John Jantsch, The Duct-Tape Marketer, says to reexamine FourSquare http://bit.ly/nUCBvT, particularly by piggybacking on popular businesses in your area, collaborating with other Check-In locations all over town to create a referral web and taking advantage of FourSquare’s flash specials.

Meanwhile, according to News Backbone http://bit.ly/nKkahS, ShopKick, which has spent most of its first year recuiting national chains, is now beginning to court local merchants like coffee shops, but only in major markets: Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Chicago, IL; Detroit, MI; Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, CA; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Seattle, WA; and Washington D.C.

Then there’s Yelp, Google Places, Facebook and even Groupon and AdzZoo’s just-launched Groupon competitor.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is customizing, or at least private-labeling, an existing app, using HTML5 or completely going native. Someone must have these options laid out in a flow chart. More research to be done, but I think in a year’s time, it will be pretty common to have an app (in some form with increasingly blurred lines across all these options) for many of your favorite stores.

(Image credit: Review Unit)

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My cell phone usage for work was so much less in the past.  Today, the app explosion for smartphones has rendered these portable little gizmos computers in their own right.

Whether it’s an iPhone, Blackberry, or Android-based device, there are apps available for nearly everything I used to only be able to do from a full computer.  A sampling of apps I now have on my iPhone 3GS and their workflow relevance…

1. Trillian:  a great IM platform that ties into multiple accounts such as AOL and Hotmail (among others).  I can now chat in real-time with a wifi or 3G data connection with my coworkers while at various locations away from the office.  Great for letting people know of last-minute schedule changes or asking quick questions of co-workers.

2. Salesforce: being able to reach into fields of data in our Salesforce database from a phone is a very powerful tool.  Looking up contact and account information as well as opportunities, tasks, and events is a real boon when out on the road.

3. Chatter for Salesforce:  Being able to dip my toes almost immediately in the “stream” of ongoing internal company conversations with my phone is another nice feature.

4. Apps from online retail sites like BestBuy and NewEgg provide handy, easy ways to search for new technologies and products, as well as customer reviews and ratings, while passing that 5 minutes waiting for an appointment or meeting to start.

5. The obvious foundational smartphone apps for today like Twitterific for Twitter, the Facebook app and the LinkedIn app were not-so-obvious as foundations apps a year ago.  Today, not having these on your mobile phone places you a generation ago in terms of technology!

6.  The Dark Horse:  Chipotle! Having a burrito paid for and waiting for me at the counter is a great way to minimize down time in a busy day out and about!

The moral of this story:  I used to dread cell phones for their intrusiveness into my privacy.  I still do when it comes to voice calls.  But the enhancements to my lifestyle and workflow efficiency provided by the mobile app universe have converted me.  I now feel “slow”, “inefficient”, and even “lost” at times when I realize my battery has died or, worse, I left my iPhone at home or the office.

Webmail is ubiquitous. Easy to setup, check from any browser, or download to email clients like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, most individuals have several webmail accounts.  Many businesses use webmail for their business email as well, whether provided by a website host as an add-on service, or through more evolved products like Yahoo Mail Plus or Gmail.  These email options all share many characteristics, most based on the POP or IMAP protocols that are used for the email server and service. 

Traditionally only larger organizations and companies have utilized Microsoft’s Exchange technology for hosting email servers, which linked to Outlook clients provide some significant feature sets and productivity benefits not found on POP and IMAP email servers. A few years ago, companies started offering shared Exchange server hosting environments for monthly fees so that small-medium businesses that didn’t want the extra cost and hassles of their own in-house Exchange server could still benefit from the technology and utilize Outlook the way it was designed to be used.  Even more recently, Microsoft took that over themselves, providing the servers and improving the features and costs with Microsoft Online Services.  I have written about this previously in its’ several forms, from Exchange Online only up to and including the full Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).  I have yet to publish a simple list of the advantages and features small and medium businesses can expect when transitioning to Exchange Online for email hosting….Here is that list!

1.  More than email: Exchange adds a robust Contacts database, Tasks/To-Do Lists, Calendaring, and Public File Sharing

2.  Access methods:  from any web browser with Outlook Web Access, from smartphones with data and ActiveSync, from Microsoft Outlook

3.  Advanced scheduling tools, the ability to see multiple calendars within your organization, the ability to edit other’s calendars, the capability to share documents with others online easily, complex task database and task management, categories

4.  Reduced costs and complexity with all the productivity enhancements of a traditional in-house server

5.  Built-in backup of data, enhanced spam filtering and security tools compared to many other email hosts

If you add Microsoft Outlook 2010 to the mix as part of the email solution, there are additional benefits: Task Delegation (create and assign tasks to others); Enhanced Scheduling and Calendaring Features (Overlay mode for multiple calendars, scheduling assistants to suggest meeting and appointment times, plugins for services like GoToMeeting); and now the Social Connector (see updates from social networks like Facebook and Linked In for your contacts right inside Outlook).

At prices per user per month that are only a few dollars more than POP and IMAP email options, and new features coming with Office365 in 2011, there is little reason for any small to medium business NOT to give Exchange Online a try.  You may find it changes the way you do business and enables some exciting changes for your organization.

Contact tech@nsipartners.com if you’d like to work with NSI Partners for a free trial of any Microsoft Online product, or for support in transition from your existing solutions.

(Photo Credit: DroidX)

Touchdown has provided fantastic email functionality on the Droid, but after three months, we’re only now realizing how much its failure to integrate with the resident Contact app has held us back.

We originally got Touchdown because it would allow us to sync with as many Exchange email folders as we wanted, whereas the resident HTC email app only works well if you have a small number of folder. If you’re like me and have many, it seems to select a subset at random and usually makes poor choices.

So with email working great, I never understood why it would take me so much longer to search through and edit contacts. It turns out Touchdown had been making multiple copies of contacts each time it synced, and finding the right copy got reduced to random chance as well.

Ultimately it was a failure of Touchdown to properly integrate with the Incredible. So we removed Touchdown and its superior email functionality in favor of more reliable contact functionality. In the end, the Droid is still a telephone and contacts are very important. Now hopefully I won’t feel left behind in a room full of iPhones when people start rapidly capturing each other’s contact information. My next business trip in a week will tell!

Taking advantage of the benefits offered by products like Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint have either been cost- or infrastructure- prohibitive for many SMBs, but Microsoft has come into the age of cloud computing with some great offerings.  One set of services, titled Microsoft Online Services, has introduced the benefits of products like Exchange and Sharepoint  to the “cloud”.  What does this mean for organizations like those described so far in this post?

For starters, these services provide a cost-effective, infrastructure-friendly method of bringing Exchange to the geographically-dispersed, telecommuting-heavy organization.  No longer forced to choose between POP and IMAP email accounts, we are now able to tap into the many benefits offered by email hosted on an Exchange server.  What are some of those benefits?  Complete integration with Microsoft Outlook 2007/2010 and other Microsoft Office products, for one.  Shared directories, data storage and integrity provided offsite, enhanced calendar and scheduling features such as the Scheduling Assistant, Out of Office functions, the ability to see in real-time the status of all one’s co-workers, Outlook Web Access with almost full functionality from any web browser, synchronization of mobile phones such as the iPhone directly to the Exchange server, among many other enhancements.

In addition to the benefits realized with the Exchange-based email platform, Microsoft Online Services also provide access to a Sharepoint site for our organization, again hosted offsite by Microsoft with guaranteed data integrity and no additional burden to our own power, hardware, or property.  For those unfamiliar with Sharepoint, think of taking all your files used by your company and organizing them in a familiar folder structure on a server reachable by all through the web or through Windows Explorer.  Including advanced document-management features such as file versioning, checking in and checking out, and integration in real-time into Mocrosoft Word, Excel, and Power Point, Sharepoint sites enable greatly evolved and more efficient sharing of digital resources.  But Sharepoint is not just about file management.  It also includes task management and assignment functions, document workspaces for teams, shared calendars, and many other teamwork-enhancing features.

Beyond the benefits realized by utilizing Exchange and Sharepoint, subscriptions to Microsoft Online Services can include their Instant Messenger client for business, Office Communicator, as well as their screen- and voice-sharing teleconferencing solution, Microsoft Live Meeting.

All these services can be paid for on a monthly subscription basis per user and can range from one standalone product  to all four of the services being bundled.  As cloud computing evolves to offer SaaS and other offsite solutions, it is arguable that technology traditionally too expensive for the SMB market, or unmanageable for organizations with heavy telecommuting and geographic dispersal, is the silver lining in said clouds.  The advantages outweigh the limitations so heavily that I cannot recommend these services enough for organizations historically forced to settle for other more limited technology solutions.

In fact, we are convinced enough of the great value of these services that we are now Microsoft partners in advising and providing these solutions to existing and new clients.  If you are in an organization that fits any of the characteristics described here, or are wondering if  ”life in the cloud” might have anything to offer you, I encourage you to look more into Microsoft Online Services at  http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx or others like it.  Contact our tech team at tech@nsipartners.com if you would like to learn more or get a free trial or quote!

Jott and reQall are services that allow you to make a call from your cell phone and record a message. This message is then transcribed to text and emailed to you along with the attached recording. You get home, open up your email, and there’s the idea you wanted to remember waiting for you. You can also manage your messages on the services’ websites, and you can setup reminders that will text message you at the time you set.

Each service is a little bit different. Jott has lots of options for sending messages to other people by transcribed text message or email. reQall seems more aimed as a task manager/mini calendar, with the ability to choose between categories such as Tasks, Meetings, or Notes, and to assign a date and time using natural language (Jott just added organizational folders too). Jott, however, has the power to be connected to web services via their APIs, giving it a leg up on reQall. Some of the services already connected include Twitter, Blogger, Remember the Milk, and Google Calendar, letting you blog by cell phone or let your social network know what you are doing. The Cranking Widgets Blog has a nice post about how handy Jott is.

If you use web services to manage your life then give Jott a try. If not, reQall might be better, especially if you have lots of appointments during the day.

To use Jott you must be in the United States or Canada, but reQall also has you covered in the U.K..