Browser battles are ongoing regularly these days.  Mozilla is releasing new versions of Firefox with increasing rapidity, and market share has definitely changed, but a comment from one of my co-workers this past week made me ponder why so many are still using Internet Explorer when it is still having more problems than most other browsers.

To be fair, IE has made major progress from 7 to 8 to 9.  Regularly rotating into the top position in terms of speed and security features, Microsoft is doing their best to keep up with the competition.

New features, such as HTML 5 support, hardware acceleration, best plug-in libraries, and now RAM optimization (Firefox) must be emphasized by browser manufacturers in order to try to differentiate themselves.

One thing I have noticed is that, in most cases, speed is now the least relevant item to use to distinguish one browser from another.  All recent benchmark reviews I have seen, really over at least the last year, show no “human-discernable” difference between browsers.  However, one area where IE seems to consistently lag behind the other browsers is in Java-scripted site content, where it continues to struggle.

All this, and regular usage of all browsers, has led me to realize that the “look and feel” and feature-set are more important to me than raw speed, stats, or behind-the-scenes security settings that aren’t exactly visible.

For instance, the RSS-feed-aggregation in Safari I wrote about in my last update.  As an IT professional I regularly need to be seeing and digesting industry news, updates, tips, etc.  This method of adding feeds in Safari, and the built-in tools and sorting methods it provides, represent a real improvement in efficiency AND my own experience/perception.

All else being equal, it seems the individual user experience, which is NOT measurable in the way most benchmarks work, makes the biggest difference for individual selections.

Some of my co-workers like Firefox because they are used to the larger library of plug-ins.  Chrome, the first to introduce search in the address bar, with a more-streamlined UI and behind-the-scenes updates, impressed others and hasn’t done anything since then to convince them to switch.  Opera, long considered the “geeks” browser, actually won the latest round of speed tests done by Lifehacker, and continues to add new and interesting features, some of which are not immediately apparent.

However, looking at the stats, it seems the overwhelming issue for users is which browser is the default for their OS.  Even though I can and have installed Firefox and Chrome for Lion, I rarely find myself opening them because Safari does everything to my satisfaction and I really enjoy the minimalistic interface.  Since Windows still ships with the largest percentage of computers sold, and IE is the built-in, default browser, the majority of people still use IE. Despite its’ lag, bugginess, and lack of some features and UI design elements compared to other browsers, most users seem content to use it.  Maybe because they don’t need to spend extra time researching, downloading and installing other browsers, configuring and migrating favorites, plugins, etc?  Or maybe because a high percentage of the computer-using world doesn’t even realize other browsers are options, and might provide them value?

Regardless of the causes, I must say that when it comes to browsers, it is one area where ignorance is NOT bliss, and I am glad to have the time to regularly review, test, and experience the various products.

What are your experiences?

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.

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One of the exciting things about the TechConnect services we provide here at NSI Partners is being able to constantly innovate technology solutions for the Small-Medium Business (SMB) universe.  From software to hardware to smartphones, technology is often fluid, and one of the advantages of smaller organizations is being able to move swifter with less cost and investment than large enterprises.

A great example of this is a business with multiple locations in one city or regional area that relies on software solutions designed for the more-traditional Local-Area-Network (LAN) architecture.  For instance, let’s say your business wants to use a time-sheet program that allows employees to log in and out for the workday and track hours , as well as enabling reports and calendaring features for the admin staff.  One such example of this type of program is ShopClock.  Designed to work with a Microsoft SQL back-end database residing on a computer in the LAN designated as a server, then allowing workstation or client installs on multiple computers for employees to access and sign in and out.  Problems start to appear when you want to have one server at one business location but install licensed copies at other store locations that need to reach out to the server across the internet.

One traditional solution to this problem is from a hardware perpective:  work with your ISP to create a tunneled VPN via routers and switches, or get your own routers with VPN features that tie your public IP addresses together into a Wide Area Network (WAN) allowing the devices at each store to communicate with each other as if they were on the same network.  Thousands of dollars can be spent successfully implementing such a solution.  A second option that is less than desirable is to install stand-alone server/workstation setups at each location.  However, this can cost more as often additional licenses are required, and the stores don’t communicate with each other.

A third solution, and one we enjoy recommending and implementing for our TechConnect SMB clients, is LogMeIn Hamachi.  A great product that allows us to do a simple software install at each computer needing access to the WAN, and viola!  Instant connectivity between multiple geographical office locations for the purpose of connecting workstations to a server as in the case of ShopClock.  This has other obvious uses too, such as file sharing, remote printing, and even includes chat functionality.  For a handful of dollars a month, it could take over a decade for the costs of this option to catch up with some of the hardware solutions (not to mention saving on electricity bills and space not being used for additional hardware).

This is just one example of a creative, cost-effective technology solution for a small or medium business that enables the business to focus on growing and servicing customers with excellence, without sacrificing lots of time, energy and money on enterprise-type solutions.  If you work with a small or medium business needing better support and implementation of technology, feel free to contact us at tech@nsipartners.com.

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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.

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I’ve longed praised Google’s Chrome browser for it’s lightening speed. Now Google has introduced an app store for the Chrome browser .  One app I have just downloaded should convert a lot of you to Chrome if you’re not already using it: Session Buddy. Say you’ve been researching a topic for a newsletter and you have 12 windows open, but now need to move onto another task or perhaps reboot the computer? No need to bookmark all those pages. Using Session Buddy, which installs as an icon next to the Chrome wrench icon in the upper right, you just name and save the session, then open up the whole session anytime later.  LOVE IT !!

Click the Session Buddy link above to get to the download page, and – not to state the obvious, but I will anyway –  be sure you are using a Chrome browser to go to Session Buddy.  It’s a very quick instll: you’ll have it before you can count “one one-thousand.”

However, the last thing most people would associate with the “cloud” is Microsoft, especially Microsoft Office.  Traditionally requiring hundreds of megabytes on a hard drive, needing regular updates from Microsoft, and costing anywhere from $100.00 to $500.00 per machine for a license, Microsoft Office has traditionally been one of the mainstays of the workstation-based computing model.

NO MORE!  Microsoft has been hard at work to create a cloud-based option for Office products, similar to what Google has done with Google Apps and Google Docs.  For years, companies and individuals have been able to buy hosted Microsoft Exchange or Sharepoint services from various Microsoft Partners.  The newer version of that is Microsoft Online Services, of which NSI Partners is a reseller.  I have written about this previously, and it moves Exchange, Sharepoint, IM and online meeting solutions even more into the cloud than before.  However, Microsoft has made 2 more big strides in this direction of late.  The first is available now, and comes with your live.com, hotmail.com, or msn.com account.  The second is still in beta (Office 365) and I will be writing about that in a future post.

So, what are Office Web Apps? Simple:  web-based versions of Word, Excel, Power Point, and OneNote.  They are free for use for anyone with their live.com, msn.com, or hotmail.com sign-in.  Once you sign into your account, look for the Office menu button at top.  From here, a drop-down allows you to navigate to Recent Documents, your stored document folders, or create a new Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote document.  You can also click the Office menu button to take you to a new interface, such as the one dispayed below from my login.

Office Web Apps

The documents are stored using SkyDrive, a feature of Microsoft Live that’s been around since the launch of Vista and which now gives you up to 25GB of online storage at no cost. Designed as a “cloud hard drive”, the SkyDrive allows you to place documents here to work from, rather than your hard drive, thumb drive, etc.  The addition of Office Web Apps makes SkyDrive much more useful, though, as I can now create, edit, download, or email Office documents from the web WITHOUT needing to have Microsoft Office installed on my computer!

SkyDrive and Office Web Apps also allows you to share portions or all of your documents with friends/family/co-workers, and you can even set permission levels to allow them to edit, add, and delete files from your online library.  Microsoft Office Web Apps are also viewable from several mobile device browsers (Safari 4 on newer iPhone models and IE on upcoming Windows Phone 7).

Moving steadily upward into the Cloud, Web Apps are a great new tool for those of us who need to keep our documents formatted with Microsoft Office file types.  Enabling creation, sharing, and editing of the most common Office document types from any compatible web browser, for free, should keep Microsoft and the Office product line serious contenders for the standard choice in the electronic document universe.

Next year, when Microsoft fully unveils Office 365, Microsoft Office will take on a per-user, monthly subscription fee model, and Microsoft will move even more into the stratosphere.  Currently in closed Beta, NSI Partners is one of the companies testing these new services out.  Look for a future post about our experiences with Office 365.  For now, enjoy your web-enabled Office experience!

The illusion of efficiency.

Recently, I came across these words on an acquaintance’s blog. They served as a good reminder of how being busy is easy but being efficient takes work.

We all want to be productive in our work and personal lives. But turning that desire in to reality requires a plan. For me, I know it requires a list.

Whether you use OneNote like my boss, Toodledo like my co-worker, or plain old pen and paper like me, there’s something almost magical about ordering your day and life. Your organization’s big goal may seem far off in the distance, but today you can take a small step that brings you closer. And day by day, week by week, you get closer and closer. Finally, one day, there’s nothing left to cross off the list. You’ve made it- you’ve reached the goal! And it all started with a list.

Today, remember the value of ordering your days. Find a system that works for you, whether it integrates the latest technology or simply consists of a notepad and pen. Set aside a few minutes. Envision, chart the course, plan. These moments, spent in preparation, will truly yield great dividends.

And when you are done meeting with your list, go attack the day with purpose!

Last spring/summer, our company leadership decided that the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software we were using was falling behind the times and not getting prettier.  After months of research and several near-misses, we decided pretty much unanimously that Salesforce offered the best feature set (cloud-based, requiring no real company infrastructure, web 2.0-style easy-to-learn interface, little internal technical support required, integration with Outlook and Office via apps, huge user community, robust 3rd-party plug-in development).  However, the price per user was painful for a smaller business, and so we almost missed the boat.  But at the last minute we were turned onto the Group edition, which we had previously not been aware of.  With a significantly reduced subscription price and some blocked features (no deal-breakers), we excitedly worked with a 3rd-party contractor to migrate 10 years of data from our old CRM (Goldmine) into Salesforce.

And we’ve never looked back!

All those features we felt drawn to have taken some time to get used to, but Salesforce not only has a great feature set and interface, but also provides a guiding light to their “doctrine” around the sales process.  Let’s face it: though it’s great to have a robust set of data that captures phone calls, meetings, projects, and emails with existing clients, the main fruit of a platform like Salesforce is in leveraging it to get new business.  Though we are still working through the details of how to best leverage Salesforce’s feature set, suffice it to say we have been very pleased with all the features actually working for us like we hoped they would.  And we can’t always say this about every product we might turn to in hopes of features delivering on their promises.

For other folks out there in the SMB market wanting to have an affordable, intuitive, cloud-based, ever-improving system of capturing client/partner/vendor data that also excels at helping with managing the lead/opportunity/sales process, I can’t encourage you quickly enough to point your browser to the Salesforce pages and get your own relationship started.  Hopefully you too won’t be looking back as you move forward with this bright system!

So…it was time for a laptop upgrade.  I had a lot of requirements this time around.  I wanted a desktop replacement on a budget.  I also wanted a good processor, hard drive, and networking performance.  Quality screen, multitouch keypad, good sound were all pluses.  Decided I wanted to use Best Buy, since I have a Silver membership to their Reward Zone.  This meant a few things.  One, I had up to 45 days to return or exchange the product.  With my experience with Windows laptop builds, I figured this would be a great bonus.  Second, I still wanted to be able to physically test the laptop before buying it.  If I was going to get a desktop replacement that I would be using regularly, I wanted something I would be more-than-OK with interacting with physically on an ongoing basis.

By now the question is…where does social media come into all this?  Well, like many online shopping sites, even those that are online versions of brick-and-mortar establishments, bestbuy.com has a customer review section for their products.  The data is overwhelmingly in favor of us “consumers” trusting each other’s experiences far more than most advertising or marketing around a product.  This trend has grown so much that company’s are now wisely diverting large portions of their traditional advertising and marketing budget into Social Media Marketing, using “listening platforms” to understand how and where us “consumers” are talking about their products and brands.  But online customer reviews around products are really where this roller coaster began.

The time I spent reading the experiences of other users with their laptop purchases became rather addictive.  I changed my mind at least 5 times based on the experience of other customers, and ended up choosing a laptop brand I never would have believed I would selected otherwise: Samsung!  Even though I had follow-up experiences involving the return of my initial purchase and 4 subsequent exchanges and second-guesses (hence, the value of the Silver Reward Zone Membership), I ended up a very happy camper with a laptop chosen in large part because of the high marks given by other consumers, and less because of any advertising, marketing, or brand loyalty.  And it may be my most favorite portable computing device yet!

Moral of the story:  all else being equal, it really pays for technology manufacturers, distributors, and even retail point-of-sale facilities to include social media as a centralized portion of the buying process.  Now, I’ll find it hard to consider buying technology elsewhere for all these reasons.