Don’t buy a Treo 700w

Posted on January 13, 2006 by dstrom

You would think Palm’s first phone that uses Windows and EVDO would be a big deal. Yes, you read that right — Palm has joined the Borg. Their latest SmartPhone is packed with a ton of features, but one thing missing is the Palm OS. I think it is mostly a bad decision.

Overall, the Treo isn’t as cool as the Sidekick, doesn’t do iTunes like the Rokr, and isn’t as addicting as a CrackBerry, although just about as big and with an even smaller micro-QWERTY keyboard. Call it a phone designed by committee, and subject to many compromises.

It sits squarely in the middle of the Rokr-kick-berry axes. It has the cumbersome duo of Windows Pocket Media and Microsoft Synch (rather than the elegant iTunes) to manage your music, should you have enough room to store any number of tunes to your phone, for example. The first thing you’ll want to do is boost its internal storage with a SD card.

The synch program is annoying in what it does: you can view the filesystem on the phone, sort of. You can move programs and data back and forth from phone to PC and from phone main memory to phone SD card — if you can find where Windows puts things. This can make a Unix admin grin with sympathy. And while you can synch via Bluetooth rather than the supplied USB cable, I couldn’t get it to work with my HP dv5000z notebook. That USB cable is good for charging the phone, but you have to turn the phone feature off (what Palm calls “flight mode” — meaning that you can’t get calls).

Next, the Treo doesn’t do email as well as the Berries: if you want to synch up with a POP mailbox on the Internet, you’ll need to download some software and spend some time messing around with the configuration. On the other hand, if the DOJ shutters RIM next month, Treo does have a viable solution. In the device’s defense, it did allow me to grab my email from my IMAP server without doing much more than entering the account information. And you can grab emails from multiple accounts, something the Blackberry doesn’t do.

Finally, the range of communications applications isn’t as rich as with the Sidekick: there is no AOL IM and the support for SMS is a bit cumbersome. There is just their stripped down Windows counterparts including Explorer for the Web, Pocket Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Pocket MSN Messenger. If you want to spend a lot of time scrolling down to view your documents, then you’ll like this. Otherwise, it will drive you crazy.

For a $400 fancy phone ($500 minus $100 rebate), I would have liked a few more things. For example, the ability to use it as my EVDO broadband connection for my laptop (what Palm calls Dial up networking via USB): it hogs the broadband for its own pocket apps, although Verizon might add this feature eventually. In the meantime, buy PDA.net and you can get around this limitation.

Another thing missing is the ability to stream my music to my Bluetooth headset: nope, that’s just for the voice calls. And it would be nice to have a little bit more internal memory, or a way to manage it better: when I tried to download all 6000-some contacts into it, it rightly complained. The only way I could clear them out was to delete them over on the PC side, and then synch up.

HP’s latest notebook — the dv5000z

Posted on January 4, 2006 by dstrom

The HP Pavilion dv5000z is the latest in their line of multi-media friendly notebooks. It isn’t the lightest, but could be one of the best screens that I’ve seen in a while, and in that nice widescreen 1280x 800 format too.

The issue I have is price. The base model on HP’s site goes for $749. But the model that I got was selling for more than $1800. By the time you add a better CPU, more RAM and disk, and upgrade various other components, you are spending real money.

The key takeaway on the 5000z is that it isn’t as heavy or as pricey as the larger dv8000z model, but still has some of the nicer features of the 8000 models. The 5000 comes with ATI Radeon video cards that can contain up to 128 MB of video memory and built-in Altec Lansing stereo speakers on the front panel. While not astounding for the true gamers, they deliver better video and audio performance for watching movies than the lower end models of the dv4000 and dv1000.

Steer clear of the dv4000 series — for not much more money you get a better CPU and 802.11 a/b/g networking, better graphics, better sound and a larger hard drive.

One downside is that the 5000 isn’t as media center capable as, say, the Toshiba Qosmio. HP didn’t do more than add a few bits of software to manage your media files.

Overall, this notebook is a nice compromise between the Big Bertha weight of the Qosmio and having enough features to make a $1400 (which is about where you should end up on the options when you are done configuring it) notebook worthwhile.

Network Magic and McAfee’s Wireless Home Network Security Reviewed

Posted on November 10, 2005 by dstrom

Setting up a small LAN isn’t always easy for the newbie. While both Microsoft and Apple have made big strides in their latest operating systems with respect to sharing folders and printers, it still can be a daunting task, especially if you are using earlier OS versions or mixing non XP and MacOS X systems into the network. Two companies are trying to make it even easier with some software solutions. And while they get points for trying, they both still have a long way to go before network setup is as easy as turning on your computer.

The two products are Network Magic from Pure Networks and Wireless Home Network Security from McAfee Software. You can read the complete review here.

The joys of wireless messaging (2003)

Posted on February 28, 2003 by dstrom

I would have written this column earlier, but I was having too much fun with wireless AOL Instant Messaging to take the time to write you all about it.

I haven’t seen an application energize this many people since, well, since the early days of wireless email c1992. Remember Radiomail? They were one of the early pioneers in providing wide-area messaging, and I recall sending and receiving messages after going through a turnpike toll booth (no, not when driving, I was parked on the side of the road, please give me some credit), only to have a cop stop by and ask me what I was doing. Ah, those were the days. Who knew from the Internet and dot coms back then?

Back when I was at CMP the first time around (as editor of Network Computing), the Radiomail application went through our staff like wildfire, and soon everyone was emailing each other rather than doing just about anything else, including paying attention at various meetings or writing their stories. The level of wireless emails got so bad that at one point we had to ban carrying the units into meetings so we could get some real work done.

As a side note, this pervasive multi-tasking continues apace today: when I was last in my high school networked classroom, I had great difficult getting my students to pay attention to my lesson because they were too busy surfing the net for their overnight CounterStrike ratings and catching up on their emails. This situation will only get worse as more colleges and schools install wireless networking, and as more students carry around laptops. At least in my wired classroom I was able to unplug the Ethernet jacks to get my students to pay attention to me. (It became a dramatic moment too, but I won’t get into that here.

Anyway, back to the present day. A couple of us at VARBusiness had received Palm i705s and as an experiment I downloaded the special wireless AIM software that works on it. I wanted to see how far things have come in the decade-plus since Radiomail. I was also motivated by the fact that I have to give a presentation this Monday at our local middle school on what parents should know about AIM. (If you are in the area and interested in coming, email me for the details.)

It didn’t take too long to install the Palm client, once I figured out that I also needed to update the Palm OS firmware as well. (The AIM web site, normally an example of clarity, mentions this in their FAQs, but they bury the factoid and don’t have the link to the firmware readily available. No big deal, but it would have been nice to know this up front.) It works pretty much like the desktop AIM client, including being able to view your buddy lists and insert smiley-faces into your conversations.

I found the same level of annoying connectivity that I initially had with Radiomail: the ability for anyone to reach me no matter where I was during the day. Several of my IMs were received during staff meetings, which began to take on the same level of rudeness that our early ones at Network Computing did (the only difference: in the present we don’t yet have the level of penetration and critical mass that we did with the early Radiomail devices). The difference, though, is a subtle one. Email is a store-and-forward system: you send a message, wait, and send one back. IM is very much an interactive setup: you are conversing, in near-real time, with several people, and your correspondents have a very low tolerance for waiting for your replies. I am not proficient at Graffiti, the handwriting recognition system for the Palm, so my replies took longer. All this interacting means the IM application is a lot more intrusive than plain old wireless email, and your colleagues’ tolerance for your multi-tasking will probably be a lot less.

We at VAR use AIM all the time now that the bosses are on it, and we have staff spread around the country. It is really a big time-saver, especially if you have to get a quick question answered. Some of us are better than others about setting up our away messages (when you are away from your desk you can set the software to tell your correspondents where or what you are doing, so they don’t get frustrated when they are trying to IM you and you don’t respond) and signing off at night when we leave the office. Having the Palm AIM client means you never are away you’re your desk: which means you feel more compelled to answer incoming IMs.

Nevertheless, we adults can’t hold a candle to the kind of usage my teenaged daughter has: IM is clearly her mission-critical app. She documents her movements and actions so completely on IM that one could write a book on her schedule and activities just from her away messages alone.

So I brought the Palm home and had her try it out. She very quickly was timing the delay in sending messages back and forth between a regular wired desktop and a second account that she had up and running on the Palm within a few seconds. (No, I didn’t suggest this, but she is her father’s daughter after all.) The average delay was around 5 or 6 seconds, and it wasn’t symmetrical, meaning that sending an IM to the wireless network took longer than receiving one. I didn’t have a ready explanation for that circumstance, but figure it is just one of those wireless network oddities.

But she didn’t extensively test the Palm, mainly because after a few minutes, she was back on the desktop, typing furiously to her closest dozen or so friends. She isn’t an expert on Graffiti either, although she did admit that with the Palm keyboard she would probably have continued to use the wireless version for a bit longer. She did point out (again without any prompting from me) that having AIM anywhere could get rude when one was in meetings or with friends, and I agreed with her. It remains to be seen if I end up carrying the Palm around with me or not.

In the meantime, please don’t IM me,

Supporting PDAs and wireless devices on your corporate network (2001)

Posted on May 28, 2001 by dstrom

As more and more people purchase Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) for their own personal use, corporate IT managers need to become more proactive in supporting them on their networks. I wrote this for CDW’s Focus magazine back in 2001. I cover which devices to recommend, describe their differences and advantages for various types of knowledge workers, and explain other tips and techniques on how to put them to their best use for various corporate applications.

PDAs for business uses

While there are numerous PDAs available on the market, three major categories of devices are best suited for corporate users. They are the RIM Blackberry line, various devices running the Palm operating system, and the latest series of units running on Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform.

What kinds of information can you carry around on these devices? All of them have the ability to store your contact information, calendar, and some kind of email capability. All support the ability to scroll through your address book by beginning to input the initial letters of your contacts: as the software matches names with what you are typing, it displays these choices. That is helpful, even for large contact lists.

However, when it comes to specifics, the three PDAs couldn’t be more different and have more different target audiences. The Blackberry is designed first and foremost for email and to communicate, so it makes sense for users who spend a lot of time composing and receiving plenty of emails during their workday. While it does have the ability to maintain contact and calendar information, this is really just to help you communicate and compose your emails more effectively. The Blackberry makes sense for a wide variety of users, from executives to help desk and other support personnel that must be in touch with the office, even when they are elsewhere.

The Palms excel at overall contact management information, including the ability to send and receive your “electronic business card” directly into their contact database. They are probably the most popular devices, and now come from a wide variety of vendors besides Palm, including Sony and Handspring. They are the best general-purpose contact manager, and good for taking short notes and carrying a portable version of your daily calendar. They are appropriate for people that need their address book when they aren’t at their desks, such as to get in touch with their project team or for someone who travels frequently and needs to call on various clients. With the addition of a wireless modem, they can be very effective email tools, although someone who gets and sends over 50 messages a day would be better off with one of the Blackberries. The Palm platform also supports the widest number of add-on applications (Palm’s web site lists close to 10,000 different ones) and a very active developer community, and you can run applications on your Palm that help you search for the nearest restaurant or restroom, book a flight, or lookup a word in a dictionary.

Finally, there are numerous Pocket PC devices from Compaq, HP, and Casio. Microsoft has taken Windows CE to the next level, and these are useful for workers who are more document-centric and want something that can work with their usual Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. While you probably wouldn’t want to develop a large financial model using Pocket Excel, the Pocket PC version does come in handy for doing some quick calculations and for reviewing your existing Office documents. The Pocket PC PDAs have the ability to recognize your handwriting and attach short voice recordings to your messages, so they can be useful to annotate your correspondence and documents. They also support the widest connectivity options, including wireless LANs, wired modems, and wired Ethernet networks.

But part of using a PDA is also having some fun with the device and showing it off to your friends and colleagues. The most fun part about the Blackberry is that you can get email almost anywhere anytime, without having to fuss with extra add-on modules or modems. The best part about the Pocket PCs is the ability to function as an MP3 media player, with a built-in headphone jack to listen to your music. And the wide variety of applications available for the Palm can do just about anything.

The chart below summarizes some of the main features of each product line, including the types of batteries used, the range of screens and connector types, and how much memory comes installed with each PDA.

PDA Specifications Overview

Specification	Pocket PC	Palm	Blackberry
Batteries used	Lithium Ion rechargables	2 AAAs or Lithium Ion rechargables	AA or Lithium Ion rechargables
RAM installed	16 – 64 MB	2 – 8 MB	5 MB
Approx. weight	6 – 9 oz.	4 – 7 oz.	5 – 6 oz.
Screen size, colors	640 x 480 colors/mono	160 x160 colors/mono	Up to160 x 160 mono
Connector types	USB, serial, IR	USB, serial, IR	Serial
Desktop software used	Active Synch, MS Office	Palm Desktop	Blackberry desktop
Input text via	Character Recognizer	Graffiti	QWERTY keyboard
Wireless modem included	Only as an option	Only on Palm VII series	All models

Setting up your corporate deployment plan

If you are going to fully embrace using PDAs within your corporation, you need to do more than acquaint your IT support staff and help desk people with a few of the basics. Here is a four-point plan, care of ZDnet columnist Jim Seymour. The plan is worth implementing if you want to ensure the widest possible deployment of PDAs to make your employees more productive.

First, you should pick a set of recommended devices to support. You might want to select one Palm or Visor model, one of the PocketPCs, and one model of the Blackberry that you will recommend to your end users. Include in your list of supported devices any communications gear that you’ll need to connect them for wireless email usage, because this will become a big attraction as people become used to its quirks and convenience. Pick service from either Go.America or Omnisky, because both offer the widest array of choices and service plans.

Don’t try to make this list of supported devices too large, but do try to cover a range of particular uses and tastes. Seymour suggests keeping your recommended list short, but not too short. He also advises against including anything else such as the Nokia phones and Psions: they don’t have much of a place in corporate applications anyway. A possible addition is the Kyocera Smartphone QCP 6035, which marries a Palm with a cell phone.

Second, buy at least two or three units of each supported device and then distribute them — gratis — to the enthusiasts among your overall corporate user population. These are the people who will act as your ambassadors, showing off their new PDA to their peers during the workday and as they travel about your enterprise. You want these people on your side, and you want them to carry the device with them at all times and show it off. As Seymour says, “You want the team members to take the things home, walk around with them in pockets and purses, and put personal name and address lists in them, along with the kids’ T-ball and Little League schedules.” The more uses they can come up with — including both business and personal — the better.

Next, offer intelligent buying advice for others. Once your ambassador group gets going, lots of other folks in your enterprise will want to have them. Try not to be heavy-handed about your recommendations; after all, the first word in PDA is Personal. Seymour says “You’re going to be supporting a variety of these gizmos from now on, so get used to the fact.”

Finally, don’t forget about what you need to do to establish a series of training and enhancement classes. Offer seminars during lunchtime, in the company cafeteria, and in conjunction with other informal corporate gatherings. Bring in a variety of the cooler attachments like the VisorPhone and show them off. Work with your corporate IT training department to develop short seminars that can introduce new users to some of the more important features, and establish a few in-house user groups so that peers can learn from each other.

Synchronicity

Each device has different ways to tie itself into your existing corporate desktop PC, and all pretty much work the same way: you load the desktop software on your PC, hook up the PDA via some kind of connection, and begin to synchronize the information between the two devices. Palms come with the Palm Desktop for both Windows and Macs, Blackberries have their own Windows desktop software, and Pocket PCs work with Microsoft’s Active Synch and Office applications to move files back and forth.

If you want to download new software into the PDA, you either first have to copy it to someplace on your desktop and then transfer it to the PDA via the synchronization software, or beam it directly from another PDA using their infrared ports.

The Blackberries come with their own cradle that connects to your computer’s serial port. The cradles for the rechargeable Blackberries come with a power adapter, so you can recharge them without having your desktop PC turned on. The Pocket PCs usually come with cradles with USB adapters and external power supplies.

The Palms have a variety of connectors, and some can use more than one kind to hook up to your PC. And the rechargeable Palms come with cradles that have power adapters and either serial ports or USB connectors.

While the nine-pin serial port is almost universal, it does limit your synchronizing your PDA to a paltry 115,000 bps data rate. As you need to move larger databases of your contacts and documents, you’ll find this somewhat limiting and lengthy. The best situation is to make use of the faster USB connection available on some Palm devices and most of the Pocket PC units.

One of the best applications for PDA users is to have portable access to your desktop contact database. If you’ve ever been on the road and found out too late that you left important phone numbers on your desktop machine, then having a PDA copy of this information can be very handy, not to mention a terrific business advantage. Each of the devices has this feature and works reasonably well with a wide variety of desktop applications, including Outlook, ACT, and other programs (see the table below).

But sometimes you need something even more portable than a PDA, and that is where having a web-based contact manager comes in handy. This can also serve as a backup copy of your contacts in case your PDA goes south or if your rechargeable batteries are nearing the end of their charge. The widest range of options is available for Palm devices. First, you need to match the application that you will use to store your contacts with your Palm, to make sure that you can get information synchronized properly. Next, you need to find a web address book service provider that supports this application, and offers a synchronization tool that can connect to its data storage. Finally, you have to install everything on your desktop and get it working properly.

Traditional contact mangers like ACT or Outlook are best if you plan to maintain your contact list on a Palm or Pocket PC device. ACT has more fields and functions than mere mortals need, but many swear by it. Outlook does more than contacts: it is Microsoft’s window onto the world of Exchange and POP-based Internet email. If your corporation runs Exchange, then you are probably using Outlook. You can also make use of the supplied contact manager in the Palm Desktop and synchronize directly to the web from here.

Web Address Book Service Providers

Provider	Desktop Software Supported	PDA supported	Synchronization support
Junglemate.com	Outlook, Outlook Express, Organizer, Access, Excel	None	Upload only
Myphonebook.com	Goldmine	None	Upload only
Scheduleonline.com	Outlook, Palm	Palm	Two-way
My.Palm.net	Outlook, Notes, Organizer, ACT, Goldmine, Palm	Palm, Pocket PC	Two-way
Magicaldesk.com	Palm	Palm 7 only	Two-way
My.Yahoo.com	Outlook, ACT, Palm	Palm, Pocket PC	Two-way
Visto.com	Outlook/Outlook Express, Palm	Palm	Two-way

If you don’t use a Palm but still want the benefits of having a web-accessible address book, you have a few alternatives. Both My.Palm.net and My.Yahoo.com support Pocket PCs and several different desktop applications. Versions of Microsoft’s Exchange since 5.5 SP1 have included the ability to use a web browser to examine your Outlook contacts directly, without having to do any synchronization steps. Another choice is Adr_Book from Brown Bear Software (www.brownbearsw.com/adrbook). It comes with its own built-in web server, runs on any Windows machine and costs only $35. Within minutes, you’ll have your own contact list available on the web, and you can specify whether browsing users can update or just search your database. You just need a machine that has a constant Internet connection.

Wireless connections

There are numerous options for the corporate user on the go to turn their PDA into a wireless communicator. Much depends on how and where you travel, and whether you want a unit with wireless options built-in or want to purchase an optional wireless network adapter for the PDA. See the table below for a summary.

Wireless connection options

Network	Pocket PC	Palm	Blackberry
Wide-area	Optional CDPD modems/service plans for some models from Omnisky and GoAmerica	Built-in CDPD modem (Palm VII only), optional CDPD modems for various models	Built-in support either Motient (850, 857) or Cingular (950, 957)
WiFi LAN	PC Card models only	No	No
Cellular modem	PC Card and Compact Flash models only	Compact Flash models only	No
IR point-to-point	Built-in	Built-in	No

All of the Palm and Pocket PC units we cover include infrared capabilities. This can be useful if you meet up with someone else who has the same type of PDA and you want to transmit your contact information or copy one of your software applications to that person’s device. Some of the Ericsson cell phones also have the ability to send data over infrared links to Pocket PCs, eliminating the need to use a cable to connect the two devices (although some phones might require a special infrared adapter that fits in the same connector as the AC charger, which can be inconvenient). And if you need to move information to your laptop or have a printer with an infrared port, you can make use of these connections.

But infrared beams don’t travel beyond a few feet, and require a fairly precise alignment of the two devices to exchange data. Most PDA users want something that is more capable, and can be used when they are on the road.

The simplest situation is the Blackberry: all of the various models include a wireless modem that works in most metropolitan areas across the country as part of the package. Depending on the model chosen, the Blackberry operates on either the Motient (Ardis) or Cingular (BellSouth Wireless/Mobitex) network, and both networks offer seamless nationwide roaming coverage and some in-building coverage as well. In-building coverage will vary depending on where you are located and the construction materials used in the building. A handy reference from Aether Systems’ web site provides a way to enter your zip code and check coverage on both networks for both in-building, on the street, and mobile coverage:

http://www.aethersystems.com/software/software_template.asp?PAGE=ssvc_wim_main

The only Palm device that currently has a built-in wireless modem is the Palm VII series: it operates on the CDPD network, which also offers nationwide roaming but less capable in-building coverage. When you purchase either a Palm VII or a Blackberry, you sign up for one of the monthly service plans available that covers all of your data needs.

For example, Go.America offers two different service plan options for its Blackberries: an unlimited usage plan at $60 a month, and a lower-cost plan at $10 a month that includes the first 25 kilobytes of data transmitted. Once you send more data, you start paying extra by the byte. The wireless packages for the Palm VII also start at $10 a month for 50 kilobytes and there is another package at $25 a month and an unlimited plan for $45 a month. Other vendors offer different deals.

The Compaq iPaq Pocket PC PDA can also make use of wireless LAN PC Cards, provided you purchase the optional PC Card adapter that clicks on the back of the unit along with a wireless LAN PC Card, such as one from Lucent’s Orinoco. This can get expensive with all these options, but then you can roam around your building or home if you have one of the 802.11 access points to connect you to your corporate network.

Finally, there are a number of cellular modem optional accessories for both Palms and Pocket PCs that fit in their various expansion models and can connect to a variety of cellular phones. However, this particular route can easily be very costly, since most cellular networks charge by the minute and your minutes can add up quickly when you are online.

Using your PDA for corporate email

Each PDA has a variety of methods to send and receive emails. If you purchase a PDA with a wireless service plan, you obtain a special email address for the device. But you can also make use of additional software that can access your existing corporate email account.

The Blackberries come in two different configurations. The first, called Enterprise Edition, works with your existing Outlook/Exchange desktop email account. A special piece of software that resides either on your desktop or on your corporate Exchange server can redirect emails to your Blackberry that were originally addressed to your corporate account. The second configuration is called Internet Edition and doesn’t have this capability, but does have the ability through the use of Go.America’s Go.Web software to grab emails from any POP account.

Palms and PocketPCs with wireless modems can grab emails from existing POP accounts via Omnisky’s software. Palm platforms have the widest variety of email client programs, including ThinAirMail, AOL and email from portal vendors Yahoo, Excite, and Hotmail. The Palm VII comes with its own email software called iMessenger that doesn’t have as many features as some of the other products, and works with its special wireless account on Palm.net.

With any of these products, you can set up your email client on the PDA to leave copies of your messages on your email server, so you can download them to your desktop when you return from your travels.

Security concerns for PDAs

Having all this data on such a portable unit should be cause for some concern. There are a few things you can do to protect yourself. First, you should enable the password protection feature on the device: when you turn the unit back on, you need to enter a password to proceed to use it. While a bit more cumbersome, you have some minimal protection in case you lose the unit. The Blackberry has the best built-in security features of the three platforms. You can lock the unit from anyone else using it unless you enter a password, and it checks to make sure that enter a password of more than four characters and of sufficient complexity to make it harder for others to guess. It also only lets you enter a wrong password up to ten times.

The built-in Palm security options also allow you to hide specific contacts from view. You also need to specifically go to the Security application to turn off and lock the device from further use, which isn’t as capable as the Blackberry. But you can extend the Palm’s security features with add-on software utilities such as AutoLock, EasyLock, Locker, OneTouchPass and others available from the Palmgear.com’s web site.

Second, you need to synchronize your contact and other information that you store in your PDA regularly with your desktop, so that you aren’t at risk if your unit goes on the blink or if you leave the device behind on some airplane. All of the products make synchronizing data very easy, and you should also take advantage of one of the web-based address book services for further backup of your contacts. An add-on to your Palm called BackupBuddy also extends protection further to all of your applications.

Finally, if you are concerned about the reports of catching email viruses on your Palm, Symantec makes a version of its popular Anti-Virus software for Palms that can help.

Storage and expansion modules available

There are a number of different kinds of expansion cards available for the various PDAs, with the notable exception of the Blackberries. And the market for these expansion cards is quickly evolving, as manufacturers incorporate new designs into their devices. Let’s look at the various types available and typical costs.

Why would you want to use any of these expansion products? Three reasons: memory, connectivity, and coolness. All of the various expansion cards offer some form of memory expansion to begin with, ranging from a few megabytes to several hundred. If you are looking for the maximum amount of memory, the PC Card and Compact Flash cards currently have the largest capacities, and IBM sells a gigabyte micro hard disk drive that fits into the Compact Flash form factor. Prices for these different memory options is somewhere around $1 per megabyte, although the IBM Microdrive is half of that. If you have to tote around your entire contact database, or the collected works of your corporate legal department, this extra room can come in handy.

The range of installed RAM with any PDA can be limiting, particularly as your needs and installed applications grow. And while a typical PDA application doesn’t take up much room, it doesn’t have much RAM to play with: Palms come with at most 8 MB of RAM, for example.

The various connectivity options literally cover the map. There are wireless and wired modems, Ethernet adapters, wireless LAN adapters, and Global Positioning System devices, complete cellular phones on a card, and more. These make your PDA more useful, particularly as you can connect it to your corporate network resources.

Finally, there are some pretty cool attachments that can make using your PDA fun, such as a miniature digital camera for your Visor and Palms.

The oldest expansion card family is the PC Card, which began its life as a means to standardize amongst the various notebook and laptop expansion modules and can be found on just about every portable computer these days. Despite their ubiquity, PC Cards consume a lot of power so aren’t as popular among PDAs, although the Compaq iPaq supports them. Given their popularity, there are a wide variety of converter adapters that allow other media to fit inside PC Card slots, including Compact Flash cards, SmartMedia cards, MemoryStick cards, and others.

Handspring created a new expansion series with its Visor Palm-compatibles, and now there are dozens of different Springboard modules, as they are called, available. Some of them come with their own battery power. The disadvantage is that only the Visors can make use of them.

Another popular expansion card is the Compact Flash adapter, which is about half the size of a PC Card module and available on a wide variety of PDAs, digital cameras, and portable MP3 players.

Finally, there are smallest cards called Secure Digital Memory Cards and MultiMedia Cards. They are both the same size, about that of a small postage stamp. The former are designed for creating secure digital copies of music and other copyrighted information. As devices continue to shrink in size, this form factor will probably become more popular.

Can all cards fit in all PDAs? No, not even close. Both the Compact Flash and PC Card format have different form factors, depending on the thickness of the card. This means that the thicker cards can’t fit into the thinner slots.

Expansion Options

Expansion Interface, URL	Pocket PC	Palm
Springboard www.handspring.com/developers	No	All Visor models
PC Card www.pc-card.com	IPaq*	No
CompactFlash www.compactflash.org	Jornada, Casio E-125, iPaq*, Aero	Some models
Memory Stick www.sony.com.hk/Electronics/pr_t/tec/memory	No	Sony Clie
MultiMediaCard www.sony.com.hk/Electronics/pr_t/tec/memory Secure Digital www.sdcard.org	Casio EM-500	Palm m500/505
SmartMedia www.ssfdc.or.jp/english	No	Some models

Note: None of these expansion modules are available for any Blackberry devices.

* Add-on expansion modules for iPaq require an additional “jacket” adapter.

Overview of wireless networking technologies

Keeping track of the various wireless networking standards is getting tougher, particularly as they continue to multiply. Here are the three latest versions and what is involved in each.

	802.11 Wireless LAN	HomeRF	Bluetooth
Speed	1-54 Mbps	1-10 Mbps	30-400 Kbps
Range	100-300 feet	150 feet	30 feet
Radio Technology	Direct sequence and frequency hopping	Frequency Hopping	Frequency hopping
Typical vendors	Cisco, Lucent, 3Com	Apple, Intel, Motorola	Ericsson, Nokia
Types of devices	PC and notebook connections	PC and notebook connections	Cell phone and handheld connections
Web site for more information	wirelessethernet.com hiperlan2.com	homerf.org	bluetooth.com

The 802.11 wireless networks standards actually encompass two very different sets of products and standards: 802.11a and 802.11b. While the 802.11b series has received the most attention and is the first to reach product maturity, the 802.11a series isn’t far behind and should actually reach the market within the next year. The 802.11b products are also called WiFi, for wireless fidelity, or wireless Ethernet in various places. The design goal for these types of networks is to replace wired Ethernet cabling with radio waves, but still be able to deliver the traditional office and network applications, including web browsing, email, and document sharing.

HomeRF, for Home Radio Frequency, is another wireless standard. With products from Intel, Proxim, Compaq and others, it is geared towards lower-cost and shorter distances than the WiFi 802.11b product line, and thus more suitable for home uses. It also was designed from the start to support low-latency integrated voice/data applications, something that the 802.11 products are not designed for. It extends the European standard for wireless telephones called Digital Enhanced Cordless Telephony, which is used in wireless PBX equipment there.

The HomeRF standard is different from the HomePNA standard, or Home PhoneLine Network Architecture. PNA is strictly a wired connection, making use of two wires as would be found in almost every modern home. Ordinary twisted-pair Ethernet wiring uses four wires: PNA enables PCs to be connected over standard telephone lines, and more importantly, to share the phone line concurrently with regular voice calls. Another advantage of PNA over ordinary Ethernet is that no hub is required: it is a daisy-chain connection from one PC to another, similar to the original PhoneTalk wiring from Apple.

If you really need a keyboard

Even the most dedicated PDA user will find out that there are sometimes a real keyboard can come in handy. All of the Blackberry models come with miniature QWERTY-style typewriter keyboards: the 857 and 957 models have keyboards that are somewhat larger but still nowhere near the size of your average laptop. You wouldn’t want to write the great American novel, or even a short story, on a Blackberry. But for sending quick messages, these keyboards are adequate.

However, the Palm and several of the Pocket PC units are more expandable and can be connected to an optional keyboard if you need to compose lengthier documents. Perhaps the best is the Stowaway units that fold up into a package not much bigger than the PDA itself. When unfolded, these keyboards are surprisingly responsive and large enough even for the most ham-handed typist to deal with. Targus makes different models for various Visors, and Jornada and iPaq devices, and Palm sells its own version. (CDW sells these for about $100, see the table below.)

The separate models are necessary because the keyboards fit on the bottom of the units, in the place where the synchronization cable or cradle is usually connected. And this connector differs depending on the particular PDA you are using. This means that you need to disconnect one to do the other, but that is a small inconvenience given that you can type in lengthy documents: we have heard of people writing entire books on their PDAs with these keyboards!

Portable Keyboard chart

Product	PDA Devices supported	CDW Part Number
Palm Portable Keyboard	Palm V series	209778
Palm Portable Keyboard	Palm III, VII, m100 series	238134
Palm Portable Keyboard	Palm m500 and m505 series	285734
Targus Stowaway Keyboard	All Visor models	221204
Targus Stowaway Keyboard	Jornada models	244552
Compaq Stowaway Keyboard	IPaq models	277673

VARBusiness: Groove up close (c2001)

Posted on February 15, 2001 by dstrom

We test out Groove, the new collaborative tool from the father of Notes

Tired of using a bunch of different tools to collaborate over the Internet? Then you need to get with the Groove.

Groove Networks is the latest software brainchild of Notes inventor Ray Ozzie. It combines the best of Notes with the peer-to-peer flexibility that Napster pioneered. Only Groove isn’t about sharing digital music files. It’s about getting serious collaborative work done. It’s both mundane and elegant at the same time. And it deserves serious consideration for enterprise network managers.

Over the years, I have developed my own collection of tools to get work done over the Internet. For example, I use My Yahoo for keeping track of my family calendar and contacts, MyDocsOnline as a shared storage space for my critical documents and AOL Instant Messenger (IM) to communicate quickly with friends and colleagues. It isn’t perfect — and it’s often messy — but this collection mostly does the trick. I am sure your own remote workers have a similar set of tools to do their jobs.

These are just my own personal preferences; there are plenty of other companies that are trying to provide pieces of this puzzle. The number of office-in-a-browser Web sites numbers in the dozens, including TeamOn.com, MyFreeDesk and Blox.com. There’s also Ecal.com, which provides Web-based calendaring technology. And LapLink.com does file synchronization with document repositories such as Driveway and MyDocsOnline. Even old-economy Pitney Bowes has iSend.com, a secure document delivery service

Stop! Between remembering the various login and password requirements for each site, downloading whatever piece of client software is required for these “100 percent browser” solutions, and dealing with their various idiosyncrasies, I’ve had enough. The trouble is, these solutions are far too complex and fussy for the average person. And as enterprises become more distributed, they are impossible to support. Groove changes all of this.

Yes, you do need to download its client, but it’s free. And once you get it set up — and it doesn’t take too long — you can start doing all of the tasks mentioned above (and more) with your workgroup. And it works behind firewalls and over dial-up connections. All you need is an Internet connection and a Windows PC.

I tested the latest beta build on both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Pentiums with at least 96 MB of RAM — you’ll need at least this much memory and a 300 MHz or better Pentium if you want to see acceptable performance from Groove. And while the company claims it will work over dial up connections, I would recommend that your initial group of users make use of higher speed links, such as ISDN, DSL, or T-1 connections.

Under the Microscope

If you understand how Napster works with music files, Groove does something similar, but for all kinds of digital information. When you are connected to the Internet and have its client up and running, Groove broadcasts who you are and what you have to share with the outside world. You can set up different workspaces for different groups of people, similar to the way Notes works, only this time the workspaces contain common things like Word documents and Web pages. You can start discussion threads, doodle something with your mouse on a sketchpad or jot down some thoughts in an IM session. You can even play chess or tic-tac-toe, though you can move the chess pieces around with abandon.

Groove has some impressive features, and you don’t have to turn on secure or encrypted communications within your workgroup. It’s always on, and there’s nothing extra you have to do. That’s a big plus. You can invite others to participate in your little collective via e-mail, sending an attached invitation that can easily be incorporated into the Groove client.

There aren’t any new protocols to support, port numbers to enable, or any other network infrastructure. Best of all, you don’t have to run — and support — a specialized Groove server, since everything is peer-to-peer. This is a boon for overworked IS managers and other support personnel. The amazing thing about Groove is that it just works, and works well.

The biggest issue is that Groove is still pretty new stuff, and the number of people who are using it in any meaningful way is small. I get the feeling this is what the people who had the first telephones had to deal with. You want to be grooving with all of your frequent contacts — the days of sending e-mails back and forth, trying to collectively produce a presentation or document should be over by now, and Groove will help us get there. It works even better if an entire corporate workgroup can bring up Groove together.

Desired Features

There are a few missing pieces that I wish I had right now that would make me feel more groovy. One is the ability to import my calendar information from Yahoo or some other online or enterprise calendar service. Another is the ability to communicate with AOL’s IM users and download my buddy list into Groove. Ozzie says he is working on these and other enhancements. In addition, the use of e-mail to send out invites may not work properly if you have multiple e-mail clients on your PC and don’t have them configured correctly. You also will need some patience, as synchronizing all this information can take some time, depending on the raw size of the files and the quality of your network connection.

But these are minor points. I think Groove holds lots of promise and, indeed, just using it to communicate between my home and office machines was enough of a plus for me. Those of you who leave files on one computer or another, forgetting to upload them before you leave for work, are ripe for getting groovy. If you are already using Notes, Groove is worth looking at because of this: many of us have quit in frustration and bought a laptop to use at both home and work rather than try to deal with synchronizing their Notes desktop between different machines.

And if you can set up your own workgroups in Groove, you’ll get immediate benefits. This software is definitely worth a careful look and could be the most important example of peer-to-peer technology in the coming months, regardless of what happens legally to Napster.

Sidebar: Five Ways to Sell Groove to your clients

To best get with the Groove, you’ll want to identity the lowest-hanging fruit in an organization. Here are my suggestions:

— Look for project managers of distributed workgroups. Those workgroups that span several countries or time zones will be ripe for Groove.

— Focus on higher-level managers who work both out of their homes and at the office, and need to synchronize their files between both computers.

— Look for pockets of users within your organization who are frequent instant messaging users. They have the right culture to adopt Groove.

— Find project teams who need to frequently exchange files.

— Find people who travel frequently and want to stay connected with the home office. Groove can be used effectively to update these traveling users.

Computerworld: Three new wireless email devices

Posted on October 25, 1999 by dstrom

(NOTE: This was written in October 1999)

Traveling executives looking to cut the cord on their email habit have lots of choices these days. I looked at three of the latest wireless email devices — the Palm VII, the Touchpoint phone with a built-in web browser from Sprint, and an updated two-way pager from Research in Motion. All three do more than wireless email of course — you can jot down notes, keep track of your schedules and even use the phone to make cellular phone calls, too. While each unit has its frustrations and problems, all three are improvements on the trio of devices I reviewed this past February 15, “Hold the Phone (Line).”

I’ve used one form of wireless email or another for over eight years, and you’ll want to consider the following issues:

— Can I get email on these devices with the same corporate email account that I use on my desktop? Most devices require some effort and some combination of software and services to do this.

— How much skill do I need to key in a typical reply message? None of the devices is as handy as a full-sized typewriter keyboard. You should try one out before buying to make sure you are comfortable with its controls and key layouts.

— Do these devices work indoors and in out-of-the-way places? All three work best outdoors and in major metro areas. The further from the center city and inside buildings you take them, the worse the radio reception gets. This is just physics.

— Is the price reasonable and predictable? All of the devices come with a wide array of monthly service plans and fees. Make sure you understand the pricing plan you need up front.

In the ideal world, each device would come with everything you need to extract email from your existing corporate account. However, we aren’t there yet. Each of the three devices comes with its own email account, separate from your existing corporate email account. If your corporate email system has message forwarding features, you can turn that on when you leave town and have your mail forwarded to your device.

But that isn’t always convenient or possible, and a series of web-based service providers offer ways around this by acting as email forwarders. They make copies of email in your existing corporate account and then send them to your wireless device (or indeed, any other email account). Two service providers are MonkeyMail.com and Visto.com.

With both you setup your existing email account information and tell it where you want your mail forwarded. MonkeyMail costs $5 pre month, and free for the first month. I wasn’t happy with the MonkeyMail service: once you start it there isn’t any way to stop it, which means if you get a lot of email it will quickly overwhelm the device. Visto has a better interface, more features, and the ability to filter messages based on subject or sender or other criteria, plus it is free.

I took all three devices with me on several business trips, as well as carried them all over town to determine coverage and battery life. I also connected them to a Windows NT desktop and tested their synchronization software and other utilities. Of the three, the Palm offers the most promise: it has the largest and most active developer community and the best software. However, to really be an effective Palm user you’ll need to learn its Graffiti language to compose messages.

Touchpoint phone with Wireless Web

Sprint PCS / Denso

Kansas City, Mo.

800 480 4727

www.sprintpcs.com

Wireless service: Sprint PCS with service from Phone.com

Price: Various pricing plans for both voice and data, starting at $10/month and up plus price of phone

Keyboard/screen: 7 lines with 12-button phone keys with Tegic script

Batteries: rechargeable, last for up to two days

Available this fall

Sprint PCS has introduced its Wireless Web service, where you can browse some web sites using your cellular phone. A number of different phones are available for this service, which should be available by the time you read this, including phones from Motorola, Nokia, Qualcomm and others. I tested a phone from Denso called the Touchpoint. Any of these phones comes ready to read mail from Yahoo: you can setup a free account there and have it collect your corporate email. And if you don’t need to reply to your messages, you can forward or copy mail to Sprint’s short messaging feature (every Sprint phone can receive email at phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com). I wanted to use the phone to read my mail at Infinite Technologies’ MailAndNews.com site, but Infinitie was still working out the bugs with Sprint at press time.

Built into the phone is software from Tegic Communications Inc. called T9. Since you only have 12 buttons to key in any text, Tegic has developed a way to predict what you are going to type and help shortcut the process. While no substitute for a QWERTY keyboard, it does a credible job.

Blackberry Interactive pager

Research in Motion

Waterloo, Ontario Canada

519 888-7465

www.blackberry.net

Wireless service: BellSouth Wireless Data (850 model uses Ardis)

Price: $399 plus $40/mo for unlimited usage

Available: this fall

Keyboard/screen: full QWERTY keyboard but very small keys, screen has up to 8 line display

Battery: one AA lasts up to three days

The Blackberry has the best keyboard of the three, with a full typewriter layout of keys albeit only three inches wide. Given its size, I could type fairly easily and compose longer messages than on the other devices. It comes with relatively weak desktop synchronization software, since you can’t synchronize your emails yet between the device and your desktop. It also has the most confusing set of different models. There is one that works only with Microsoft Exchange servers, another with Internet email, and a third model runs over American Mobile Ardis wireless networks. This latter model has a $60/month usage plan and works with your existing email account, called eLink Agent (www.elinkmail.com). GoAmerica offers email access for varying fees as well as will sell you a reduced-price Blackberry (www.goamerica.net). Also, if you have an account with several ISPs including RCN and Espernet.com, they will configure a unit to work with your email.

Palm VII

Palm Computing

Santa Clara, Calif.

408 326-5000

www.palm.com

Wireless service: BellSouth Wireless Data

Price: $499 plus various plans ($10 to $40/mo, depending on volume) plus $10 for activation fee

Keyboard/screen: Touch screen with Graffiti script, Palm screen 3.5 ” diagonal

Batteries: two ordinary AAA, last for two or more weeks

Available in NY since May and nationwide since October

The Palm VII has a variety of ways to read and respond to email. It comes with its own email software built-in, callled iMesenger. However, it doesn’t have as many features as I’d like, such as filtering, scheduled forwarding, and mass message deletes. For example, you have to login to the palm.net website in order to delete multiple messages at once. To obtain these features and also to read your existing email account you’ll need to make use of either Visto, Yahoo Mail or MonkeyMail services mentioned earlier. Another choice is to use ThinAirMail.com’s client software, which is free and my favorite of the current alternatives for wireless email.

No matter which service or software you use, you are stuck with using Graffiti to compose messages. It will take some time to learn this language, but is easier than keying than responses on the Touchpoint phone’s keypad.

————————————–

Palm Info:

Under the Basic Plan, a user pays $9.99 per month for

approximately 80 transactions (50 kilobytes). Typical monthly

usage under this plan might include a combination of 30

messages, 20 stock quotes, 10 sports scores, 10 traffic

reports and 10 weather updates. Under the Expanded Plan,

more frequent users pay $24.99 per month for approximately

240 transactions, or three times the number of transactions as

under the Basic Plan (150 kilobytes).

Volume Plan at $39.99, which covers twice the usage of the

Expanded Plan, or approximately 480 transactions (300

kilobytes). Sample monthly usage under this plan might look

like 180 messages, 120 stock quotes, 60 sports scores, 60

traffic reports and 60 weather updates. Under a special

promotion, Palm VII users who sign up for the Palm.Net service

under the Volume Plan before January 4, 2000 will receive

approximately 1,600 transactions per month (1,000 kilobytes)

for the first six months of service.

Blackberry info:

typical email: user@myblackberry.com

Also offers web-based email which can collect mail from your POP mail account

Can’t reconcile emails with your desktop but can synch calendars.

RCN and espernet.com are offering the units to their subscribers

Confused, though: contact jkampfe@bellsouthwd.com

Under a special purchase promotion that

also is in effect until December 31, subscribers can buy a RIM

Inter@ctive Pager 950 for $249 with a minimum two-year service plan of

at least $29.95 a month or for $299 with a minimum one-year service plan

of at least $29.95 a month.

American Mobile also offers another plan for $60/month that works with Ardis and uses your existing email account, called eLink Agent (www.elinkmail.com)

Computerworld (1999): Internet to fax technologies

Posted on June 14, 1999 by dstrom

(Note: this review was written back in 1999 and preserved for historical reasons.)

There is nothing more frustrating for a business traveler than trying to send and receive faxes when on the road. Having your most confidential business dealings exposed to the world of front desk clerks, or just plain lost in transit, makes any trip aggravating. Trying to stay put in one place long enough to receive a fax can be tough, especially for executives on the go.

Fortunately, there are several Internet faxing services available that can make things easier, using either your existing email software or the web to send and receive faxes securely and with less trouble. While Internet faxing isn’t new, in recent months these providers have added functions and made their products easier and cheaper to operate.

The best solution for sending faxes is to use a fax modem (on your PC, but that may not be practical when you travel and are expecting a fax. Enter the Internet fax providers. Some providers offer services for both sending and receiving faxes, others specialize in one direction only. The sending/outbound services work in one of four ways:

an email gateway maintained by the service provider. You compose your fax as an email message, and send to a special email address that is maintained by the fax service provider which transforms your message into a fax. This is the easiest method to use since there is nothing to learn and you can send messages to mixed fax and email addresses.
a Windows printer driver on your local PC. This is best if you compose your faxes with Office applications such as Word.
a series of CGI scripts you install on your own web server. This is good if you want to install a fax gateway quickly on your local network.
a web form hosted on their web site which you fill out to send the fax, great for occasional use.

One of the advantages of the outbound services is the low rate for sending international faxes, as compared to the cost of using ordinary dial-up voice phone lines. If you do a lot of international faxing, you should considering using these services exclusively for your faxes. Other advantages over traditional paper-based faxing is that some services send confirmations on successful transmissions to your email box, and you also don’t waste time trying to send a fax to a busy fax machine — the services will make several attempts to send your fax.

But these services are for sending faxes. There are other service providers for receiving faxes. They typically assign you a fax number in another area code and route the faxes to your own email box (as an attachment) or to a place on their web site where you can view your faxes. You may require special viewing software to see the attachment fax image, or you may be able to use Windows Imaging or your web browser to view them. These services range from free to fee, depending on whether you want to use their supplied phone number or choose one which has an area code closer to your home. And some of the providers also offer 888 or toll-free fax numbers at an additional monthly cost.

Speaking of fees, you will end up paying in some cases an initial account setup fee, and either a per-page cost for your fax or a monthly charge that will cover a certain number of faxes. These all compare favorably with the cost of sending ordinary faxes over regular phone lines, around ten cents per page or less.

The table reviews several different providers and which technologies they support. (NB: Most of these have gone away.) Of the three described in detail below, Jfax has the best range of both inbound and outbound technologies and NetMoves/FaxSav the most complete outbound offerings. eFax is a good first-time solution for outbound users as well.

Jfax.com, Inc.

Jfax was one of the original fax providers and has the most complete range of services. They began with the rock star Jaye Muller who was frustrated at missing his faxes when he traveled. They offer two different inbound services, both of which do not require any additional viewing software. You can get a free fax number in a random area code, or if you desire a specific area code in one of 60 different locations (or a toll-free number) you can obtain one for a monthly fee of $12.50. They also offer an outbound email gateway under their Jfaxsend.com domain. This also has a $12.50 monthly fee.

NetMoves Corp.

NetMoves used to be called Faxsav, another long-time fax provider. They recently dropped their fees and offer a great many services for less than $5 a month, including an inbound fax number at their area code, special Windows print driver faxing software (Faxlauncher), 100 free pages both inbound and outbound per month. If you use more than your 100 pages, the cost is five cents per page. If you want to specify the area code for your inbound number, that will cost an additional $3 a month. NetMoves also has other outbound services, including CGI scripts (FaxProxy) to turn your web server into a fax machine and an email gateway (Faxmailer)

eFax.com

eFax was the first company to offer free inbound faxes to the public, but unlike Jfax you will need to download their viewing software to see your faxes, which arrive as email attachments. They have also an arrangement with eGroups such that each eGroup will have access to their own fax number allowing physical documents to be sent to the discussion groups. They offer toll-free fax numbers, which cost $30 per year, an initial fee of $5 and 10 cents per page received. They do not currently offer any outbound services.

Windows Sources: 3 eCommerce Suites Reviewed (1999)

Posted on June 2, 1999 by dstrom

The departed Windows Sources magazine from the original Ziff empire was a fun series of assignments. Here is a review that I wrote back in 1999 that looked at three leading eCommerce suites that were the cutting edge back then.

The first skill you’ll need to start your own web-based storefront has nothing to do with selling, marketing, or how to arrange an attractive online catalog of items. Instead, it is patience. While all of these skills are helpful, what you’ll really need is the ability to wait while you download lots of software to set up your web storefront. Why all the downloading? Mainly because there isn’t a single product that can do the job, and indeed finding the right set of tools will take some significant effort. To make matters more difficult, the price of tools covers anywhere from several hundreds of dollars to more than $20,000!

You’ll need a web server, of course, and you have your choice of several dozen on NT that support secure transactions. Then you’ll need to figure out how to connect your catalog, inventory and existing product information databases to whatever web server you end up using. You’ll also have to provide a way for shoppers to search for the items they want to purchase as they navigate your storefront. And you’ll need to implement a payment system to either accept credit cards over the Internet or else make use of one or more net-based payment schemes. Finally, you’ll need to administer these various pieces of software as your needs and catalog changes.

That is a lot of different pieces and products to manage. Fortunately, you can try out many of them for free, and download the required files and documentation directly from the Internet. However, these freebies have limits on their usage before you have to pay, usually 30 days. This means that before you implement any web commerce solution, you’ll want to identify all the various products you might need and get them to your hard disk. Once you install all of this software, the clock starts ticking.

Besides patience, you’ll need to be familiar with creating your own HTML documents and be able to manage and setup various databases. If you are still learning HTML or have no exposure to designing data structures, then opening your own web store will require learning these skills quickly.

While you might think that you should start by picking your web server, we recommend postponing this decision until the very end of the process. Instead, you should start by looking at database servers and their associated web-based tools. The core of any web storefront is how data is manipulated, stored, and updated. This data includes not only the items that you offer for sale but tracking inventory, orders, and customers. If you already have this information maintained in your own electronic database, then you should run your web storefront using this software. If not, then you should consider using Microsoft’s SQL Server, Informix or Oracle’s software, all of which run on NT. Why? These are the most common platforms for many web-based storefronts, and there is a wide selection of web-based tools that work with these servers. Pick SQL Server if you think you want to use any other Microsoft-based tools, such as Merchant or Microsoft’s web server. Pick Oracle if you can find someone who is steeped in Oracle’s plSQL language. Pick Informix if you don’t fit either of these situations.

Once you pick your database, you’ll next want to look at what tool to use to manipulate your data into web format. There are many different ways to go here, but all products fall into one of three categories: First are those such as Allaire’s Cold Fusion that add their own HTML-like markup commands to specific web pages, so that results from your queries can be built on the fly. These kinds of products are good for developing your own web-based forms, such as to search for a particular kind of product feature through your entire catalog. Second are products such as Bluestone’s Sapphire that are complete application development environments and allow for publishing parts of the database via the web. Use these if you already have developed your own client/server databases and need to webify them. Finally, there are products such as Oracle’s Web Server that extend the database procedural language itself. Depending on your own database expertise and what you are trying to accomplish, you may want to look at more than one type of product.

Now that you have your database decision, it is time to look one of the storefront software suites. Unlike office productivity suites, these suites are really more toolkits than pre-packaged software. There is still a great deal of integration, setup, and programming that you’ll need to accomplish before you can open your storefront. Not to mention price – while you might pay several hundred dollars for each single-function tool, the suites will cost several thousands of dollars – and in some cases several tens of thousands of dollars. Obviously, these products are for serious merchants.

The three leading candidates for NT-based servers are iCat’s Electronic Commerce Suite v 3.0, Microsoft Merchant v 1.0 and IBM’s Net.Commerce v 1.0. All three are shipping products. We should mention that Open Market, which has had one of the most expensive but also capable of merchant suites for Unix, should have a beta version on NT by the time you read this. There is a wide range in price among the three suites from a few thousand dollars to nearly $20,000. Setting up these three products is covered in our lab notes section, although we had to have lots of help from each vendor’s technical support teams to get our store running.

Overall, we liked the IBM product the best: it had the most coherent set of software, controls, and features, and came with both a fully-featured web server and database server as part of the package. However, both Microsoft and iCat have more third-party tools and support. We liked the shopping cart portion of iCat and the many different sample stores that came with Merchant. And we didn’t like the fact that Net.Commerce requires the IBM web and database servers to run – if it were more inclusive with other people’s products, it would be a hands-down winner.

Why would you want a suite? Several reasons: you need help in understanding how databases and web servers interact, and the suites are a good place to learn by example. Each suite comes with at least one sample storefront that you can modify and use as the basis of starting your own store. The suites also come with their own shopping-cart systems, making it easier for you to develop a way to track what a shopper chooses as she or he navigates through your web storefront.

Merchant comes with the VeriFone payment system as part of the package. This is helpful if you already have your own merchant bank account set up to accept credit card payments via non-Internet customers, such as those that call you or visit your physical store. Speaking of VeriFone, they sell a separate payment server that runs on NT for $2500 – this could be useful if you are concerned about security, don’t want to run Merchant software, or have existing non-NT based web storefronts.

Don’t buy a suite if you have lots of CGI and perl programming expertise, or plan on using a consultant who has these skills. The home-grown perl solution, such as for a shopping cart system that can be found at www.egrafx.com/minishop, can provide much of the same functionality at much the same cost. And you if already are using web/database products such as Cold Fusion or Sapphire, then you probably can duplicate much of the suite’s functions at much lower software cost.

If you don’t have the funds to buy a storefront suite and don’t have the programming skill to do it yourself, you might want to consider buying several single-function tools and seeing if you can knit them together into what you need. For example, you could use a shopping cart system from Mercantec, a search/index tool from Saqqara, and an accounting tool from Inex and still end up spending much less than the least expensive suite. Our table lists the various products that run on NT and which particular elements each supports.

At this point, your web server decision is easy. Pick the ones that are supported by your database and your suite of software tools. Keep in mind that you want a web server that supports at least one, and preferably both of the two common secure protocols: Secure HTTP, originally developed by Enterprise Integration Technologies and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), originally developed by Netscape. S-HTTP encrypts the web-based traffic between client and server on a page-by-web page basis. SSL encrypts more of the protocol stack and works on a connection-by-connection basis. Neither is bullet-proof against the most determined hacker, but shoppers like knowing that something is encrypted when they are about to type in their credit card number and send it over the Internet. Some servers, such as IBM’s Secure Internet Connection Server, support one or the other, while others, such as WebSite Pro, support both security systems.

The most common secure NT web servers are from Microsoft, Netscape, O’Reilly’s WebSite Pro, AOL’s NaviPress, and Oracle. There are plenty others to choose from, and you can view a long list at www.webcompare.com. Once you obtain your web server software, your final step will be to obtain a certificate from VeriSign at www.verisign.com. This company keeps track of who you say you are and is necessary for making use of a server that runs SSL. You’ll need to use the web server software (both IBM’s Server and WebSite Pro have excellent documentation on the steps required here) to create a certificate request. Then, you’ll need to print out this information and fax your request to VeriSign along with information on your company’s letterhead that indicates you have the right to use your corporate identity.

As you can see, e-commerce covers a wide range of software tools, from freebie utilities to multiple-thousand-dollar suites, and lots in-between. There is also a wide range of knowledge between assembling some plain HTML pages and being able to integrate database, web tools, and payment and catalog servers together to put up your web storefront.

[lab notes]

Lab notes MS Merchant

Microsoft Merchant is a complex product to install and setup, and digs deep into the underlying NT operating system. Before installing anything, make sure you are familiar with SQL Server and have installed at least version 6.5 with Service Pack 1 for SQL Server applied. You’ll also need to become familiar with at least version 2 of IIS and have it installed as well.

The advantages of Merchant is that it comes with lots of tools to help you manage your store, step up your database, and handle financial and accounting of your sales. If you already have databases setup for products and financial systems, and if you can connect to these data sources with ODBC, then chances are good you won’t have to duplicate this information inside Merchant.

Merchant also comes with three different environments for development, staging, and production. You can post changes to your development environment. Merchant does some simple debugging of your HTML pages in this environment, which is a plus. Once you are satisfied with these you can migrate your data over to the production server, where any debugging code is removed. This has lots of appeal, especially if you want to test various storefront configurations and options without having these tests appear in your production online store. However, the migration is complex, requiring you to copy the database schema and its associated data tables, any supporting files such as templates and graphic images, and registry keys. All of this has to be copied manually using the tools in the database server and registry editor programs. That’s a lot of work.

Merchant also comes with a sample version of VeriFone’s vPOS credit card software. This is used to post credit card transactions to your acquiring bank and issue credits, although the version that is included with Merchant is missing these features. If you have an existing merchant bank account, you should obtain this software directly from your bank. If you don’t have a merchant account, then you will have to obtain one.

Setting up a new store is a multiple-step process: First, you use the Administrator control panel screens to make a copy of one of the starter stores that comes with the package. Microsoft has included four sample “starter stores” that have different item groupings and configurations: there is a sporting goods store, a coffee store, a bookstore, and a clock shop. We suggest you take a look at each of the samples to figure out which one matches your own needs the closest. Unfortunately, you can’t mix and match elements of the samples – you can only copy an entire sample store to use as the basis for your own store.

The Adventure Works sample store has the best set of advanced merchandising techniques, including the ability to support sales, promotions, and cross-selling. If you want to take advantage of any of these features, then examining how this store was designed is helpful. The simplest store is the clock shop, with only one type of product and a limited number of items. The clock shop has no searching or registering functions; these are implemented in the other two stores.

Next, you want to run the ODBC control panel and create a new data source name to link to. Then you’ll have to use a text editor to modify a series of four SQL script files, replacing the name of the starter store with the new name you’ve created. Then you’ll run these scripts in Microsoft’s SQL Enterprise Manager, modify the registry entries for your starter store, and restart the Merchant Server from its control panel.

While these steps are carefully documented in the Merchant on-line manuals, that’s a lot of mucking about with five different NT programs. We didn’t mind this as much as the frequent use of the registry editor to do various tasks, including modifying the behavior of the program itself. There are entries to enable cookies to store user identities, to enable SQL Server to startup before the Merchant service starts (otherwise Merchant won’t come up automatically when you reboot your server), to be remotely administered over the Internet, and indeed most of the ordering system itself. Using the registry editor is a concern because there is the potential to damage a working NT server – indeed, throughout Microsoft’s documentation are warnings to be careful typing in the various commands. We hope Microsoft eliminates the need to modify registry entries directly in the next release of Merchant.

Merchant can be freely downloaded from the net at http://www.microsoft.com/merchant/eval/survey.htm, and is a 15 MB file that includes online documentation in both MS Word and HTML format.

Lab Notes icat

The heart of the iCat software is its catalog of items, and the software comes with a variety of tools to manage these items, design your web storefront pages, and track purchases. Like Merchant, you post any changes first to a staging database, and then when you are satisfied that your changes are correct, copy them to the live production database. This has lots of appeal, but is somewhat confusing to keep track of.

Getting our store setup with iCat wasn’t too difficult, but does require going through a series of four steps. Each of these can be accomplished by using a web browser or by working directly with the underlying database structure. If you have to make many changes to the sample store, you’ll want to work directly with the database itself. Once your store is setup and you have a few changes, you can deal with the HTML-based forms. This is because the forms take more time to display, fill out, and post the updates than the equivalent database-oriented commands.

The first step with iCat is to create your database. You can use the copy of Sybase SQL Anywhere that comes with the product or connect to your own ODBC source. Unfortunately, the Sybase software was not included in our beta. You can enter the promotional prices, discounts, and upsells here. (An upsell is where a customer is shown another item to buy based on something he or she has already purchased. You want the floor mats with that new car?) Next you design a series of templates, which will control the look and feel of the actual pages of your catalog that will be seen by your shoppers. Third, you specify the location where all the HTML pages, database files, and other miscellaneous files can be found on your hard disk. Finally, you set various sales options such as matching sales tax rates to particular locations and whether or not to make use of the registration, indexing, and searching tools in your catalog.

Many of these options are already included as part of the sample hardware store database, and it is fairly easy to understand how the store is structured and what pieces related to others by just navigating through the pages. For example, the sales tax screens matches a sales tax rate with a zip code. You still have to enter both pieces of information, but at least the data structures are specified.

There isn’t any wizard to walk you through this process, instead you have to visit a series of screens and fill out the web-based forms. It isn’t all that difficult, just time consuming.

iCat comes in two versions, a standard and professional. Even though the latter costs almost three times as much, it is worth the extra money because it runs much faster and is more extensible. A cottage industry of third-parties has grown up to supply iCat with various add-ons, including payment authorization software and sales tax calculators, and these add-ons only work with the more expensive version. We also recommend buying additional memory to bring your server up to at least 64 mB, since the software ran slowly on our Pentium server with 32 mB of RAM.

Lab notes Net.Commerce

IBM’s Net.Commerce comes with everything you need in a single package: a web server (IBM’s own Internet Connection Secure Server), a database server (IBM’s own Database 2), and the various e-commerce pieces, including a shopping cart application and a credit card number verification applet.

Setting up the servers should be relatively straightforward, but we had all sorts of problems and had to reinstall the product several times. Once we began the installation on a “clean” NT machine (meaning a machine that had a fresh copy of NT without any other applications), we had an easier time. The setup screens are all HTML forms, and there is plenty of help showing you how to navigate from screen to screen. IBM has done a great job with providing this roadmap on how to set up some fairly complex software.

However, a few tips are missing from the manuals. First we disabled Microsoft’s own IIS web server before doing anything else, something that the IBM support people recommended. We then created a new account that had administrator privileges – DB2 can’t install under the default Administrator account name. After rebooting, we installed IBM’s web server software.

You get the feeling that IBM is concerned about security, which is a good thing when you are setting up your storefront. One of the first tasks you’ll need to deal with is obtaining your Verisign SSL certificate. This is needed to provide encrypted browsing for your customers, but is also needed to get your store built as well. We liked this approach, even though obtaining a test certificate was a bit cumbersome.

After activating our secure key, we then installed the remaining two software components, DB2 and the Net.Commerce server, and rebooted. Not of all this is covered in the printed documentation, but IBM representatives said they were working on an extensive rewrite that should be available by the time you read this. Finally, we started the DB2 server, the web server, and the Net.Commerce server using NT’s Control Panel/Services applet, and began the configuration process.

There are four basic web forms that contain various controls to get your storefront up and running: System Configuration, which contains basic web server details on location of directories; Access Control, with user identities and password information; Server Control, which can start and stop your web and database servers from within a web form; and Database Management, which tells the software the database name and TCP port number. These don’t take much time to fill out, and there is plenty of help from the printed documentation that tells you the sequence of steps more explicitly.

You can accomplish the same tasks if you know DB2 command line syntax, but why bother? This is where the IBM software is head and shoulders above the Microsoft product. With Merchant, just about anything requires a trip to edit the registry, while with IBM’s software there is a reasonable graphical interface.

There are some rough edges to the software, such as dual-purpose error messages that betray the fact that this product originally was developed on Unix. And there is a “DemoMall” sample series of five stores that is included in the software, but unlike the other products you have to install the sample files before you can use them as a template to produce your own storefront. Making modifications to these samples is not well documented either, and not as easy as the iCat product.

Net.Commerce can’t be freely downloaded from the Internet. More information can be found at www.internet.ibm.com/net.commerce/. It comes with three printed manuals that are clearly written: an installation guide, a command and programming interface reference, and a very complete manual for store administrators on how to setup the software. The DB2 manuals are also available on-line in IPF (a Windows help file) or postscript format.

Microsoft Merchant Server 1.0
Company: Microsoft
Price: $14,995 plus $3,495 for each store
Availability: Now
OS Support: NT 3.51 or later
Phone: 800 426 9400
URL: www.microsoft.com/merchant

Icat Electronic Commerce Suite 3.0
Price: $3,495 (Standard); $9,995 (Professional)
Availability: No
upgrading to 3.0
OS Support: Windows 95, NT
Phone: 206 623 0977
URL: www.icat.com

Net.Commerce 3.0
Company: IBM
Price: $5000
Availability: Now
OS Support: Windows NT
Phone: 800 365 4426
URL: Www.internet.ibm.com/net.commerce

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