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My name is Jamie Gump. I am a senior Business major, minoring in Mass Communication. I will be graduating in May and I am looking forward to completing school. I transferred to UF after receiving my Associate of Arts degree at Central Florida Community College. I currently work for the Online Business Program as a student assistant but plan to begin work as a tax accountant in June. My plans for the immediate future include completion of my Bachelor of Arts degree and beginning work. I am an avid sports fan. I love the Gators, the Colts, the Cubs, and the Yankees. When I’m not watching or attending games I’m likely to be spending time with family and friends, reading, shopping, or playing with my dog. I hope to use what I learn in this class to enhance my computer operation skills and learn how to help connect my future employer with more efficient and meaningful uses of technology.
Web presence is essential for all businesses because it allows quick efficient communication with your clients, employees, suppliers, and distributors. It is also important for corporations due to the growing global connectivity and interdependence of many firms around the world. A presence on the web is also becoming one of the quickest ways for potential clients to find your business. It’s never been easier to jump online and search for businesses in your area. Corporations who haven’t joined the online community are losing out on a billion dollar market. The goal of business is to be where the customers are; in today’s world they are online.
Podcasts, downloadable or streaming audio and video files, began to develop with the rise in popularity of iPods. Fear not non-ipod-owners, you can enjoy these files on your personal computer or you MP3 player. Topics for podcasts range from “How to Speak Japanese” to government related topics to advice on how to handle kids and family. With a radio show format, Podcasters are creeping in to supply advertisements for their products via a podcast. What better way to reach such a young sophisticated market?
Podcasting is a great tool. I have not used it as a student but I just started a new job and hope that by incorporating a podcast for our clients to download will help them begin to run more effective businesses and learn about what extended services we can offer to them. My roommate who is an elementary education major has even discussed using this to offer assistance to students on subjects they are having difficulty with.
This was an easier assignment than I was expecting as the Web site (podomatic.com) was VERY user friendly. I had never created a podcast before and was able to turn one out in about thirty minutes. I was fearful coming into this that I would need to purchase a microphone, but I was thrilled to read that my headphones can be plugged in and used as a microphone! This is a great tip to keep in mind for beginners who don’t want to spend money to begin podcasting. The only con I see to podcasting is that it isn't a well known technology for much of the older or technologically challenged population. With a little promotion though, I think we could have people tuning in everyday for tips on how to run their businesses more efficiently.
Encrypting email is an aspect that individuals need to be aware of. I was reading online about encryption and found a Web site ( www.mycrypto.net/encryption/secure_email.html) that compared sending email to sending a postcard. MyCrypto.net suggests that sending email without encryption is similar to sending a postcard. Without a security device such as encryption for email or an envelope for a postcard you are allowing others to view your conversation without having to work very hard.
What is email encryption and an email certificate? An email certificate identifies the sender and is distributed by a trusted third party software program. An encrypted message is encoded so that no one else but the person with the private key can read it. If someone with a public key intercepts your encrypted email they will just see random numbers and letters. It takes the private key to unlock the true meaning of the email.
So how can you become more secure? For this segment of the project we installed a personal email certificate so that we could send and receive digitally signed emails. Other ways to protect yourself include encrypting messages, using text, and hiding extremely sensitive material with steganography. Steganography is the technique of hiding a message so well that only the sender and receiver know there is even a message. Besides just safe email you should practice safe internet activities, check out a list of 99 tips to make you more secure at this website (http://www.itsecurity.com/features/99-email-security-tips-112006/).
As discussed in the course lectures, businesses have a vested interest in secure email. They want to keep important items or conversations such as product advances or trade secrets in front of only their employees’ eyes. They also want to keep out competitors out. An important aspect in my job (working with people’s social security numbers and financial information) makes my employer want to keep our clients’ information out from in front of people who could steal their identity. Encryption is making e-commerce a safer environment for everyone involved.
I had never thought about the type of analogy presented at the beginning of this discussion, but it makes perfect sense. I had never used a digitally signed email or sent and encrypted message for my personal email before this project. Why? Partially was because I thought I would be bothered with any additional steps. I send many emails everyday and do not have time for extra steps. After completing this project and learning about encryption and digital signatures, I’ll use them a lot more. It does not take a lot of time to be safe now compared to the time it would take me to clean up a mess that is the result of someone viewing sensitive materials.
The Art of Motion : Florida Gator Gymnastics
The Collaborative Computing Project was a great learning tool. It gave us a chance to work together without ever being together. With globalization more influential than ever in our past, collaborative computing is something that cannot be overlooked.
Companies spread thousands of miles apart are as close as a click of the mouse. Using services like Microsoft’s Sharepoint to bring teams of people together will not only enhance the working environment but will also allow for decreased overhead costs. You do not have to pay for flights to Japan to bring a team together; you can setup a digital workplace instead and even avoid the jetlag. Implementing this new technology is not expensive either. Most all employees already have computers at their desk, more than likely they are already plugged into the Internet and from there all you have to add is the software. No training should be needed for this new technology either. It is as simple as clicking links.
Sharepoint allowed us to work as if we were really creating an advertisement. It was also easy to see who was putting the work in and who was not even logging on. None of the features were difficult to use and even provided for quick access to the information I needed to get to, work on, and update with minimal roadblocks.
I explored more of Sharepoint than was required for the project and found that it was definitely meant for more professional settings than what we used it for. None of us used the “Contacts” feature nor did we use the “Task” feature. Using the task feature would have allowed us to track each other’s progress in a more organized format than the Discussions allowed for. Upon first using Sharepoint and through out this project I was disappointed with the Home Page content. It has been blank throughout this whole project and now I found that the Home Page content can be modified. Overall this is a very useful tool that any corporation could benefit from.
Other services that would allow for a collaborative but digital consortium include Hyperoffice.com and 1stmanager.com. Online meetings can also be held at sites such as WebEx.com, GoToMeeting.com, and Voxwire.com. Online meetings can range from web conferencing (instead of teleconferencing) to training and webinars (instead of seminars.)
For future use, visit ntsecurity.net to learn ways to enhance your Sharepoint experiences.
For the Excel portion of this project I was required to create a Pivot Table and evaluate quarterly sales requirements and pricing decisions. This was a very rewarding exercise. I've been using Excel for a number of years but had not used a Pivot Table until I started this project. I really like the many functions that were used to extract data from one cell. I can't count how many hours I've wasted separating first names from last names in data.
I would like to use the skills I learned from this exercise to help at work with the spreadsheets we make for commissions that are paid to our agents. We currently have to hand enter everything because it doesn’t come to us in a usable format. If we were to separate material as was done in this exercise we could save a lot of valuable time. I like to use Excel for many applications from simple ones like keeping an address book that is easy to use for a mail merge to complex tasks that involve extended formulas.
Microsoft Access is a very useful tool. With its many different functions it would be easy to adapt to nearly any setting. I have always been a fan of using Excel for creating ‘databases’ but now I understand why many people use Access.
During this project I was required to apply many new skills to create tables, queries and reports. I especially liked the report function that Access offers. It prints much nicer and looks much more professional than Excel spreadsheets. The tables provide a place to input or import data and the queries provide a place to add quantifying data to the data we already have. I also like the idea that you can have multiple people working in the database at any time. In Excel you have to open it as a read only file and only one person at a time can make changes to it. Doing some reading on the Microsoft Web site, it is recommended to use Excel when you have small amounts of data and to use Access once you get into the thousands. In my opinion, Access is great to use at any point. If you set up and run in Access from the beginning you will not have to train personnel on two programs and you will not run the risk of losing data when you convert to Access.
Access is especially important when your data is relational. Much of the data I work with includes multiple years of tax return data which would be better kept in a database format. Also our corporations that we work with have multiple requirements monthly from different government offices. We could have a table to detail all of this information. I would also like to create forms, which we did not do in this project. The forms give the database a nice clean look that is easy to navigate through.
In conclusion, I’m going to need a lot more practice at Access before I can use it efficiently. Right now I don’t foresee being able to implement it immediately at work because the data input is so labor intensive. With more than 1300 clients and it being tax season we don’t have time to input data and teach a new application. Once things slow down this will definitely be a function that would be useful to our business.
