Kevin Southworth

I think Apple might be wearing me down.  So far I haven't really had a reason to invest in a Mac since my professional life is spent developing web applications using ASP.NET and C# (which I enjoy).  However, a lot of people I know (both normal people and developers) have switched over to Macs (or at least bought one to use alongside their PC) and we're thinking of buying one for the office so we can actually have a Mac to test our web applications using the real Safari browser (instead of the Mac screenshot services that we currently use).

I also recently watched the Mac OSX "Leopard" video walkthrough of Apple's next version of the OSX operating system.  The one feature that stood out for me was the "Time Machine" feature, it just seemed really intuitive, very useful, without feeling like it's "in the way".  I'm not sure what the overhead is for that feature (i'm assuming it's gotta be indexing the hard disk constantly, which I assume would affect performance?) but it does look pretty slick.

Also, I gotta say that the iPhone is a sweet product.  I don't have an iPhone yet, but I have visited the AT&T store twice and played with them.  I just haven't had that event that put me over the edge enough to pay $250 to ditch my current provder (Centennial) and plunk down $400 + 2-year contract with AT&T.  However, Apple recently announced that they'll be providing an SDK for the iPhone in February 2008, depending on what that SDK provides, that might be enough to sway me to the Apple/AT&T side of things.  I've also heard rumors of the next version of the iPhone that might include GPS and 3G, if that's the case then I don't think I'll be able to resist!

This week Web Ascender launched 2 new websites: www.c21lookingglass.com and www.lansingitcompanies.com

Century 21 Looking Glass is a Lansing Real Estate broker. Their new website allows visitors to search the MLS property database in the Mid-Michigan area, along with the ability to save properties in their "cart" for revisiting later.

LansingITCompanies.com is a website designed to increase the visibility of IT-related companies in the Greater Lansing area.  If your business relies on IT workers and you're located in Mid-Michigan, please add your company to the website!

Ryan and I decided we needed to find a real solution to our problem of sharing our contacts, calendars, and accounting information between our office computers.  We've already adopted Microsoft Office 2007, which means we're already using Outlook 2007.  Microsoft has a sweet add-on for Outlook called "Business Contact Manager" which adds a lot of CRM-like features to Outlook like accounts, oppotunities, projects.  What's really cool though, is you can connect your BCM (business contact manager) to a remote/network SQL Server 2005 database instance, and then share your BCM data between all you machines.  BCM also installs a local SQL 2005 Express instance to store all of your data when you're offline, and it will sync up with your master network database when you re-connect.  Another cool feature is that BCM can integrate with Microsoft Accounting 2007, a new accounting package for small businesses.

Just recently we setup this whole deal on our office server.  First we installed SQL Server 2005.  Next we installed MS Office 2007.  Next we installed the Business Contact Manager Addon for Outlook 2007, which detected our SQL Server instance and installed it's database there. The last step was to install MS Accounting 2007.  We had been using MS Accounting 2006 for the last year, so we were a little concerned how the upgrade process would be from 2006 to 2007 as far as our data was concerned.  The upgrade went flawlessy, however, and sucked in all our 2006 data.  The really cool part though, was that Accounting detected our BCM database and asked us "Would you like to integrate Accounting with Business Contact Manager?"  That's exactly what I wanted! So I said yes and after clicking through a couple more wizard steps, we had BCM and Accounting running in harmony on the our server.

The last step was to configure all of our Outlook 2007 clients to point at the server's BCM database stored in SQL Server.  The whole thing was actually pretty painless and I'm impressed with the level of integration Microsoft has put in to Outlook 2007, Business Contact Manager, and Accounting 2007.

Now Ryan and I can write invoices, create leads and contacts on our laptops (offline) and then sync up to the server when we get back to the office.  It looks like it's going to be a great solution for us.