The August 22, 2010 Akron Beacon Journal featured an article on Harry Stark, Wadsworth’s new economic-development coordinator and assistant public-service director.

Click here for more information on SaberLogic’s web development services and custom programming services.

Corporate backups are one of the IT administrative areas that we really find to be difficult to manage. The backup management software is often “buggy,” especially with different hardware and operating system configurations.  Most basic tape backup systems required that someone at each customer location physically switch tapes daily and carry the backup tapes off-site each night.  The often gets forgotten about and overlooked, especially with employee turnover.  We also found that users were failing to copy critical data to corporate servers.  We consistently found CFOs with critical data stored on their PC desktop and nowhere else.  So, after some thorough research and testing, we selected Mozy as a simple solution to allow you to easily perform backups without having to remember to do anything.

So…how does it work?  Mozy’s backup solution provides automated remote backup services right over the Internet.  The Mozy software client is loaded onto each system you want data backed up and then the software is configured to back up certain file types and directories.  The backups can be set up to run automatically when the system is not in use or can set to run on a defined schedule.   You can also set the client to back-up certain file types, no matter what directory they are in.

Another great feature is the speed at which the backup transfer will occur.  It can be set to be throttled up or down to reduce the performance impact on your system and the overall network.  Alerts are sent to us whenever backups fail or when size quotas are reached.  Mozy uses strict security policies, 448-bit Blowfish encryption, and world-class SAS70 certified data centers to protect corporate data.

The software can be set-up to run on any Windows or Mac operating system.

Click here for more information on our new remote back-up services, or please contact us!  Don’t let another day go by without back-ups of your data!

“The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively. So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we encourage you to update your browsers as soon as possible.”  SOURCE

They also argue that they will phase out supporting browsers that are not even being supported anymore by their own manufacturers.  Overall this type of stance is good news for our website clients.  It adds considerable time and cost to the development of a website to get new website technology to run, look and work well on very outdated browsers…especially those that were never designed to run these types of websites.
What are IE6 users encouraged to do?   The following are some modern browsers that SaberLogic recommends upgrading to:

• Internet Explorer 8
• Firefox 3.5
• Chrome 4.0
• Safari 3.0

If you would like more information on SaberLogic’s website development services, please visit our website or contact us at sales@saberlogic.com or at (330) 335-6442.

I believe we need to look at the direction of what I will call “casual” computing.  For most people this involves writing and checking e-mail, spending time on their choice of social media sites, watching videos, playing music and browsing the internet.  There are a large number of people for whom these daily tasks encompass the vast majority of their computing needs.  It is these people that Apple is targeting. These are all areas that play directly into the strength of the iPad.  The interface is simple and elegant.  The operating system is stable and goes almost unnoticed.  The iTunes and App Store make it easy to buy music, movies or install over 140,000 different applications with the touch of a button.

Netbooks today still run using a typical Windows or Linux operating system.  This means that the same issues that you encounter on your typical full desktop or laptop system are going to plague these netbooks too.  An iPad will be a simple, no-fuss way to perform 95% of the day-to-day things that a casual computing user would need.

Obviously there will be specific needs that the iPad will not address.  Most Mac users will still require the processing power and applications they require to do high end work.  Most business users will still require full systems to run specialty applications.  (Although, I believe that an interesting market will open up for very specific iPad business applications that can take advantage of the iPad’s mobility and touch screen.)  But for people that want a system for fundamental computing, the iPad offers a compelling alternative to a typical laptop or netbook.

A summary of some interesting articles this week regarding the iPad:

• The Apple Blog:  iPad Buying Guide
• TUAW – What’s missing from the iPad
• TUAW – iPad vs. Kindle:  Which way to go?
• Apple Insider – A closer look at Apple’s iPad bundled applications
• Macworld – Apple details first iPad accessories

[EDIT 2010.02.01]

A great summary of all of the new iPad features on the iPhone Blog.   Apple iPad and iPhone 3.2 Preview

To complete the timeline, they are asking industry experts to share their ideas. They’d like to fill in the gaps and add another 15+ dates/events to the timeline. If you have any ideas or suggestions, email Houston Neal (houston@softwareadvice.com).

Being a developer takes a serious toll on your computer. On top of all of the tools I need to have installed in order to perform my job (MS Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Crystal Reports, etc), I am constantly installing and removing programs for testing, loading and unloading giant customer databases, and generally abusing the operating system. The result is a computer that grows painfully slow after a few months of usage. Traditionally I resolve this by reformatting once a year which ends up killing at least a day of my time to get everything back in place as I need it. However, this year I decided to go a different route and use one of those system optimization utilities. I’ve always been very skeptical of these utilities for some reason, mainly because I’d only use the free versions and they never seemed to help all that much. This time I decided to dish out some money for a promising all-in-one utility by Auslogics called BoostSpeed 4 and I have been very impressed. For $30, this utility gives you an amazing collection of tools to get the most out of your PC – here are a few of the highlights:

• A disk defragmenter that runs circles around the one built into Windows. Not only is it faster, but it also is smart enough to move your data to the start of your hard disk for faster access and it defragments the MFT.
• A registry cleaner to fix registry errors.
• A registry defrag utility.
• An Internet Optimizer that collects information about your network connection and makes changes to not only your TCP/IP settings, but also settings for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
• A RAM defragmenter that can be run easily from the system tray.
• A disk cleanup utility that runs much faster than the one built into Windows.
• A duplicate file finder.
• Various utilities to remove Internet history and shred files beyond recovery.
• A “Tweak Manager” that guides you through optimizing not only Windows settings (many of which are undocumented and only accessible via the registry) but also settings for MS Office, Acrobat, etc.

All of my results with this utility are purely subjective as I didn’t take any measurements before I ran this, but I can tell you this made a night and day difference on my system. For $30 it is well worth the investment, anybody who has a Windows PC should really check this out.

Here is a link where you can download a 14-day trial of the program with all features enabled.

Should you choose to purchase the software, here is a link for where to purchase it from.

Note: all of these links are redirects so that we get a referral credit with Auslogics. Their actual website is auslogics.com, but if you found my review helpful please use our links.

The Hatch My House, a Home Wedding Registry, can be used by anyone who wants to save money for a home, but may especially interest engaged couples planning a wedding and saving for a down payment. Additionally, families in need of home repairs caused by a natural disaster can benefit from Hatch My House. HMH registries often accompany an event such as a wedding, fundraiser, birthday or holiday celebration.

By using the Hatch My House Online Gift Registry, users take advantage of PayPal, reaping the benefits of being aligned with a 10-year money transfer service business and a built-in security infrastructure, which includes data encryption and fraud prevention tools.

The founders Rieve and Erin-Marie MacEwen launched Hatch My House for personal use just days before their April 2009 wedding. In a little more than six months, they were able to save a few thousand dollars towards their future home. Now, they aim to give others the same opportunity.

For more information on SaberLogic’s website development services, please visit our website design page or contact us!

For the vast majority of our website development projects, we use Joomla as the content management system. Joomla makes it very easy to edit an update the content on your website without having to have any knowledge of website design or programming. With over 10 million downloads now, it is used by organizations such as Citibank and Harvard. Along the same lines, when we build an e-commerce website, we prefer to us an e-commerce engine called Magento. It has over 1 million downloads and is being used by companies like Lenovo, 3M and Samsung.

The issue has always been…what should we do when a client needs a website with many editable pages and e-commerce capabilities? Because both platforms operate in completely different ways, it becomes difficult to integrate the two. For example, user account management in Joomla functions completely differently than user account management in Magento.

Fortunately, we can now offer an integrated solution for our website clients who need a website that utilizes both Joomla and Magento. A company in the Netherlands, Yireo, has developed a product called MaeBridge. In addition to integrating the visual and templated elements of the website, it also includes integrations such as user synchronization for single sign on and simultaneous single user creation on both systems. This new product allows us to develop websites that have the flexibility and strengths of the Joomla content management system and the benefits of Magento, one of the most robust e-commerce systems on the market today.

For more information on SaberLogic’s website and e-commerce development services, please visit our website or contact us today.

SaberLogic developed a framework that allows for integrated custom labels to be generated using Crystal Reports files as the design template.  This framework is composed entirely of form customizations and Crystal Reports files, so the software will upgrade with future versions of Epicor Vantage just like any other form customization.

A quick list of features includes:

• Specify a specific label format per record type in Epicor Vantage
• Labels are stored in a user defined table and serialized with a unique number
• Supports the concept of a “Master Label” that can vary in format from regular labels
• Full Crystal Reports functionality is available, allowing you to use things like parameters to prompt users or complex suppression formulas.

We’ve built this to be a custom solution which is put together using our pre-developed logic and components.  We simply need to know exactly which label formats are required with a full mock-up and where they are to be generated from.

Follow this link to learn more about SaberLogic’s label printing solution for Epicor Vantage,  or please contact us for more information.

Consistently customers tell us that they want to be able to control the content of their own website.  They want to be able to change text, update pages, and build the content that is essential to search engine optimization (SEO).  To that end we design and build nearly all of your websites using Joomla, a content management system (CMS).  A CMS allows you to edit and update text, links, pictures, pages, menus, etc without having to know anything about website development or programming.  Joomla also has a large developer community that provides well over 3,000 various extensions and add-ons which we can use to expand the functionality of a website.  For more information on SaberLogic’s Joomla website design services, please click here!

We were also excited to make an initial presentation to the Wadsworth community of our new Apple and Mac support services.  Our Apple Certified Macintosh Technician is now working with a variety of clients to provide apple and Apple + Windows network set-up and administration, file and printer sharing, back-ups, and various upgrades. Please click here for a complete list of SaberLogic’s Apple Mac services and support.