I am a native Floridian, growing up in the Ft. Lauderdale area, now living in Tampa. I've been married for 6 years and have two dogs that I love to spoil rotten. I work full-time in customer service, and I'm also a part-time student at the University of Florida in the Online Business Administration program. It has been a life-long dream of mine to graduate from the University of Florida and this dream will become a reality in Fall 2009. In my spare time, I enjoy traveling with my husband and spending time with my adorable dogs.
Click here to view my resume.
It is crucial for businesses to have a website because it allows their customers to interact with them on-demand. Regardless of the size of the business, a website provides instant access to information about the business. For websites that have an online store, customers can buy products from the business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This on-demand service creates a speed and ease for doing business that couldn't exist without a website.
The purpose of a podcast is to inform the public and keep consumers up-to-date on the products and services offered by a business. Podcasts are in the form of audio files that can be accessed on the computer or any MP3 player. People can subscribe to the podcasts of their choice, without the need to submit personal information. There is also the option to unsubscribe at any time. This puts the user in control.
Before taking this class, I had never subscribed to or listened to any podcasts. I found the ISM3004 Sound Bytes to be very interesting and informative. I think that businesses can benefit from the use of podcasts due to the need for information to be readily available to consumers.
In our increasingly digital and technological world, people expect to get the information they want exactly when they want it. Podcasts are part of the solution to on-demand information. You can listen to my podcast here.
During this project, I used a digital certificate to send secure email messages. A digital certificate contains both a private key and a public key. The private key is used to both digitally sign outgoing messages and to decrypt incoming messages. A public key is used by the email recipient to confirm the digital signature and also to send encrypted messages back to the sender.
This can be useful for businesses that deal with sensitive information, such as medical records or bank accounts. This information is confidential and should be protected using encryption, so that only the intended recipient can access it. If the information was sent without encryption, it would become vulnerable to anyone with internet access.
Identity theft is at the forefront of internet security issues today. With phishing scams and spam email becoming more prevalent, the need for secure email is a necessity. Phishing scams send emails posing as legitimate companies like banks and web-based businesses. These emails request information like passwords, social security numbers, and account numbers. A digital signature would prevent these phishing scams from occurring by allowing the email recipient to confirm who the actual sender is or is not.
Businesses who want to gain the trust of their customers should use secure email when sending messages. When a customer receives an email from a business that contains their digital signature, they can verify the sender by the public key that is stored in their address book. This process facilitates a better customer experience.
In our technological business environment, it is nearly impossible to work in a group without the use of collaboration software. In my job, I work with people in several different locations. We often need to share documents and have discussions, but we don’t have any type of collaboration software. Sometimes the threads of emails get out of control and it becomes very time-consuming to read and keep track of these emails. To share documents, we use shared drives on network servers, but this can be challenging if all group members do not have access to the appropriate shared drive or network server. SharePoint could be a great solution to these issues.
SharePoint is collaboration software that allows a group of people to work together effectively to share documents, participate in discussions, create alerts, and post announcements. When posting a document, SharePoint allows you to keep the previous versions of the same document, which facilitates better tracking of changes. Using surveys allows all group members to give their opinion on the work being done by the group. The surveys track which person answered what to each question, and allows all group members to view this information.
Using SharePoint with my group in this course was a great learning experience. The five group members were all in different parts of Florida and never met in person. All of the group members worked well together and we did not have any problems using SharePoint. My favorite aspect of SharePoint is the alerts. I created an alert that sent me an email any time a change was made on the group website. This was very convenient and prevented me from having to login to the site just to check if my group members had posted anything.
I would recommend this software to my employer so that the employees in different locations can work together more efficiently.
Click here to view my group's ad.
During this project, I used functions in Excel including Text and VLOOKUP functions, as well as the Goal Seek tool. Other than the VLOOKUP function, I had never used these tools in the past. I also created a pivot table, which I had not done before. I did not realize how cumbersome it was to create a pivot table before I did this project. I can understand how useful it can be to have this knowledge, but I don't see myself using pivot tables in my current job. I use an ERP application, SAP, that has built-in reports which have the capability to extract data directly into Excel. These reports can also create pivot tables with the specifications the user chooses. For me, this is more powerful and useful than manually creating the pivot table in Excel from scratch.
This is a screen capture of the pivot table I created for this project.
In this project, I used Microsoft Access to import data; create tables, queries, and reports; and perform a lookup function. I had previously taken a class in Microsoft Access, so I found this project to be somewhat intuitive. I enjoyed this project because I can see the value in using databases in the business world.
Databases are essential tools for businesses of all sizes. I work for a large corporation, and in my job, I support a website that has all of its data stored in an Oracle database. The website is customer-facing, so we rely on the ability to quickly retrieve the data that our customers need. I also pull data from the database and use it to create reports that are distributed to management.
I think that Microsoft Access would be better-suited for smaller companies because it doesn’t require a database administrator to manage it. The average computer user can learn Access in a short amount of time. Access is also less expensive, which is a benefit to small business owners.
Here is a screen capture of the table relationships in my database:
