Apple Fall 2016 Product Announcements

Are the  Apple product extravaganzas vaguely creepy? It seemed if you were a presenter you had to be a gray-haired guy wearing a rumpled denim shirt. We are so excited.   The new Home button!  The special adapter for plugging your old earphones into the Lightning port! Everything is so awesome. Each tiny incremental change is touted like a family FaceBook update.

We wanted a refreshed MacBook (four years old). We got Pokemon on the iWatch.

Biggest news was probably the upgraded camera on the iPhone.

Upgrade to Quickbooks 2016

We have upgraded our QuickBooksPro 2014 to QuickBooksPro 2016. There doesn’t appear to be any major changes from an installation standpoint.  The main steps include:

1. Purchase Quickbooks Pro 2016 3-user license through TechSoup. The result of this purchase process is that you receive a unique license ID number.  You’ll need that number plus the “product ID” number to complete installations on each machine.
2. Download Quickbooks Pro 2016 to each workstation.
3. Download Quickbooks Pro 2016 to the “server”  Our server is a re-purposed  Windows 7 workstation with a shared folder for the Quickbooks data files.  When you use the Quickbooks installer on the server,  choose “Host the company file on this machine, but access it from Quickbooks on other machines”
4. Copy the company data file to the shared folder on the server.
5.  Run the Database Manager on the server, to make the file available to the workstations.
6. Open the file on the workstation(s).
   A few more hints on configuring the server are located here.  Don’t forget the AntiVirus!

PCI compliance.

If you take credit cards and handle the actual card data, then you may have already been prompted to certify that you are in compliance with the PCI security standards. This requires a yearly questionnaire and a quarterly scan of your public IP addresses. You can get started by doing free scans from HackerGuardian. If this works for you and you need to continue with scanning you can get a 3 year subscription via TechSoup for $67.00.