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Archive for January, 2012

Jan 30

Major New Customers for Microsoft’s Office 365

Microsoft has been courting businesses both large and small with their cloud offering Office 365. Their latest big new customers who have made the switch are JetBlue,Patagonia, and the American Heart Association.

Each of these new customers are very different, but they all need to increase collaboration, communication, and teamwork within their organizations. Each also recognized the potential for increased reliability and efficiency along with decreased costs promised by the Cloud.

Microsoft Office 365, launched June 2010, has Microsoft Office along with popular server productivity and communication tools that have been a mainstay of large enterprises for years including Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. Before Office 365, the prohibitive expense of deploying these server tools in-house had prevented all but the largest organizations from deploying them.

Plans for Office 365 start at $6 per user per month and range up to $27 per user per month for the Enterprise Edition, which includes the full desktop edition of Microsoft Office and SSL-Encrypted Intranet.

Although Microsoft Office 365 is primarily geared towards small businesses, many large businesses including Campbell Soup Company and publisher Group Marie-Claire have implemented it.

The American Heart Association, a grant-making not-for-profit that funds research into heart disease, has two data centers in the Dallas area, but is still anticipating cost savings by switching to Office 365. According to the American Heart Associations CIO Michael Wilson, “The total cost of ownership is significantly cheaper.” He went on to say that he believes that the cost of the AHA’s collaboration and E-Mail will be about 50% less

Wilson estimates that Office 365 will reduce his organization’s email and collaboration costs by as much as 50% annually, compared to operating Exchange servers internally. Patagonia officials said their company expects to save $300,000 on future upgrades by moving to Microsoft’s cloud, and shave $15,000 off annual operating costs.

Beyond the cost savings, Wilson sees other advantages in moving to the cloud. “The ability not to have to upgrade to take advantage of new functions is huge,” he said. “And we get a radical upgrade in storage space.” AHA’s plan gives each of the company’s 3,000 employees 25 GB of storage space.

In addition to Outlook and Lync for email and collaboration, AHA will eventually adopt Office 365′s cloud-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The organization is also ditching Oracle’s Siebel CRM tools in favor of Microsoft Dynamics. “We’re going strictly cloud,” said Wilson.

Wilson said American Heart Association took a long look at Google Apps before deciding to go with Office 365. Ultimately he wasn’t comfortable with the search giant’s privacy assurances. “Google changes their privacy agreements for a lot of different reasons, just like Facebook. Some of them appear to be commercially oriented, and that concerned us,” he said.

Competitor Google Apps claims that they have millions of users. While a Microsoft spokesperson wouldn’t say how many organizations or users are on Office 365, he did say that it “is on track to be one of the fastest growing business offers in Microsoft history.”

Jan 19

2 Comments

Microsoft Office 365 and the Security and Compliance of your Data

When comparing cloud productivity services such as Google Apps, IBM Lotus Live, and Microsoft Office 365, most companies do not realize that only Office 365 complies with leading information security and privacy standards. As part of their commitment to customers, Microsoft is certified for ISO 9000 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Microsoft also has implemented a site called the Office 365 Trust Center. This site has comprehensive information about the privacy and security practices for Office 365. The Office 365 Trust Center is available at http://trust.office365.com.

Compliance Updates

The European Union released model contractual clauses that are a standard for transferring personal data internationally outside the European Economic Area(EEA). When these model clauses are included in service agreements with corporations housing the data, customers are assured that their data has been safeguarded, even if that data is stored in cloud-based service centers outside the EEA. Regulators in the EU have stipulated that they can request that customers halt using a data service that has not implemented their specifications for data protection.

Microsoft has used the model clauses specified by the EU, which is something that none of the other cloud service providers has done. Microsoft has also recognized the fact that 27 member countries in the EU have more stringent and specific regulations than the EU Data Protection Directive. Microsoft has added clauses to make them compliant with the requirements of these 27 member states as well.

Creating cloud productivity applications that are suitable to businesses with European customers means more than just building functional applications that work in a browser. Microsoft has taken European data protection and security standards seriously, and they have implemented a comprehensive approach to making sure that their product complies completely.

Another stringent standard for information security management is the ISO/IEC 27001. In addition to strict standards to achieve this benchmark, there is a yearly audit to ensure compliance and maintain the standard. Microsoft Office 365 is the first major cloud software to achieve this benchmark. Microsoft has also ensured that safeguards are in place to make sure that Office 365 is fully compliant with HIPAA.

Lack of HIPAA compliance has previously prevented healthcare organizations from taking advantage of cloud productivity software. Microsoft has removed this barrier by taking the steps with their policies, their program, their security, and the underlying physical architecture of the cloud service centers to ensure that they comply fully with HIPAA standards. Office 365 is a natural fit for the administrative needs of hospitals, health insurers, clinics, and individual physician’s offices. While maintaining compliance, they can lower IT operating costs by using Office 365.

About Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is the cloud productivity software suite from Microsoft. Included with Office 365  is Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync. Office 365 gives you robust E-Mail service for all of your employees, the latest version of Office for their desktops, document storage and collaboration, video teleconferencing, and enterprise instant messaging.  All of these services are more compliant, secure, and reliable at a price hundreds of times lower than would be possible with an on-premises solution would be. As Office 365 does have some technical intricacies in its’ implementation, it is a good idea to have an experienced partner to help you. The Web and I has experience in implementing Office 365, and we are certified Microsoft Channel Partners.  Call us today for a free consultation at 646-853-0573.

Jan 19

SharePoint Customization and Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Office 365, the popular new cloud service which is revolutionizing business across the World, has four software products that serve to help people in business collaborate, communicate, store and share information: Exchange, Lync, SharePoint and Office. One of the most useful and important pieces of software in this suite is SharePoint, the highly customizable document storage and collaboration intranet portal.

Of all of the four products offered with Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint online might well be one of the most useful because of its usefulness in creating and sharing content. SharePoint Online comes with the base configuration, but with a bit of knowledge it can be customized to be useful for many types of businesses.

When different people are working on the same project and sharing the same files, SharePoint can help to keep track of all of the changes. SharePoint can also host databases for collaborative data. Larger companies that have enterprise systems can share the data from those programs with SharePoint where it can be analyzed.

The most common use of SharePoint is to make a corporate intranet to facilitate internal communication and sharing of common documents. The following are instructions on creating your first corporate intranet.

From SharePoint Administration, create a new site collection. Each site collection has a root template, and for this project it is best to use the Team Site Template.

Once the initial site has been created, sub-sites can be created for different purposes. Some sites can be for discussion. A site can be created as a document repository. There are no limit to the number of sites you can create, but it is best not to create unneeded complexity. Lists and libraries can also be added, along with lookup functionality that makes them act like a database application. Policies can be stored and shared using the Wiki Site Template.

Although Microsoft offers a wide variety of site templates, pages, and other structures, they are very generic. Customization should follow careful planning by your SharePoint administrators in order to build an environment that reflects the needs of your company.

Another good feature is the ability to customize a site from a template and save that as a new template. This allows you to re-use any customization that you will need again, such as project-specific sites that will likely need to be replicated frequently over time. For companies that have their own on-premises SharePoint, the customized templates can be downloaded and transferred to your on-premises instance as well.

The process of saving a customized list or site template is quite simple.

If you are saving a list as a template, go to the default page for that list, then click the Library Tab at the top of the page under Library Tools. On the right=hand side click Library Settings. In the next option group that opens, click, “Save document library as template”. Fill in a file name and description and click OK. Then when you go to create a new list, it will be available under Lists in the Templates.

Saving a site you have created as a template is very much the same. On the top of the page, go to Site Settings under Site Actions, and then you can save your site as a template.

Another great feature of SharePoint is the ability to get access to external data for use in multiple scenarios from data analysis to mail-merge applications. Using the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) application this is possible. Use of this feature enables connectivity for ERP system data into SharePoint. The data is presented through a method that SharePoint calls the “External Content Type”. Our client First United Services makes use of this. They have their Microsoft Dynamics CRM data linked up to SharePoint. The great thing about Microsoft Dynamics CRM is that it is made to work with SharePoint, and it has an easy way to set it up.

For other ERP systems, open SharePoint Designer 2010, which will give you the option to create a BCS External Content Type. With the site open in SharePoint Designer, click the Site Objects list then under that click External Content Types. This will create a basic definition in SharePoint designer. Then you can add all of the details to connect to the external system.

In addition to ERP data systems, other types of web service data sources can be used, such as geographic data systems, market data, or other public data such as the public data accessible through Amazon’s Web Services.

Another option that Microsoft offers with SharePoint Online is the option to develop and deploy custom code. Visual design changes as well as new web parts are possible. With Office 365, Microsoft gives you the options to sandbox your applications. This segregates the code you make from the rest of the server farm, protecting other Office 365 user companies from the possibility of malicious code being written.

Office 365 is customizable because one solution does not suit all types of companies or sizes of companies. The customization possibilities in SharePoint Online allow for enough customization to be useful for any kind of company of any size, enhancing communications and collaboration. Other customizations that are available in SharePoint include:

  • Adding user defined fields to the user profiles.
  • Using the Content Organizer to arrange data in different locations based on metadata.
  • Create associations between a document template and a library.
  • Building workflows to define tasks and the flow of work.
  • Defining content type policies that can delete aging files or review workflows.

With the significant capabilities and possibilities available within SharePoint Online and Office 365, it is a great time for your organization to discover the possibilities. For a free consultation, please give us a call at 646-853-0573.

Jan 12

Online Brand Review Management

One of the most important things we do with our Reputation Management Campaigns is our brand review management.

At the Web and I, we make sure to stay ahead of the curve. We know that continual monitoring of brand reviews keeps us alert and provides us with the ability to properly react. This vigilant way of doing business has been at the root of our success.

Customers and critics are always reviewing our customers’ brands, and these reviews, whether good or bad, need to be responded to. This is the job of our professionals.

Always alert for the good of our clients, while maintaining strong ethical standards, the Web and I has developed a strategic plan that incorporates three main parts:

  • The Reputation of the Brand:
    • We respond to reviews one customer or critic at a time. We promote the reputation of the client through our responsiveness and connection with customers and critics.
    • We use SEO techniques to index the responses in search engines so that they have a high page rank.
  • The Experience of the Customer:
    • We value our clients’ customers’ experiences, and we show that with our interaction with them online.
    • We encourage reviews and remarks, and we keep an open dialog with customers and critics.
    • We make sure that their comments always elicit a positive experience, so they keep coming back.
  • Building Customer Relationships:
    • We use reviews and our response process to build long-term relationships with your customers.
    • We try to use our responses to bind your customers to your company and brand.
    • Customers are more likely to bring repeat business when they feel that they have personalized attention. We work towards that and give your company the results it needs.

When you are in need of brand review management, you can call on us for a free consultation at 646-853-0573.

Jan 11

Reputation Management

Are you  aware of what customers are saying about your brand? Your customers are!

The management of your brand’s reputation is starting to become one of the most important parts of running a business. With an increasingly connected world, consumers are doing their homework, and they are also offering feedback in more places like Epinions.com, Yelp, YP.com, Ripoff Report, social networks, and niche sites specific to many different industries.

People are more likely to post comments about their negative experiences than their positive experiences. These opinions can change the way people see your business. If your customers are seeing your business online, 80% of them done a little looking online to try to read reviews when they are deciding whether to use your company. It is this process that makes the management of your reviews increasingly important.

Because it is important to you, the Web and I maintains the right professionals who are skilled in managing your online reputation, monitoring it, and safeguarding it. We will go to any effort to ensure that your company maintains a respectable online reputation.

Once you understand the critical importance of reputation management, it is also valuable to understand the process that the Web and I uses, which has earned us a great reputation with our clients. Our reputation management procedures has had a 100% successful track record improving the reputations of our clients.

Stage 1: Analyze

  • Take inventory of the company’s reputation online.
  • Create graphical representations of the online reputation.
  • Provide a list of sources to support the research.
  • Come up with incentives for existing clients to post positive comments and ratings on various online venues.

Stage 2: Reputation Improvement

  • Publicize incentives for positive comments and ratings to existing customer base.
  • Create links from the company’s website to the positive reviews, giving them higher search engine value.
  • Use SEO methods to lessen the importance of negative reviews.
  • Contact those with negative reviews and attempt to change their opinion and work with the company for their satisfaction so that comments may be removed.

Stage 3: Response Tactics

  • Design and implement tactics to respond to negative comments and complaints systematically.
  • Train the company to deal with negative comments and help them respond correctly.
  • Post responses to negative comments that show the steps that have been taken to resolve the complaints.

Stage 4: Evaluation

  • Work towards showing that the company and brand is a problem-solver and that they are willing to work with customers for their satisfaction.
  • Evaluate the campaign to measure improvements.
  • Build the company’s reputation and strengthen it, avoiding future negative comments.

When you are interested in reputation management, call us for a free consultation at 646-853-0573

Jan 11

Partners

  • Website Designing – Varshyltech is a website designing company in India. We offer professional website design, custom logo design, SEO and other web solution.

Jan 10

Increasing Sales with Social Paid Advertising (Social PPC)

The best way to supplement traditional search engine optimization (SEO) is with paid advertising. Not only are search engines like Google a great place for advertising, but some of the more popular social networks offer their own advertising programs. The professionals at the Web and I can help you with your campaigns.

Advertising involves strategy, and it is never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. That is why in addition to search advertising such as Google pay-per-click programs it is a good idea to leverage the more popular social networks and their advertising programs. It is all about how you want to expose your target market to the products and services you offer: they are on the social networks just as often or even more so than on search engines, and you can gain new customers easily.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Business owners everywhere like the idea of their ad being exposed to a social network with over 800 million potential customers. Using Facebook advertising has many advantages including this large audience. Social PPC advertising on Facebook is a great way to increase exposure and gain new customers.

Besides the large audience, Facebook is known for collecting data about people. This rich demographic database of 800 million people is not for the advantage of the individual user: Facebook makes it work for the advertiser. As a Facebook advertiser, your business can target your audience by age, sex, location, interests and more. The platform allows you to combine an image with your text, and you can test your ads to find out which are the most effective before your campaign is completely launched.

Twitter Promoted Tweets Advertising

Twitter is a great place for your online marketing efforts. Featuring a large user base, there are a great many potential customers available. Twitter offers a service known as promoted tweets. These tweets are like ordinary tweets, providing the same functionality, but can reach a wider audience.

LinkedIn Paid Advertising

Many professionals are on LinkedIn, and the tone of this network is very serious. You may in fact have used your account to find your present position, or you know of friends or acquaintances who have done so.

If you are marketing to an upscale clientele, or if you are offering products or services business-to-business, then LinkedIn advertising makes a great deal of sense.

Why Social PPC?

If you think of the Internet in terms of the way you think of the World, Social PPC makes a lot of sense. In the World there are neighborhoods and cities with their own populations. In Social Media on the Internet, there are also enclaves of regular users, much like cities or neighborhoods. This makes social media a great way to engage with millions of potential customers day or night.

The Web and I takes a great deal of interest in helping companies small and large to make the best of the opportunities presented by social media and Social PPC. We are ready to handle paid-ad campaigns for clients of all sizes. Now is a great time to take advantage of this tried and true form of advertising.  Our services are particularly helpful to smaller businesses that lack the experience to properly leverage this opportunity. Call the professionals at the Web and I today for a free consultation at 646-853-0573 today!

Jan 9

Social Media Monitoring

When we launch a social media campaign for your business, it is not the end of the process: your campaign requires monitoring, which can either be done by your firm in-house, or the Web and I can manage the monitoring of your social media campaign ourselves. We are well aware and prepared to help you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media, because we are very experienced and always learning more. The  Web and I has developed a five stage plan to follow-up with social media:

  • Defining Goals – We start by taking inventory of our clients’ goals for their social media campaigns. We take into account what our clients would like to monitor, details such as customer service inquiries, product reviews or reactions, general discussions, or comment spam. Often the goal is to identify potential new customers as well as to monitor the reputation of their products and services.
  • Planning – Once we understand the defined goals of the social media campaign, we develop a roadmap to get there. Working with our clients, we develop a list of keywords to which we should pay attention to. The priority of our social media efforts is to listen to the right posts and tweets of potential buyers and existing customers.
  • Methods of Interaction – According to the guidelines we have set up in the Planning stage, we define specific responses to different scenarios. When we are planning this we take into consideration all of the possible types of posts that potential customers, existing customers, and critics may pose. We then define how we will respond to each of these.
  • Relationship Building – Because social media is a form in which to interact with customers, potential customers, and critics, we look for ways to build relationships with these parties in ways that help to build the recognition of your brand. We understand the importance of effective communication, and we will find the best ways to leverage the process to your advantage.
  • Evaluation – We are always evaluating the results we get versus the original defined goals for the projects. Social media is continually changing, so evaluation helps us deal with this change as well as monitoring your results. The experts at the Web and I are always working to find new ways to improve what we do with social media. When we are finished with our Evaluation, we return to the first step and repeat the process.

We are always ready and eager to help you with a new social media campaign or to help monitor and respond to an existing one. Our experts are on the cutting edge of social media marketing, and we would like to help you improve your branding efforts and get you new customers today. Call us at 646-853-0573 for a free consultation.

Jan 8

Public Relations Services

Visibility in your target market is a goal that every business shares, and effective public relations campaigns are a great way to gain that visibility while also increasing website visits, sales leads, and driving more sales. More cost-effective than television and newspaper advertisements, public relations are getting results for businesses just like yours every day.

The role that public relations can play for your business in a competitive market is vital. The Web and I has valuable relationships with many major media outlets that your customers are looking at on the web, and we get our customers articles exposed there on a regular basis. These news outlets are always looking for reliable sources of articles, and we will help by writing the kind of articles that get picked up by the major news services.

We can provide the following related services:

  • Writing and submitting press releases.
  • Capitalize on article submission opportunities.
  • Link your public relations campaign to an overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign.

For more information or to get started on the path to increased visibility, call the Web and I for a free consultation today at 646-853-0573.

Jan 8

Landing Pages for Pay-Per-Click Advertising

The landing page design professionals at the Web and I are ready to provide you with results in the form of great conversion rates for your pay-per-click advertising campaign. To make sure you have the best possible landing page to make the most return on investment, we test two landing pages side-by-side for results in a process known as A/B Testing. We do our best to match the content of your potential customers to the search terms they are using.

Landing pages which are not properly thought out and are under-designed are not able to hold the attention of your potential customers, resulting in poor conversion rates and wasting advertising dollars. With the increasing costs of pay-per-click advertising campaigns, it is essential to have a very optimized and targeted landing page.

Our professionals will make landing pages that are specific to your campaign and reflect the needs and wants of your target audience. Our team will put each page together from scratch, with carefully chosen images and language while using proven technologies and techniques to increase your sales.

Testing, Quality Assurance and Quality Improvement

What kind of advertisement is the best to accentuate your products and services? Many original ideas will come from you, but there is always room for improvement. The landing page optimization process involves the study of your target market and the behavior of online consumers. Each page must be put together to attract your target market, but the page design will be in testing phase until the performance can be tested by comparing to similar landing page designs in what is called A/B testing. We will test different ideas until we find out what works and doesn’t work for you in practice, rather than going with our first design. This will make a great deal of difference to your bottom-line.

Ideas From Other Important Pages on your Site

Gaining a conversion on your landing page is great, but what about cross-selling of other related products on your site? A well-designed landing page takes content from other pages of your site, and has suggestions for other related purchases on your site which your potential customers may be interested in. Additional suggestions or enticing copy can be placed which will be of interest to a consumer who has already made a purchase.

An Effective Call-To-Action

Having an effective call-to-action is an intrinsic part of creating a great landing page. The call-to-action is the part of the page that draws to consumer and urges them to act, making a purchase or requesting additional information. The call-to-action should be alluring and enticing. This part of the advertising is very similar to traditional advertising, and involves a collaboration between graphic artists and content writers.

The most important part of our landing page designs, is that they are designed to work with your pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Each landing page is crafted to compliment  they keywords you have selected in your pay-per-click ad group. Together with us, we will team up to maximize your return on investment. Call us now for a free consultation to discuss how we may make your sales dreams come true at 646-853-0573.

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