May | 2009 | digitalflood.com

It seems after a few months (read- year) of bad news from the stock market we’re finally starting to see a small turn around including continued gradual movements northward in both trading volume and closing average prices. Nevertheless, the cost cutting trend surges on as corporations big and small discover the benefits of running lean.

Maybe it’s the years of excess and complacency finally wearing itself away, but across the US you can see corporations publishing financial filings with key notes of “cost reduction” and “expense consolidation” with pride. Think what you will, but this trend seems here to stay for the time being. The truth is there are some really great (and not so amazing) ways to reduce reoccurring expenses. Over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be visiting ways you can think about cutting cost without cutting service because truly running efficient should not result at the cost of customer experience or create reduction of service offerings.

We’ll be looking into ideas small and large that can be implemented easily throughout an organization of any size. These ideas can be implemented by any member of a staff. We’ll focus on various portions of the business including operations, finance, buildings/facilities, and marketing. My hope is that with these ideas you’ll spur initiatives of your own and let us know how you take these strategies to the next level.

The first area we’ll focus on is one that is near and dear to my heart– free IT desktop programs that cut costs day one while offering the same functionality of user applications costing hundreds more. Think of it this way– for each license you don’t purchase you’re saving cash for other initiatives such as improving the infrastructure and operation support elements that most support the applications. In short, it’s money well saved.

Open Office 3 – Developed by Sun Microsystems, Open Office is an open source free alternative to Microsoft’s Office XP Suite. It comes with a word processor, a spread sheet application, a math program, a presentation program, a drawing program, and a database program. The one thing Open Office misses is a true diagram program (i.e. Visio), but otherwise for your standard staff member the goods are all there including spell checking, multi-platform support, ability to write out to many formats (including native PDF output), and interoperability with MS Office. I use the program in my home office as do many of my colleagues. It’s great for students and professionals alike whether you’re home or at work.
GanttProject – Microsoft Project is a great tool, but most Project Managers do not touch the true potential of what the program can do. For those of you who are rudimentary project planners or you’re not looking for true server side multi-user input (i.e. one person owns the update of the project plan) then GanttProject will work great for your team. Meant for the Project Manager dealing with projects of all sizes; GanttProject will help you plan, execute, and track a project through its life cycle. It too offers the ability to cross interface with MS applications including Project.
FoxIt PDF Reader – I know Adobe PDF Reader is free, but my problem with their program is two fold. First, it’s notoriously slow. Second, it is the constant victim of exploits. For this reason, I’m a huge fan of Foxit’s PDF Reader. It’s fast, small, and not as targeted as its mainstream cousin.
AVG Free 8.5 – Technically you cannot use Grisoft’s AVG Free Anti-virus for business deployments, but if you need a free, effective, and reliable anti-virus/anti-spyware application for your home PC (*ahem* home *cough* PC… *wink*) this is the one. AVG is robust and secure as one would expect from Germany’s number one malware protection company. Updates are timely (usually every day) and offer protection through “smart” ID methods that can even catch a virus the program does not have a definition for yet. AVG is the number one tool I install on a PC infected with a virus… usually one that already is running Symantec or McAfee, but was exploited any how.
Firefox – Firefox is a free web browser that is secure, expandable, and fast. The multi-tab support has been copied by other web browsers, but no one can match the speed, stability, and over all configurable limits of Firefox.
Thunderbird – When armed with the Lightning extension, Thunderbird replaces Outlook XP with ease. This email application includes mutli-account support, junk mail filtering (that works), calendar/reminder/task support, and a flexible contact address book.
LogMeIn Himachi – Another program that is for “personal” use, Himachi is a VPN that needs zero configuration aside from being installed on the computers you wish to link. Himachi will change the way you work and liberate your ability to work from the cloud.
Pidgin – Pidgin is an IM application that works with all the popular IM networks including Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. The ability to chat with co-workers in real time is both under estimated and under utilized. It will change the way you communicate internally and the speed which you do so.
Google Earth – Need directions to a client’s business? Need to see where you can stay while on a business trip? Want to find a place to eat while out walking the sales beat? Google Earth is not only a mapping utility, but it can be used for finding businesses in an area or measure the distance between two nodes. Once you start playing with cartography (the art of mapping) you too will be hooked and it will change the way you literally look at the world.

Today we focused on common desktop applications. In the future we’ll be looking at more applications that are both free and useful for various tasks. This should, however, get you out the door for the time being and start making you think about what other “free” software alternatives exist. Stay tuned for more blogs on free software that is useful and offers real cost savings for every day tasks.

I figured I’d catch up for this week (3/27-4/3/09) on a few items that you may or may not have been following:

Time Magazine published its Top 100 Influential People this week. Particularly interesting is the “Builders & Innovators” category being lead off by the Twitter Guys (Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams) with commentary by Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher, whose main claim to fame is some bad movies and marrying Demi Moore, recently reached a milestone on Twitter by beating CNN.com to one million followers. For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is, it’s a micro-blogging site similar to WordPress or Blogger. You’re limited to 140 characters and thus brevity is somewhat required. The idea is that you can in short updates let people who subscribe to your Twitter feed know what your up to and what’s on your mind. I personally don’t get the attraction around Twitter. My guess is that if you either have enough spare time while sitting around waiting to update your micro-blog via your cell or if you’re that bored that you want to see what other people are doing it may have some attraction. I’m otherwise at a complete loss as to why you’d even bother using it. I’m sure that is a certain sign that I’m too old and starting not to get it… or maybe I just don’t care what Kutcher is eating today– probably a little of both. I can tell you this much, it is becoming a hacker’s dream to crack into (see the latest break in here) and put words in some rather famous people’s virtual mouths.
“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” came out this weekend to much fan fair. Mostly because experts were weighing in onhow a leaked unfinished version of the film would effect viewership. The anti-piracy set jumped right into the fray saying that early version could deter viewers from going to the cinema even if they knew the final special effects and production work was not done in the pirated version. I think the real fear is if the plot itself stunk then why would anybody bother to show up even if the special effects were unbelievable? That of course was not the case in this particular release, but the MPAA and other anti-piracy groups were really trying to make a stand. Particularly it was important to further push the envelope in light of the $3.6 Million victory over Pirate Bay this week. What better timing could there be to let would be downloaders know that stealing would not be tolerated? Well, how about getting RapidShare to hand over its list of uploaders on top of it all? All-in-all it was a bad week to be a virtual pirate.
Bandwidth caps took a major step back this week. First there was Time Warner Cable being forced to repeal its 40GB/month cap. Subscribers swamped TWC with complaints and for the time being the caps are off. TWC does plan to move ahead with reinstating caps after a “customer education program” is initiated to explain to subscribers why caps are important. On the other side of the spectrum is Cablevision who announced its new 101/15 Mb/s “ultra” tier of service. Included is a promise not to cap. The underlying argument is that as subscribers continue to migrate their multimedia viewing habits away from traditional medium and instead flock to the Internet for access to movies, TV, radio, and news that the cable divisions of providers will lose revenue. The easy way to make up loss for that is to charge for throughput on top of the traditional speed tiers. With record profits being cited by the big cable providers I’m not sure this is the case though. The sad truth is the big three (Comcast, TWC, and Cablevision) all own the majority of cable TV content. So even if they loose the subscriber on the cable side they will still have the eye balls on the stream. Ad revenue is ad revenue so in the end, except for small providers, I cannot personally see how they’re losing out. It seems like double dipping to me and just another angle for the big guys to milk every last dime from the subscriber.
Microsoft made several big splashes this week that were notable. The first is the release of Internet Explorer 8 as a mandatory critical update. The second is Windows 7 hitting the MSDN as a release class (RC), which means it’s probably about six months or less away from final release. A little birdie cites a mid-October 2009 release (just in time for the holidays might I add) according to a leaked company email. The third and final was Office 2007 SP2 finally being released. The neat part of this is that the popular ODP open document format is now supported, as is export to PDF. That particularly is important as the open source competitor to Office (OpenOffice) supports those right out of the box today with much acclaim and it means that Microsoft is finally admitting this combo is a serious threat to their pay product. A minor side note announcement was that Windows 7 will support emulated Windows XP if you happen to have a legal extra copy of that OS lying around. This should address issues that Microsoft with slow adoption of both Vista and Server 2008. Even if it means that their Virtual PC may go the way of the dinosaur in lieu of built in emulation support, but let’s face facts– the 30%+ plus of revenue loss Microsoft saw year over year is enough to convince the top dogs its time to do just that. Lest it face mass migration to Linux or (*gasp*) Apple.