We are honored to serve you and proud to be the team that supports more accountants than any other technology company nationwide.  Thank you for your continued trust in Xcentric.

At just 1.5 lbs, 0.5 inches thick and about 10 inches long, the iPad  connects to the fastest Wi-Fi networks to give you access to everything from email, videos and photos, to music, web pages and more at just the touch of a finger.   The iPad runs almost 140,000 apps from the App Store (and any you’ve downloaded to your iPhone) and also features iBooks and iTunes stores as well.

The iPad utilizes multi-touch technology similar to that of the iPhone, but on a much larger scale, with over 1000 sensors in the design.  The iPad rotates the screen to whatever orientation you are holding it in so basically there’s no up or down and its IPS technology allows for a wide viewing angle so you can hold it any way you want and still enjoy a brilliant display.

The iPad comes with up to 10 hours of battery life and its wireless technology allows you to connect devices such as wireless headphones or the Apple Wireless Keyboard, although the iPad also comes equipped with a touch-screen keyboard and built-in speakers and microphone.

The Wi-Fi iPad is scheduled to hit the market in March, starting at $499, and a 3G model with data speeds up to 7.2 Mbps should hit in April.

Click here to learn more.

Xcentric was one of the first to offer a totally outsourced solution to the accounting industry back in 2004, with the introduction of Xcentric Gray Matter.  Since then Xcentric has released several new versions of Xcentric Gray Matter and also offers managed services and online backup in the Cloud.

Xcentric has also recently been ranked as the top outsourced technology provider by both the CPA Technology Advisor magazine Readers’ Choice Awards and the Association for Accounting Administration 2010 SaaS Survey.

There are various options depending on which version you and your client base use.  For example, the Accountant’s Copy of R9 will retain compatibility with previous versions, so if you choose to download the latest release, you would still be able to receive, open and return an Accountant’s Copy of your clients’ files in earlier releases of QuickBooks 2008 and 2009, and your clients would be able to accept and upload the Accountant’s Copy without moving to QuickBooks 2009 R9.

Click here for more information on QuickBooks 2009 or feel free to contact us at 678.297.0066.

The webpage, www.xcentric.com/cloud, walks you through a three-step process to explore the dimensions of the Cloud:
•    Step 1: Download the “Why Paper” on the benefits the Cloud offers CPA firms specifically.
•   Step 2: A webcast on what is behind the Cloud infrastructure, including data security, privacy and disaster recovery, and how a firm can leverage the Cloud.
•    Step 3: A free one-on-one consultation to help determine if the Cloud is right for your firm, based on a brief strategic and technical survey.

The idea behind the kit is to raise awareness about the Cloud and the significant benefits it offers CPA firms, while helping firms effectively assess whether or not the Cloud is a fit for them, based on their firm’s specific needs and structure.

Click here for more info or to get started.

Press Release

Did you know that an eight character password that is all lowercase letters would only take about 2.4 days to crack?  That’s how long it would take the average hacker’s computer to process through every possible password combination for those 8 letters.  That’s scary!  But, the good news is that just adding a CAPITAL letter and an *asterisk* would lengthen the time for that same computer to process through all the possible password combinations to 2.1 centuries.  That’s more like it!

Basically, with today’s technology, it’s only a matter of time before a computer runs through all of the password possibilities for a given number of characters- or gets shut down trying.  That’s why making sure your passwords are strong enough is so critical.

Here’s a look at how long it would take the average computer to run through every possible password for a given number of characters (link):

With that said, it’s a good idea to set up an enforced password policy at work, if there isn’t one in place already.  Here’s a sample policy that requires users to change their login password every 90 days based on the following set of complexity requirements:

• Passwords may not contain all or part of the user’s account name
• Passwords must be at least 8 characters in length
• Must contain characters from 3 of the following 4 categories:
  1 – English uppercase characters (A through Z)
  2 – English lowercase characters (a through z)
  3 – Base 10 digits (0 through 9)
  4 – Non-alphabetic characters (for example, !, $, #, %)

Candidates for this award were nominated by the Accounting Today readership, as well as by the magazine editors. The finalists were then selected based on the editors’ judgment of the candidates’ impact on the profession over the past few years and the years ahead, as well as on their knowledge of the profession as a whole.

Here’s an excerpt from the article in Accounting Today:
“With their Gray Matter service, James and his company let more and more accountants focus on their work, not their network, by hosting and deploying entire IT systems in the ‘cloud’.”

Here is the link to the press release.

Congratulations, Trey!

Inc. Magazine attributed Xcentric’s continual growth to our focus on CPA firms and our ability to host all of a firm’s applications remotely.  We agree that these are important factors, but we would also add our faithful friends and partners, our dedicated team, and God’s blessing to the list of essential growth factors.  Thank you for your contribution to making Xcentric a success!

Here’s a link to the press release.

5.  Open Source – Firefox is developed by the Open Source community.  It’s free to download.  You can see the source-code.  You can even contribute by helping to write some of the software if you want to.  You can submit ideas to the development community to improve or expand the functionality, and see the results relatively quickly.

4.  Innovation – Firefox was the first to introduce tabbed browsing, integrated search engines, and popup blockers.  Most of these features were added to IE, but Firefox had been doing it for a long time.

3.  Extensions – The architecture of Firefox allows developers to create add-ons to Firefox to add new functionality and features to the browser.  For example, there are plug-ins that will block advertisements on web pages, open IE within a Firefox tab, or make instant updates to your social networking sites.

2.  Speed – It’s difficult to compare browser speed side-by-side.  But moving around in Firefox seems to be much faster.  Opening a new tab with CTRL-T instantly allows you to type in a new web page.  Doing the same in IE shows a noticeable delay of several seconds.  Little things like this make Firefox appear much faster than IE.

1.  Security – Some might say it’s not fair to claim that Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer.  After all, it has just as many security bugs and patches as IE.  But the difference with Firefox is that the source code is freely available, so the global development community can fix those bugs extremely fast.  Also, Firefox automatically checks for and installs updates for itself automatically.  And because Firefox is standards-based, it does not run ActiveX controls which are proprietary to Microsoft and have a history of security problems.

Tom Weast | Infrastructure Services Consultant

Notebooks have traditionally been a desktop computer in laptop form. Possessing tons of horsepower needed to run the operating system along with all your applications. However, as connectivity is on the rise along with the trend towards Server-based computing ( or SaaS, ASP, Cloud Computing, etc) – so goes the release of leaner laptops called Netbooks.

See this WSJ article for more info – Click here