I want to talk a bit about web applications that can help your business without putting a hole in your pocket. Today there are hundreds of web applications out there just waiting for you to sign up. Some of them are great while others are not. Before reading the rest of this, have you seen our previous post explaining the history of cloud apps?

In a nutshell, the “cloud” is a term referring to robust, data-driven applications that are accessible from on the network (usually the public Internet). At the same time, since most of these applications are subscription-based and many customers can utilize it at once, the costs are significantly lower than purchasing and installing an in-house solution. For example, Microsoft Outlook E-Mail and Microsoft Office will cost about $150 per user every 3-4 years, not including setup, maintenance and technical support (add these in and it’s looking more like $125 per year per user, at least). Contrast that with Google Apps, which provides the same service in the cloud for a flat fee of $50 per year per user. QuickBooks is a hefty accounting application that requires some knowledge and security practices to keep data safe – QuickBooks online allows for mobility and handles all of these things at only about $30 per month.

Of course, that doesn’t always mean that running your business on the web is the best way to go. If your business has more than 10-20 users, it might be better (and cheaper) to use an in-house solution. If your business data is abnormally sensitive or you just want a high level of control over it (see U.S. Government), you might also want to think carefully before setting up on a public network.

Etnacom as a small business tends to use a high number of cloud apps. Not only do we enjoy the mobility that it provides, but we get to “play” with a lot of fun systems that we can potentially recommend to our clients. If you’re interested in a solution in the cloud, come talk to us. We’d be happy to help perform a cost/benefit/risk analysis to see if it’s right for you.

Taken from http://www.abricocotier.fr/

Years ago, applications were all run from mainframes, which were large central computers with lots of storage space and memory (by the standards of the time, anyway). Everyone had terminals which didn’t have much computing power, and simply connected to the mainframe in order to run the applications. All of the applications were actually on the mainframe. This sometimes proved to be expensive, as everyone needed to “share” one big computer.

Over the years, this changed. Individual desktop computers (and then, laptop computers) became more powerful. It made more sense to start running applications on your own computer so that there was no need to share processing power. Computers could still be connected to “centralized” systems, but these systems concentrating on sharing storage, printers, reference information and databases – things that usually should be shared. Connections were slow though, so there was only so much that you could store over a network link before the transfer speeds started to get annoying.

Nowadays, we’re kind of in a hybrid between the two. Our computers are still (and continue to grow) even more powerful. However, the network links are also becoming faster, and so are the centralized computers (usually called servers). Advances in technology also allow us to cluster multiple severs together so that they can assist each other in storage, processing and applications. Clustering is also useful because it’s easier to add a new server to an existing cluster than to upgrade what’s already in place. We call these clusters “the cloud”.

In addition, we’re more concerned about mobility. Most of us have more than one device, whether it’s a laptop, desktop, PDA or something else. We want to be able to access our applications and files no matter where we are or what device we’re on. We also have the Internet, which connects all of our devices together, along with our co-workers and friends. Why not have all of our applications and data accessible from the Internet?

We’ll be posting again a bit later this week on how to leverage cloud computing in your organization.

Personally, I tend to follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach fostered by David Allen. There are many other strategies that can be just as successful. However, if you’re a techie like myself, you may find yourself struggling to find software that best fits your personal organization scheme. I’ve been struggling with that question for a long time, and I finally found a solution. Yes, I do think that simplifying my life a bit is certainly part of the answer, but life gets busy, no matter what. For a long time, I sought a solution that could help me keep information from all parts of my life in one spot. A couple of months ago, I found my solution and it has been working wonderfully. I call it “life by CRM”.

CRM, as you may know, stands for “Customer Relationship Management”. It is one of the bigger business buzzwords these days, partially because we’ve entered the age where software to manage CRM is available and relatively inexpensive. It’s popular among sales teams and project managers for its strength in measuring customer requirements, tasks and interactions. SalesForce.com is one example of CRM software – other examples include Microsoft Dynamics and my personal and professional favorite, Highrise. Highrise is a web-based CRM manager created by 37signals.

Let’s back up to how businesses use CRM. It’s strengths are in tracking contacts, interactions and tasks, to keep it simple. Isn’t that how personal life is structured as well? When running personal errands, there’s usually something to do, something that happens and someone to do it for. Many people like to keep track of their personal errands in some sort of journal or diary. CRM is a journal that’s in electronic form and tailored to help you get things done.

Being that Highrise is my CRM tool of choice (and what I use for both business and personal), I can share my strategy for keeping my life organized. Here’s a screenshot of what my Highrise looks like (with some proprietary data conspicuously hidden):

When I log in I can see a “Journal” of recent entries, including my notes, e-mails, tasks and so on. I can also see upcoming tasks, which I can complete and assign categories to. On the top of the page, I can view my contacts, tasks, cases, deals and tags. Cases and Deals are great. They are special groupings of notes, e-mails and tasks that pertain to one particular initiative. Cases and Deals are very similar, but Deals pertain to initiatives when there is an incoming sale. You can keep track of bid information and whether or not the deal was won. Tags allow you to assign categories to various people, companies, cases, and so on. This is all set on top of a pretty powerful set of permissions, if you’re going to allow multiple users to access the system. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the product – you can access a tour on the Highrise website.

What’s important to me is that I can use this Web-based contact / case / task / sales / Rolodex manager to help me stay on top of everything that I need to do. As a part-time consultant, I am constantly trying to keep up with shifting needs, changing priorities, and multiple updates from clients and vendors on a variety of issues. Highrise is uncanny in it’s ability to help any kind of professional like myself stay on top of this and update case files easily. When I need to fulfill a request, I add a task and categorize it. When I receive new information or have an interaction with someone, I can add notes or forward e-mails. At the end of the day, Highrise is the best tool for me and helps me to stay agile.

This doesn’t just translate to my professional work, either. Highrise CRM’s organization capabilities help in my personal life, too. My fiancé and I are planning our wedding and this tool helps us keep on top of our vendors, financials, and everything that we need to do before the big day. Being able to search for a receipt or for conversations from a specific person or company works great! It is especially useful when something doesn’t go as planned and need to go back to a previous conversation to verify what was said. I’m sure many have been in a situation like that.

Although I strongly advocate Highrise, please understand that I have some specific needs and operate in a specific way. Highrise is a perfect fit for a small company with many different things going on – most of them short-term. If you are a larger organization or operate in a different manner, different software might work better for you. I’ve worked for medium-sized businesses that have used Microsoft Dynamics with great success. I’ve worked with startups who use SalesForce.com and it is a disaster, while other startups wouldn’t want to use anything else. It is all about finding a solution that meets your needs. I can certainly assist anyone looking to determine how to leverage the benefits of CRM software or just boost productivity in general.

I invite you to keep this discussion going. What sort of CRM or web-based productivity software do you use (or have used in the past)? How has it worked for you? Feel free to share success and horror stories. Perhaps I’ll even share some of my own!

However, what we’re going to talk about today completely dwarfs the article from a few weeks ago. Today we’ll discuss online telephony services that actually allow interactive calling, such as Skype and other Voice-over-IP services. To those of you who are very technical, this is not a new idea. On the other hand, to a small business owner that doesn’t frequent the IT realm, this could be a revolutionary new strategy.

Voice-over-IP (also known as VoIP, which I will use for the rest of this article) is a technology in which voice and telephony services are delivered through the Internet or another comparable network. It became popular in the early 2000s when large corporations saw just how expensive it was to run an internal phone system. Think about 2,000 employees in an office building, each of them with their own telephone wired into the central telephone room. What if one of those employees moves to another floor? Their telephone system needs to follow them, which means that the company needs to hire an expert to come in and reprogram the telephone system so that the one particular employee can have his telephone socket at another desk. This is on top of the already ongoing maintenance of the telephone system and the ongoing maintenance of the data network that is also in the building.

Well, enough of that. Why not have the telephone system and the data system part of the same network? Additionally, since the telephone system is now travelling through the data (computer) network and so it could carry much more information, such as configuration and user settings. Now, instead of re-wiring the telephone system every time someone moves, the employee can just take his telephone to a new spot (the telephone is configured with all of the information it needs) and plug it in. Voila! Same number.

As this technology evolved, some thought “why even have a desk phone at all?” Why not make the phone part of the computer? After all, the computer is already part of the data network. Large businesses started turning to Cisco’s VoIP system, which is quite expensive. On the small business end however, services such as Skype started to pop up. Skype is very similar to many online Instant Messaging clients such as Gtalk and AIM, but it has superior call capability. For example, a Skype user can call any other Skype user and talk for free. A Skype user can also choose to receive telephone calls and place telephone calls for a very small amount of money. Etnacom’s employees each have their own direct telephone number and the capability to make unlimited outgoing calls anywhere in the United States and Canada for a cost of $12 per month per employee. Skype also offers many other services such as video calling, international calling, voicemail, call forwarding and more – all for free or at a very low cost.

One of the major advantages of VoIP is that it eliminates the need for physical phone lines – everything is done through an existing Internet connection. As long as you are running some type of Broadband (Cable/DSL or better), there should be no reason why you shouldn’t be able to run at least 2 or 3 VoIP lines. Additionally, since services like Skype are portable, you can access them anywhere with an Internet connection. We are frequently on the road and make telephone calls from outside the office. Even if we didn’t have Internet connectivity, we could always forward calls to our cell phones while away.

Although we use Skype and it is certainly the most popular VoIP application out there, many other services do exist. Vonage is one such company and offers some interesting phone plans starting at $17.99 per month. We used to use Vonage, but abandoned it because Skype was a better fit for us. On the other hand, there are plenty of businesses that might feel that Vonage is a better fit. Instead of requiring computer software, Vonage supplies an adapter that connects to the Internet on one end and an ordinary telephone on the other. So, if you’re looking to keep your existing telephone hardware but still take advantage of VoIP’s costs, Vonage is certainly a great solution. Vonage also supplies some interesting services such as “telephone on a stick”, which is a USB-key-like device that can plug into any computer for access to a telephone line.

There are many other small companies that offer VoIP services – many of them may be good, but we encourage you to check them out thoroughly before making the switch. Be sure that they are proven, reliable and cost effective – and feel free to contact us if you need assistance in making that decision.

There is one last warning that we feel is very important – VoIP services don’t have the same quality emergency services as physical lines. Although we may never need to use it, we always take comfort in the fact that during an emergency we can reach 911. This is not so on every VoIP service – Skype does not offer 911 capabilities. Vonage does have 911 services, but you must register your location in your control panel and update this location when you move – this could be troublesome for those that are frequently on the road and rely on Vonage. On the other hand, this may not be a large problem if you also use a cell phone, since you can access 911 easily with that. The bottom line is, always have a backup phone for emergencies.

In the end, VoIP technology is a very reliable and cost-effective alternative, especially for those looking to cut the costs of expensive land-lines or mobile phone plans. Our company has saved an average of $30 per employee per month since switching to VoIP services – our cell phone plans are much less expensive now!

Happy chatting!

Today we’re going to talk about online faxing and PBX hosting services. First, a little bit of explanation regarding what these services actually are. If you’re a normal business, chances are that you have a fax machine, and maybe a dedicated fax line that you can use to send and receive faxes at will. You might even have a main phone number for your business with extensions that point out to various departments or people. Unfortunately, these systems provide a lot of overhead, and it is time-consuming (and costly) to maintain them. But what if you could outsource all of the equipment and time associated with maintaining these systems- and for only a fraction of the cost? Five or ten years ago, this would be difficult – but today it is routine and just considered to be smart business.

Let’s start with fax lines. A typical fax line costs about $20 per month for standard service. Additionally, a fax machine costs anywhere from $30 to $200. Therefore, the cost of maintaining a fax line is about $340 per year, when including the cost of the line, equipment replacement and maintenance. On the other hand, an online service costs about $95 per year for the same capabilities.

An online fax service typically includes a log-in screen which takes you to a homepage, which looks just like a webmail service. You can view incoming faxes and download or print what was sent to you; you can also create new faxes with cover sheets and attach documents from your computer (or scans if it is a hand-written document). In most cases, you can also configure the service to notify you via e-mail or SMS when you receive faxes as well as allow you to send faxes via e-mail. It’s easy, convenient and most importantly, inexpensive. There’s no need to worry about re-sending faxes to busy phone lines (the system will automatically re-attempt as many times as you wish). Power and telephone outages won’t disrupt your fax system at all. Best of all, you don’t even need to be in the office to work with your fax system.

To take things a step further, you can also host your entire phone system online. Many companies offer “Virtual PBX” services that allow callers to contact you via a local or 800 number (and more than one number if you wish), hear a custom greeting, access extensions, voicemail, and even added services such as company directories. In many cases, these virtual PBX services also offer faxing capabilities. Some of them even offer online conference calling capabilities – allowing you to hold conference calls with multiple people simultaneously without using up all of your phone lines. When a user dials an extension, the call can be transferred into a queue, forwarded to one or more lines such as a home, office or mobile phone, or even answered online using your computer.

Some of the companies we have worked with in the past include j2 Communications, eFax and RingCentral. J2 and eFax are normal online fax services, although j2 does offer an online conferencing service. RingCentral includes this as well as a virtual PBX service. All three companies offer custom plans depending on the capabilities that you’re looking for and the price you’re willing to pay. Etnacom is currently using RingCentral for various telephony services and has been using them since 2006. We’ve never had any problems with them.

Our next article will take telephony services a step further and show you how to stop paying for telephone lines altogether. We’ll explain how to use VoIP (voice-over-IP) services such as Skype and Virtual Assistant / Paging services to act as virtual receptionists.