Online office suite comparison

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Neil McAllister

The idea that someday we’ll be doing all our computing in a Web browser is gaining traction, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to do all your daily office tasks online? I did, too, so I set out to see whether I could replace Microsoft Office with any of the current generation of Web-based office suites. I looked at Google Docs, Zoho, and thanks to an invitation to Microsoft’s Technical Preview program, the forthcoming Office 2010 Web Apps. The results are up at InfoWorld, but I should warn you: They weren’t all positive. Click the link to read about the good and the bad, and see if you want to try for yourself.

First look at Office 2010

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Neil McAllister

As a writer, I spend most of my life in Microsoft Office. Love it or hate it, Office has become the gold standard for business productivity software. So when the good folks at InfoWorld gave me the opportunity to take the upcoming version for a test drive, I jumped at the chance. My first impressions are largely favorable. Microsoft keeps making steady improvements here and there, and the suite is more polished and consistent than ever. On the downside, each new release seems to tie Office ever closer to back-office products like SharePoint and Exchange, which means customers will be locked in to Microsoft software more than ever. Click on over to InfoWorld for the rest of my thoughts.

Oracle buys Sun: I was right!

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Neil McAllister

Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to learn that Sun Microsystems had accepted a $7.4 billion purchase offer from Oracle. Not least of all because I actually predicted the sale more than a week ago!

Click on the above link to read my InfoWorld editorial speculating on the deal before it happened, and learn what I think the two companies have in common and what each stands to gain. If nothing else, it’s going to be a very interesting year for users of Java, MySQL, and other Sun products.

For full details on Oracle’s purchase of Sun, check out InfoWorld’s news story here.

Test your Web trivia knowledge

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Neil McAllister

InfoWorld has posted the next in our ongoing series of fun quizzes to test your knowledge of all things tech. This time around, the topic is the Web itself. It’s hard to believe that it’s only about 17 years since the Web’s inception, yet we’ve come a long way from those humble beginnings. This week’s quiz tries to reflect the full breadth of topics throughout that storied history.

From browsers to the HTTP protocol, JavaScript to the history of e-commerce, there’s something here to test everyone’s knowledge of history and technical nitty-gritty. Don’t feel bad if you miss some of the answers — that’s part of the fun. There are a lot of unexpected details hidden in this one, so if you bear with it you might learn a few fun factoids for your next LAN party.

BTW, if you enjoy this one, check out our earlier IQ tests on programming and the Linux OS.

Ubuntu for newbies

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Neil McAllister

A few weeks ago, PC World published an excellent guide to setting up your PC with a brand-new installation of Ubuntu Linux. Now they’ve let me do the follow-up.

Available now on PC World’s site, check out “Don’t Fear the Penguin: A Newbie’s Guide to Linux.” It’s your quick-start tour of your Ubuntu installation, including application highlights, configuration options, and how to work cross-platform with Windows and Mac OS X. Best of all, it’s chock full of screenshots, so you can make sense of it even if you haven’t taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu yet yourself. » More... » →

How eBay built a global platform

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Neil McAllister

I have a new article in the current edition of Multilingual magazine, which I co-wrote with Nelson Ng of eBay. It’s about how eBay re-engineered its back-end systems to support Unicode, the universal character-encoding standard.

Unfortunately, this one is subscription-only for now. But the gist is that eBay needed to convert all of its database tables, applications, and HTML to Unicode in order to expand into Asian markets while maintaining maximum compatibility across all its global sites. Considering the scope of eBay’s operations, it was no easy task. In fact, it took years to complete.

It’s a fascinating case study, so if you’re interested in multilingual computing I encourage you to check it out. Multilingual is a print publication, but digital subscriptions give you access to the current issue online immediately.

Linux IQ quiz

Posted on November 3, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Another one from the “just for fun” file — this week, InfoWorld is running a quick quiz to see just how much you really know about Linux.

I always get a certain amount of hate mail when we put together one of these things, so let’s clear up a few points right off. No, getting some of the questions wrong doesn’t mean you’re dumb, or that you’re bad at your job as a Linux admin. It’s for fun. See?

Anyhow, check it out, and if you feel like bragging about your score — or calling me an idiot — post ’em here or on the InfoWorld site.

20 (more) IT mistakes to avoid

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Think you know something about how to manage IT? Care to learn a thing or two about how not to do it?

My latest article for InfoWorld revisits an old theme, originally covered in 2004 by Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld’s then-CTO: the top IT mistakes to avoid. We all fall prey to bad ideas once in a while. Presented here are twenty doozies for you to observe and evade.

And lest you think you’ve heard it all before, rest assured that this year’s list doesn’t overlap much with the original 20. Some of the topics are related, but I’ve tried to present a new twist or an opposite angle. Taken together, the two articles form a pretty formidable list of “worst practices.” So click on over and let me know what you think.

Inside Google’s Chrome browser

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Neil McAllister

For the truly geeky among you: In the latest post to my Fatal Exception blog over at InfoWorld, I’m taking a look under the hood of Chrome, Google’s new Web browser. A lot of articles make mention of how Chrome is open source. I actually put it to the test, by building a custom copy of it myself.

Along the way I found out a lot of interesting information about Chrome’s internals and how Google built it. On the plus side, it’s very clean, well-organized code. On the minus side, it looks like it’s going to be Windows-only for a good while, yet.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this piece (it’s been a long time since I had a legitimate excuse to pull out a compiler on Windows), so if you have the hobbyist spirit, drop on over and join the discussion.

Taking netbooks through their paces

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Neil McAllister

A new category of low-cost, ultra-lightweight laptops has appeared recently. It began with the Asus Eee PC and spawned a slew of imitators, including the Acer Aspire ONE, the HP Mini-Note, and the MSI Wind — not to mention a somewhat-confusing array of Eee PC models to follow the original.

These devices have mostly been marketed to students and home users, with Web browsing and light computing tasks in mind. I wanted to see whether they might also be attractive to business users. So I packed up an HP Mini-Note and Asus’s latest Eee PC 901 and headed off to the airport, with the plan to test each of them in real-world field conditions. My review for InfoWorld, published today, details the results of my trials. » More... » →

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