My name is Diana Cristina Jordan; I am a 20 year old University of Florida student majoring in Zoology and Business Administration. I was born in Cali, Colombia, thus I am fluent in Spanish. I love nature, animals, rollerblading at the beach, and my favorite being in the world is my dog Piwi.I was valedictorian of the class of 2006 College Academy at Broward Community College, an accelerated program that allows high school students to graduate with a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree simultaneously. I am currently looking for an internship position in Business Administration for this summer, and I expect to graduate on spring 2010.
Click here for my resume
It is essential for a business to have a web site because it is the main portal of communication between a company and its consumers. It is an effective way for the company to convey information about the company and its products or services to all its customers. It also provides a way for the customers to communicate to the company any concerns, complaints, or compliments, allowing the customer to feel like the company cares about his/her opinions. Having a web page also broadens any company’s market by allowing online purchases in areas where a physical store may not be available. Most importantly, all of the reasons mentioned above have the added convenience of being available at anytime and in anyplace.
Truthfully, I have never used podcasting before. I had heard of it but I had no idea what it was, and I thought it was only for iPods. During this ISM project I realized that podcasts are short sound or video files that can be accessed on the computer or taken on the go on an iPod or any other mp3/mp4 player. Podcasts come in virtually any topic, are usually free, and the software to subscribe to podcasts is also free.
Professor Olson brought up a good point that podcasting is a good way to constantly keep your customers informed on any new information regarding a product, company, or any topic associated with a business. It gives users the freedom to unsubscribe whenever desired, which is a feature greatly appreciated in today's world where we are constantly bombarded with advertisements from every media including spam and junk mail. As consumers become more savvy in evading these messages and new ways to block out this overload of messages develop, podcasts allow businesses to get through that barrier by allowing users to have up to date information on products/businesses/services that they are interested in with minimal hassle. It eliminates the issue of having to remember to check the business' website on a regular basis and then navigating through it to find the desired content. With a podcast, users can subscribe to feeds about topics they are interested in, the episodes are downloaded automatically onto the software, usually require little or no user input, so users can just listen to what they want to listen to when they want to listen to it.
Unlike newspaper, television, and other media that are sometimes limited to regional advertising, podcasting allows messages to be seen/heard throughout the planet by anyone with access to the Internet; thus a company's podcast would have a broader reach than traditional media. Also, unlike advertising media that are usually costly, low budget or small companies can use free or low priced podcast hosting companies to keep their customers updated. With podcasts, a company knows that once a user subscribes to a feed, that user is sure to receive the message, unlike other media in which the company can never know if the target viewer was exposed to the ad (not watching the TV when the commercial comes on or uses TiVo). This brings me to one issue I find in podcasts, the fact that just because the user has the episodes it doesn't imply he/she will actually listen to them. For example a user might at first join a Chevy podcast to get information on Chevys but once the person buys a car or gets over the hype of having a new Chevy, he/she might stop listening to the podcasts.
Click here to get your own player.
If the player above doesn't work, click here to go the DC Rentals podcast page
There are two parts to a secure e-mail: the e-mail certificate and encryption. An e-mail certificate identifies who you are, it is your electronic identification. E-mail certificates are usually issued by a trusted third party, including companies such as Thawte and Verisign. When a recipient receives a signed e-mail from you, his/her e-mail client checks that the digital certificate matches the sender and also checks the issuer of the certificate, verifying that you are really you. Encryption is a mathematical process of scrambling a message to make it very difficult to read; to do the encryption the algorithm needs a seed value, a big random number, that then gets transformed into your certificate and keys. When a certificate is issued, two keys are generated, a public and a private key, necessary to encrypt a message making it almost unreadable to anyone without the private key. This private key must be kept confidential, since it is what keeps the messages from being decrypted by others, yet it must be kept safe because once the private key is lost it might be impossible to decode any encrypted messages received.
In order to receive an encrypted message, you must first send a signed message to the other party, which includes the e-mail certificate that has the public key embedded. In our ISM project, we completed this first step by sending a signed message to our professor and also received a signed message from the professor that included his public key. Sending the certificate with the embedded keys gives the other party the means to send you encrypted messages. In the ISM project we used the professor's public key to send him an encrypted message, and in reply he sent an encrypted message (using our public keys). In order to decode an encrypted message you must have the private key that is paired with the public key used to encode the message, thus we used our private keys to decode the encrypted message that the professor sent us. This way two parties can securely e-mail back and forth using encrypted messages, once each has the public key of the other.
With the advances in technology and the increased use of e-mail as a faster, more efficient means of communication in businesses, encrypted e-mails provide a means to protect a company's confidential information from being attained by its competitors and used against them. Using secure messages prevents embarrassing information leaks that can lead to great loses including loss of consumers, employees, and direct monetary loses through public relations efforts to repair the damages to the company's reputation. In today's world customers are extremely wary of the use of their information and using secure messages ensures that the promise to protect its customer's privacy is being kept. There are often stories of consumer's credit card information being stolen from a company causing all sorts of inconveniences and possible monetary losses to the customer, thus it is the company's responsibility to do all that is possible to prevent mishaps like this from happening. Although most businesses use MS Outlook, the cost of using encrypted messages may be decreased by using open source software like Mozilla’s thunderbird e-mail client, which is free to download and modify.
With the advent of the internet, communication has become increasingly easy and accessible. With the use of e-mail, companies were able to speed up the distribution of information, replacing the not-so-clear faxes and the slow paper memos and documents with fast, efficient, clear e-mails. Yet e-mail is not a very efficient method of carrying out large projects in collaborative situations where quick replies are necessary and the coordination of various team members is involved. E-mail normally cannot support the large amount of data necessary to transfer databases, spreadsheets, image, video, and sound files. To solve this problem collaborative computing uses software like Microsoft SharePoint to allow team-members to share information and large files easily from any location at any time.
Collaborative Computing is growing in the business environment where there is a rising move from individual work to team work. Using web based collaborative software companies can give employees the flexibility of working on projects from anywhere in the world, on any computer, at any time. This becomes extremely useful in a growing world where companies have various locations in multiple parts of the world, and where employees are constantly traveling, overcoming the geographical and time zone restrictions that make it very difficult to physically coordinate projects among team members.
In the collaborative computing project that we carried out in the class, I realized that it would have been very inconvenient (if not impossible) to share so many large picture files with all the team members and to constantly e-mail back and forth any comment, draft, or idea. Most importantly, this constant surge of unorganized information in my e-mail inbox would have become too overwhelming and time consuming to sort through. With Microsoft SharePoint, we were able to maintain the conversations organized, keeping a logical sequence of events, and easily uploading images. We were also able to make decisions as a team through surveys and announcements creating consensus within the group. Through my experience with this project I realized that all these features could be helpful in a real business situation where teamwork is crucial and where people with different schedules could coordinate and come together.
Click here to view the result of our collaboration.
During this Excel assignment, we worked with several (previously unknown to me) Excel features that help with database/spreadsheet management and interpretation.
We first used extraction formulas to separate pieces of information that were together in a single record. Using the "left" and "right" functions we separated the state and the zip code from a single cell that contained the state, zip code, and city. These functions are very useful in organizing data that has been provided to you into a more usable format, that can be easily sorted by the various extracted categories.
We also inserted values from another worksheet using the "VLOOKUP" function, which automatically goes through a worksheet and inserts paired values into the other worksheet. Here we had a table that paired states with regions and using this function we were able to automatically insert the "region" into another (long) worksheet that contained a list of states. This task would have been very effort and time consuming and prone to human error. I like to keep track of my music so i have been wanting to make a music database, and I can see immense value in this tool. I can now easily make a table pairing a number with a genre and use "VLOOKUP" to insert the genre into a music database that is organized by numbers (saving a LOT of typing).
We created a pivot table that summarizes our data in an organized, aesthetically pleasing format. A pivot table makes data seem more formal, and presents the data in an easy to compare format, making it a useful and appropriate tool for a business environment where data must be presented to executives, clients, etc.
The most interesting tool was the Goal Seek tool, which can be used in "what if" scenarios. It performs simple calculations to determine quantities, prices, etc, needed to obtain a final value. I can see the usefulness of this tool in a business environment where businesses have to find the break-even point, or (like we did in this project) need to figure out how many units and at what price must be sold to reach a target revenue.
During the first part of the project we imported external data from an Excel spreadsheet and set up a database with that data creating a useful arrangement of information. This is a very useful tool because you can take data given to you by other people from inside and outside
the company in many formats, and sort it and manipulate it into something more than just a long list of characters.
We created a validation rule to limit the range of characters that a user can input into the database. This is extremely useful because it helps increase accuracy by avoiding the input of irrelevant data and decreasing the range of human input errors that can occur, making sure the user receives an error message if he/she tries to input data that does not match the desired range (making sure the zip code entered is from Florida for instance). Another feature we used to limit the type of data that can be entered into the database is the drop-drown boxes embedded in the database. In this case we used drop-down boxes to tell the user that he/she could only enter one, two, thee, or four stars in that “rating” field.
We created a lookup table that linked two tables that displayed which DVD outlets were assigned which videos. Doing this not only created a display in that table, but also created submenus in the two tables, allowing you to see what information from that table had been linked to the other table, saving you the time and effort of having to open and search through the other table. In business where one supplier is used for many products, or one product has many suppliers, this lookup table can create relationships between the individual ID of a producer and the ID of a product without compromising the original producer and product tables. The same principle could be applied to products, retail stores, materials used, costs, etc.
The use of queries seemed to me to be a valuable business tool that allows the user to “pull out” and display only the desired information. In this case we created a query that only displayed movies that had a PG rating and only the fields that we wished to see, decreasing the clutter and inconvenience of having irrelevant fields and records displayed with the desired information. We also used an update query which is a true time saver. This query is used to replace data that repeats throughout a table with other data, in our case we replaced all the instances of the word “PG13” wit ”PGTeen” with the click of a button.
Finally we created a report from part of our data that presented information in a clear, aesthetic way. This is a useful Access tool that allows the user to create a printout that can be handed to a CEO, manager, or co-worker that presents the information in an easy to read manner.
