eBizBlog

Ten Key Issues for IP Communications Buyers

Posted by: Andy on August 24th, 2006
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 2,223 times

With all you have to contend with in your business—changing market conditions, striving for cost effectiveness, growing your business, differentiating against competition and many other factors—the need for simple, effective infrastructure solutions is more important than ever. For enterprise business managers and IT managers currently evaluating their roadmap for communications services, navigating the wide range of choices in terms of technologies, services, solutions and applications can be challenging.

We’ve identified ten strategic elements you should evaluate when matching a solution to your business.

1. Flexibility.
Moves, adds and changes should require minimal effort. The system should be able to expand or contract easily without either stranding capital or imposing financial penalties, and it should not limit you to using one particular network or type of hardware.

2. Integration.
A change in voice services should deliver value to the end users (not just the general ledger) right away. Any solution that requires significant integration with existing I.T. infrastructure such as email servers, messaging servers or between aspects of the solution itself should be carefully evaluated.

3. Operations and Management.
If you have limited IP network engineering expertise or don’t have available headcount, consider outsourcing, especially if a multi-site implementation is required.

4. Business Continuity.
 Look for geographic and multi-modal availability and centralization of services, which ensures no single point of failure. Unleashing the power of IP technology can effectively transform the whole concept of contingency planning.

5. Telco resource optimization.
Best in class solutions will not only converge voice and data but will also offer greater efficiencies in PSTN services such as trunks and inter-office communications. Outsourcing can be a good solution if you intend to make use of advanced call routing and forwarding services that can quickly use up PSTN accesses.

6. Capital Management.
Look for services or solutions that are modular or flexible in growing with your business and limit costs in incremental software licensing costs as upgrades and feature releases occur. Be wary of services that require duplication in order to achieve redundancy. You may wish to look for services that offer multiple points of service instead of hot backups or duplication strategies.

7. Ease of Implementation/Migration.
The greatest barrier to the adoption of IP Communications to date has been lack of effective delivery mechanisms. Businesses have had to content with long, complicated rollouts, proof of concepts and integration issues that were typically expensive in terms of resources and capital. Choose a partner that can help you get up and running flawlessly and quickly with a minimum of project delivery related effort/expense.

8. Obsolescence Risk.
Look for seamless upgrade paths that adhere to open or industry standards, not proprietary tools and technologies. Choose a partner with a good track record and a clear policy for upgrades and new features.

9. Value Added Features and Services.
Deploying IP Communications based only on cost savings will shortchange your business. Focus on applications that deliver value to the business. For example, if your business needs to differentiate itself based on customer intimacy, then you should consider tools and services that make it easier for your customers to reach your employees and vice versa. This means looking beyond dial tone to services such as on-line directories and call logs, find-me/follow-me services and secure mechanisms that create open multi-modal communications between your suppliers, customers and your business.

10. Teleworkers and Remote Offices.
With IP, you can take advantage of powerful tools to enable seamless communications for your mobile workers. They’ll look and feel just like they’re in the office, the tools are easy to use and best of all, they give the mobile worker great visibility into the availability of their colleagues in head office with presence based services. The same goes for remote offices—with IP services integration can be seamless, cost-effective and painless to get up and running.

This article has been reprinted with permission from OneConnect Inc.

Tags: VOIP, Business Communications, IP Communications, Communications Technology, OneConnect
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Goodbye Microsoft Office - Hello Free Tools

Posted by: Andy on August 23rd, 2006
Category: General eBusiness, Free Tools
Viewed: 2,098 times

Microsoft Office is $499.99 (Microsoft Office 2003 Edition,  $499.99 Canadian from Best Buy August 23rd, 2006) and if you operate a small business chances are you will need the 4 most popular components of office: Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

It’s impossible to operate in the age of computers without the ability to create documents, organize financials, demonstrate to clients and communicate by email. There are alternatives to purchasing expensive software.
 
Goodbye MS Excel, Hello Google Spreadsheets
Imagine a free spreadsheet tool that can do just about everything that MS Excel can do. It’s called Google Spreadsheets and is available as a beta from Google Labs. There is no software to download and install; Google Spreadsheets works within a web browser, like Firefox or Internet Explorer.  The list of features is impressive and includes cell formatting, sorting and almost 100 functions. Unfortunately, Google Spreadsheets does not support charts. 

Goodbye MS Word, Hello Google Writely
Google Writely is an online word processor with features comparable to MS Word. A key advantage of being online is portability; work from any web enabled computer using a web browser. Google Writely enables true permission based collaboration, sharing of information and syndication with RSS.  Other great features are a revision system, the ability to save documents in popular formats such as MS Word, PDF, RTF and HTML and a handy folder based organizing system.

Goodbye MS Outlook for Email, Hello Thunderbird  
MS Outlook is a powerful Contact Manager but is often used only to read email. To take full advantage of Outlook a business must first install a Microsoft Exchange server; a complex and expensive undertaking. If your only need is to read email then a great free alternative is Thunderbird by Mozilla. Thunderbird is safe, fast, and easy to use, with intelligent spam filters, quick message search, and customizable views. Powerful, and customizable, it is a full-featured email application. Thunderbird supports IMAP and POP mail protocols, as well as HTML mail formatting. 

Goodbye MS Outlook for Appointments, Hello Google Calendar
If you need to track your appointments then use Google Calendar. Access your appointments in this secure, flexible and free calendar from any web enabled computer using a browser. No software to download and install. Share your calendar with coworkers to coordinate events and set up automatic event reminders, including mobile phone notifications, and instantly bring up anything on your calendar with the built-in search tool.

Goodbye MS Office, Hello OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is an entire office suite that is free to download, use and distribute. The suite is made up of 6 components: Writer, Impress, Math, Draw, Calc and Base. It is compatible with all major office suites and works on all major computing platforms (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X X11, GNU/Linux, Solaris). Because it is open source there are no commercial licenses or software compliance issues to worry about and no language barriers - if it’s not yet available in your language, the chances are it will be soon. OpenOffice.org looks and feels familiar and is instantly usable by anyone who has used a competitive product.

Tags: Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Open Source, MS Office Alternatives, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird
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5 Reasons Every Business Needs a Website

Posted by: Andy on August 23rd, 2006
Category: General eBusiness, e-Business Basics
Viewed: 1,707 times

Electronic commerce or e-commerce refers to business transactions that happen online. That is, selling on the Internet. Electronic business or e-business refers to more than just selling online. In Canada’s private sector, more than 75% of businesses are estimated to be using the Internet to facilitate some aspect of their business. In fact, more than 62% of businesses in Western Canada operate a website.

The Benefits of eBusiness
E-Business is about utilizing Internet technologies — such as email and online banking solutions, and more sophisticated systems such as web-based customer relationship management solutions –- to provide superior customer service, streamline business processes, increase sales and reduce costs.

#1) Consumer demand
Consumers demand information and businesses’ websites are where more and more of them are finding that information.

#2) Cost effective advertising
Dollar for dollar the web is the best place to advertise. Compared to traditional media such as TV, Radio and Yellow Pages a website:

• Information can be updated and added 24/7
• Accessed 24/7
• Multilingual
• Interactive
• Searchable

#3) Levels the playing field
The Internet levels the playing field for small businesses. That is, it allows small business operators to compete on equal footing with larger businesses in the same industry.

#4) Increase customer interaction
Email communications, website FAQs and auto-responders are examples of simple and cost effective electronic techniques that can help to improve communications between you and your clients/customers.

#5) Increase brand awareness
Even if you are not considering selling online, having a website that promotes your business, provides contact information, and outlines your unique value proposition -– that is, the unique collection of benefits attributed to your product or service which create value for your customers or clients — will simply increase your reach and value in the marketplace, and make it easier for your potential clients/customers to find you.

Tags: eBusiness, eCommerce, Business Website
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5 Reasons Customers Don’t Buy From Your Website

Posted by: Andy on August 22nd, 2006
Category: General eBusiness, e-Commerce, e-Business Basics
Viewed: 1,718 times

#1) You’re anonymous
Customers will not buy from your website if they can’t quickly determine who you are, where you are located and how to contact you. It’s all about trust. If customers don’t know or can’t find these 3 basic things, then they will not buy from you.

Put your address and telephone numbers on the bottom of every page. Create an About Us page and make certain it’s easy to navigate to. Provide information about you and your company, your location, office hours and contact numbers.

#2) Your shipping rates aren’t displayed until the end of the checkout The main factor in considering an online purchase is the cost of shipping the product. Nothing is more frustrating then deciding on a product and going through the checkout process only to discover that the shipping fees are too high.

Give your customers a few samples of what the shipping fees were on some past orders, eg: It is approximately X dollars to ship product Y to location Z by postal.

#3) You don’t mention security or protection
What are you doing to ensure that credit card numbers are being protected? Online shopping is still relatively new and the media has done a terrific job of scaring people. Responsible businesses will take steps to ensure their customers are protected – consumers demand it.

Detail the steps you take to protect your customers. Use plain language and be clear about what you have done, do no and are going to do in the future.

#4) You focus on technology
A shopping cart is a complex thing – but your customers don’t care about that. They want information and ease of use. Too often business owners are preoccupied with how the store works and fail to consider the user.

Have you tested the interface – the navigation and display of information – that shoppers will use to buy your products? Is it intuitive and user friendly? Don’t assume that because you find it easy then everyone must.

#5) You don’t provide customer service
Shoppers often have questions that need to be answered before they complete the sale. If they can’t get the answers they need then they will not buy and will leave your website. Now they may have buyers remorse, forget to bookmark your website, go to a competitor or even choose to buy the product at a retail store. You’ve lost the sale.

Provide your customers with multiple ways to contact you and make sure they are easy to spot on every page. 1 800 numbers are often the best option however there are easy ways to add real time chat functionality and instant messaging services too.

Tags: eCommerce, eBusiness, Shopping, Online Shopping, Shopping Carts
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The Secret to Google PageRank

Posted by: Andy on August 22nd, 2006
Category: Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing
Viewed: 11,870 times

What Is PageRank?

PageRank is a method invented by Google to measure the relative importance of web pages, which is often called popularity. It is based on the topology of the web, i.e. the links structure between pages.

The main idea is that if a page A has a link to a page B, then the page A “thinks” that page B is important enough to deserve being cited and maybe visited by visitors of page A. This link from A to B increase the PageRank of B.

In other words, a page rank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (”incoming links”). A page that is linked by many pages with high rank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support of this specific page.

In Chris McElroy’s latest article, What Is Page Rank And Why Do We Want It? featured on Self SEO, great PageRank is so prised by spammers that they will do almost anything to get it.

“The spammers keep coming up with new nicknames and websites, and even new ip addresses. Getting their link on a high pr website or forum is so important to them they are like roaches after leftover cake in your kitchen at night. (I hope you don’t really have roaches . . . or spammers.) “

Is Page Rank Still Important?

SEO professional Andy Hagans downplays the importance of PageRank, placing more emphasis on link building.

“With each new Google update, it is apparent that PageRank counts for less, while other factors (trust, age, authority links) count for more.“

Spoofing PageRank

While the PR shown is usually accurate for most sites it must be noted that it is also easily manipulated. A current flaw is that any low PageRank page that is redirected, via a 302 server header or a “Refresh” meta tag, to a high PR page causes the lower PR page to acquire the PR of the destination page. In theory a new, PR0 page with no incoming links can be redirected to the Google home page - which is a PR 10 - and by the next PageRank update the PR of the new page will be upgraded to a PR10. This is called spoofing and is a known failing or bug in the system. Any page’s PR can be spoofed to a higher or lower number of the webmaster’s choice and only Google has access to the real PR of the page.

The Secret to Google PageRank

“Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search.” This secret is direct from Google.

Tags: Google, Google PageRank, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Marketing,
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