The Refresh Orlando Heirs

What makes Power Pads similar to the printed template?

The Power Page is a pad in template form that you can carry around with you when you visit clients. Why is the Power Pad a template when you write so much information on it and transfer it to a computer program? By template in this instance, we mean a “Form”.

You have all filled out order forms, forms for getting refunds, etc. Each of these forms requires the same information over and over again. We use forms to capture information and when you create your Power Pad templates, you will actually be creating a hand-written form that can be later transferred to the computer. Forms help you to be more organized and also to make sure you get all the information that you need when in a meeting. It will help you ask the right questions to fill in important information.

Creating your own template will also make you think about what is important. It will also help you to discard some data as totally irrelevant to the business at hand. You should carefully think about what to use and then design your form (template) so that it is easy to use. I know I have filled out information on some forms and wondered why they would need to know some of the things they ask for. Make it easy on yourself and know what it is you need to have in order to get to the proposal.

Do not give yourself lots of work; only gather what you need now and what you can use in the future. Design your template to be practical and useful. You can even have a space that records what promo items you have given to this client or to your potential customer. If gives you an excuse to call them and create yet another touch point.

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. has been networking with others since leaving high school years ago. Realizing that no one really cared about what she did in life unless she had someone to tell and excite. She decided to find the best ways to get people’s attention, be creative in how she presented herself and products, getting people to know who she was, and being visible all the time. Her friends and colleagues have often dubbed her the “Networking Queen”. Blueprints for Success - Networking: 150 ways to promote yourself is the first in this series. Blueprints for Success Branding Yourself: Another 150 ways to promote yourself is planned for release in 2006. For more information visit http://www.BlueprintBooks.com

Working from home has its advantages, including no commute, a more flexible work schedule and fresh coffee and home-cooked meals whenever you want.

But working from home while using a wireless local area network (WLAN) may lead to theft of sensitive information and hacker or virus infiltration unless proper measures are taken. As WLANs send information over radio waves, someone with a receiver in your area could be picking up the transmission, thus gaining access to your computer.

They could load viruses on to your laptop which could be transferred to the company’s network when you go back to work.

Up to 75 per cent of WLAN users do not have standard security features installed, while 20 per cent are left completely open as default configurations are not secured, but made for the users to have their network up and running ASAP.

It is recommended that wireless router/access point setup be always done though a wired client.

Change default administrative password on wireless router/access point to a secured password.

Enable at least 128-bit WEP encryption on both card and access point. Change your WEP keys periodically. If equipment does not support at least 128-bit WEP encryption, consider replacing it.

Although there are security issues with WEP, it represents minimum level of security, and it should be enabled.

Change the default SSID on your router/access point to a hard to guess name. Setup your computer device to connect to this SSID by default.

Setup router/access point not to broadcast the SSID. The same SSID needs to be setup on the client side manually. This feature may not be available on all equipment.

Block anonymous Internet requests or pings.

On each computer having wireless network card, network connection properties should be configured to allow connection to Access Point Networks Only. Computer to Computer (peer to peer) Connection should not be allowed.

Enable MAC filtering. Deny association to wireless network for unspecified MAC addresses. Mac or Physical addresses are available through your computer device network connection setup and they are physically written on network cards. When adding new wireless cards / computer to the network, their MAC addresses should be registered with the router /access point.

Network router should have firewall features enabled and demilitarized zone (DMZ) feature disabled.

You can test your hardware and personal firewalls using Shields Up test available at http://www.grc.com

All computers should have a properly configured personal firewall in addition to a hardware firewall.

Update router/access point firmware when new versions become available.

Locate router/access point away from strangers so they cannot reset the router/access point to default settings.

Locate router/access point in the middle of the building rather than near windows to limit signal coverage outside the building.

While none of the measure suggested above provides full protection as counter measures exist, a collection of suggested measures will act as a deterrent against attacker when other insecure networks represent easier targets.

The author of this article ia a software developer, consultant and author of numerous books. Visit his site for more information about the Top Spyware Removal Software.

To predict the demand for jewelry items in the future, you must have knowledge of product performance of the past. And that is one of the important functions of a well-designed jewelry software program.

Of course, no matter how well designed, a jewelry software program cannot totally eliminate intuition and luck. But having a well-organized and accurate history of sales provided through jewelry software reports, will take much of the guesswork out of inventory management.

A jewelry software program will help you look at a number of forecasting factors such as product history and the expected demand. The reports generated by your program should give you an in-depth analysis of numbers, both for historical sales and ongoing sales curves. At the very minimum, you should be able to rely on your jewelry software reports for 60% of your forecasting decisions with 20% based on experience and 20% on intuition.

Naturally, the more you become familiar with your jewelry software, the more reliable your inventory planning will become. You will never obtain 100% accuracy but 90% is an achievable goal.

Don’t be timid about customizing your jewelry software

Jewelry software programs are customizable. So after purchasing a good jewelry software program, it will probably need some tweaking. For example, every jewelry store has its own forecasting process to suit its particular needs. Therefore in order to be successful, the program must work for you…not you for the program. So don’t hesitate to adjust the jewelry software program to fit your exact needs.

You will probably find customizing easy with any of the top jewelry software programs now on the market. Not only do the developers want you to customize their software but will help you do so. A well-written and easily understood manual is a must for this activity. Lastly, a good customer support program should back the software.

Use your jewelry software program every day

Inventory management should never be a once a month or once a week activity. You should be looking at the figures generated by your jewelry software program every day. This will help you develop a more accurate understanding of your daily business flow, be able to quickly spot the need for inventory adjustments and greatly increase your forecasting accuracy.

Remember, a well-designed jewelry software program is the first step toward reducing overstocks and preventing out-of-stocks. You will find it to be one of the best inventory tools available for the successful operation of a jewelry store.

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Web Analytics - Part 2
Jason OConnor
Copywrite 2004

Not accessing and reviewing your vital website statistics is like never looking at your checking account activity and never knowing how much money you have in it.

In Part 1 of this two-part series I explained how to crunch relevant website statistical data to facilitate constant e-marketing initiative improvements. I explained what types of data are important, such as unique visits, click-thru numbers and percentages, lead conversion rates, and how to process all these numbers. (You can read Part 1 at http://www.oakwebworks.com/articles/article-6-analytics-part-1.htm). Here in Part 2 I’ll explain how you obtain the data in the first place and then provide a fool-proof method for website click-thru statistical acquisition.

The first thing you need to know is where your website lives. Every website sits on a server, a computer with the purpose of waiting for requests from clients (people’s personal computers by way of a browser). Each server physically lives in one of two places. It is either located at its website owner’s company, which is called in-house, internal, or self hosting. If company A has an active website and owns the server the website is on, and the server is physically located at their company, then it falls in this first category.

The other place a website server can physically live is at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or host company. There are a number of configurations the server can fall under in this category which is beyond the scope of this article. The main thing to keep in mind is you first need to know where your website’s server is.

Once you know this, you can begin to assemble all the relevant site statistics. All servers automatically generate all the data you’ll ever need on an ongoing basis. They are relentless in their stats recording. They record all the data in what’s called server log files. Manually parsing through these log files is a horrible job that should only be wished on your worst enemy. They are huge laundry lists of everything from every site visitor’s IP address, browser type, site referral, time and date visited, and much more.

Fortunately, there are software programs that can do this for you. One of the most popular is WebTrends (http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp). You feed your server log files to the WebTrends software, and it produces for you an excellent presentation of all your relevant (and some superfluous) website statistics.

If your website sits on a server that your company has in-house, than you need to purchase WebTrends or some similar software and locate your server log files. The files often end in .log. In other words, it’s up to you to get your website’s statistics, and you do this by locating your server log files and running them through software such as WebTrends.

If your website sits on a server in an ISP then you can either request the server log files from them and run them through your own software, or you can ask them if they provide an interface for you to review your site statistics online. Most do provide this service. It’s often web based and all you have to do is log onto their site to view them.

Now you’re armed with a lot of good data. But if all your e-marketing initiatives drive traffic to your homepage, how will you know which ones are working and which ones aren’t? If you send out emails to rented lists and the call to action are all links that point to your homepage, then you’ll never know which emails are doing better than others. You may get an idea by seeing if your overall traffic increased the day you sent out the email or posted the banner (even to determine this you’ll need your website stats), but to do it right, you need exact data, and the web will provide it for you.

Some sites that you place banners on will offer you click-thru counting services to you. Most email brokers also offer similar services, at a price. But what if they don’t offer tracking information for you? Or worse, what if you don’t trust their reporting?

The solution: Create, implement, utilize and manage your own unique tracking pages.

It’s relatively simple. In every e-marketing campaign you conduct you create and assign a unique html page to it. Then the initiative’s call to action (hyperlink) points to its unique page. After the campaign is done, you can then go to your website statistics obtained through your website’s server log files, and see how many visits were logged for each unique tracking page.

For example, let’s say you send out an email to a list of 1000 email addresses. In the body of the email there is a call to action link that says, “Click Here to Buy Now”. This link points to a page on your website. But not just any page. It points to a unique tracking page you created earlier to track how many of the 1000 people clicked-thru from the email. It’s important that no users can get to this new page in any other way than through the email. Let’s say you named the page email-campaign1.htm. After the email campaign is done (I like to wait about 2-4 days), you go to your website statistics (the result of parsing the server log files through WebTrends or its equivalent) and search for the page called email-campaign1.htm. Finally, you view the page visits number. Let’s say the visits to this unique page totaled 200. That number is your click-thru number.

Now you can really start to fill in all the relevant data discussed in Part 1. This will enable you to determine how well each campaign is doing and whether you need to make adjustments.

To help manage all these unique pages, keep them all in one sub directory of your site. If you don’t do the technical work for your site, you ought to consider giving Part 1 and Part 2 of this series to your technical web person so they can get a better handle on your website vitals.

Until you know how well your website and e-marketing campaigns are doing, measured in visits, leads and sales, you can’t possibly maximize your operation and increase your bottom line. Now you have the information to make this happen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason OConnor is President of Oak Web Works - The synthesis of Web marketing, design, and technology.
Jason is a Web development expert, e-strategist, and e-marketer who
is trying to affect the future of the Internet in a highly positive way
http://www.oakwebworks.com
mailto: jason@oakwebworks.com for a FREE site consultation and to learn how to increase your bottom line by properly leveraging the Web

When Oracle announced in 2005 that it was acquiring an in-memory database provider, the term “real time” had become an industry standard. But with the way technology has progressed and broadband driving the demand for speed, the term has now taken on a new relevance. In-memory databases can speed transaction times and give immediate access to real time data, making this a requirement in the gathering of business information. One application that benefits from the speed and accuracy of an in-memory database is call accounting software.

Ten years ago the communications industry that provides call accounting and billing services to organizations and multi-national companies, was faced with requests for immediate access to the wealth of untapped information in call detail records. At that time, a business’ ability to process the call data, and run the reports necessary to effectively acquire and isolate the desired information, could take days or even weeks. In most cases, the task was abandoned before it began. The industry’s challenge was to provide an easy-to-use solution in which data retrieval and reporting are virtually instantaneous.

“To meet customers’ requirements, we set out to meet certain parameters,” says Don Simons, CEO of TelSoft Solutions. “All reports, regardless of size and type, had to run in less than five minutes (start to finish.) Call processing speed had to be sustained, (collecting call records, calculating call price information, and database insertion) it had to exceed a rate of one million calls processed per hour, the speed of processing had to ensure that data processing did not delay reporting in any way, even when the call data arrived in large batches, individuals with no programming background and minimal computer experience could easily run and customize reports, and the system had to run on off-the-shelf industry-standard hardware of the time.”

Experts in the fastest databases (such as Oracle, Informix, and Ingres) were gathered and divided into competing research teams. Over a period of several months, these teams tested existing technologies in an effort to meet the performance specifications. To best optimize potential solutions, the teams called upon additional experts in each respective database technology. Numerous tuning and caching schemes were implemented. And still, the target goals were nowhere in sight.

During this process, additional calculations proved that no existing off-the-shelf solution – even if disk drives were 100 times faster – could attain the required performance goals. All standard solutions proved unsuccessful.

“We were about to throw in the towel,” says Simons. “Then one of the developers came up with an original and exciting idea, an in-memory database manager (IMDB)”

Since call accounting reports by nature access a large majority of the dataset in each query, it wasn’t clear at first that such a solution would be viable or reliable. A team was assigned and a prototype rapidly assembled. The new concept was rigorously tested for performance, reliability, and data integrity. Testing proved that a full-blown IMDB would meet and exceed all specified requirements, even on the standard hardware technology.

TelSoft’s MegaBase IMDB and the MegaCall application were completed and made generally available in 1995. The database runs most reports in just seconds and even large annual reports in under the five-minute limit. It processed real time calls virtually instantaneously, could be used effectively by a novice, required no routine maintenance or additional support personnel, provided seamless archival access, and had extensive open data exchange capabilities.

The ability to access business intelligence immediately and have data be totally secure is vital in today’s competitive environment. Under current conditions requiring the highest levels of security, real-time retrieval of critical data is an essential element in maintaining a secure environment. MegaBase was designed and is currently deployed in enterprises with heightened security requirements as well as the standard reporting needs.

Karen Ritz is the VP Business Development for TelSoft Solutions Inc. Since 1985, TelSoft has been providing call accounting and billing services to meet the challenges of their clients, many of whom have unique telecom management needs. TelSoft provides call accounting solutions like CallTrac for organizations with as few as 100 stations and MegaCall for large multi-location companies exceeding 60,000 stations. For more information, visit http://www.telsoft-solutions.com

Patch panels are used as the central point in a network where all the network cables terminate. It is the grand central station of the network. Networks that use patch panels (and almost all modern networks use this technology) are consider “star-networks” or they use the term “star-topology.” This is because if you look at a drawing of your network, all the network nodes (nodes are end-points on the network and include things like computers and printer) all connect back to the central “hub” and it looks like a big starburst. Another term is “spoke-and-wheel”
where the “wheel” is your hub and patch panel and the individual cables going out to your nodes (computers and printers) become the spokes.

Patch panels come in various types and configurations from the simple wall-
mounted 12-port patch panel block, to elaborate 96-port (and more!) rack-
mounted patch panel. As was mentioned above, patch panels are rated for speed. So
if you are running Cat 6 cable, you will need a Cat 6 patch panel.

Patch panels come in various designs and styles. There are patch where the cables
plug-in straight (90°), or angled at a 45° angle downwards; there are panels with
110 style punch downs on the back and ones with tool-less punch downs; there are
various number of ports on the patch panels. Check the internet for the vast array of
patch panel styles available. There are also two different standards for patch panels:
T568A and T568B mentioned above. Be sure to buy the correct patch panels for the
installation!

It is best to buy patch panels that are rated for both standards. Since the only
difference between the two standards is the order of the colored pairs, most
manufacturers rate their patch panels for both standards. They simply have both
wiring diagrams affixed to their patch panels.

Dean Novosat is computer expert and network engineer. He is the author of including
“How to Wire Networks for
Profit.” He has several websites including http://www.YourOwnNetwork.com and http://www.sageadviceltd.com.

Mobile computing is getting to a rather large industry. With Wi
Fi(wireless internet) and many features a laptop computer can do
it’s no wonder everyone is buying them. Discount notebook
computers offer high quality standards with a price that’s
easy to afford.

Owning a notebook computer has never been easier and cheaper.
Most of us that buy laptops will only use them for a few basic
functions. Mostly, surfing the internet, using Microsoft Word,
keeping notes for school, or for business purposes. New laptops
come with everything, even the kitchen sink, but hardly anyone
will use all the operations.

Discount notebook computers from the same big name companies
like IBM, Dell, HP and more offer the same high quality
standards, but with a lower price tag, so that everyone can
afford one. Discount notebook computers come with an operating
system already installed and all you have to do is turn it on
and get started.

Buying a notebook computer has many advantages for everyone from
kids, students, to busy professionals. You can take the entire
office with you without wires to play educational software, do
schoolwork in class, connect to the internet and connect to all
your clients. Imagine what that could do for your business.

Picture this for a moment, you have a notebook computer that
weighs about five pounds in a nice case. You can be anywhere in
the world and connect to the internet. Checking your favorite
websites, e-mail, staying in touch with clients, or whatever.
Maybe you’re a student. Taking a laptop in class and keep track
of notes, create documents and make learning a little more fun
with the technology of a portable computer. What about the kids.
Why spend all that money on an expensive computer when a
discount notebook computer has the same technology, but a lower
price. They can play educational games, even watch DVD
movies(with optional DVD-ROM drive).

There is literally no end to what laptops can do for you.
It is very practicle because there are no wires, no bulky
equipment and light enough to put them in a backpack, or a case
and take it anywhere. The world is never going to operate
without computers again. In fact, it’s only going to get more
advanced and technical. It is very necessary to learn to operate
a computer because almost every job will have some type of
computer technology. Notebooks are a great tool to use in your
everyday life and they are getting easier to operate.

Discount notebook computers offer all these advantages plus
more! The main difference is the price. You could save up to 60%
off the retail price and still get a great mobile computer. You
no longer have to spend large amounts of money to get a great
deal. By spending wisely, you’ll save big. Discount notebook
computers offer the best technology at the best price!

Online Crazy Deals
has more information about getting ahead in the world of
computers. Be amazed at technology, but don’t fear it. The more
advanced laptops become, the more practical they get and
operating them gets easier.

1. Not knowing, before you design your webpage, why anyone
(besides you) would feel compelled to visit it.

2. Not knowing, before you design your webpage, why anyone in
their right mind would return to your webpage on purpose.

3. Lack of focus. Not knowing the one, single thing that
visitors come to your page to have satisfied. (If you
actually have more than one way of satisfying visitors,
then, unless they are *intimately* related, put them on
separate pages. Better yet, separate sites. Think
infomercial rather than search engine. Think television show
rather than channel surfing.)

4. Not knowing –and, therefore, not taking it into account
before you design your webpage– how people will get to your
webpage. In detail. (What did they see and how did they
happen to see it? What did they click and why did they click
it?)

5. Not understanding that trying to please everyone pleases
no one.

6. Being afraid to repel visitors. (Even though it was likely
designed by some, the U.S. Small Business Administration
website probably repels people who say “Later, Dude.”
America Online is actually proud that nerds hate America
Online. XXX.com is designed to repel your grandmother.)

7. Not knowing the likes and dislikes of your page’s reader.
(You don’t have to conduct a survey to find out — you will
get what you design into it.)

8. Giving your visitors too many options. (Yahoo! adds options
to *keep* their multitude of regular visitors coming back.
They did not, and could not, *get* that multitude with all
those options. Ebay.com does not offer email accounts.
Napster.com does not offer electronic greeting cards.)

9. Not knowing the age bracket of your page’s reader. (You
don’t have to conduct a survey to find out — you will get
what you design into it.)

10. Not knowing whether more men read your page than women, or
vice versa. (You don’t have to conduct a survey to find out
— you will get what you design into it. If you try for
both, you will probably get neither.)

Dale Armin Miller. The author makes his living online, and is Master At Arms of the
Internet Marketing Success Arsenal![sm] “What works online …
guaranteed.” Get free, detailed, online-marketing strategies at
http://www.successarsenal.com