prime?

December 20, 2006 from Enterprise Open Source Magazine – “Is XML overrated? This is a question not asked lightly. It is a heavy and bloated question, much like XML itself. XML has been around since 1997. It is document based and it is extremely verbose. It requires a higher payload across the network and cannot be natively used once it arrives. The XML payload must be consumed in some fashion. None of these activities attribute to the speed of an application…

XML still thrives on the strength of one key factor: its market penetration. As clunky and obtrusive as it may be, XML is still a highly-used standard for data interchange between disparate systems. Most application servers can accept XML and apply some layer of processing to the XML. EDI is a key driver to not only XML's perpetuation, but its very existence.

JSON ("JavaScript Object Notation") is a format that more and more languages are "learning" to consume. It is, as the name implies, a standard object notation. Logic can be created to consume and serialize this notation into language-specific native datatypes. The only limitation to this would be language-specific object instances which cannot be serialized and de-serialized. If more systems were to use JSON for data interchange, in lieu of XML, the payload would decrease and application performance would increase because the parsing of an XML document still outweighs the de-serialization of a JSON string.

Where does this leave the first question? Is XML overrated? There are compelling arguments on both sides of the aisle, but the answer lies in individual preference. If a developer is more comfortable with XML, it will be used. If they are more comfortable with an alternative data interchange format, that format of preference will be used.

Either way, XML will continue to exist; but its days may, indeed, be numbered.”

180 View – For some of our readers, this article will be too technical and they may be wondering why we included it. The reason is that XML is touted by many people as a panacea to solving integration issues and as the tool that will enable B2B eCommerce to become the way to exchange transactions between organizations. We too could be accused of hyping XML. This article shows the warts of XML, which we think are not fatal. By the way, XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language.

BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth

November 4, 2006 from Livewire - “A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice. For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies…

180 View – If you haven’t heard of BitTorrent, ask your kids, nieces, nephews… And there are other file sharing programs sucking up bandwidth. One reason this is important can be read in Deloitte & Touche's Technology Predictions for 2007. Their #2 prediction is “Internet Capacity Woes: Reaching the limits of cyberspace - The unrelenting growth in Internet traffic in 2007 may overwhelm the Internet's backbone; the terabit-cable pipes connecting continents will reach capacity and ISPs will not be prepared to pay for extra bandwidth because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs. The threat to available capacity will be driven by the number of Internet users continuing to grow, and the exponential increase in the transmission of video files.”

Hakia: A New Google?

January 3, 2007 from E-Business News – Google entrenched itself deeper in our lives in 2006, but the success of the world's most popular search engine is attracting early-stage competitors in the New Year. One of these competitors is Hakia, whose search engine I tested out recently.

The Hakia premise, summed up in a company blog entry by software developer Chris Gates, is that "We are just now entering the phase of search with engines that understand 'what you mean' not just what or how you say it." Gates is referring to search engines with semantic (context) over and above syntactic (contextless keywords) capabilities.

For example, Gates suggests typing in "what drug treats headache" into another search engine. I ran the search on Google and got the following hits:

• Lower Cervical Bupivacaine Injection Treats Headache in the ED
• IngentaConnect Dexamethasone/amitriptyline treats drug-induced ...

As you can see, it wasn't a helpful set of results. The tacit question behind my query (what can I take for my headache?) went completely unanswered, as Google relied on the syntactic recurrence of keywords rather than deducing my semantic meaning. As a result, I didn't get a single relevant hit.

I repeated the search on Hakia and, right at the top of the page, Hakia told me: "The following should help: By reducing the amount of prostaglandin available for synthesis, paracetamol helps relieve headache pain by reducing the dilation of the blood vessels that cause the pain." There was a link to a specific page about headache pain, as well as to a Hakia gallery of prescription drugs.

The hits that followed this helpful top-line explanation were much more relevant to the issue of headache pain than Google's hits. Hakia's hits told me more about aspirin, nurofen, barbiturates, and even techniques like "sleep, darkness, or a quiet room…"

180 View – Even though 180 Systems does not show up on top of Hakia for keyword searches such as “ERP comparison”, we can see that it does offer a good alternative to Google if you’re getting nowhere in your Google search.