Microsoft are circulating a Frequently Asked Questions document which addresses some common user questions when migrating to Windows 7. The guide may be downloaded direct from Microsoft here

If you haven't yet taken the plunge frequently asked questions for those considering Windows 7 are answered here.

Should you upgrade to Windows 7?

In my view Windows 7 is everything Windows Vista should have been. It looks similar to Vista but is much more consistent in the way the user interface works - with Vista I found myself going round in circles for example with network configuration where you would follow links through from one screen to another and eventually end up where you started. User Access Control is famously less obtrusive in Windows 7 than Windows Vista, whether it is also less secure remains to be seen.

My main impression with Windows 7 though is that everything seems to work properly - unlike Vista. Network discovery is faster and will show machines even if they aren't in the same workgroup or domain. I've also found plug and play works very well, if Windows 7 can't find the driver it needs (eg for older hardware) help screens seem to lead to the right place to get them. For example I installed on a laptop with an unsupported Intel graphics chip-set. The machine was setup with a default VGA driver and prompts took me to Intel's site where a usable driver could be found and installed.

The only think I've found so far that I don't like is the taskbar which is not as slick or as stylish as Apple's.  

If you are still on XP Pro (and why not if it works) your current hardware may not support some of Windows 7's newer features (Areo graphics), and while there are some nice utilities and gadgets with Windows 7 XP users can get equivilent or better elsewhere. It would probably not therefore be worth an in place upgrade until you replace your hardware and get Windows 7 bundled.

If you have a machine that came with Vista you probably already have hardware support for the Aero interface sported by Windows 7 and therefore the newer user interface features. if you have found Vista incredibly frustrating to work with then Windows 7, in my view, would ease the pain but upgrading isn't cheap - Microsoft have not been very generous with their upgrade pricing and you might still want to leave it until your next hardware upgrade.

To check your hardware's compatibility with Windows 7 use Microsoft's upgrade advisor here .

Finally; a question which is frequently asked but not tackled in the Microsoft FAQ is "...where is Outlook Express?". Outlook Express is gone from Windows 7 having been replaced by Microsoft's Windows Live platform, including Live Mail. This may be an issue for some. Windows Live Mail can be downloaded from here.

One of the biggest headaches for a small business, or a business start-up, is keeping control of your finances. Often what happens is that initially you keep records manually or on a spreadsheet but as the number of transactions increase (all being well) this gets more difficult to manage so your thoughts turn to accounts software packages. Most of the small businesses I encounter using purpose built small business accounts packages have either Sage or Quickbooks.

Up until recently Microsoft offered their own small business accounts software (the starter version of which was conveniently free) but they have recently announced they are dropping this product, their argument being that small business can manage with templates in Microsoft Office and bigger businesses are catered for by their Navision ERP suite. I am afraid I don't agree with Microsoft's argument there. Spreadsheets are not the perfect tool for managing small business accounts for a number of reasons (see also my post here ) and it's a big jump to Navision which is not cheap to implement or run. Microsoft's decision is probably more a reflection of their failure to significantly challenge Sage or Quickbooks in the SME market coupled with a realisation that the trend is to move these applications online.

The market leading small business accounts products (Sage and Quickbooks) have been around for a while in various editions and are favoured by accountants, and that is probably their shortcoming. Accountant friendly does not equal small business friendly. In terms of usability they are quite technical from an accountancy point of view, and they come as a licensed product which you install on premise. On premise installation incurs cost in infrastructure and maintenance and puts the onus on the user to manage backups.

My specification for small business accounts software (and I am talking here about very small businesses (ie the one to three man bands that are a significant part of the UK economy) is ..

• Always and instantly available: I want to be able to access from anywhere easily and quickly so that I can input transactions on the fly.
• Easy to use: I am not an accountant and don't have any plans to become one.
• Secure: Secure both in terms of access and reliability of data and backups.
• Automation: I would like to be able to automate the sending of regular invoices and regular bills.
• Inexpensive: I don't want to pay the earth for this and ideally would like to find something open source and therefore free to use.
• Modest capital investment: I don't want to have to spend a lot on servers or software licencing up front.
• Regular update: I want a product that is updated seamlessly to accommodate changes in law or the addition of new features.
• Comprehensive reporting and simple year end procedure.

 A relative newcomer to the small business accounts software market which meets most of the above requirements is Kashflow . This is a UK developed and hosted product instantly provisioned by signing up online, it isn't open source and it isn't free but it is inexpensive and doesn't require upfront investment. You access Kashflow through your browser, so no software installation is needed and updates to the product appear frequently and instantly (there have been 5 significant feature updates so far in November). Kashflow offers a 60 day free trial which is long enough to do something useful with the product and really check it out.

Kashflow does currently have some limitations. There is only one user account so you can't have different users with rights to different parts of the system (eg sales and purchasing) and although you can give your accountant access to the system you have to give them your username and password. It's not good practice for two users to share the same login credentials under any circumstances. Multiple user accounts is a feature that has been requested by users so I would expect to see this in Kashflow before too long. Also there is no checking of password strength when you register so make sure you use a good (obscure) password.

If you are worried this limits Kashflow's scalability (which it does at the moment) or are reluctant to build your business around a relatively new product then Kashflow gives you an exit route. All data can be imported and exported as a CSV file and you can set a periodic backup which emails the data to you as a Sage compatible bunch of CSV files.

The feature I really like though is the ability to setup repeat billing and repeat purchases. If you invoice customers regularly for a service (eg support contract or rental) you can easily setup the invoice to be sent automatically at the required intervals, and you can include variables that customise the invoice by, for example, inserting a date range relative to the invoice date. Repeat billing works in the same way, so regular monthly bills are entered automatically.

If you have found this review useful you can say a small "thank you" by using my affiliate link here, which will also gain you a 10% discount if, after your free trial period, you decide to sign up to Kashflow. 

I wonder how many small businesses with websites actually understand what is meant by an SLA (Service Level agreement) and of those how many actually know what the SLA is with their webhosting provider? Very few I would imagine, and that's not a criticism of the users, its a criticism of the hosting providers who very rarely give meaningfull information in their SLA's - assuming they provide such a thing. One might  expect this at the low end of the market where you are paying a few pounds a month for hosting but when a company approaches you offering a dedicated server at upwards of £250 per month you expect something fairly concrete in terms of an SLA. In a lot of cases you will be offered 99.9% uptime which sounds very good, if you read the small print that may well be uptime of network connectivity to your server, power supply to your server or in some cases both. Very rarely do you see retail web hosting providers offering 99.9% availability of your website, which after all is the bit that matters. Why is this? Well most retail web hosters don't have thier own data centres, they rent space in commercial data centres who offer the hosting provider an SLA. This SLA from the datacentre will specify network and power availability and it is this SLA which is quoted to the retail customer. What the data centre doesn't cover is the server itself which will belong to the hosting company. The hosting company won't have their own engineers on site at the data centre, and they will likely not have built in any redundancy in the server they have provided so it is virtually impossible for them to offer any gurantees should a problem with the server arise. Add to this the level of reselling that goes on the the webhosting industry and you realise what an uncertain tangle it all is. My advice? Welll the first thing is to understand how much down time you would be prepared to accept for your site. If it is a brochure site that sees little traffic you might be comfortable with a couple of days (not unrealistic). If you run an e-commerce site then downtime will cost, the question then is does the business lost through downtime cost you more than hosting with a clear SLA?

Now I appreciate there might not be many who go with me on this, but I have formed the opinion over many years that packaged Office suites, and I am not referring to any particular brand but the concept as a whole, have on balance been very bad for business. I have two arguments for this view. One is that Office suites treat business information as documents when the concept of a document is a limitation of the original  medium - paper. This has led to a whole raft of increasingly complex technology to try and manage this outdated concept of documents. My second (and main) reason is that people try and use office suite applications, notably Excel and Access, to write line of business applications. These people (you and me mostly) are end users, not programmers. The technology they are using is not scalable nor is it manageable and because everybody has access to these tools even a small business can amass a plethora of "documents" with islands of critical business information in them completely inaccessible to the business as a whole. There is no shortage now of cost effective business centric application that are designed to manage business information in a structured way so that information is relevant and retrievable and many of these are very affordable and easy to get started with. So if you want to crunch some numbers on an occasional basis by all means use a spreadsheet. If you want to keep track of your customers, sales, stock, process or anything else in your business on a day to day basis stop, and give me a ring.

This has happened to me a few times recently. I have a business broadband service from Tiscali that is supposed to have a static ip address. My router is rebooted every day (actually I switch everything off at night - don't blame me if the planet goes up in smoke) and every now and then I find that my assigned static ip is not what it should be. Usually I discover this at the most inconvenient time, i.e. when I want to use a service or application that depends on the static ip. A few minutes of attempted diagnoses follows until I realise what is going on. So far restarting my router has picked up the ip address I am expecting, but really this just shouldn't happen thank you Tiscali.

A straw pole of teenagers in my vicinity (and that's not very many it has to be said) revealed an interesting fact. They all do Facebook, MySpace and MSM - but none of them use twitter. They text (or should that be txt) each other incessantly, holding more extensive remote conversations with each other than they do with the people they are face to face with, but no tweets to be heard. We are led to believe that young people are the pioneers in adopting new technology but Twitter seems to have bucked that trend. Twitter, with advocates like Stephen Fry, seems to be the domain of middle aged, middle class usually professional types. Or have I got that wrong?

So Google have announced they are to release an operating system (called Chrome) for the pc. The majority of commentators see this as a direct challenge to Microsoft Windows but from what I understand Chrome is a very different concept. I have been arguing for years that all we will need from the operating system of the future is the ability to boot up and run a web browser and this is just what Google have announced. The Chrome O/S is aimed at netbooks, a rapidly growing but still niche corner of the pc market. Netbooks are intended for people who live their lives on the road and online. The applications you run on a netbook are, for the most part,  applications that run in a browser (it just so happens Google offer one or two of these). The applications you run on a pc are, for the most part, client server applications written for the Windows platform. It is this base of client applications that is Windows' strength. Neither Google nor anyone else will break our dependence on Windows until such time as we are happy to run everything on-line. That day will surely come, but it will take more than Chrome to bring about Windows demise.

Zotero, the bibliography add on for Firefox, is now on version 2.0.5b and this wonderful software is saving me a lot of time at the moment, but I hit a snag. A paper I am currently working on started off in Writer using the OpenOffice biblio database. Now that I am working in Zotero I wanted a quick and simple way of getting all my references across from the original document into Zotero so that I had everything in one system. I've just spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do this. Some of the "solutions" I've come across were more like exercises in programming but in fact it's dead simple. Open your original document in Writer, select File | Export and choose BibTex as the file format and save. A file will be created with the .bib extension (note: this isn't your entire OpenOffice biblio database, just the bibliography for the document you have open). Now in Firefox from the Zotero menu select import and open the bib file you've just saved. Job done, you now have a new collection in Zotero with all your imported references.

I am currently trying to get my head back into academia mode and a real pain for a practical nuts and bolts type like me is managing the biblographic referencing required in an academic paper (there can't be anybody that enjoys this part of academic research). I am an OpenOffice user and previously have used the built in biblography function in Writer. Much better than nothing but still tedious to capture the information and then output correctly formatted, and I was finding that at least half my time was spent just managing the bibliography with much of the remainder trying to refind that quote I read somewhere but didn't keep a note of. Then along came Zotero. This free plug-in for Firefox automatically captures bibliographic data from a web page (and the plugin can extract data from a wide variety of academic and not so academic sources) and allows you to capture, catalogue and annotate the data for later use. Plugins for OpenOffice and Word make including references and quotations a drag and drop affair. It's not perfect by any means as in practice there are some limitations, not all libraries and indexes are supported - the Prism based index I use at the University of Wolverhampton isn't yet for example, neither is Emerald Insight a useful repository of IT related research papers, but "resolvers" are being added all the time and data from unsupported sources can be manually added without too much trouble. It is also important to check imported data against the book or document in question to ensure that all the details have been imported correctly (I am finding I have to manually add place of publication to books imported from Amazon).

Version 1.5 (beta) of Zotoro has a powerful feature to import a collection of pdf's. If you are doing research you may well have a large collection of pdf's on disc already and Zotero will import these and look up reference information through Google scholar. A restriction here is that Google limits the number of enquiries over time, so if you have a large number of imports do them in small batches otherwise you'll be locked out of Google scholar for a while.

Zotero claims to be the next generation research tool and so far I have no reason to doubt that. Thanks to Zotero the next few weeks of my life suddenly look a little easier.

Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and is funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

It can happen to the best of us, an otherwise effective marketing campaign that fails to deliver because the infrastructure behind it runs out of steam. If you are a regular listener to talk radio ( I am thinking Radio 4 here ) you may have heard interviewees slipping in a plug for their website, and later in the conversation the presenter comments listeners have been complaining the website is "down". You haven't noticed? Just me then, I suppose you have to be tuned into these things. Anyway, that's excusable if it's a community venture with limited resources, but if you are a major IT company you'd be expected to get it right, if you are planning a marketing campaign make sure you have the capacity to handle responses. A promotional e-mail from Cisco this morning caught my eye and I attempted to click through to find out more but, you've guessed it, the site was unavailable.

Now there could be other reasons for this but the most likely cause of this message is a loading problem, so if you are sending out a marketing e-mail to a long list of subscribers then make sure any websites linked to in the message can cope with the hits you are hoping to generate.

TIP: If your web hosting is on a budget then send your e-mails out in small batches to spread the load.

Two of the world's biggest IT companies have announced this week their intention to combine as Sun Microsystems agrees to be bought by Oracle. (for the full story see here). This represents a pretty major shift in the industry's tectonic plates. It positions the acquisitive Oracle, generally known as an enterprise database vendor, as a head to head rival to IBM across the enterprise software, hardware and services stack.

Sun Microsystems has been a significant supporter of Open Source software. As well as open sourcing Solaris, Sun's own Unix operating system, It originated the Open Office project in 2000 and recently acquired the popular Open Source database MySQL, so my concern is what will Oracle's stance on open source be? OpenOffice is not a threat to anything Oracle currently does but it may not see any value in continuing to support the project, but MySQL is widely used and ubiquitous on the web being the "M" in LAMP - the acronym that describes the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP open source software stack which underpins a major chunk of the internet. Will the database vendor continue to support an open source rival to it's core product range? Will MySQL be killed by Oracle, will it become "Oracle lite", or will the Open Source community fork the product? Time will surely tell.

I have been involved with some tender responses lately and have had problems with over specifying my bids. To be competitive in tender responses you need to ensure that your proposals match the bid requirements exactly. This inevitably means you restrict yourself to the precise wording in the tender document rather than thinking about the requirements behind them. This is a difficulty for me in that I specialise in seeing past a customer's expression of how they see their requirements and digging out actually what it is that their business or organisation really needs. This might sounds presumptuous but I find people usually express things in terms they understand or based on past experience - this means the solutions they envisage will probably exclude things that are outside their experience. So what is a supplier to do if faced with a tender proposal that quite clearly doesn't address the real needs? If you want the work you restrict yourself to the limitations of the tender document and leave the customer to deal with any shortcomings at a later date. Hardly a recipe for long term success.