The Savvy CIO

This is part 6 of a series on IT Self-Assessment for small businesses. We’re providing information and guidelines for a simple IT check, giving you the ability to gain free insights into how your technology can serve your  business better. Each post covers a critical area of technology.

Communications: Email & Collaboration

Function & Value

Email has become the central form of communication for business. Email is critical to your company in marketing, sales, customer service, operations and more.

A host of related functions have grown up around email: calendars, contact lists, task lists, instant messaging, etc. Collaboration technology takes these functions and connects them: you see not only your own calendar, but also your team members’. Contact lists, project tasks and more now become shared information. The effects on productivity are incredible.

Common Problems

(1) Lack of collaboration. Email is provided (often for free) by a website host, and is accessed through a basic webmail program or Outlook. This creates two major issues:

• Each employee’s information is on an “island”, with no ability to share schedules, contact information, or to-do lists. This is a massive time sink with significant cost to your business.
• All email and related information is stored on individual PCs. When a hard drive fails, all of that information is lost. This is a massive business risk with significant potential cost to your business.

Take an informal survey. Find out how much time staff is spending each week managing contacts and calendars, or making phone calls and emails to set up meetings. Multiply that out into annual salary to see what lack of collaboration is costing your business. (And that’s not even considering lost revenue from all that wasted time!)

(2) Overly complex and costly tools. The collaboration tools with the most brand recognition (Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes) were made for very large corporations. They work in economies of scale. 1,000 users utilizing a $10,000 investment makes a lot of sense. 25 users utilizing a $10,000 investment does not. These tools are too costly and complex to maintain for smaller businesses.

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Google recently launched a “Going Google” billboard campaign in several major US cities, including our beloved Chicago. The ads focus on Google Apps for small and medium businesses: Gmail, Calendar, Google Documents and Google Chat.

The Savvy CIO is always interested in the best solutions for Chicago small businesses, and believes cloud computing is often a smart and cost-effective. So we took a closer look at Google Apps for small businesses: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Not to spoil the ending, but boy does it get ugly.
read more »

We’ve just finished a series of posts about how small businesses can get the most out of hosted solutions. It all started with Forrester’s survey revealing the most popular hosted solutions for small businesses.

Here’s a brief recap of the key information in one place, as well as links back to the original posts.

Customer Relationship Management: How to Get the Most out of a CRM

Key Benefit: Help sales and support win, keep and grow business by organizing customer information and history.

Most popular providers: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM (we use this), ZohoCRM

Email and Collaboration: How to Get the Most out of a Collaboration System

Key Benefit: Increase productivity with best of class email and calendaring tools, without the huge costs of Microsoft Exchange.

Most popular providers: CommuniGate, Kerio, Zimbra (we use this)

Content Management System: How to Get the Most out of a Content Management System

Key Benefit: Make content updates to your own website without the ongoing need for a developer or designer.

Most popular providers: Drupal, webEdition (we use this), Wordpress

Document Management System: How to Get the Most out of a Document Management System

Key Benefit: Store and find files more easily than on a file server, get to files anywhere, help teams work together on documents, control who sees what, and provide client access to deliverables.

Most popular providers: Alfresco, HighlandShare (we use this), KnowledgeTree

Why is it that in 10 seconds on Google you can find exactly what you are looking for in an entire world of online information, but you could spend 10 minutes (or more!) locating a file on your local file server?

If you can’t remember where you—or someone else—put that file, it’s File Treasure Hunt time. A File Treasure Hunt involves clicking into dozens of folders inside of folders inside of folders. Like a bunch of bad blind dates, they all seem promising until you look a little closer.

If you’re getting desperate, you could ask the Windows Search Dog to try and track it down, then check back in the afternoon to see what he dug up. If you have ever used the Search Dog to find something on a file server, you instantly hate him. He’s slow, inaccurate and often completely useless. I suspect he’s aging and partially blind.

If you have a hard time finding files stored on your server, that’s one sign you may need to revolutionize how you store your company files with a document management system.

Here are seven more signs that a small business may need a document management system, and how a document management system can help fix what’s broken.

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Twitter, media darling that it is right now, is logging a bit of bad press for having company documents stolen.

The short version is a hacker got into an employee’s web email account, and from there was able to access information stored in Twitter’s Google Apps account.

Depending on where you read the story, the spin is:

Twitter has serious security issues (partially true)
Cloud computing is unsafe (mostly false)
Someone needs a better password (clearly true)

The real lesson to be learned here is be extremely cautious with your email. Think about it. Virtually everything online is linked to your email account.

Are you equally vulnerable?

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How can you get the most from a content management system?

To start, be aware that content management can mean two very different things:

A content management system is software that allows non-technical users to update a website.

-OR-

A content management system is software that stores, organizes and controls access to company documents, files and information.

To my knowledge, no single piece of software does both of these things. At least not well. These are two different pieces of software solving different problems that (unfortunately) share the same name.

A document-focused CMS will be covered in the next post. Today we’ll focus on CMS for a company website. So to ask our question more specifically,

How can you get the most from a website content management system?

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• 

Continuing our series of posts on how to implement the most popular cloud computing services for small business, we come to collaboration tools: advanced email, group calendaring, shared contacts and more.

For many, collaboration means Microsoft Exchange. But Exchange is costly for a small business.

If you have 500 users and spend the $13,000 a year it typically costs to own Exchange, the cost per user is a modest $26 per year. With 50 users, the cost per user is a whopping $260 per year. 10 users? $1,300 per user per year. Yikes.

What collaboration tools actually make sense for a small business?

read more »

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) databases have been all the rage at large companies for years. So it’s no surprise that most of the marketing for CRMs is still targeted at medium to large companies. However, CRMs today are affordable for small businesses, and small businesses are increasingly adopting them. Why?

A CRM can help a small business do what you most need to do: find new customers and grow existing ones.

In practice, a CRM usually starts out as a glorified database: a high-tech group rolodex. (Which is a valuable thing.) But a well-used CRM will put that information to work to help your business market, sell and support with more effectiveness and efficiency.

How can a small business get the most from a CRM?

1. Find out why you fail to win, keep or grow business.

2. Make the CRM simple and easy to use.

3. Find an experienced CRM partner who can tailor the CRM to your needs.

4. Get buy-in early and often.

5. Train, train, train.

Once you’ve made the transition onto a CRM and solved a problem or two, you can identify and address additional issues with the CRM. But it all begins with a solid beginning that solves real problems and empowers people throughout your business.

Where are small businesses finding value in cloud computing?

A recently released report by Forrester Research sheds some light on the subject.

The top five business processes small businesses are moving to the cloud are:

1. Customer service and support
2. Sales force automation
3. Content management
4. Collaboration
5. Marketing automation

What’s to note? You can target THREE of these processes with ONE cloud solution.

read more »

Still don’t have company calendars?

Neither did we until 3 years ago. (And we’re a technology and business solutions company–the shame!)

As easy and as basic as it sounds, many businesses are running their operations as if every employee was in charge of their own individual calendar. Here is what company calendars did for us:

⇨    Reduced overhead time and made our staff more efficient. Checking calendars and scheduling a meeting now takes about 15 seconds.

⇨    Reduced embarrassment. We no longer have to reschedule that meeting we planned on a day a co-worker is taking vacation, or make lame excuses for the co-worker who didn’t remember (or wasn’t told).

⇨    Connected mobile staff. Our office manager no longer has to figure out how not to admit, “I actually don’t know where she is today.” Shared calendars enable the office staff to help clients and prospects schedule meetings with busy executives and sales staff who are often out of the office.

⇨    Organized conference rooms and other resources. Our busy locations and resources have their own calendars and can be reserved. There is still competing demand (who doesn’t want to meet in the conference room with the mini-fridge?), but the calendar keeps us forewarned.

One thing to keep in mind:  If your calendaring and scheduling system is not integrated with your email and CRM database, you or your employees may not use it because it’s just going to be too hard. We chose a full email and collaboration platform, and went from not using calendars at all to using them religiously in six months. It was so helpful, we didn’t need any carrots or sticks. Our people realized the value themselves.