LANcom Technology Blog

Looking to forecast your financial future? PocketSmith is a new online tool, produced right here in NZ, which could help you do it. It allows you to see really easily where you are headed with your personal finances and helps you plan for the future.

Here’s how it works

1. PocketSmith looks like a web-based calendar, except all the events are financial. You put in your salary, bill payments, rent, etc and set them to repeat how ever often they occur.
2. You can then upload your electronic bank statements and match the transactions up to categories e.g. Entertainment. If you spend cash or do not want to upload your bank statement you can also enter information manually.
3. PocketSmith will then use the information you are entering to generate a 6 month cash forecast, with a daily predicted balance of your bank account. This means you can look at a date in the future and see an estimation of how much money you will have in your account on that day. If you adjust your spending in the present you can see how that will affect your bank balance in the future.
4. You can then monitor your PocketSmith forecast and ensure you are reaching your goals. You can even enter interest rates and track the progress of your savings or debt repayment.

So what else is great about PocketSmith?

• Integration – It integrates with Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook. So you can be reminded about important cash flow events e.g. bills to pay.
• Graphs – You can analyse your budgeting success with numbers or with simple, easy to understand graphs

The free version of PocketSmith is great, but if you would like additional features and benefits like the ability to export your cash flow forecasts then there is also a premium and Super version. To visit the PocketSmith website and try it out for yourself click here.

Want to know what cool things your business can do with firewall and threat management technology? SonicWall have put together a free report - 10 cool things your firewall should do.

Here’s a quick summery

1. Managing streaming video
2. Group based bandwidth management
3. Prevent company confidential information from being sent by webmail
4. Application use enforcement
5. Allow FTP uploads, but only for certain people
6. Keep P2P apps under Control
7. Manage streaming music
8. Prioritise application bandwidth
9. Blocking confidential documents
10. Block forbidden files and notify

To download the full report click here.

If you would like to learn more about firewall and threat management technology please contact Owen Redmond at OwenR@lancom.co.nz or 09 3778282 ext 112.

WallWisher is a website that allows you to create an online notice board really quickly and easily. This site is a great way for a group of people to communicate announcements, display opinions, or keep notes.

It only takes a minute to set up a board and then you can just send the link to anyone you want to view or write on it.

So what else is great about Wallwisher?

1. You can pick the URL of your wall (check out www.wallwisher.com/wall/lancomtechnology)
2. No registration is required to make a note; you just need to double click anywhere on the board.
3. You can include images and videos
4. Just like a real notice board you can drag and drop to rearrange the notes
5. You can choose to make your wall private, so only you can view it.
6. You can customise your board to get it looking just how you want

Unfortunately the notes on this site have a 160 character limit so it’s not ideal if you have long announcements to make, but it could still be quite useful.

To visit the WallWisher site click here.

Hat tip to MakeUseOf for the idea for this post

Last week Microsoft announced that an online version of Office 2010 will be free through Windows Live Online. There will also be a free online version available for enterprises who are licensed for Office’s software maintenance program, and a paid online subscription version for small businesses who require more security and control than the free Windows Live version provides.

The free Office Web Apps will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote and will have limited functionality. You will be able to view and create all these documents, but have only basic editing abilities.

Microsoft Office 2010, both the online and desktop versions, are expected to be released in the first half of next year. To find out more about Microsoft’s Office Web Apps from ComputerWorld click here.

Looking for free icons for your website? Here are three sites which can help find just what you are looking for.

1. IconFinder – IconFinder is a great for finding free icons online. Just type what icon you are looking for into the search box or browse through over 160 icon sets. IconFinder allows you to download icons as both PNG and ICO formats and provides information on how each icon can be used. Pretty much all the icons here are free for personal use, but a large number are free for commercial use as well. To check out IconFinder click here.
2. Iconza – Iconza provides you with a totally free and totally customisable icon set. On the Iconza site you can easily change the colour, size, and background of the icons and then either download them individually or as a group. These icons download as PNG files. To try out Iconza click here.
   
3. IconPot – IconPot only lists icons which are completely free for commercial and personal use. Unlike IconFinder, IconPot only allows you to download whole icon sets not individual icons. They have over 40 icons sets for you to choose from. To check out IconPot click here.

Looking to rent or buy in a particular area? Google Maps New Zealand has just added a real estate search tool to their site that makes it easy to see what’s available within a certain area.

Here’s how it works

1. Enter an area or street into the search box on maps.google.co.nz
2. Click on Show search options next to the Search Maps button and select Real Estate from the Drop Down box.
   
3. Then just click Search Maps.

Google Maps then displays all available listings on a map and allows you to refine your search by price, type of property, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and parking options.

Details for each property including photos and links to the websites can be found in the sidebar. You can also easy select a property on the map and switch to street view and see what the rest of the street looks like.

Another great feature of this tool is that you can pan to different suburbs or zoom in or out and the property listings will automatically update.

To learn more about Google Maps real estate search and see a video demonstration of it in action click here.

To learn more about other great features of Google Maps click here.

Worried what will happen to your business if email goes down? The MessageLabs Email Continuity service provides an on-demand email failover system which enables users to keep sending and receiving emails even while your email server is down.

This service allows users to continue to send emails through Outlook, a web console, or a blackberry device and can be activated so quickly your employees may not even notice a disruption.

So what else is great about MessageLabs Email Continuity?

1. It’s just a simple monthly fee – There is no maintenance cost for this service, just a simple monthly fee.
2. It’s secure – MessageLabs uses the same encryption and security technologies used by banks and governments.
3. It restores your messages back to your email server – When your primary system is back up and running, all emails sent and received while it was down will automatically migrate to your email server.

Here’s how it works

1. While your system is running normally, every email will be backed up to MessageLabs Email Continuity data centre.
2. If your email goes down you will be able to activate the service by web or phone, 24 hours a day 365 days a year.
3. Within a few minutes your Outlook email client, web console, or Blackberry devises are connected to the backup system.
4. All activated users have access to email, contact lists, and calendar entries.
5. When your primary system is restored, all internal and external email communications during the outage automatically migrate back to the email server with email data intact.

If you would like to know more about MessageLabs Email Continuity please contact Owen Redmond at owner@lancom.co.nz or 09 377 8282 ext 112.

If you would like to visit the MessageLabs website click here.

Co-op is a really simple free online tool to help people working in teams or small businesses stay connected. It’s a little bit like Twitter, it allows users to post updates, ask questions, and share links. You can also display your agenda, make group announcements and track time.

How does it work?

It’s really easy to set up a group in Co-op, all you have to do is:

1. Sign up to the site with your name, email, and a password. Co-op will then send you a verification email with a link for you to click.
2. Once you have verified your email you can create a group and invite others to join just by entering their emails.
3. The people you have invited will receive an email and all they have to do is click the link and enter their name and a password to join your group.

So what are some of the advantages to using a service like Co-op?

• You can cancel your daily status meetings – Co-op keeps everyone up to date with what’s happening with a project without the need for status meetings. Within the activity stream users can post updates, ask questions, and share links. In the side bar you can enter your agenda for the day and view the agendas of the other members of your team.
• You can stay connected with co-workers without disrupting them – Need to know where a member of your team is up to on a particular project, or need to ask a question? Rather than interrupting someone you can just go to the group Co-op page. If you would like to know when your Co-op page is updated without having to visit it you can subscribe to it via RSS.
• You can see what the team has accomplished each day - As each team member updates their status and tracks time, Co-op automatically records the transcript. You can go back in time to see what your team has accomplished each day.

If you would like try out Co-op click here to visit the Co-op website

Last year we released an information report titled ‘Free Technologies that could improve your business’ and it was such a success we have decided to release another.

‘Free Technologies that could improve your business 2′ will be coming out in the next few months. If you would like to pre-order a copy please contact Owen Redmond at owenr@lancom.co.nz

If you would like to download a copy of the original Free Technologies report click here.

Want to find the best way to track your website visitors? You have probably already heard of Google Analytics, but another service you should seriously consider is Clicky. Clicky offers both free and relatively cheap services for tracking of your website visitors.

Just like Google Analytics Clicky can tell you a great deal about the visitors to your website, but Clicky also has few advantages over the Google service.

So what advantages does the free version of Clicky offer?

1. Real time stats - Perhaps the biggest advantage the free version of Clicky has over Google Analytics is that its statistics are displayed in real time, with Google Analytics you have to wait up to 24 hours for your stats to appear.
2. Details about individual users - Unlike Google Analytics, Clicky gives you details about individual users such as their IP addresses and what pages they have looked at.
3. Works with users who have disabled javaScript - Clicky also has the ability to track visitors even if they have JavaScript turned off which Google Analytic can not.

Of course there are also some disadvantages to using the free version of Clicky over Google analytics, which is why it may be a good idea to use both. The free version of Clicky only allows you to track one website per account and also only stores 30 days of data history.

If you are willing to pay a small amount for your website analytics then you should definitely consider the Clicky Blogger or Pro plan. These plans offer some amazing features like being able to see visitor organisations and the spy feature which allows you to see who is on your site right now and what they are doing.

Clicky is offering a free 21 day trial of their Pro service so you can try before you buy. If you would like to find out more about Clicky click here.

To learn more about Google Analytics click here