Internet and Technology

Can your small business get both affordable professional-class IT service and peace of mind? The secret lies in having a technology services provider handle your technical solutions.
To stay competitive, small businesses must make the most of current technology. But it’s expensive, time consuming, and inefficient to maintain a full-time IT department like larger companies. A true Professional Technology Services Provider offers on-demand talent, depth of experience, deep resources and huge economies of scale. Here are the top 10 benefits you’ll see.Benefit #1: Stay Focused On Core Business Functions
People are happiest doing what they do best. And they get frustrated by tasks that distract them from it. Researching solutions, implementing new technology and fixing IT-related problems are extremely inefficient for non-IT professionals. Free up internal staff for revenue-generating functions and the business of business.Benefit #2: Tap Economies Of Scale And Purchasing Power
Due to a single focus on IT, sechnology services providers achieve greater efficiencies and economies of scale. They consolidate purchasing power and have access to deep and broad knowledge bases. Using developed best practices, tasks are completed more efficiently than small businesses can do on their own. The means real cost savings– both in time and money.Benefit #3: Reduce Cost and Control Operating Expenses
The business value of technology services providers results in very hard dollar savings. In almost all cases, small businesses will spend 25% to 50% less than the cost of even one mid-level IT professional. Then take recruiting, training, vacation, sick days, turnover and other management issues out of the equation to see even more savings. Costs are budgeted, predictable and controlled.Benefit #4: Access Highly Specialized Talent
Small businesses cannot cost effectively achieve the scale and flexibility to properly support their technology environments. Even a very experienced and dedicated IT employee has limits to skills and avenues for help. Professional technology services providers offer access to teams of IT specialists that deliver the cross-sectional IT knowledge needed to provide both on-going and critical support for small business networks.Benefit #5: Get Services On-Demand
Many small businesses face the challenges of growth and the burden of scaling back. Both cases present a genuine HR problem when relying on in-house IT resources. Small businesses need the agility of just-in-time resources for emergencies and the flexibility to adjust technology support levels. With a professional technology services provider, sudden changes won’t affect the livelihood or morale of employees.Benefit #6: Help Employees Innovate and Stay Productive
Communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing allows employees to innovate. These capabilities are delivered through a multitude of technologies including file servers, central databases, broadband connectivity, mobile platforms, email communications, and many others. However, true productivity and business benefit can only be realized when this complex technology is properly planned, implemented and maintained. The best practices and comprehensive experiences around planning, implementing and maintaining such systems allow technology services providers to successfully deliver these productivity improvements.Benefit #7: Reduce Downtime
Even a few minutes of systems downtime carry enormous business costs. Maximizing uptime must be a high priority. Small businesses can longer afford issues with internet connectivity, email communications, corrupt data or systems failure-the cost of reacting to these events is just too high. Professional technology services providers offer planned, measured approaches to pro-active systems maintenance, security, backup and disaster recovery.Benefit #8: Get A Technology Edge Over Competitors
Don’t just level the playing field: take advantage of new technologies for a competitive advantage. Technology services providers keep up with the latest solutions through ongoing training and real-world experience. They know how to implement the latest hardware, software, and network applications available. Just as important: they know which technologies are not worth the investment.Benefit #9: Attract and Retain Employees
Employees want to work in an environment where their computers are up and running. Employees want to be competitive with their rivals and they want the technology tools that really help them deliver. Potential new talent will weigh your company’s technology prowess. Utilizing a professional technology services provider allows small businesses to meet these expectations and increases the ability to attract and retain employees.Benefit #10: Access Otherwise Unavailable Vendor Support
Access to manufacturers is crucial in effectively supporting complex technology. When available, technology manufacturers traditionally provide basic or unreliable direct end-user support. With a well-established professional technology services provider, small businesses enjoy the benefits of priority access to Microsoft, Cisco and thousands of other technology vendors.

Technology has played an imperative role in business operations. The advent of internet has given a new methodology to conduct business faster in a cost effective way in a limited time and space.

Internet is wrapped up with thousands of interconnected networks connected worldwide. The deployment of Internet in business has given rise to perform business worldwide to unlimited audience and it is one of the best methods for globalizing business. Internet is a powerful tool for winning a business strategy that assists companies to compete with their competitors and to improve customer satisfaction and hence internet business model has been formulated to assist companies to choose the right model at the right time.

Internet business is simply not designing websites to promote the products it has its unique process to automate any business function. Internet business helps manufacturers to understand the customer’s wants and needs by understanding their behavior when they visit company websites or research any relevant information and this in-turn helps manufacturers and marketers to produce customize and personalize product.Internet business has changed the marketing practices of company to the great extent and hence marketers need to be more and more proactive and creative to reach and convince their audience to buy products.

Today many companies have also set up extranets with their suppliers to facilitate information exchange, transactions and payments. Internet business has given birth to e-commerce which is more and more specific when compared to internet business or e-business. The term e-commerce encourages companies to sell their products or services through internet. To be more precise about internet business; it is simply performing business using internet for worldwide audience in order to globalize business.

Advantages of Internet Business – Internet Business has its unique advantages

There is no need of physical location and hence you don’t need to have your own or rent place for starting up business as how traditional business requires.

Of course you need location that is DOMAIN NAME for website registration and its very cheap you can get for about $5 to $25 with free web hosting service.

You need website for selling your product or service. If you know programming and designing you can always do it on your own or you can hire a web developer and/or designer based on your requirement or even you can become an affiliate of some site which needs no website since your merchant will provide you website.

You can advertise your products or services for free in most of the websites say free classified advertisement site.

Since internet works on the principle of 24×7 you can reach your customer at any time.

Internet business is not geographic specific and hence you can reach global audience.

Disadvantages of Internet Business -Of course, internet has major advantages but it has some disadvantages too.

Through internet it is very difficult for the user to recognize what is genuine and what is not because users will not have the ’Touch and feel’ of some product before they buy.

Internet makes you feel isolate and hence it separates manufacturer and customer, and this ultimately end-up in lack of trust between two parties.

It is also difficult for the user to choose the product as there may be many products with different varieties advertise through internet.

Business Models:

Every Business needs model to run its business and operations. When it comes to internet it is not that companies have design or built their own models Most of the companies sustain with the following business models through internet.

Products

Professional Services

Information Business

Internet profession

E-Publishing

E-Advertising

Let’s understand the above six proven internet business model.

Products: This Internet business model includes stuffs like electronic goods, books, computer hardware and software, household, jewelry, etc. Companies may already use direct marketing to market its product.

Adopting this model is most inexpensive method to communicate universally, and consumers can look into the product through company’s website or online catalogue as it cost only the fraction of what printed catalogue cost and the duplication is achieved virtually. The vital part is to note that internet is not the business strategy. However, it helps business to formulate strategy more effectively and efficiently. These are none other than the Internet or Online retailer.

Professional/Specialized Services: This model includes Professional services such as accountants, consultants, architects etc. The use of technology has encouraged service business to devise innovative strategies to support the very nature of the business.

Service industry advertise its services electronically that is through internet and since internet reaches global audience by breaking the geographic barriers and hence today service sectors enjoy massive profit and growth since internet has out-performed the traditional advertising and it directly reaches its prospective audience.

Information business: This E-business model is for those who gather, create and sell knowledge. Internet has given a new room for this kind of business. Today people use internet for many reasons and information search through internet ranks top. Many netpreneur today adopted this business methodology and has created a success because there is lot of scope for business in this digital era and information business is one such businesses which grows with a full pace.

Internet Careers: Many people have started making careers in internet itself. This business model includes graphic artist, web designers and developers, software programmers, computer and software trainers through online, Internet marketing professionals etc. This is considered as fastest growing business and many people have started business model.

Electronic Publishing: Today people can find free news, magazines, and newsletters in the digital format. In this business model any factual written material can be published in digital format and uploaded in the website. Online or Electronic publishing is exploding since its too cost effective when compared to the printed version of newspapers, magazines, newsletters etc. There are many innovative ways that a company can generate revenue from this business model.

E-Advertising: Electronic advertising, the business model which grows constantly and is expected to out-perform the traditional advertising methods. From this business model companies can simply sell advertising space on the web which in turn generates a mutual understanding to both the parties (advertisers and publishers).

Advertisers get revenue by posting advertisement in their website and publishers gets traffic to his website and/or brand awareness of his (publishers) product through advertisement. This is really a big business and one can monetize his/her website (if available) by just selling the website space.

The above mentioned internet business model has been adopted by many companies and have created a history in this digital era. Thus internet has become the right source and a powerful tool for the businesses to create a new and innovative business strategy in order to sustain the market.

Different authors have defined Internet business models in a different manner but the actual proposition and meaning is same. To see the different internet business model terms have a look at this article. Read Here

As a Wannabe internet business you have to analyze which internet business model is best for you or where you actually fit in the whole scenario.

Traditional business management has had to make room for a new facet of business: technology. Through the years traditional business management has had to marry its strategies with the proliferation of technology where every business owner from Starbuck’s to Jim’s Auto has had to incorporate technology into its everyday operations.
The problem is that in the late nineties business believed technology was going to be the solution for every business problem, but it wasn’t until recently that business managers realized that technology will fail if not implemented properly. That is, traditional business management must seamlessly marry itself with technology.
Traditional business management is pretty self-explanatory; it’s managing business through traditional methods that have been used for many years. Traditional business management takes into account all aspects of running a business, large or small. Whether it is a million-dollar company or a billion-dollar company, all companies run the same. Those traditional methods incorporate three aspects of business: sales and marketing strategies, efficient operation and production methods, and manageable finances (SG&A). I believe all businesses should pay attention to these areas of business management.
So, now you have this traditional business model to think of, and you also have to think that the model has incorporated technology. You see, managing a business is not as easy as it sounds, and I know you have never looked at your business in this way before.
Believe it or not, graduate schools teach this stuff and larger companies obviously have the money to pay someone to think of this stuff. But most businesses do make the mistake in believing technology will solve all of their business problems. This is simply not true; technology cannot solve every business problem.
Many large corporations install and implement technology as quickly and arbitrarily as they would a new desk or a new lamp, not taking into consideration the stress new technology places on both business processes and human nature. Humans inherently do not like change, especially at the work place where they might feel as they might lose their job or were not consulted in helping determine which technology is best for their task or function.
Business processes do not like change either as the processes a business must go through to operate are much more complex than people might think. Most technology consultants want to “go live” with their implementation as soon as they can so they can share the praise of a successful launch. What most technology consultants don’t realize is that their eagerness to “sell” the job puts a business in a precarious operational bind.
It only makes sense to understand that as technology can be customized and most business processes cannot, basic technology implementations will hurt a business’ process as opposed to helping.
Some of the technology solutions out there can be very complex and some can be very simple. For example, I recently helped a client realize that developing a method of capturing labor time per phase of each of their projects allowed them to better understand and account for costs associated to labor and materials, per project. This allowed their sales team better cost data related to profit margins required per project. Initially the client was looking to spend money on purchasing one of those electronic card readers that each of his employees would have to swipe as they moved from station to station. We were able to solve his process issue at half the cost of that electronic clock by simply creating a custom process document from Microsoft Excel. The fact that the clock was not customizable would require the business processes to change just to accommodate the clock.
In this case we are trying to convey the importance of understanding your business and its processes before you move into technology. It is less expensive and less burdensome on your business processes. What we accomplished in the case above was that we were able to ‘tweak’ the business processes at will, where had we purchased the clock, we would have been forced to comply with what the clock required, not the business.
In the late nineties the hype of technology and the Internet fueled the belief that plugging technology into your business or developing your business around technology was the best way to run a business. A great example was WebVan and HomeGrocer.
These companies spent over a hundred-million venture capital dollars building the infrastructure that was going to give them the warehouse space to buy food products to fill all the customer orders that were to come via the Internet.
The mistake was that the company put all of its money into the assumption that its idea would work because the American grocery shopper was ready to buy groceries online via state-of-the-art technology. The orders never came.
Actually, the orders did come; the problem was that both companies were in so much debt because they couldn’t generate interests in their business model and they went out of business.
Today, the traditional grocery chains such as Albertson’s and Vons in the western U.S. have capitalized on earlier business models and realized their traditional way of doing business could was a great foundation to build their technology around their current processes.
I had the privilege of touring the WebVan warehouse in Oakland, California. It was impressive. If I remember correctly, it was an 80,000 square foot building equipped with a technologically advanced conveyer belt system worth millions of dollars. It looked like the inside of a United Parcel Service (UPS) warehouse, but much more expensive. For those who have never seen the inside of a UPS warehouse, it is just a bunch of conveyer belts.
Interestingly, about 50 people were milling around the WebVan warehouse; their main task was making sure the computers were pulling the right products and putting them on the conveyer belts. Great operation, but they ran out of money after just a little over a year.
So, what failed here, technology or money? Lack of money failed at WebVan, and lack of money fails almost every business that goes out of business. Lack of money fails business due to lack of business knowledge.
Business owners, make sure that you understand technology and that it can be customized and should be customized to meet your business process requirements. You can see the most successful implementation of technology in companies such as Wal-Mart and Toyota and we can see failures in technology such as WebVan.
We make sure we know how our business operates and what those operations require when making your businesses more efficient and effective. We look at understanding what your business requires before we recommend technology.
In the long run, you’ll spend less and profit more.

Do you often feel stuck in the computer abyss when it comes to managing your company’s needs for web or information technology services? Businesses with fewer than 50 or 60 employees often find themselves struggling to keep pace with their basic web and computer support services and miss out on effective small business IT solutions.

Without the guidance of an information technology services provider, small businesses can end up wasting time and money on computer support services because they aren’t in touch with the best technology tools and practices for small business IT solutions. Even zero-employee companies can benefit immensely from a computer support services partner who shows them how to standardize their practices, save money with the right hardware or software and develop effective websites.Putting Out Fires – Who Needs Dedicated Computer Support Services Anyway?

The approach often taken by small organizations when it comes to information technology services is one of putting out fires. No one has time to update the website, the network is cobbled together with wiring strung across the floor, and you’re not sure when the last backup really ran. Then, a hard drive starts going click-click. You call that guy you occasionally use for computer support services, “Joe-I-Fix-Anything-PCs,” to get the computer booting. That’s when to your horror you discover that the tape in the drive since last Tuesday wasn’t really backing up and the click-click is the sickening sound of your QuickBooks data being eaten by the dying hard drive. There is a Better Way: A Solutions Partner for Web and Information Technology Services

It isn’t that “Joe” can’t spot you some quick computer support services and get you up and running again. It’s the point that the “bargain” hard drive failed without warning, your data wasn’t backed up and you didn’t even have a centralized data management practice to begin with. Wouldn’t it have been great to avoid all the headaches by using best-practice guidelines for business management and making informed purchase decisions? That’s where a good small business IT solutions provider comes in, not only to avoid disaster but to save money. For example QuickBooks could be integrated with your shipping and credit card processing which saves three employees 30 hours a week in order fulfillment. Then you might implement a web solution for online orders which integrates with QuickBooks. A good information technology services partner makes computer support services a value proposition. Small Business IT Solutions – Hiring a Partner

So what’s the best way to find a great web or information technology services partner to work with and then get the most out of that relationship?1. Look for a company that specializes in small business IT solutions

Computer support services companies that specialize in small business will be more in tune to your particular needs and challenges. They will understand budgetary constraints for computer support services and the need to use resources very efficiently. Because technology developers and manufacturers are now seeing a large and relatively untapped market of small business customers, there are some terrific tools emerging for small organizations. A technology partner focused on small business IT solutions and information technology services will help your company grow and succeed.2. Do you need a local information technology services partner?

Not necessarily. If the goal here is to find a provider of information technology services to help you manage your website, make purchase decisions and facilitate projects, it doesn’t have to be local. With sophisticated remote tools and web-based collaboration, many problems and projects can be addressed remotely. The key is to find a good fit. For onsite service such as network installation or hardware swaps, a good solutions partner can identify and schedule local computer support services as needed or works with a nationwide network experts for repairs, rollouts or other onsite computer support service. If the company isn’t local, ask what provisions it has in place for onsite service.3. Personalized computer support services

One of the stigmas attached to the tech industry and a common complaint about providers of computer support services is lack of personalization. A good provider of information technology services wants to get to know you, your processes and your employees. The staff should ask questions about what your company does and who the key contacts are to gain a feel for your organization’s culture. Likewise, access to the provider’s staff and resources is equally important. The relationship is going to be much more effective when that company has a mandate for personalized service and an open door to communications.4. Due diligence

Think of hiring a solutions partner for information technology services like you would hiring someone for your staff. Look for a company that is seeking a long-term partnership. Ask for references. Then find out how long the company has been in business, who you will have access to for a problem or project and how the provider charges for its computer support services.5. Cohesive approach and good facilitation

The partner that you select should want to take a cohesive approach to understanding your business or organization and help you come up with a customized plan for your technology and web needs, be it a long-range strategy or a specific project. The difference between “Joe-I-Fix-Anything-PCs” and a provider of complete information technology services and solutions is someone who can do a good discovery about your organization and its goals, facilitate the project and help bring together providers for the components outside their expertise. Also, a one-stop shop can provide you with benefits. Keeping your hardware and software purchases, web and computer support services together can provide you economies of scale combined with the convenience of single point of support and access to someone who knows your business.How to Get the Most Out of the Relationship 6. Identify key problems, goals and areas to improve efficiency

Once you partner with a provider of information technology services and solutions, the first and most important step is an analysis of problems. The more you can communicate about your company, current practices and areas to improve, the more effective your solutions partner can be in coming up with a computer support services plan designed to keep things running smoothly, maximize your assets and move your organization forward.7. Set up best practices

Typically the biggest challenge small organizations face in being successful is getting out of their own way, seeing the big picture and making the changes necessary for improvements to happen. A good small business IT solutions partner can help you set up best practices to get most out of your investment in information technology services. However, making sure those practices are implemented and followed rests squarely on your shoulders, not on those of your computer support services provider. 8. Avoid costly mistakes – Don’t make impulse purchases

Whereas large companies tend to have a formal evaluation and approval process in place for making technology purchases, many smaller organizations make impulse purchases. Let the company you’ve hired for information technology services do its job and provide you its expertise on purchases. If the company resells hardware and software at competitive rates, purchasing from it can be worthwhile. You’ll have a single point of purchase for computer support services, and the company can recommend hardware and software from manufacturers it has partnerships with and expertise on as well. All of that translates to added benefit to you.9. Choose managed information technology services designed for business

Small organizations have a tendency to operate off the cuff, looking for freebies or grabbing cheap services not really designed for business. This approach to information technology services can come back to bite you. If you want to grow your business, approach your needs for computer support services like a bigger organization would. If your IT partner makes recommendations on computer support services that you think you can find cheaper elsewhere, take a hard look at what you are getting and how it can really benefit your business. Once you weigh all the benefits, you may find the value to your business growth and offerings far outweighs the cost.10. Can I still do it myself?

Working with a good provider of information technology services doesn’t mean you can’t do anything yourself. In fact, a reputable and innovative IT company should educate you on how to better manage your technology needs and investments. There are still a lot of day-to-day tasks you can and should do within your organization, depending on your skill level, time and desire. The point is to keep your computer support services partner in the loop and use their expertise and input on major technology decisions. Conclusion

So, what’s in it for you? By partnering with a provider of information technology services, you’ll find a more thought out, comprehensive approach to small business IT solutions that can increase efficiency, save you money, generate revenue, and help your business succeed

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Centralize and manage your customer, contact, sales, and project information within the familiar look and feel of Office Outlook. Manage your time and information, connect across boundaries, and protect your information with Outlook 2007. Office Outlook 2007 helps users better manage their time and information, connect across boundaries, and help remain safe and in control. Here are the top 10 ways that Office Outlook 2007 helps users increase productivity and improve collaboration. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that provides the tools and capabilities needed to create and easily maintain a clear picture of customers, from first contact through to purchase and post-sales. Empower every employee to boost sales, satisfaction, and service with automated CRM that’s easy to use, customize, and maintain. Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions are typically implemented for you by a Microsoft partner with the right industry and technical expertise. Implementations are painless and fast, enabling your business to continue without interruption. Your in-house technologists or Microsoft partner can customize the solutions and help to ensure they suit your requirements. Because the solutions require little continuous maintenance and have a low-adoption threshold with users, you can enable your IT staff to focus more on business-critical issues rather than on running technology.

Microsoft Supply Chain Management Software

Microsoft Dynamics solutions provide you with a multitude of ways to plan, coordinate, and execute delivery of goods and services with increased productivity and gain a strong return on investment as a result of better individual and team productivity, streamlined operations, and more effective collaboration.   Build productive vendor relationships Microsoft Dynamics solutions can help your people work with business partners and suppliers in such a way that everybody’s business model can advance and key business relationships deliver high value. As you empower your team to work productively with other companies in your supply chain, you also support those vendors and suppliers in attaining their own business goals  Microsoft Dynamics supply-chain management solutions Each of the following solutions come under the Microsoft Dynamics family of products providing functionality to automate and help you improve supply-chain management processes.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0

Microsoft Dynamics software solutions for financial management give your people a way to raise the visibility of financial metrics and the effectiveness of financial management throughout your organization-all using familiar tools and existing skills.

Microsoft Dynamics solutions for financial management can provide tools and insight to help your team make more informed decisions. These tools and insights can help your company set a competitive direction for your business. With Financial Management tools from Microsoft Dynamics, you can transform financial and executive management of your company into a dependable, efficient process.

Microsoft Dynamics AX provides you and your people with fast, reliable, and comprehensive accounting, financial reporting, and analysis capabilities. It offers a straightforward way for business managers and others to create, view, and understand multidimensional reports and manage fixed assets efficiently. They can also add new functionality quickly and with limited coding. What’s more, Microsoft Dynamics AX helps you manage a broad range of other business areas, so you minimize the need for multiple systems.

 

In this day’s websites normally requires simple web hosting plans for smooth performance of the website and email transfer that is essential. There are two modes of hosting planes are generally available, first is Linux hosting and second one is Windows hosting. Both have several advantages and disadvantages respectively but Depending upon small business owner’s requirements suitable managed hosting plan can be selected for a specific website.

Well in most of the normal situations, the general preference of small business owners for choosing web hosting plan moves towards the Linux server hosting plans rather than window server hosting, because there are numerous optimistic factor that influence people to choose it.Expenditure Factor

The truth is that Linux hosting plans are much economical than Windows servers plans. For all small business people the web hosting price matters vastly. They wish to receive many options or you can say facilities at a tiny expenditure. Most of them not required supreme type of security and they also do not bother whether it is MS-SQL database server or some thing else to develop their database. Thus Linux server is the best option for them at really least cost with several kinds of features.Open Source Factor

Linux is an Open Source code and enables people from all around the world to promote their own knowledge for its development. This is one of the main reasons where Linux servers have the power to eject Windows servers far away form competitive hosting industry. Now a day’s, due to its farthest adaptability Linux becomes a unique platform for lots of fresh technologies that are mostly used in competitive hosting industry. This means that a Linux server gives you numerous features than Windows servers can does.Scripting Language Factor

There are many scripting language available on the Internet like Perl, Python, Java, and PHP to build your site. All these scripting languages and have been developed on Linux / UNIX web servers and they do not required Microsoft support to run them. But when you use those scripting languages which can be run on windows servers like ASP.Net then you require MS-SQL to develop the database and other supports of Microsoft. Now it is easily understandable that for small business owners Linux hosting is best to host their website into the internet.Dependability Factor

Now a day’s Linux is vastly known as really steady and dependable. This means that Linux servers are little faster, easy to use and reputed as non crushable than a Windows server. Thus, Linux servers will provide more upgraded facilities for your website at a minimum outlay.Familiarity and Executing Speed Factor

Linux servers have years of experience for providing services than Windows servers in hosting industry. There is no such recommendable difference in executing speed between Linux servers and Windows servers, but it is viewed that Linux servers are slightly quicker in processing normal website pages.Efficiency Factor

Windows support ASP which is a programming language supported by Microsoft, which allows people to fabricate dynamic database motivated website pages by connecting with a MS-SQL server or Access server. It increase the production cost as well. Linux neither requires ASP language nor MS-SQL databases to build dynamic database driven website pages, because it simply uses MySQL database which is freely available.

Damn Small Linux is an excellent tool for learning Linux commands and running the Linux operating system. But what if you don’t plan to be a computer nerd; can this software still be useful? The answer is a definite yes; you can make use of this tiny operating system whether or not you want to learn the sometimes gruesome details of operating systems. This article introduces the text editors that come with your free Damn Small Linux that runs on even obsolete Windows computers. You can use these applications to compose simple text or programs of any level of complexity.
Once you have downloaded and installed Damn Small Linux there are several equivalent ways of launching its text editors. You can click on the DSL button in the lower-left hand corner or on the Apps icon toward the top of the screen. Then open the Editors: there are four, Beaver, Nano, Notepad, and vi (actually vim). We will look at these editors in order plus an additional one.
Beaver is my choice for creating and editing the text files used in my Damn Small Linux tutorials. The name Beaver stands for Beaver is an Early AdVanced EditoR which is the kind of joke that many Linux and Unix people find funny. This editor is particularly useful for programming and web page editing. Beaver’s special features include color coding and the ability to convert text to Upper Case, Lower Case or to capitalize the first letter of every word. You can convert text among the following formats: Unix, DOS, and Mac. Programmers will be glad to know that Beaver formats code for the following programming languages: C/C++, HTML, Perl, JavaScript, PHP, and Bash. Unfortunately there is no Help function.
The nano program is especially used for email messages. It stems from the widely used Pico email program that is not available for some versions of Linux. I have not worked with nano but am told that many Linux and Unix people like it.
What the Damn Small Linux people call Notepad is actually another text processor that is similar to the DOS/Windows Notepad. I haven’t used it because Beaver is more powerful, and just about as easy to use.
The final application in this group is VIM, vi IMproved. The original vi was a very-widely used text editor for Unix and Linux systems. Today almost all Unix and Linux people work with other, more sophisticated text editors. When I teach Linux on systems other than Damn Small Linux I teach a reduced version of vi. This editor is cumbersome, but you make like the improved version. Damn Small Linux offers you a choice.
The Office folder includes Ted, a word processor which is compatible with Microsoft Word. Ted saves documents in RTF (rich text format) that can be read by Microsoft Word and other word processors including Open Office. Ted and Beaver belong to different worlds; you can’t take documents back and forth between these two applications.