Salesforce.com mobile app developers gain security tools

Good Technology has integrated its Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform with Salesforce.com's Mobile SDK to help developers build mobile applications that are more secure and easily managed.

The growing popularity of smartphones and tablets combined with the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend presents several challenges to IT departments, including developing mobile applications and then efficiently managing and protecting them. Salesforce.com's Mobile SDK (software development kit) helps with the former and Good's Secure Mobility Platform offers the latter.

The goal with the integration is to make it easier for Salesforce.com developers to build apps compatible with Good's containerization technology, which offers features such as app-level encryption as well as compliance and jailbreak detection. Enterprises can also put in place data loss prevention and automated actions that lock and wipe applications without impacting a user's device or personal data, according to Good.

The Mobile SDK, which is available for Android and iOS, is a key part of Salesforce.com's accelerating mobile push. It lets developers choose between building applications directly for Apple and Google's OSes, web applications or so-called hydrid applications -- which make it possible to embed HTML5 apps inside a native container.

Recently, Salesforce.com announced version 2.0 of the SDK, which added the SmartSync data framework allowing developers to create applications that work with data both off and online.

Good isn't the only mobile management tool vendor that's working with Salesforce. On Tuesday, competitor MobileIron announced Anyware. The hosted enterprise mobility management service lets administrators distribute mobile apps to employees as well as manage their devices from the Salesforce administration console, MobileIron said.

Browser privacy tools still lack bite, security analysts say

Browser vendors continue to implement privacy in a halfhearted way, with Internet Explorer's default use of cookie "do not track" technology being the best of a weak job, a new assessment by NSS Labs has argued.

Currently, the latest versions of all four leading browsers—IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari—implement Do not track - but only Internet Explorer 10 installs it switched on by default, NSS Labs' latest Comparative Analysis found.

The cookie-tracking setting can be enabled in the other three, but only by locating an option in a menu setting. The authors are especially critical of Chrome, which requires users to find and expand a nested Advanced Settings tab to enable the feature.

Even Microsoft treats the do not track as a design afterthought, burying the settings where only the most curious non-expert users might chance upon it.

NSS Labs interprets this lack of enthusiasm for the setting as revealing each vendor's "philosophical views on consumer privacy," while accepting that do not track remains ineffective as a privacy control while advertisers remain free to ignore it as they please.

browsers
"Until legislation is passed that will mandate compliance with the user intent of Do not track, the feature will remain a polite request that will be ignored by the advertising industry," write authors Randy Abrams and Jayendra Pathak.

With third-party cookies, Safari and IE are given the thumbs up, with the former blocking all by default, and IE implementing a partial block. Although Firefox and Chrome don't activate this setting by default, Firefox in particular offers granular control over a setting that is vital to automate access to many commonly used sites.

Other privacy features—the ability to control geolocation, private browsing, and tracking protection lists—all fall down to some extent.

Controlling geolocation (the ability for a site to detect a user's country location), all four browsers prompt as required, but in order to disable the setting completely Firefox forces users to access the technically demanding about:config page.

Uniquely, IE9/10 allows Tracking Protection lists from third-party vendors, essentially lists of sites for IE to block third-party cookies automatically unless the setting is overridden by the user.

Overall, then, IE comes out on top for privacy thanks to the relative simplicity of its slider controls and privacy templates, but none of the four are given a ringing endorsement.

It remains unclear to what extent browser privacy and features such as do not track are valued or even understood by users. A YouGov poll from late last year found that consumers valued ease of use more highly than the ability to block cookies, although the same survey admitted that many disliked targeted ads which follow users even when they have left sites.

Do not track has certainly upset some advertisers, with the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) recently lobbying a W3C discussion on how to standardize the way that not track should work.

Bosses without borders: Essential tools for managing remote workers

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made headlines in February when she banned telecommuting, as did Best Buy when it canceled its telework program shortly afterward. But according to the Families and Work Institute (PDF), remote working is on the rise: Last year 63 percent of companies reported giving employees workplace flexibility, up from 34 percent in 2005. And in a recent Gallup survey, 39 percent of employees said they spent some time working remotely. The research firm also found that remote workers put in more hours and are slightly more engaged than their office counterparts.

It’s all well and good for workers who can opt out of frazzling commutes or choose to crank out a bunch of work in their pajamas, but what about their boss? How can you know if telecommuters are working as much as they say they are, and how can you help them do their best work? Here are some of the best tools available to promote stellar communication with remote workers.

Forget about tedious status reports. This slick cloud platform works as a communications backbone for companies by prompting employees to spend 15 minutes a week writing about their successes, challenges, ideas, and morale in a report that takes a manager only 5 minutes to read. Managers decide the questions 15Five asks, such as “What’s going well in your role?” or “What challenges are you facing, and where do you need support?” With the click of a button, managers can include an employee comment in their own report. Whenever an executive responds to an idea or issue, both the manager and employee receive an email notification, so they can hop back onto 15Five to continue the conversation.

15Five prompts employees to spend 15 minutes writing a status update that will take their manager just 5 minutes to read.
Currently 15Five is off-limits if you use a free email provider, such as Gmail or Yahoo. The company plans to lift that restriction in an upcoming upgrade to the platform. Try it at no charge for four weeks; after the trial period, it costs $49 a month for the first ten people and $5 more for each additional person.

Though millions of people use Basecamp, that solid and popular project management platform no longer offers a free version. Instead, tiers start at $1 a day for managing up to 15 projects. If you’re managing a small business on a tight budget, try Asana, a free product you can use on the Web or on your mobile device.

Asana lets you sort tasks by project or team member.
Asana’s cloud platform (which resembles the three-paneled Web app that Evernote uses) gives you a wealth of information about a given project. On the left you can filter what will appear in the main, middle section by project or team member. Click a particular task there to get more details about it in the right pane—information such as due dates, people assigned to the project, and comments that team members have made about it. Asana lets you attach files from your computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox to any task. The company also nudges new users toward a demo video to make the process of getting started less difficult.

If your employees are coders, you might try Pivotal Tracker, a project management tool for software development teams. It starts at $7 a month for three collaborators and five projects.

For a two-person video call, Skype is easy and free. But if you want to Skype with up to ten people at once, someone in the group has to ante up for Skype Premium, which starts at $5 a month.

For that reason, I recommend using Google+ Hangouts, which is free for meetings of up to ten people. Though you have to have a Google+ account to use one, iOS and Mac users can also take part. In contrast, Apple’s FaceTime isn’t available on Android or Windows.

A Google Hangout, which is free for meetings of up to ten people, lets you share screenshots and pull in popular apps.
Google has baked some pretty cool features into Hangouts, such as Hangouts On Air, which lets you live-stream any Hangout to Google+, record it to your YouTube channel, or broadcast it to your website. You can also share screenshots, snap photos of the Hangout, and pull in apps like SlideShare and Cacoo to give presentations and enable drawing, respectively.

If you need to hold an online meeting with more than ten participants, you might try Zoom. For $10 a month (or no charge if you can keep your meeting to less than 40 minutes), it lets you include up to 25 participants. And like Google+ Hangouts, Zoom works on your mobile device. Unlike Hangouts, however, Zoom supports HD video and audio.

Intuit’s Online Payroll, which easily lets you export data to sister products QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online, is perfect for small businesses. For one thing, it gives you tons of assistance as you enter data during initial setup. This process can be complicated because you have to deal with so many variables, from your pay schedule to federal, state, and local taxes. Intuit’s setup wizard generates a to-do list that identifies required and recommended tasks, and its email reminders help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Intuit Online Payroll helps with everything from time tracking to taxes.
Intuit Online Payroll lets you access payroll information from a Web browser, smartphone, or tablet. It comes in three flavors. Basic, which starts at $25 per month, is strictly for paying people. Enhanced (starting at $35 per month) generates paychecks, automatically fills in W-2s and federal and state tax forms, and reminds you when payroll taxes are due. Full Service (starting at $99 per month) takes care of paying workers as well as filing and paying taxes. Under each plan, you must pay an extra $2 per month for every employee you pay. For an additional $3 per person per month, you can add a time-tracker module to the service: Employees can then clock in and out and complete their own timesheets, eliminating the need for double entry.

Expensify—offered by a San Francisco startup whose tagline is “Expense reports that don’t suck”—is an online tool and mobile app that greatly simplifies tracking expenses and creating and submitting expense reports. When installed on your employees’ mobile devices, the mobile app lets them record expenses on the fly, snap photos of receipts, use GPS to figure out how many miles they’re driving, and track how many hours they’re spending on a project. This is especially handy now that Expensify offers invoicing features.

Expensify’s mobile app lets employees record expenses on the fly.
Once back in the office, workers can access the Web app, which syncs with information entered on the mobile app. From there, they can use Expensify’s SmartScan technology to analyze photos of receipts and automatically fill in date and amount fields. If users import bank and credit card transactions, the platform will generate e-receipts for expenses that will pass muster with the IRS, so nobody has to keep files of paper receipts.

Expensify integrates with many popular products, including Evernote, FinancialForce, FreshBooks, Google Apps, NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Salesforce. You’ll need a premium subscription to connect to some of these accounts.

The free version lets bosses accept, review, and approve the expense reports of two employees. Coverage of additional staffers costs $6 per person per month. Users can upload as many receipts as they want to Expensify. Free SmartScans are limited to ten per month, after which they cost 20 cents each.

Want more? If you need to track remote workers’ time on the job, give TransparentBusiness a whirl. It does things like take screenshots from an employee’s computer every few minutes. For phone-intensive businesses, ShoreTel Sky’s VoIP technology (priced at $35 to $50 per user per month) enables your people to transfer calls to each other even if they’re all working remotely—and it lets you see how much time they’re spending on the phone. Need to group-chat with a bunch of people at once? Try HipChat. Harvest is great for time-tracking, managing expenses, and invoicing, and it integrates into many project-management apps. FreshBooks is a good cloud-based accounting service that integrates with a plethora of other software platforms that your employees might already be using.

Honestly, the list could go on. There has never been a better time to embrace remote work, because fantastic, affordable tools abound that make keeping in touch with telecommuters dead simple.

Khronos Group releases updates to graphics, parallel programming tools

Programming tools that harness the computing power of CPUs and graphics processors have been updated, bringing more parallel programming capabilities to the table.

Standards-setting firm Khronos Group released OpenCL 2.0, which is a key development platform used to write applications in which processing is broken down over multiple processors and hardware inside systems. The group also released OpenGL 4.4, a graphics programming standard that takes advantage of the latest graphics hardware available in consoles, PCs and mobile devices.

OpenCL has grown in importance as graphics hardware and other co-processors are increasingly used to crunch complex math and science applications. Some of the world's fastest computers combine CPUs and co-processors to speed up application processing, and Hewlett-Packard and Dell are offering servers and workstations loaded with graphics cards for customers that work on visual and CAD/CAM applications.

"It does significantly expand some of the new GPGPU compute function," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

McGregor referred to general-purpose graphics processing unit computing, in which processing is increasingly offloaded to graphics processors in systems.

But the effectiveness of OpenCL depends on programming and OS, which needs to support all the functions. OpenCL is backed by organizations such as Intel and Nvidia, which offer their own parallel programming tools to speed up processing of applications. Microsoft offers DirectX, its own parallel programming framework that is also used for game development and rendering.

Khronos also announced OpenGL 4.4, which allows "applications to incrementally use new features while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) across diverse operating systems and platforms," the organization said in a release.

The new graphics specification also allows easy porting of applications across APIs (application programming interfaces), Khronos said.

Power up your PDFs with these five free tools

There's no point to drowning in PDF features you don't want (and really, really don't want to pay for) when you can stock your toolbox with exactly what you require. These five freebies push the boundaries of what you can do with a PDF file.

Whether you long to edit, watermark, or otherwise tweak your PDF; add a Creative Commons license, or just cut your PDF down to size, one of these can make your PDFs what you want them to be...for free.

This portable app's website says "Bright Snippet Sire," but everybody calls it Briss. An open-source favorite, Briss crops a section of a PDF file and creates another PDF file of the cropped area. It's easy to use, and it's awfully handy.

Snipping out unwanted areas of a PDF—then saving to a new PDF—is Briss's specialty.
E-bookworms with e-readers have a particular need for Briss. To read a PDF on an e-reader, you normally have to format and convert it, and traditional ebook converters (such as ePub converters) frequently make a hash of PDF conversion. Briss converts two-column pages into single-column pages, cuts out the unnecessary margins, and automatically removes unwanted fluff, such as page numbers and chapter headings. You can successfully pass the resulting clean PDF through an ePub converter.

With Creative Commons licenses, you can distribute your creative work for free and specify the conditions under which it can be used. For example, you can offer your work free for use, provided you receive attribution. Or you can say that it's fine for personal or nonprofit projects to use your work, but that commercial ventures have to pay you. Attaching one of these licenses to the work removes any ambiguity or doubt as to the terms and conditions under which you share your work.

CC PDF Converter helps you find the best Creative Commons license for your creative work (in this case, "you" means Randall Munroe nd "your work" is the webcomic XKCD).
CC PDF Converter converts your Word document, Excel file, or Internet Explorer HTML file into a PDF doc...but it's no ordinary PDF. This free, open-source beta program asks you a series of questions about the type of license you want, then stamps a small but legible Creative Commons license on the pages.

Open-source developer Michael Schierl describes his jPDF Tweak as the "Swiss Army Knife for PDF Files," and it certainly lives up to that promise. With it, you can add watermarks, change the metadata, combine PDF files, encrypt files, make printable booklets, rotate pages, and more. I love this program so much that it has a permanent place on my PC (and there are Linux editions, too).

jPDF Tweak gives you a great deal of control over your images, and it's free and open source.
This Java-based portable app makes a nice addition to the road warrior's USB drive or Dropbox folder. Simply double-click the BAT file to run it. Then load the PDF file from your PC in the "input tab" and choose the next tab you need. When you've made changes, go to the "output" tab to generate your tweaked PDF.

Bear in mind, though, that if a PDF has existing restrictions protected by a password, that password will hold. jPDF Tweak does not allow you to remove or break the password.

PDFill is similar to jPDF Tweak, but with a nicer user interface. As well as the usual features, PDFill includes other goodies, such as file conversion and adding headers and footers. The only downside is that it costs $20 to work watermark-free.
If you don't mind a watermark on your saved files, then don't worry about this nag screen.
In a default installation, a PDF button appears inside Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to start PDFill directly. You can also insert the same button into the Internet Explorer browser, and into the Quick Launch and SendTo functions of Windows.These integration options are voluntary and easy to de-select at installation.

PDFill consists of Editor, Writer, and Tools. Editor, whose interface resembles Microsoft Word 2003, is the paid $20 version of PDFill. If you decide not to pay, Editor remains fully functional, but it pops up a nag screen upon saving and stamps a watermark on files. PDFill Editor provides a variety of pro-level functions such as creating form fields; writing, drawing, or highlighting pages in a PDF; and exporting and importing form data; as well as the usual PDF file management tools, such as converting, cropping, and rotating.

PDFill Writer creates PDF files by attaching itself to your PC printer function. When you want to create a PDF, open your printer dialog box and choose the PDFill Writer as your printer.

The watermark an unregistered copy of PDFill Editor adds to saved files can be distracting.
PDFill Tools provides even more editing tools, some of which overlap with the paid Editor. This includes merging, splitting, watermarks, rotating, cropping and much more.

PDFill packs a punch when it comes to PDF editing functions, and the free version is fine for anyone who doesn't mind nag screens and watermarks. That said, the $20 full version is a really good deal, considering the features that you get.

For sheer handiness, it's hard to beat Debenu PDF Tools. It integrates into your Explorer right-click menu, so it's easy to go to town with the PDF editing.

Debenu PDF Tools puts an array of PDF functions in the right-click menu of File/Windows Explorer.
Right-clicking and scrolling down the Debenu menu reveals features such as converting a PDF to an image (and vice versa), combining multiple images into one PDF file instantly, converting a PDF to text, adding and removing passwords, removing all bookmarks or extracting them to a text file, adding or editing metadata, and much more. Any functions that won't work on the selected file are grayed out.

With the PDF Preview function, you can quickly open the file to get a sneak peek, which is nice if you don't have a PDF reader installed.

The Debenu PDF Tools menu has a good selection of features even in the free edition, but many more are available in the $59 Pro edition. Pro includes many more editing features such as adding, editing, extracting, splitting, and removing text and images; removing annotations; and applying digital signatures.

When you think of PDF, don't think of it as a restricted, locked-down file format manageable only with big-ticket Acrobat or still-pricey imitators. These five tools show you that whether you need a Creative Commons license, a PDF book converter, or a wide array of editing tools built into your Windows PC, you can have impressive PDF features for a fraction of the cost…or even for free.