Got a resource to share, Divvy it up!

Here at Click Engineering we do a lot of our troubleshooting and maintenance work remotely, i.e. from our desk in our office.  We subscribe to a service that makes it easy to create a remote connections to any computer with Internet access.  The only problem, only one technician can use the service at a time.  While conflicts are rare, there are occaisions when two of us will schedule a remote session with a client at the same time.

I’m sure you can think of similar resoures in your business that need to be shared and periodically lead to a conflict.  It may be a conference room, an office laptop, or perhaps even a staff member with specific skills.  Whatever the resource, you may be able to prevent scheduling collisions using Divvy.com.

Divvy is a free web-based service that allows you to share the calendar of a resource so that people can reserve time to use it.  You tell Divvy about the resource, its availability, the cost of reservation (if you wish to charge for it), what questions you want to ask the reserver before committing the reservation etc.  Once defined you can specify who has access to the calendar to make reservations, or you can open it up to the world.

To help conceptualize the service let’s look at a couple of examples.  In the case of a conference room you may create an ‘item’ called ‘Conference Room’.  Availability could be restricted to office hours and calendar access granted to staff members only.  The reservation cost would be $0.  You could define a set of questions to ask such as ‘Do you require a projector during your session?’ or ‘How many people will be attending’, so that the room can be configured and set up appropriately.

Alternatively, perhaps you have a resource that you rent out, such as a piece of high tech diagnostic equipment, and you want to enable your clients to reserve time to use it at a fixed rate.  Again you create an item in Divvy, give it a name and define the times it is available.  You can then configure the rental fees and set up a payment mechanism using Paypal such that when your client reserves time with the equipment the rental fees are automatically collected on the spot – no accounts receivable!  The fee structure can be defined in detail including information such as minimum and maximum lead time, down time required between reservations, different rates for different users etc.  Finally you can ask Divvy to send an email reminder to the client and to you shortly before the reservation.

I’m sure with a little thought you can come up with a resource that would benefit from having it’s own schedule and maybe can even drive a little revenue for your business.  Pick a simple one and try Divvy for a little while to see if it is a good fit.  I predict that once it is adopted by your audience you will wonder how you ever managed to share resources without it.

Dave Ferguson
CEO, Click Engineering Inc.
www.clickeng.com
Twitter: clickceo

Bing?

Have you heard?  Microsoft rolled out their new search engine this week.  It’s called…. Bing.

Um, wow, where do I start.

In a nutshell, too little too late.  Now to justify that let me first say that I have been using Microsoft’s Live search engine about 50% of the time for the last year and quite like the user experience, though I’ve found the search results to be a little off target in comparison to Google.  As for Yahoo (they have a search engine right?) I just don’t use it – ever.

But Bing.  It smacks of a deperate attempt to catch up and frankly is disappointing.  For starters, I just can’t get used to the name.  Shallow, I know, but it’s my first impression and it counts.  Accepting that I’m looking for the value, and unless I’m a consumer shopping for a new TV or searching for a place to eat tonight (who does that?) I see little added value.  Now capture my friends and followees and rank their ratings higher and I’ll agree you have a progressive, appealing, contemporary service.

I gather the premise for rolling out a new search ’solution’ was that users were dissatisfied with the existing search portals, that they simply got endless lists of links and had difficulty finding the actual information they want.  I guess I’m not the target market because I find if the information is available on the Internet I can usually pinpoint it pretty quickly.  I may get an endless list of links back, but for the most part the one I’m interested in is near the top.

Microsoft is selling Bing as a ‘decision’ engine, the idea being that the engine performs the search, but also does some analysis on the results and helps you organize them to come to a decision more quickly.  Bing provides rough cuts at categories, aggregates user reviews, compares pricing etc.  Again, all great if I’m buying a TV or booking a flight.  Not much help if I’m trying to determine why my PC bluescreened.

There are no features evident that will help businesses.  Google provides their analytics and Local Business Center.  If Bing is going to provide similar services I’ve not heard about it.

On top of all this Microsoft is throwing a marketing budget at the new brand that makes Ballmer ‘gulp’.  That would make sense to me if the brand offered significant additional value, but just as with Vista the value isn’t there.  IMHO, too little too late and money down the drain.

Hey, you want to see a ground-breaking, highly valuable new search engine, check out Wolfram Alpha.  Granted it’s not going to appeal to everyone yet, but the concept and delivery are unique, appealing and compelling.  It has great potential.

Bing?  Really?

Dave Ferguson
CEO, Click Engineering Inc.
www.clickeng.com
Twitter: clickceo

Microsoft seems to be on track for a change

Microsoft has announced the availability of the release candidate for their next version of Windows, cleverly dubbed ‘Windows 7′.  Now I don’t mean for you to immediately go out and install the new version (though you can if you wish, here).  No, I just wanted to highlight that Microsoft seems to be tracking on their goal to release the next version of Windows sometime in 2009 (or maybe early 2010).

This is great news to those of you who love to hate Vista.  Personally I think Vista is a perfectly good operating system, though it has its quirks as do all operating systems.  The biggest problem with Vista was that it didn’t offer enough value over XP to justify the pain of upgrading.  The rumor is that Windows 7 truly is better, faster than its predecessors.  I have read numerous reports that it runs faster that Vista, or even Windows XP, on the same hardware.  Now that would be something worth upgrading to!

Never fear, I am already in the process of evaluating the RC on your behalf and will report my findings here.  If the reality is as good as the scuttlebutt I’ll be recommending y’all skip Vista and upgrade to Windows 7 ASAP.

Dave Ferguson
CEO, Click Engineering Inc.
www.clickeng.com
Twitter: clickceo

Collaborate and Communicate with UStream.tv

 

Free video streaming service

Nobody talks about it, but we seem to be experiencing a revival of the mystery Internet services that provide stunningly valuable services at no cost, make no money and enjoy spectacular popularity but somehow remain in business.

I would lump the free video hosting and streaming service, ustream.tv, in with the likes of Twitter, YouTube and Ning.  I don’t see how they support themselves, but I do see a lot of possibilities to leverage the service in business.

Briefly, ustream.tv allows you to livestream events through their website.  So imagine if you will sharing an important sales meeting with reps who are out of town, or streaming the release of a new product, or recording a new employee training session.  According to the ustream.tv homepage all you need is a camera and an Internet connection.  You can of course restrict viewing of your ’show’ to only certain ustream.tv users if you want to keep it private, or you can broadcast your news to the world!

Tuck ustream.tv into your toolchest of social media and communications solutions.  Creative application of tools like this will set your business apart from others and help you run things more efficiently.

Enable communications with Jott

The speed of  business requires almost constant communication to stay on top of things.  But there are times when I am away from my computer and it is not convenient to tap out a message on the Lilliputian keyboard of my mobile phone.  Actually, when you think about it any keyboard is a terribly inefficient way to communicate your thoughts anyway.

I find the services of Jott.com to be a great help.  Jott allows you to record a voice message on your phone and specify to whom it should be delivered.  Not so special you might think, but the neat part is that the service will translate your message into text and deliver it as email, or use it to update services like Twitter or Outlook if you so choose.  You can build groups which you can use as destnations to share a message with multiple people at one time.  Since the service is voice based you can define a speed dial for the Jott phone number, use a voice command to call it, speak your message and its destination, all hands free.

Through one service I keep my team informed without having to focus on a keyboard, and they don’t have go through the time consuming process of checking voicemail as it is delivered just like any other email.  I can also leave myself notes, such as how long I spent at a particular client’s office, or where I picked up some equipment.  I use it to update my Twitter status so my team knows where I am and what I am doing.  Finally I can create appointments and reminders in Outlook so that I don’t forget to follow up on committments I make while out of the office.

Of course there are countless other applications of the service, take a minute to think about how you may be able to apply it in your business.  Then sign up for the free service at www.jott.com and see how it works.  The free service limits the length of the message to 15 seconds and has some other restrictions, but if you like it more feature rich subscription services are very reasonably priced.

Dave Ferguson
CEO, Click Engineering Inc.
www.clickeng.com
Twitter: clickceo

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft has officially released the latest version of its Internet Explorer utility (available for download at http://twurl.nl/epdsl8).

Say what you will about Microsoft and Internet Explorer, but in the end IE is a viable option for browsing the Internet.  Personally, I am browser agnostic.  I run IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera since each has its advantages.  I have used the IE8 pre-releases for months now and on the whole am happy with the feature set and performance.

I will spare you the litany of features added in IE8, you can read it on the Microsoft site (http://twurl.nl/kqzcae).  I’ll just say overall it is an improvement over previous versions.  I like the look and feel.  I find some of the new features valuable.  But most of all it is the newest version and I find no reason not to adopt it.

One caveat I will mention is IE8’s compatibility with existing websites.  Often I find sites do not display properly the first time I browse to them.  Microsoft has made a lot of changes in how IE8 interprets the script that defines web pages and in some cases those changes break existing sites.  Fortunately IE8 provides a compatibility mode which you can enable with a simple click of a button.  I find in almost all cases that solves the display problems.

I recommend adopting IE8 when you have the time to download the installer, close all the applications you are running and potentially reboot your computer.  We can talk about the advantages of specific features down the line.

Employing IT in your business – a story unfolds

The story is about you, or more specifically about how you employ IT (computer technology) in your business.  It is no secret to a business owner that technology changes fast, very fast.  No sooner have you adopted the latest and greatest than someone asks you if you have heard about something even newer, which you have not.

Don’t despair.  You are not alone, and unless you work in the IT industry you are not to blame.  The volume of information generated by the IT industry is daunting and for most business owners it is not relevent enough to their business to justify watching every little change.

That’s my job.  I do watch the changes, and I weigh the business value of each one, and think about how it can be applied to my clients’ businesses, then decide who I need to discuss the change with so that they can use it to improve their business.

Now you can benefit from my work as well.  In this blog I will share the most interesting tidbits, case studies, experiences, successes and failures resulting from changes in the IT industry.  I will filter out the chaff, the false starts, the hype and bring to you only the information that is of true value to your business.

That’s where it starts, the discovery of a reliable stream of high value information that you can apply to your advantage.  Put a check in that box, and let’s turn to page two.