Squaring the Apple

NetSuite iPhone and iPod Touch app

NetSuite Inc.

www.itunes.com/appstore

For years, Apple traded on its cool, artsy image as the product of choice for students, graphic artists and other drug-addled reprobates. With the runaway success of its iPhone and iPod, however, it will have to come to terms with the fact that many of its users are now clean-cut, productive citizens - the type who might use the new app from NetSuite that allows users to view ERP data on their iPhones and iPod Touches. Features like dashboards that show key performance indicators, report snapshots, trend graphs and the like, and a calendar for accepting or declining events and marking tasks complete, may prove entirely too adult for Apple's core demographic, but offer executives useful, timely insight. And while anytime/anywhere access to lead, prospect and customer records may not mean much to those who use their iPhones to distort photos of their drunken friends, it'll prove enormously useful to salesmen and service people.

Separately, NetSuite announced that it's now integrated with U.S. Postal Service shipping, so companies can save time and improve accuracy in labels and manifests.

You don't work for free

NetClient CS

Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting

http://cs.thomsonreuters.com/portals

Online portals are all the rage for a reason - they make communicating and sharing documents with clients much faster and much easier - and they're getting better all the time. The latest release of Thomson Reuters' NetClient CS, for instance, offers integration with its UltraTax CS tax prep product, so you can print Web organizers and finished tax returns directly to a client's portal; the ability to have source documents from FileCabinet CS flow directly to the portal; and integration with the GoFileRoom document management system so you can securely publish all manner of documents and statements. Now you can even access two client accounting systems straight through the portal - Client Bookkeeping Solution and Hosted QuickBooks powered by Right Networks.

Don't get us wrong - productivity and efficiency and streamlining are great - but you don't do all that work for free. That's why our favorite new feature is NetClient CS Bill Pay for Practice CS users, which lets you post invoices and collect credit card payments directly through the portal. After all, communication should be a two-way street.

Not enough lap

StudioDesk

Bluelounge

www.bluelounge.com

The ever-decreasing size and weight of the modern laptop was supposed to free up all sorts of space - but even the ever-increasing size of the American lap can't handle the proliferation of peripherals, cables, ancillary devices and the like, which threaten to overwhelm even the old-fashioned desk, leaving no space for even the smallest box of donuts, let alone a half gallon of diet soda. As a partial answer, the design gurus at BlueLounge have created the StudioDesk, a sleek, sharp-looking piece of office furniture with a sliding top surface that reveals a compartment for storing peripherals, power strips and excess cables, leaving the top of the desk free for the equipment you actually use.

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