eBusiness: Reviews

In sports, successful athletes narrow their focus during crunch time. They may concentrate on footwork, technique or increase their margin for error. Technology providers must do the same thing during tough economic times. You must focus on your customer and nothing but your customer, whether the customer is a consumer, another business, or internal departments needing technology and support.

Day Software may be best known for its CRX (Content Repository Extreme) Java Content Repository. But after testing the general release of its Communiqué 5.1 (CQ5) modular CMS, I think it's time to get reintroduced to the rest of what the company offers. This notable Web content manager will impress business users with drag-and-drop page design, in-context content editing, and a component library that includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. And it will impress IT with a nice complement of enterprise bells and whistles -- from integrated BPM to hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering capabilities.

The Internet is a scary place. Criminal malware lurks on legitimate and illegitimate Web sites alike, looking to steal your money one way or the other. Vendors have been scratching their collective heads attempting to make more consumers safer, more often. One of the results has been a class of anti-malware software that I call sandbox protection products. These items encapsulate Internet browsers (and e-mail programs and sometimes any other program you can run) within a virtual, emulated cocoon designed to keep malware from reaching and modifying the underlying host computer.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

The success of a BPM (business process management) initiative hangs on a good plan. Spend too little time developing a snapshot of your company's inner workings, and the resulting system of misfiring rules and unhandled exceptions will find you mired in costly troubleshooting. But, sure enough, you can also lean too far in the other direction. Spend too much time charting workflow definitions, control points, and exception management, and the delays will start whittling away at your ROI.

If you run a small service business and want a simple way to bill customers for your work, FreshBooks.com could be just what you need. This Web-based invoicing service is easy to set up and use, and relatively inexpensive: It's just US$14 per month if you have fewer than 25 clients. (For a higher fee, you can use it to manage as many as 5000 customers.) If you want a complete accounting package, however, you must supplement FreshBooks with third-party software at extra cost.

Enterprise search vendor Vivisimo is launching this week a version of its application that can more easily replicate indexes across servers, allowing users to complete searches even when one machine crashes, company officials say.

Enterprise search is much like air and water: Users expect it to be available without a second thought. Google and ISYS continue to perfect their enterprise offerings to do just that.

My first tour of Virtual Earth 3D in the Windows Live Search beta left me impressed by its bird's-eye view and by the easy access to information about local businesses (including free phone calls to them); but as you would expect with a beta, the service is still only halfway there.

Choosing an enterprise search product is often fraught with compromise. If you, say, pick something with a simple search interface to appease users, administrators will likely be restricted in indexing databases or customizing results.

Alcatel-owned company Right Vision has released an appliance to manage network and Internet services in a branch office environment.