On the Net

with Chris Goh

SAP goes open source

For many businesses the name SAP is synonymous with big expensive information systems that often blow out over budget. However SAP has taken a major turn around in the last couple of years and has dramatically changed its strategy, including going open source with the purchase of My SQL this year. The once proprietary system is going the way of IBM. One of the great products that has taken small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) by storm is SAP Business One, which for around $22,000 gets you one of the most comprehensive financial systems including fixed asset management. With its open source policy there is now a growing list of vendors creating applications that easily attach to Business One. If MYOB and Quicken are reaching their limits for you or you want more business knowledge and a better view of your finances this package is excellent.

Moving now to your network, the two biggest concerns of SMEs are security and mobility, which go hand in hand. The greater mobility in how you access your data and information, the more you have to think about security. For those businesses that have one shop and a sales team of one or two, looking at anything more than a phone or pocket PC that synchronises with your mail system is more than adequate. However, if you really want to proactively service your customers, you have to think one step ahead with a CMS (Contact Management System). Microsoft Outlook does to a reasonable job and if you have staff with the skills you can get what they call an MS Office SDK and really customise it to make it a reasonably effective CMS. However, most SMEs won't invest in something so convoluted. The product ACT! has become the defacto CMS for many SMEs and though I have personal issues about its database design, it is one of the best value for money out of the box CMS's you can get at the moment. However, it can be an IT manager's nightmare to integrate as ACT! Premium has its own version of MS SQL. Next week we tackle IT business strategies.

Hotnews

Intel gave wireless access its legs when it introduced the Centrino Chip in all new laptops. Since August last year Intel has promised that it would develop the Rosedale, which would be a chip that supported WiMax, and now the first commercial release of that chip, the Intel PRO/Wireless 5116, is being sold. This announcement coincided with service providers around the world committing to WiMax products based on this new chip and will mark a key turning point in the promised WiMax saga, which has been sitting on the edge of community acceptance for the last 5 years.

Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia tallies up to $3.4 billion US and is Adobe's big jump into multimedia. The marrying of the two organisations' culture will be one of the more interesting tasks, but what is hoped by most speculators is that there will be a more seamless integration between Adobe products like Photoshop and Acrobat with Flash and Cold Fusion.

Hotsites

www.alexa.com

Amazon has come up with this beaut search engine and has an excellent interface and great heuristics that spit out competent results. Try it out.

www.archive.org/web/web.php

For those interested in web page history this is an excellent and fun way to look back in time on how websites used to look. Plug in The Echo and look at the first online edition of The Echo. The Way Back machine archives the world's website and besides some fun, it's a great online records management system.

www.kartoo.com

Looking for a search engine with a difference, Kartoo is a Flash Search engine, which kind of works but is unique in its delivery of results. It has a large and comprehensive database and works reasonably quickly.