We’re huge fan’s of Google Apps at Digital Partners. One of the reasons is the ease of setup and deployment of the system itself but also the extensibility with the Google Apps Marketplace.
Here is a quick overview video of what it’s all about:
We’ve received a number of calls in the past few weeks from both new and existing clients looking to get more organized in the New Year.
One of the most recommended type of systems we advise our clients to adopt are called CRM or Customer Relationship Management systems. They go beyond an address book list of who; by adding context of what, where and when. They can also help you track what’s next and who needs to do that. CRM systems help people take the sticky notes off the wall and bring everything together for everyone to see. How much time do you spend a day tracking all that down?
A technology trend we are huge advocates of is for companies to adopt software that is hosted on the Internet. You may hear people refer to these as SaaS or Web Applications. They allow for powerful software to be easily accessed by anyone, anywhere just by going to a website. Since we focus on the small business market; allowing our clients to gain access to powerful software with little upfront costs is a great win for our clients.
A popular CRM software you likely have heard of is Salesforce.com. They make powerful software that is very popular in the Enterprise market for providing a CRM solution to clients who want the quick implementation and other benefits of hosted software. As great as their offerings I was reminded today by our friends at DBPro’s that one size does not fit all. If found Salesforce.com to be to expensive for small business; charging for pretty much any user and any devices to access your data. I’ve also found the extendability of their services to also come with additional costs for both access and implementation. In our experience Salesforce.com is just to cost prohibitive for small business customers.
We are advocates of systems that are very lightweight: easy to setup, easy to learn, easy to use and affordable! A great hosted CRM which we’ve been advocates of for years is called Highrise by a company called 37Signals. They offer their hosted software on a per-company flat rate, there also are inexpensive partner products, services and iPhone Apps that work with their fantastic service. I encourage all small business to give them a try. You can signed up for a 30-day trial by clicking on this link or the banner to the right.
When speaking to business about Google Apps one of our most asked questions is what’s the difference between the standard edition and the Premier edition. This presentation gives a brief overview of Google Apps and expands on the key features of Google Apps Premier edition. For decision makers interested in Google Apps this is a must watch.
After watching if you have any additional questions we’d be happy to discuss with them. You can email us here.
I’m very happy to announce that were are now official authorized resellers of Google Apps!
For those of you who don’t know, Google Apps is a very powerful suite of hosted applications for businesses and organizations. The main services include email, chat, calendaring, documents, sites and video sharing. Google Apps is a hosted services; meaning all the software is hosted and maintained on Google servers, users access these services via a web browser. This allows organizations large and small to implement powerful collaboration tools and services with a few simple steps; no expensive infrastructure needed.
Internally we’ve used Google Apps for a few years now. We’ve also been implementing it for our clients for just about the same time now. Now that Google has established a reseller program we’re very happy to have that formal relationship with Google in bringing their services to our clients partnered with the professional training, implementation and support of ours.
If you’re interested in seeing what Google Apps can do for your organization, check out these customer stories or drop us a line, we’d love to show you.
Earlier today I spoke on the topic of “How to keep your business in-sync.” at the Apple Store in Menlo Park, NJ. Synchronization for email, contacts and calendar items is one of the most requested topics for both new and existing clients. It a pleasure to share some knowledge with the many in attendance at the monthly Business Networking session the store hosts; they always host a great crowd.
The event was co-sponsored by Apple and Kerio so naturally their solutions were the topic of discussion for the day. As many home users are familiar with MobileMe is a great solution for syncing your Mac’s and iPhone with practically all your data. We’ve found MobileMe to be a great solution for personal use and for families. I’ve also seen business make great use of the collaborative features as well.
For businesses in need of a robust server solution for communication and collaboration I’ve found the solution from Kerio in their Mail Server to take the needs of businesses to the next level. We’ve recommended Kerio Mail Server to clients for over 2 years now because of the great value it provides to our clients; enterprise features at a value price. I’ve included our Kerio Apple Store Presentation that outlines Kerio as a small business solution in greater detail.
Get Sync’d has been our hosting partner of choice in delivering the power of Kerio with the reliability, support and value price that is perfect for our small business clients.
The Corleone family has agreed to send young Michael to represent the interests of the family to the meeting with Vigril ˜The Turk’ Sollozzo and the corrupt Capt. Mark McCluskey of the New York City Police Dept. As Sonny puts so eloquently they’d like to send him with more than you know what in his hands. We all know the rest¦ before the ages of cell phones, call forwarding, and now GrandCentral important people like the Captain had to sign out with a forwarding number of where they can be reached. GrandCentral would have probably saved his life because he could have updated his forwarding number himself without any prying eyes knowing where he is. Of course all things being equal, the Captain today would have simply hit one pre-programmed button on his precinct phone to have all his calls forward to his mobile phone; A pure and simple solution. Or on the other hand, he could have hired a personal IT staff to help him configure GrandCentral to do pretty much the same thing for a huge time cost to set it all up and make the simple process very complicated.
As a technology consultant I have a very basic guiding principal to technology: keep it as simple as possible. Ochkahms’ razor applies for technology as well as science: All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best. Solutions that are easy to install, easy to use and easy to support tend to be the best fit for everyone. Remember, the technology must have a net advantage in adopting it to be worth the investment of time and money.
I found Grand Central to be a service that has a great deal of very esoteric and involved features. It felt a lot like bloat ware to me. By no means is this a nice, relatively thin layer connecting your phone numbers together in a unified system. This is a service offing a lot of features that to fully utilize require a lot of user buy in and configuration. Which of course, creates an equal amount of buy out when one realizes this is a big to-do and more trouble than it’s worth. A system designed to unify data in many respects can desynchronize it a lot. This is definitely a service designed by engineers for engineers.
Things I liked (kinda):
One number for you: I like the concept a lot. For people who MUST have more than 3 phone number I see this as a service that can be of some value. Having to constantly forward multiple numbers to others can be a huge pain and become unmanageable exponentially. However, for the vast majority of Americans who don’t have (or shouldn’t have) more than 3 phone numbers I just don’t see the ends of this service justifying the means.
Europeans already have this down, they already have one number for them: their cell phone. I always have it on me wherever I go. When I’m at home, I forward my calls home. When I’m at work, I forward my calls to that line. When I have my house on the shore I’ll forward my calls there in the unlikely event I get a landline. You should only have a line if you’re there more than 30%. Pony up your minutes to the Paris Hilton cell plan and go mobile.
Web Voice mail: I liked the idea of having all my messages available in one place. I could see the desire to access personal messages while at work and work messages while at home; all from one convenient place. On top of that the ability to easily view and replay on demand along with storing, forwarding and archiving I think that this has it’s advantages.
However, for those of you who don’t already know this feature is also available (albeit on separate pages) for most phone plans today. I like keeping my personal messages separate from work ones. I’d rather not have happy birthday messages next project planning emails. For an America in crisis of attention deficit, I see this lumping as a huge distraction and lack of organization.
Thing’s I’m so-so on:
1 line/Many users: Although falling out of style fast, many people still have home phones. I live in a house with a home phone and used this as part of the service to evaluate. I ran into some issues when the GrandCentral rang my home phone while I was away at the shore this weekend. There’s likely a way to configure this differently but it would be an issue for those with many users for 1 line. My family found this annoying knowing how popular I actually am.
User buy in: It’s not just you buying into this system, as involved as it is, it’s also all the people in your address book. Once this number is setup you have to get it out there and make people understand and actually use it. That is a lot of work and a huge buy in for me and all my contacts. Once you realize what a pain it is, it’s also a big buy out too.
Things I definitely didn’t like:
NO Sync: This was the deal closer for me. In getting started the user places a copy, that’s right, a copy of their existing address book into GrandCentral. They make it easy to do, but it’s still a unchanging copy that is no different from your personal and work address book. More to keep track off!
This causes you to go out of sync very fast and spend a lot of time keeping them insync. Creating yet another address book that stays out of sync with all the others I’m already trying to consolidate. Until they create a plugin for Exchange (and other popular address book systems) on an open standard it’s more trouble than it’s worth. They should be slapped for this.
A LOT of Configuration: There are freakin’ lot of features that all require extensive customization to get working. This service requires a heck of a lot of time to setup just right. Even for me, a very smart and technical guy, this had a high learning curve and seemed a bit much. Rules, ring tones, personalized greetings, even more voicemail forwarding¦ it’ll cost you more time than it saves.
To much contact: For these features to work best, GrandCentral must know your callers. If not, they tend to slip though the other crack and either go right to voicemail (which can be good or very bad) or call every line you have (which is very annoying). For Windows users who like their technology to be up in their business and not in the background doing it’s job, you may like this. For the rest of us who enjoy elegant software this is a lot of overhead and customization, that for all but the power-users can just be a royal pain and time sink.
Conclusion:
With the brains and strength that is Google, I hope they can do something with this system for the sake of their investment. I think this type of service is past its time. Software and services that are bloated with features, not easily scalable, and don’t follow the flow of future technology are on their way out. The majority of these services already exist with your current service offerings. The only thing users need to do is learn how to make them work better for themselves. The little extras like posting to a webpage are nice, but forgettable. The high buy in from the user and their contacts is a lot of work. Supporting all these features for most users can be very labor intensive and not always provide consistent results. The added expense of bumping up your cell minutes will more than make up for the explicit and implicit time costs in getting this setup. In my professional opinion GrandCentral is a grand waste of time.
I know it’s been sometime since our last post, and for that, I apologize. We’ve been pretty busy getting things ramped internally; dotting all those digital i’s if you will. In addition to our new project management and collaboration software (Basecamp) from 37signals we decided to work a little harder and migrate the website as well.
Although we’ve been very happy with our Rapid Weaver (our now former Web Creating software) we though it best to switch over to a web-based program called WordPress. As we (the royal we that is) iron out the formating formatting please help us out and drop a line for any “improvements” you may see before we do.
So why the switch?
Hope you enjoy.
