I can’t believe I forgot this. To sneak a peek at DATACUS, click here.

So it’s official.

DATACUS is now on the market, available, at large, for sale… Yes, now that we’ve introduced the revolutionary new program to the world (or the 800 accountants and vendors at the MACPA Trade Show) and have been telling of all its wonders in rapid succession for the last full day.

The more I learn about DATACUS, the more excited I get about the product. Here’s what I know so far:

1) DATACUS can reach into a lot of different file types: Peachtree, QuickBooks, Oracle, and many others to get data about your company’s (or, if you’re an accountant, your client’s) inventory records, time clock reports, point-of-sale transactions, etc… and then allows you to decide which information you’d like to see. You can delete duplicates, make sure all of your information is correct, edit the data, and customize virtually any report you’d like to see. Its simple, streamlined and efficient… and makes your job as a business owner or accountant a whole lot easier.
2) DATACUS knows no language barriers… technologically speaking. You can introduce QuickBooks, Excel, Oracle or pretty much any other “data entry” type program file to one another without translating the data itself. That’s what DATACUS does. That’s it’s job!
3) DATACUS has so many different uses that I’m discovering new ones almost every day. Right now, Ben’s back at the office building new plugins and modules for DATACUS that improve its versatility. If you ask if DATACUS can perform a certain function, and we haven’t set it up to do that function yet, let us know… we can custom program your version of DATACUS to meet your company’s individual, unique needs.

Sorry about the rant… I just got all excited about DATACUS for a minute. It must be the haze of excitement around our brand new toy from within the haze of the MACPA Trade Show.

Signing off from the Rock,

storm

Exciting news! Well, exciting to me… although I’m not sure this is set to announce yet or not:

Tomorrow we officially (soft) launch DATACUS, a data-streaming, info-combining, life-easing product. Bruce and the gang have been burning both ends of the candle for months now and finally it’s ready. Really Truly. I designed the little icons you click on to open the thing just yesterday [this is all I can take credit for] and we’ll be teaching people about it tomorrow at the Rock Financial Expo Center at the MACPA Trade Show. Woohoo!

Here’s the concept: While Spartacus was a mighty, slashing, hero of old… DATACUS was his younger brother, who made sure everybody’s legions (…er, numbers) were in order, minimizing data casualties and effectively getting everybody paid and, therefore fed. Not really. Now I’m just making things up.

But, DATACUS is going to launch tomorrow and there will be much rejoicing at Dynamic Edge, Inc! Come to the Rock and check us out if you want. We’d love to meet anybody who reads our silly blog! I’ll be there

hasta manana

storm

So, this week I’ve been working on two Search Engine Optimization projects… for anybody jumping onboard right now, SEO is the stuff that gets your website noticed by Google and other search engines (Yahoo! Altavista, Ask, etc.) There are a lot of tools available online to help you in the process of writing good SEO copy and code, but my favorites so far are located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (which you can use for free!) and www.seodigger.com.

Here’s the major difference between these two: at seodigger.com, you type in website at a time and their robots will find what keywords are being used by that site. Okay, so maybe they’re not robots, but either way this engine can tell you what keywords your competitors are using… which leads me to the next part.

At Google adwords, you can type in a word and their robots will come up with a list of similar words that other websites may or may not be using… it’s almost like a web thesaurus, except that the words don’t all mean the same thing and will often give you words whose definitions are completely different, but are still very relevant. In “other words,” it gives you OTHER WORDS that people might be searching under to find a knowledgeable and reliable source = YOUR SITE.

So while some aspects are slow-going — like learning about how to put invisible keywords into your meta tags (???????), other stuff seems to be pretty easy to get a hold of. Of course it doesn’t hurt that we’ve got a TON of books about this stuff around here, and I’ve got a lot of people to ask questions…

Maybe you’re reading this because you want to get more out of your website. We can help you with that. We’ve got designers and programmers to make your website look and feel great… and get noticed. There are a lot of ways to increase traffic through your site, so if you’re needing help, give us a call. That’s what we’re here for!

In Ann Arbor: 734.975.0460
In Nashville:  615.526.2626

I received the following in an email from Dusty, one of our consultants out of Nashville. I thought this information might be helpful to some of you, so here it is:

“…Virtualization is a buzzword you’ll be hearing a lot of if you’re going to spend any amount of time in an IT room. But why should you care? And what exactly does virtualization mean to you anyways?

By its technical definition, virtualization means abstracting your computer’s resources to better understand what’s going on inside, and possibly even solve problems and relay these solutions back to the actual computer. In this post we’ll be addressing the virtualization of an entire machine, particularly servers.

There are three main things you’ll accomplish by using virtualization. First, you’re going to save money on hardware because you won’t be buying as many servers. Virtualization allows you to utilize your hardware much more efficiently… so while some of your software needs to run exclusively, some may only run on Linux and others, only on Windows, using virtualization allows you to run all of your software harmoniously on one server.

Another advantage to virtualization is that it makes Backup and Recovery easier becuase you can back the whole machine up and save it as an image or file. Now, that server is portable and supported by almost any hardware, making the backup and recovery processes much simpler. (And, it’s a lot more likely that they are done in a timely and effecient, non-frantic manner.)

VMWare has an established product that is reliable and quick, however Microsoft is stepping up the competition with its recent release of Hyper-V, although the benchmarks aren’t in yet. It will be interesting to see how this competition plays out. With very few other options out there, including Microsoft’s Virtual Server and freeware VirtualBox (which is getting better every day — I’m running a test server on my laptop right now and I am really happy with the performance so far), but neither are as feature rich as the Hyper-V or VMware.

So, the question remains: is virtualization right for you? Maybe it is or maybe it isn’t, but I think I know a consultant or two who could help you out with that.”

from Dusty’s TechTalk blog

After a brief hiatus (i.e. the time it takes to move from North Carolina to Michigan) the blog is up and running again. Not that it was ever down, just inactive.

So here’s what’s going on:
First, I’m not the newest Dynedger anymore. We’ve added Alan the intern and a second John. So, this is cool.
Secondly, I live in Michigan full-time… which means I’m in the office with the team ALL THE TIME NOW?@! I’m starting to re-think how much better it would be to [not] work remotely.
And finally, the MACPA trade show at the Rock Financial is coming up really soon and it’s getting to be crunch time here.

Sounds like I’d better write something funny tomorrow.

ttyl, stormie