Again, to add the weather widget to your Droid’s home screen press and hold in an empty area on your screen and be sure you have empty space on your main screen for the widget to display.

I hope that helps a few Droid users and some computer techs too.  Enjoy.

According to some local telecom providers, new customer interest and demos are growing, with significant increases in the past several weeks.  Telephony is a good barometer of the overall business climate because nothing is more basic and necessary as voice and data connectivity to a business.  With that said, voice and especially data purchasing has been down significantly since the recession hit and was realized in Oct of 08.  So when business cut back even on the basics the overall cascading affect hit most businesses, some harder than others.  Again, the point to note is that business executives and small business owners are increasingly optimistic about the direction of the economy and business in Indiana.  According to several online job sites, new job postings are up, but to temper expectations it is also reported that there is only 1 job for every 6 job seekers.

So with those tempered expectations, I think that with the recent experiences over the past year we’ll see businesses focus more on vetting their business partners, vendors and other relationships more thoroughly.  What that will mean is a leaning out of local small businesses.  A few will prosper and the others will most likely struggle or fail.  The successful businesses will drive each others bottom line and grow together.  Will we see Indianapolis business again invest in their core processes, business infrastructure and technology?  The indicators look good.

So what do these information intensive industries do to take advantage of all their data rather than be flooded by it? There are industry specific software applications to tag and categorize documents and even cross reference emails with phone calls and court documents. There are also a few solutions from Google search for business, Google Mini, the Google Search Appliance and Google Site Search.

Internal and intranet relevant search results - The Google Search Appliance (GSA)

For a company intranet and internal network the Google’s search Appliance aggregates all data and indexes it for  relevant and familiar search results.  Their description states, “Search across websites, intranets, portals, fileshares, content management systems, and business applications to deliver true “universal” search for your organization.”  The ability to uniformly present data across all your internal resources, including multiple Sharepoint sites,  is something we’ve seen needed at several client locations.  The larger enterprise Google Search Appliance 6.0 can easily handle 1 million documents while the Google mini is marketed towards the firms with approximately 300,000 documents.

We’ll definitely hear more about corporate and company wide search in the future from industry specific vendor offerings as well as from some of the search giants like Google.  Information is coming from more and more diverse platforms, such as twitter, blogs and online publications, and the ability to present a unified search result of that data is essential for businesses to succeed.

Email is still at the core of business communications providing exchange of information and documents.  However, document sharing and collaboration has taken on its own specialized applications, servers and platforms.  The biggest concern with collaboration is security and tracking.  In a previous post I wrote about Google Wave and their push to expand collaboration beyond document sharing to live sharing of ideas, text, photos, media… a digital conversation really.  Microsoft has been in this arena for some time and has an established solution in its SharePoint brand.  SharePoint services and SharePoint Portal Server allow for extremely customizable online sharing of documents, projects, teams and more.

Exchange Server 2010 - Unified Communications, archiving, flexibility, data protection and more

Unified communications was a big buzzword several years ago; however, lately it is not thrown around in the media as much as it used to be but it is in practice at most businesses.  In fact Microsoft’s upcoming next version of it ubiquitous Exchange Server 2010 touts unified communications as one of it core features.  Unified communications allows for multiple communication channels to funnel to one platform to access, send and receive email and voicemail.

The recurring themes in this post and many of my previous posts are security and access to content.  As we’ve been hearing with cloud computing and hosted applications (Software as a Service – SaaS) security is an issue that is not fully addressed.  I recently read that even Amazon admits the platform is not compliant to store credit card numbers (EC2 and S3)…  In fact Amazon has come back to clarify their position on security in the cloud after the initial comments.  Hosted Exchange mail with Outlook Anywhere was the first widely accepted hosted solution.  It offers some good features for different businesses: remote access, web interface, mobile device integration, and more.  But there are some industries that cannot  (due to laws, regulation, compliance policies) move their entire organization’s mail to a hosted mail server.  So security will continue to be an issue that will garner much attention from the developers, CIOs & other executives, the media and the tech community.

Accessibility to data and ease of that access is the other theme that seems to play out in many solutions to business need and vision.  Users want to access their documents from the mobile device, whether it is a BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, etc…  They want to document and data to look and function the same on that mobile device (which is really a very powerful mini computer) as it does on their laptop and their desktop.  Something we’ve overcome for business recently was offering not just the ability to view data on mobile devices, but actually manipulate data, run applications and utilize the full functionality of the application from the mobile device.

I’ll trail off on that note for now.  There is so much common ground on the vision and implementation of technology driving business today.  Business evolves, and the businesses that adopt the right technology will reap its rewards…  waxing philosophic about technology, although, I am an engineer