Today we bring you Dave Ticoll's insider's report on seasonal software treats for business folks. None are well known, and all are good buys. Two come from big firms, namely Google and Microsoft; they are relatively low risk, like dining at a white linen restaurant approved by Joanne Kates. The other two resemble her plastic tablecloth picks: cheap and cheerful.
I personally depend on all these items.
A goodie from Google is my most recent discovery. As the e-business company prepares for a 2004 stock offering and looming competition from Microsoft, it has been market-testing new tools that build on its popular search engine.
One innovation that I like -- and that, since it's free at least for now, qualifies as the best buy of this column -- is Google News Alerts (http://www.google.com/newsalerts). The service sends you an e-mail when news articles appear on-line that match the topics you specify. It builds on Google News, which delivers continuously updated, searchable news from 4,500 sources. You can customize news alerts to monitor a developing story, keep track of the competition, follow reaction to a new product launch, or keep tabs on your own media mentions. Although the product is in test mode, the risk is zero, since all it does is send you e-mails.
Microsoft's goodie is free, too, but only if you plunk down a few hundred dollars to buy its new kit, Office 2003. I bet that even if you've made this investment, you don't know about these amazing services included at no extra charge. At the top of the list is Factiva, a research engine that pulls articles from a huge collection of newspapers, magazines, and specialized business publications for which you would normally have to pay. Factiva's typical customers are big firms and media companies that use it as a reference and research source. They spend big bucks to give chosen employees access to its powerful capabilities and extensive resources. Microsoft's Factiva lacks sophisticated features that paying customers get, but it's still surprisingly good, and a real bargain. As a bonus, you can also get answers from Microsoft's own Encarta encyclopedia and a variety of other Internet sources.
Another feature of Office 2003 is an automated translation engine, which goes to and from a dozen languages. I recently tried out an English-to-French translation for a talk in Montreal; it was surprisingly serviceable, although I did end up paying for a professional translation just to make sure. I bought it through an add-on service from an independent firm named WorldLingo that Microsoft proffers once you've seen the automated one. Initially worrisome, WorldLingo's responsiveness to my tight deadline improved after I mentioned that I write a newspaper column.
To tell you about the third goodie, I need to bend my secret vow to get through life without writing a column about spam or viruses. Matador -- from a little company called MailFrontier -- is a great spam blocker with many good reviews. I've been using it for nearly a year and have yet to be disappointed. Whether combined with the new spam blockers of Outlook 2003 or on its own, it is as close to an effective, intuitive, easy-to-use spam tool as you can expect to get.
Like most spam blockers, Matador has a list of sites and keywords that it uses to block and divert unwanted e-mail. The product was the first to provide a challenge-response mechanism for messages that fall in a grey zone between valid and junk. It challenges the sender with a message that includes a question like "how many kittens are in this picture?" If your sender is a real person, she can easily respond and the message gets through. If the sender is a machine, the message is toast.
