Gerry Blackwell

Mid-size and large enterprises are rushing to adopt collaboration tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus Notes with Quickr – and with good reason. These programs help distributed teams communicate more effectively, manage projects and shared materials, while saving companies travel costs and reducing travel-related productivity losses. Implementing SharePoint or Notes is probably […]

Click to View The Motorola Q 9h may be the coolest-looking PDA phone ever. For industrial design, I’d give it an A+, putting it a nose ahead of the BlackBerry Curve – which is saying something. In fact, it gives the Curve a run for its money in just about every category. A Windows Mobile […]

Can’t decide between a handheld PDA and an ultralight notebook PC? Neither can some of the manufacturers aboard Intel Corp.’s Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) bandwagon: Entries range from two-handed handhelds like the Samsung Q1 Ultra reviewedhere last summer to itsy-bitsy laptops like Sony’s 4.5-inch-screened Vaio UX. About the only thing they have in common is Windows. […]

Mac OS X version 10.5 or Leopard, the latest upgrade to Apple’s Macintosh operating system, created quite a stir when it was released in October. Pictures of excited Mac-heads lining up at mall outlets to buy the new release (for $130) appeared in newspapers and on TV. For a platform that traditionally has accounted for […]

If you suggested a few years ago that it would be a good idea to network an office using only wireless technology, IT professionals would have laughed in your face. Wireless was unreliable, insecure, unmanageable, couldn’t easily provide the capacity or bandwidth needed–a bad idea all round. Besides, why would you want to? Today, the […]

The temptation to goof off or fudge time sheets and gas mileage is apparently irresistible, at least to some field workers. And even the best employees often end up estimating their hours long after the fact, introducing costly errors.  At R&J Construction Inc., a renovation firm in Danville, Calif., keeping track of where workers were […]

Imagine trying to drive a car without dashboard displays. You’d never know how fast you were going, when you were running out of gas or if the car was overheating. You’d never chance it with a vehicle, so why take a similar risk with your business? Dashboards for customer relationship management (CRM) programs and other […]

As with Word 2007 and Excel 2007, PowerPoint uses the new Office user interface, which the company is now calling the Microsoft Office Fluentinterface. It replaces menu and tool bars and vertical text menus with a “ribbon” and tabbed panels that drop down and stretch across the screen, graphically depicting groups of functions. In the […]

Excel 2007, the second application in our ongoing series reviewing the major components in Microsoft’s new Office 2007 suite, is in some ways, a radical re-making of the office productivity application used by millions around the world. As with Word 2007, which we reviewed last month, Excel features the new “Ribbon” Office user interface, which […]

One of the many cool things about IP-based soft phone technologies like Skype is that they make it easy to record phone calls to an MP3 or WAV file on your computer. It’s a useful capability. How many times have you forgotten exactly what was said in an important phone conversation? If you do interviews […]