With all the hype about Cloud Computing, all the benefits of having your data and programs has never been more promising. But what happens when The Cloud goes dark? It certainly does happen!

Unless you have a copy of your data on your computer or handheld device,  you’re cut off from your information.  Users who have experienced this say it feels far worse than a broken computer or cell phone.  Why?  Imagine opening your email to find that it’s all gone. Your contacts? Gone too.  Accounting data and the ability to generate invoices, pay your bills and more?  Gone!  The fear stems from not knowing if you data is gone permanently or temporarily compounded by when the system will be off-line.

I am not suggesting that The Cloud is not a safe and viable way to store your data and use software programs.  I meerly share this with you so you can be prepared before it happens to you and inevitably it will.

This is has happened to Microsoft, Google, SalesForce.com and other “big name” cloud technology providers.  Click here to review The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2011 (so far).

As a technology services provider, we find ourselves repeatedly answering the same question for our customers:  Which Cloud is Right for Me?

Deciding whether or not to move your business into the cloud can be a complex decision – mainly because of all the options available on the market today.  Type the word Cloud in any search engine and you will find a million different possible choices. Trying to sift through all of the options for many business owners can be a difficult task on a good day.  Here are a few pointers that I found to be helpful when taking that first foray out into the wonderful world of Cloud technology.

First, evaluate your current business environment and decide what actually needs to be in the cloud. Knowing what information you want to be in the Cloud is a critical step in determining the type of technology you will need. Listed below are a few examples of what you may want to put into the Cloud:

• Regular backups of your critical data.
• Web access/hosting of software applications you may use such as ACT!, Outlook, QuickBooks etc.
• Files you want to be able to share with other users in your organization or trusted business partner.

Once you have decided what information you want in the Cloud, the next step is to decide what type of Cloud works best for you. Common types of Cloud (i.e. hosted solutions) include:

• Hosted data services – This form of hosting is great for off-site backups or hosting of a particular software application (like ACT!, Outlook or QuickBooks).  A hosted data service enables you to pick and choose what areas of your business need to be in the cloud.
• Hosted servers – This is a great option to consider if you looking to share files, share multiple applications or possibly put your entire company’s data and computing power in the cloud.  Due to the multitude of options in this area, our term “hosted servers”  is a generic term and for the purposes of this article, serves as a guide rather than an exact type of service.

A third area to consider relates to some of the logistics of Cloud computing:

• Who within your company will need access to what’s in the Cloud?
• What additional hardware or software will you need to make your data easily accessible once it’s in the Cloud?
• How much space will you need to have hosted? This is particularly important when addressing the need for an online backup solution or the renting of server space.

By carefully considering the questions listed above, you have now armed yourself with enough information to start narrowing your focus for the type of Cloud that will best work for your business.

Many business people now own iPads.  Having recently purchased a new laptop, I now have doubts about whether I should I have purchased an iPad instead.  Based on recent testing conducted by The CRM Connection, we have concluded iPads are now ready for prime time mobile computing.

Here are results of our testing:

Our testing began with using a free Remote Desktop Connection app (downloaded to the iPad) to connect to our Terminal Server. The performance was too slow for our testers.

At the suggestion of our client, MiamiPhotoShop, we began testing Logmein.com. A free Logmein.com account was created on a computer in South Florida. We used our client’s iPad which had the Logmein.com iApp installed to connect to the computer. The performance was fast. Taking it a step further, we then used a Remote Desktop connection on the computer in South Florida to connect to our Terminal Server back in Denver. Again the performance was fast. The Logmein iApp has a button that brings up a keyboard that is usable, but we found the external keyboard for the iPad makes using ACT!, Outlook and other applications much easier.

Our conclusion is Logmein.com offers a fast, reasonably easy way to access applications in your office remotely, as long as the iPad has a cellular or Wireless network connection. At $30 for the Logmein.com iApp, this solution is definitely a viable mobile business solution.

Denver, Colorado — SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced a new partnership with The CRM Connection, a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management software systems for small and medium-sized businesses and a Top U.S. ACT! Reseller award recipient in 2008 and 2009. The CRM Connection has added SugarCRM’s commercial solutions to its existing portfolio of solutions, resulting in a full complement of cloud-based CRM solutions ranging from $30-$65 per user per month.

“After a careful evaluation of a number of Cloud-based CRM software packages from industry-leading software vendors, we concluded SugarCRM was the ideal company to partner with,” says John Kaufman, managing partner of The CRM Connection. “SugarCRM complements our existing CRM offerings by providing an affordable hosted and/or on-premise solution to the markets we serve.”

The latest release of Sugar 6 set the bar for ease of use, flexibility and openness for CRM. Sugar 6 was developed with the idea that CRM does not have to be complex to deploy or use, nor too expensive for growing companies. Sugar 6 delivers a clean, bold look and empowers users with the ability to view and consume data from nearly any source. Sugar 6 is designed to run on any cloud service platform or on-premise operating system.

SugarCRM’s award winning commercial products are now delivering proven results for thousands of customers in over 80 languages. The CRM Connection clients can now gain all of the competitive advantages of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise, including:

• Visibility into their sales pipelines, with deep reporting and forecasting features
• A closed loop between sales and marketing teams with strong, yet simple to use marketing automation tools
• The ability to increase customer satisfaction through industry-leading customer service and support tools

“We are looking forward to partnering with The CRM Connection,” said Jeff Campbell, vice president of channel sales at SugarCRM. “Our partnership makes it possible for even more customers to experience the open, flexible solutions SugarCRM has to offer.”

Videos can be a great marketing tool to engage your prospects and customers. As examples, you can create videos that can capture your products or services in use, show off your amazing team, advantages over your competition, and provide testimonials of your business by your customers. With the widespread availability of video capturing tools, videos can be created on any budget size.

Using YouTube to host your videos will allow you to upload and share your videos, generating traffic to your website. YouTube is the leader in online video sharing sites and according to Alexa, the authority in website statistics, YouTube has the 3rd highest traffic rank for the entire web – capitalize on their traffic. YouTube is free and they also offer pay per click video promotion services.

Get Started – Sign up and create your YouTube account. As you enter the registration information keep in mind the most important item will be your User Name, this is used as your channel name. Be identifiable and make the User Name your company name, your brand or your website domain, for example our user name is ACTPLATINUM, our website domain, and our YouTube channel URL is www.youtube.com/ACTPLATINUM. (TIP: Use the same identifier for all of your social media pages.) Enter a Title for your channel, add tags – key words for people to find your channel, a profile description of your business, and your company website to link back and encourage visitors. You can upload your logo, change the background and use colors to match your business identity.

Upload Your Videos – Click the bright yellow Upload button, then optimize the video by entering the Title, Description and Tags loaded with key words that are important for searchers to find your videos and business. Place your company’s website somewhere in the beginning of the Description to generate traffic to your site. YouTube allows you to embed videos on other websites, so be sure to place a key video or two on your website’s homepage (we did on our homepage at www.actplatinum.com).

Join the Conversation – Start networking by subscribing to channels of your vendors, suppliers, associations, referral partners or customers and “Favorite” their videos that have relative content to your business. Your Favorites List can be displayed to your channel viewers. Link your Facebook and Twitter social media accounts with your channel that will send notifications to your Friends and Followers of new video uploads or favorites. We recently started our channel www.youtube.com/ACTPLATINUM featuring some of our great customers, add-ons for ACT! by Sage Software and Napkin Mike- please join the conversation!

My twenty-three year old daughter was home for the holidays. Hard as it is to believe, my “baby” is now a college graduate. Of course the start of a new decade left me thinking about the technological changes that have occurred over the span of a decade – and how they’ve impacted her life and my business.

Alyssa was raised with a computer. She used to come with me to my computer school and help teach the children’s classes. We were the first house on the block to have Internet access and Alyssa took advantage of my expertise when it came to mastering Word, Excel and Power Point.

My two daughters are only four years apart in age, yet I saw a tremendous difference between their generations. When Andrea departed for college at the start of the millennium it took a mini-van filled to overflowing to carry her “necessities.” Her possessions included a stereo, television, desktop computer, digital camera, photo albums and a huge box of cables including one for the dorm’s Ethernet connection. Alyssa arrived on campus four years later carrying only an IPod, I-phone, Mac book and a couple of power cords.

Alyssa is a card-carrying member of the 70 million strong “Generation Y.” Although they travel light they have access to a never-ending source of media which they expect to access immediately, anytime, anywhere.

ACT 2010 now includes links to various social networking sites including Facebook and LinkedIn. I was surprised to learn that many of my clients weren’t as excited about this new development as I was. “Don’t use Linked In,” huffed one person. “Facebook is for kids,” snapped another. These folks obviously assume that the people they encounter in the business world think the same way they do. Unfortunately, they don’t.

I’ve identified ten areas of communication that have changed over the course of the last ten years, at least if you’re a member of Generation Y. And, like it or not, if they want your business to survive you’ll have to adjust to those changes.

1. Land lines: For Generation Y, land lines are a thing of the past. If they do talk on the phone they do it via a cell phone which has become a permanent appendage. More than 23% of homes currently lack land lines – and the number is going up all the time.
2. Newspaper Classifieds: I’m a firm believer that if radio killed the video star then Craig’s List surely killed the newspapers and put most forms of print media in jeopardy of extinction. Morning papers and TV news have been replaced by online media sources.
3. Dial Up Connections: Your first Internet connection was probably a dial-up. Today’s generation wants instant gratification and finds it at home, on their phone and even at the local McDonalds. And your site had better have the bandwidth and design to enable quick page viewing!
4. Books: I’m an author so this one really pains me. Books are expense to produce – and purchase. They take space to store. Gen Y does their research over the Internet and downloads their reading material to their Kindle. Students can even download textbooks at sites like Coursesmart.com.
5. CD’s: Whoosh. Now you see them, now you don’t. Faster than you can say “download” the CD has been replaced by YouTube, ITunes and a variety of other sites that allow media downloads.
6. Film cameras and prints: Even if you could buy one, you’d have a hard time finding a place to process your film. Gen Y has thousands of pictures residing on their cell phones, computers and Face Book pages. And can access millions more on the Internet. A single image is no longer enough to speak a thousand words.
7. Yellow pages: Ironically, the only people using the Yellow Pages these days are aging Baby Boomers who probably lack the eyesight to read them anyway.
8. Faxing: If they don’t have land lines, why in the world would a Generation Y’er have a fax line?
9. E-mail: If you think you’re reaching your target audience via e-mail alone, think again. Generation Y is so mobile that even e-mail can’t keep pace with them. they’re using Face Book and Twitter to communicate.
10. Cell Phones: Buh-bye cell, hello smart – at least when it comes to phones. Gen Y doesn’t have to sit at a desk or be tied to a computer to access information; they carry a wealth of information in the palm of their hands.

Of course, you don’t have to reach out to Generation Y. You could market only to people who think – and communicate – the way you do. Unfortunately, that idea makes the somewhat flawed assumption that those people will still be around at the end of the next decade!

Karen Fredricks
blog@techbenders.com
www.techbenders.com

As a Customer Relationship Management Consultant who provides software solutions using ACT!, Sage CRM and SalesLogix, I compete with Salesforce.com.  While I think their solution can be a good fit for company’s with limited capital, those that lack a network infrastructure or IT support or have disparate workers, what I find disappointing is they disparage the competition rather than focusing on their strengths.  I have heard many of the negative and/or erroneous statements they make from prospects as well as read the competitive emails they send to prospects.  Call me old school, but that’s not the way I sell. 

So how and why does ACT! 2010 software compete with Salesforce.com?

Pricing
First let’s look at the Salesforce.com editions that compete with ACT!

Contact Manager Edition – priced at $9 per person per month. Supports a maximum of 2 users. Provides contact and lead management, and integration with Outlook / Google Mail. 
Group Edition – priced at $35 per person per month. Supports a maximum of 5 users. Provides same capabilities as Contact Manager plus opportunity management, Google Ad Words integration and basic case
management.
Professional Edition – Priced at $65 per person per month. No limit on the number users. Similar capabilities to Group Edition plus extended marketing and customer service capabilities, as well as analytical dashboards.

ACT by Sage 2010 – Priced at $199 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $59 per person.   Limited to 10 users.  Has same features as the Premium and Corporate editions except for the following licenses or features:  no ACT! for Web license, Dashboard views by team, enhanced remote synchronization services, activity reports by user,  secured contacts, notes, history and opportunities and no field level,  group and company record security.
ACT by Sage 2010 Premium – Priced at $369 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $114 per person.   Generally limited to 30 users.  Has same features as the  Corporate editions except for the lack of ACT! for Web licenses.
ACT by Sage 2010 Corporate - The SQL Express edition is priced at $399 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $114 per person and is generally limited to 30 users.   The SQL Server 2008 edition is priced at $479 per person with optional annual ACT! Platinum Care subscription for free annual upgrades at $164 per person and is scalable to 100′s of users.  The Corporate edition is our most scalable solution.

Feature Comparison

1. ACT! provides considerable ease-of-use advantages over Salesforce.com when it comes to accomplishing simple tasks such as:

• Lookups
• Searches
• Working with groups
• Mail merges
• Personalization
• Contextual right-clicks
• Pick lists and data quality
• Duplicate checking
• Offline

1. Salesforce.com costs 2.5 times more than ACT! after 3 years  1
2. Despite what they say, software must be installed on your computer to use Salesforce.com with Microsoft Word or Outlook
3. Sending a letter in Salesforce.com takes 17 clicks – in ACT! 2010 it’s a 2 click process
4. Salesforce.com Professional offers limited email broadcasting – only 500 per day per user. With ACT! E-Marketing, you can send up to 100,000 per day 2
5. ACT! offers complete full online and offline access to data
6. ACT! can be installed on a PC, Network, Web, Terminal and/or Citrix Server for whatever type of access you prefer
7. Recent Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM)* testing carried out under lab conditions has revealed that it takes 37% longer on average to complete a range of common user tasks in Salesforce.com compared to ACT! 2010
   REMEMBER:  Usability drives user adoption and ultimately determines the overall success of a CRM project
8. Contact Manager Edition Weaknesses
   •  Limited to 2 users
   •  No offline option
   •  No dashboards, email marketing, list management or opportunity management
9. Group Edition Weaknesses
   •  Limited to 5 users
   •  No offline option
   •  No email marketing or list management
   •  Significant upgrade cost to add a 6th user or more since you have to upgrade to the Professional Edition.  Essentially, you’ll go from $35 per user per month to the $65.00 per user per month—that’s an 86% increase.  
10. Professional Edition Weaknesses
    •  Significant higher Total Cost of Ownership over the lifetime of the system
    •  Offline access is significant extra cost.
    •  Storage allocation is very low for the price

Salesforce.com Gotcha’s
According to research conducted by Sage Software, storage allocations are very storage is extremely expensive ($3000 per additional GB of storage space) and is not available as an option in the Contact Manager Editions.
Offline access is not available in lower editions and is only available at a significant extra cost in the Professional Edition.
The Master Subscription Agreement with Salesforce.com controls customer data access – that’s your data they’re holding!

Here are some other observations:

1. Without express, prior approval from a senior Salesforce.com executive, all subscriptions must be paid in advance for a minimum of 1 year generally, and the average contract term is now 2 or 3 years.
2. They reserve the right to modify its fees and charges and introduce new charges at any time.
3. Companies are deemed to have accepted Salesforce.com’s terms and conditions when they click on the ‘I agree’ button during sign up to a trial subscription.
4. Your contract is automatically renew for the same period again unless the customer expressly notifies Salesforce.com of its intention to discontinue the service.
5. If a you don’t cancel in time, it will be liable for the full cost of the renewed contract.
6. Salesforce.com subscriptions number cannot be reduced in number until the expiry of the contract period.
7. Salesforce.com reserves the right to block a customer’s access to their data in the event of a commercial dispute. 
8. Outside of any dispute, it is generally difficult to get customer data out of Salesforce.com in any meaningful format unless you have the Professional or Enterprise Editions.
9. Apart from the very largest organizations, Salesforce.com customers do not benefit from any service level agreement in relation to the availability of their application. They have no recourse in the event of service outages.

In conclusion:

ACT! is easy to use and provides a simple pricing structure so there are no nasty surprises down the line. Before signing up with Salesforce.com, know what you’re committing to and get it in writing.  ACT! customers benefit from a low total cost of ownership with most paying the equivalent of between $20 and $30 per user per month over the lifetime of the solution.  I am happy to speak with you about how CRM and specifically ACT! can help your business.  Just click here to contact me.

1  Comparison based on 20 users of ACT! 2010 Corporate with annual ACT! Platinum Care software maintenance with $3,000 of implementation services versus Salesforce.com Professional edition as of 8/26/2009.

2  ACT! E-Marketing powered by Swiftpage is a monthly subscription service.  I am a Swiftpage Gold Drip Marketing consultant and help businesses turn their ACT! database in to a money making machine with this software solution.  Monthly pricing is available for review by clicking here.

Everybody likes free, right?  Well, we as business people and owners are no different, especially in this time of belt tightening and efforts to accomplish more with fewer resources.

While we don’t typically think of Microsoft and ‘free’ in the same sentence, due to competitive pressures from the folks at Google and the open source software movement, the Windows giant has been forced to make changes in an effort to remain relevant in the dawning cloud-computing world.

Following is an overview of two Microsoft products that on their own are rather revolutionary, but combined should result in some powerful results for those who are ready to think outside their daily box.

The first item on deck is Microsoft Mesh.  I won’t get into a lot of detail here since I have already written a post at InsideSmallBizCRM blog – check it out if you are interested – but I will say:  Mesh is a cloud service from Microsoft that allows you to share files across the web.  You simply create folders in your mesh, and specify the rules for sharing.  A copy is created on your local machine and another on your Mesh desktop in the cloud.  Depending upon your rules, new files or changes to existing files will automatically replicate through your mesh to other members.  If a machine is offline at the time you update Mesh files, when it is next connected, it will be updated.  You do nothing further.

The benefits?  1) Universal access to your critical files.  2) Version consistency since changes automatically replicate through the mesh.  3) Should you be without your personal machine or should it fail, your mesh desktop will have a copy.  4) Access via various web enabled phones is on the way.

Mesh is free and allows up to 5gb of file storage.  (To make it even more interesting, Mesh allows you to remotely access your Windows based Mesh PCs – so even if something you need isn’t in a Mesh folder, you can get to it.  Sweet!)

The next Microsoft tool that I want to talk about is not really free, but it does come bundled with several versions of Office, so there’s a good chance you own it already.  My guess is this is one of the most under-utilized components of Microsoft Office:  I am referring to OneNote.

Do you often find that you are juggling Adobe Acrobat, Word, and PowerPoint files, web pages, emails, online slide shows, even video, while researching for work?  You need all of these disparate yet important information sources in one place, but there is no simple way to do so.  Sure, your contact manager or CRM is great for people interactions, but it gets unwieldy when you start throwing browser bookmarks and various document formats into the mix.
If this sounds at all familiar, you owe it to yourself to discover OneNote.   Beyond offering a central location to store and manage your important business intelligence no matter the format, it provides flexible organization of that data along with support for tagging and full text indexing for easy recall later.  OneNote lets you share your ‘notebooks’ with other team members so they too can access and add to a project repository. 

The basics of OneNote are quick to master, yet the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.  If you already have OneNote installed on your PC, take 10 minutes to learn the fundamentals.  You’ll earn that time back within two hours of using it.

So, take ubiquitous data access, team sharing, remote control, add a universal data repository, and you have the makings of a potent collaboration solution.  All for (almost) free!  Enjoy.