There are now over 175,000 mobile apps available across the three leading smartphone platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. With that many options, it is becoming hard pick out the good ones, especially for business users. Here are a few apps to help you succeed when you’re out of the office.

Evernote

The Swiss Army knife of note taking, Evernote allows you to snap a photo, take a screenshot, type in text, or speak your note to capture information on the go. And once the information is captured, Evernote helps you organize and find it by making all text in your photos or notes searchable!
Click here to visit their official site

Documents to Go

Documents To Go is an all-in-one application with support for Office, PDF, Apple iWork, and many other file types. If someone e-mails you a PowerPoint presentation, you can now view and edit the file on your mobile device. It’s especially useful in meetings when you forget to bring the hard copy of a file. Also great for prepping documents during travel since it’s always handier to whip out an Blackberry than a laptop.
Click here to visit their official site

LinkedIn

Whether or not you’re a fan of social networking in your personal life, having a LinkedIn account is a great way to keep track of business contacts online. Their mobile app brings many of the Web features, such as your Connections and Status Updates, to your phone. Their best mobile-specific feature is InPerson, which allows you to quickly share contact information with another smartphone user via Bluetooth.
Click here to login from your mobile phone

BusinessWeek Mobile

The BusinessWeek app allows you to create a personal watchlist of companies, giving you quick access to the stories that matter most to you. The app is customizable and allows you to organize the news by topic. You can also easily share BusinessWeek content right from your phone via email.
Click here to download the app

What business apps would you recommend? Did we miss a great one, or did we include one that you think is overrated? Leave a comment and let us know.

In a recent interview, Scott Charney, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing, suggested that the businesses should follow health care’s model of quarantining infected PCs from your network to prevent them from being used to send spam and conduct attacks on other users. Here are some of his comments:

When people get diseases and run the risk of contaminating other people, the medical community has devised mechanisms to help ensure the public’s health. It’s a combination of inspection, quarantine, and treatment. In today’s computing enterprises, we have Network Access Protection…The theory is if a machine is known to be infected do you want it to connect to the network and infect everyone else? Or do you want to take it offline, clean the machine, and then let it connect? The concept isn’t that complicated, but the challenge is in the implementation.
The Internet is so many things for consumers. It’s a way to engage in free speech, to engage in online commerce, to get education, to seek health care information. Their lives center around this technology in so many important ways. And they’re used to the PC being in their home. It’s considered a very private device in a way. And it may be storing a lot of private sensitive data, like your diary or your tax records. But what we’ve seen is that when people get infected they may not be the ultimate victim. The ultimate victim might be the person who receives more viruses and spam directed by the originally infected PC. You can tell people to make sure they’ve updated your machines, running antivirus, and backing up data, yet we still see a lot of people who just don’t do that. So, the question becomes how do you create a less infected Internet? Quarantining and disconnecting machines at the source is an important place to start.

If you have any questions or concerns about the integrity of your security infrastructure, never hesitate to call Responza so we can stop problems before they start and help you retain peace of mind.

Excel is an amazing and powerful tool that has come to impact nearly every aspect of the business world and makes our lives easier (at least when it comes to math). But anyone who uses Excel on a regular basis knows just how frustrating it can be to alter the formatting of a workbook to suit your basic needs. You might alter the font, borders, and alignment defaults, or perhaps you might delete or add sheets to control the number each new workbook offers. Whatever your needs, here’s a sneaky way to tweak Excel so you’ll always start out right where you want to:

• When you open a new workbook, Excel creates a copy of a template file named book.xlt (the .xlt extension denotes a template file). If you make changes to the defaults in book.xlt, every new workbook will open with the settings you need and you can go right to work!

To customize your spreadsheet, open Excel, choose Open from the File menu, and navigate to one of the following folders to find book.xlt:

• C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICEx\XLSTART

x is the version number. For instance, if you’re using Office 2003, that folder would be OFFICE11. If you can’t find book.xlt, use the Windows Search feature.

Once you have book.xlt open in Excel, make the necessary changes to bring the template into compliance with your organization.

You can even add a generic header or footer. For instance, you can enter a header that will display each new workbook’s name, as follows:

1. Choose Header And Footer from the View menu.
2. From the Header control, choose Book1.
3. Click OK and Excel will display the workbook’s name in the header. This header trick works in any workbook, not just Excel’s template file.

When you’ve finished customizing book.xlt, save it as book.xlt. Don’t change the filename. Specify Template (*.xlt) in the Save As Type control and be sure to save the altered template in the same folder where you found it. Customizing book.xlt makes sense. By reducing the amount of work necessary to get each new workbook file ready, you’ll be more efficient and productive.

One of the simplest yet most powerful pieces of advice for good IT security is to use strong passwords. A strong password should draw from as many keys on the keyboard as possible, with at least three different factors:

1. How long is your password?
2. How many different types of characters (lower case, upper case, numbers, punctuation, spaces, etc.) are in your password?
3. How many different characters are in it? Be as random as possible! Replacing letters with similar looking numbers (O=0, 5-S, 3=E, etc.) can be an easy and memorable way to boost security.

With a strong enough password, hackers won’t be cracking into any of your accounts any time soon. Unfortunately, some sites place limitations on what characters can and cannot be used in a password— this may be an indication that their personal security infrastructure is somehow lacking. Major players like Google, MSN, Facebook, and Twitter all allow you to use anything you want in your password. So remember: a little creativity on the keyboard can lead to long term security success.

Just a few years ago, Microsoft looked like a real contender in the mobile-phone market. Windows Mobile accounted for about one quarter of all Smartphones as recently as 2004, and it was gaining ground. Then Apple and BlackBerry left the software giant in the dust. on February 16, at the wireless industry conference in Barcelona, Microsoft unveiled its latest effort to get back into the game: the renamed Windows Phone operating system.
Microsoft needs to be a player in the Smartphone market. Tasks once done on personal computers, are migrating to mobile devices. iPhone, Blackberry, and other phones have become the preferred way to read e-mail, check out Facebook or catch up on the news. Total shipments of Smartphones will more than double between 2009 and 2013, so Microsoft’s new mobile software has to be different to convince their customers that they are going to fundamentally change direction and regain share.

Windows Phone is much improved and has the advantage of easily handling word processing and spreadsheets sent from PCs. It will also be more integrated with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console and Zune music player, so users can share music and videos among their Microsoft devices. But that won’t solve another challenge the company faces in attracting customers: independent software developers who create new applications for mobile phones have mostly ignored Microsoft and focused instead on the iPhone and Google-backed Android phones. Developers have cooked up more than 140,000 apps for the iPhone alone. There are about 800 available in Microsoft’s online mobile store, though the company estimates 20,000 applications will ultimately run on its new operating system.

Microsoft has begun working more closely with hardware partners, such as HTC and LG, to share engineering resources and better customize their software to their particular phones. They also plan to reduce the number of hardware partners from 58 at the end of 2008 to between a half dozen and a dozen to gain more control over hardware and make sure the total experience is consistent and better.

Microsoft may look like they’re caught in a box right now, but analysts say not to underestimate their potential. They have a lot of funding, they have terrific engineering resources, and the game is not over.

When you select a block of text, Word assumes a lot. If you drag the mouse down, it automatically selects all of the text to the right of the cursor. Similarly, if you drag the mouse up, Word selects all the text to the left of the cursor. What if you want to select text moving up or down without selecting text to the right or left or the cursor? Fortunately, you can force Word to select a vertical block of text–ignoring the text to the right or the left–if you know the right keystroke.
To customize the selection area, position the cursor at the beginning (or end) of the block you want to select. Then, hold down the [Alt] key and drag your mouse up or down and right or left to select just the block you want—without Word’s interfering assumptions.
For a quick glimpse of what you can do, just click anywhere in the middle of some text, hold down the [Alt] key, and make a small circle with your mouse. By using the [Alt] key while dragging your mouse, you can customize the shape and size of the selected block of text—it’s up to you, not Word!

Yesterday I brought you Elizabeth Bowman’s tips on inbox management, here’s what she has to say about messages themselves:

Put a hooking key statement in the subject line. First impressions matter! And be specific– don’t send messages with subjects like QUESTION, IMPORTANT, or PLEASE RESPOND without including something specific.

If the entirety of your message can be conveyed by a subject line, do so! Just be sure to end the line with EOM (”end of message”). It’s like the e-mail equivalent of texting.

The body of your e-mail should begin with a quick statement of purpose. If you’re asking questions or making requests, be sure to separate each of them with bullets or a line of space.

If your messages seem too long or start covering too many topics, don’t be afraid to use several shorter e-mails to get the point across.

Always include a signature line with your contact information. Just be sure the information is up to date!

Slow down! Avoid typos, double check attachments, and review your to: and cc: fields.

Finally, six quick tips that will immediately improve how well your e-mail works for you:

1. Set rules to automatically filter messages.
2. Use categories and flags to highlight important messages.
3. Turn off automated mail checking.
4. Eliminate noisy alerts and popups that interrupt and distract you.
5. Move messages directly into your calendar.
6. Remove yourself from unnecessary mailing lists.

With these tips in place, 2010 will surely prove to be a tidy and productive year!

E-Mail has become an essential and unavoidable force in everyday business communication—billions of pieces are sent every week in the US alone. But it is far too easy to become overwhelmed with the contents of your inbox when you receive hundreds of messages per week, if not per day. Here are some indispensable tips inspired by professional organizer Elizabeth Bowman to make sure you are in control of your e-mail, and not the other way around:

When dealing with e-mail, be proactive not reactive.

• Forbid yourself from checking messages at inappropriate times like as soon as you wake up or in the middle of the night. Remember work/life balance!
• Limit the number of ways you receive information: services now exist to have both physical mail and voice mail become e-mail attachments to unite all your most important communication in one forum.

Take three steps to prioritize when to read and respond to messages:

1. Delete what’s unnecessary: spam, mailing lists, messages with attachments (save the file elsewhere and ditch the note)
2. Delegate tasks & responses. If you have staff who can deal with a message in a more timely and effective manner than you, don’t be afraid to pass it along. The “forward” button is your friend.
3. Decide your next step: if responding to a message will take you less than two minutes, don’t put it off till later. If it will take longer, set aside time on your calendar to respond. Set an appointment with yourself.

Messages in your inbox should fall into four specific folders:

1. Needs a response
2. Requires taking action (non-email)
3. Waiting for a response
4. Read & review (newsletters, mailing lists, etc.)

• Create a schedule for checking e-mail. Turn off automatic receipt and the distractions it creates. Instead, pick regular times each day devoted to checking and responding to messages. If people are expecting a more immediate response, don’t be afraid to set an auto-response to explain your schedule.

Check back soon for part 2 with Elizabeth’s tips on writing effective e-mail!

A recent study on laptop failure rates from SquareTrade, a PC warranty services provider, had some unsettling results: one in three laptops is likely to catastrophically fail within three years. But not all laptops are created equal, and some are more reliable than others. Here are the results among top manufacturers, from worst to best:

9. HP: They may be the laptop market share leader, but nearly 26% of their units failed within the three year study.

8. Gateway: The Acer subsidiary didn’t fare much better, with a failure rate of 23.5%

7. Acer: At #3 in overall sales, Gateway’s parent company was only marginally more reliable at 23.3%

6. Lenovo: A 21% failure rate from the Chinese-owned giant isn’t what you’d call inspiring.

5. Dell: Make fun of their ads and criticize their business practices all you want, but the oft maligned 2^nd place manufacturer was found to be more reliable than their top competitors, coming in at 18.3%.

4. Apple: They’re hip, attractive, innovative, and popular, but Mac Books aren’t immortal. Their 17.4% failure rate puts them in the middle of the pack.

3. Sony: Sony Vaio laptops aren’t cheap, but you get what you pay for with only a 16.8% incidence of crashing.

2. Toshiba: In recent years, they’ve lowered price without sacrificing quality: only a 15.7% chance of becoming a doorstop.

1. Asus: While not quite as much of a household name as many of the PC makers on this list, the quietly dominant Taiwanese company produces components for HP and Apple, and their own units experienced the lowest failure rate of all, edging out Toshiba with a healthy 15.6%.

Source: http://www.squaretrade.com, 2009

As computers become faster and more powerful, a single desktop PC possesses resources far greater than what’s necessary to keep a single user productive. That means lots of gigabytes and kilowatts simply going to waste. Through the process of virtualization, a company can turn a single PC into many “virtual desktops” for multiple users.  It was recently announced that a Silicon Valley firm specializing in large virtualization projects will provide over 30,000 virtual desktops to India’s government employee health insurance program. The project will unify thousands of hospitals, clinics, and insurance offices while creating one of the largest medical databases in the world, all at a 75% savings on hardware and a 90% savings on electricity.

Virtualization requires specialized software and a piece of hardware known as a thin client that connects a user’s monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the shared computer. On top of the cost savings, a virtualized system is less susceptible to network security threats and the amount of energy and materials saved make virtualization one of the greenest decisions a business can make.

Virtualization isn’t just for clients as massive as the Indian government, it can revolutionize how any business manages its IT budget and resources. When you work with Responza’s experts to manage your IT, virtualization is just one of the many cutting edge options we offer to save money, eliminate stress, and just make IT work better.