Would you like email with that CRM?

Watch out Salesforce!.. no, really..

There's no doubt that Zoho is building good products. But it's different when you you find a new nugget of new useful functionality almost weekly - this makes a GREAT product. The feature that compelled me to write this blog entry is being able to configure email within Zoho CRM. This bridge between email and CRM has long been a bottleneck in CRM adoption, as without a nice integration people would gravitate back to email.
Leave it to Zoho to do this right - you set up your email in Zoho Business and link to it from within the CRM. You now have a new tab in the CRM for email, but more importantly, all the conversations are now tied into the client files without needing to do it explicitly!



This feature only costs $3/user/month, which is affordable to any kind of business and does not require the kind of spit-and-gum integration that would be needed with Salesforce.com (not to mention that it would be 10x more expensive). This feature, in addition to the amazing AJAX work they've done to make the system lightening-fast, makes Zoho CRM a winner in my book.
Also, I have a feeling that there's more to come with integration of their other office applications into the CRM.. Can't wait..

Skype gets built-in Screen Sharing. Watch out WebEx!

In a stroke of genius or simply by stumbling into it, Skype is gracefully extending itself to the lucrative and real web conferencing market. Yes, Skype 4.1 now includes native screensharing.. and like everything Skype, it's EASY - just select the area on the screen that you want to share as you're talking to the other participants of your voice conference.

Why is this such a big deal? Think about it - if you've ever done WebEx or any type of other web conferencing that typically inolved going through a presentation, you know that things rarely go smoothly - installing the agent, wrong version of java, separate phone bridge not working, meeting details getting mixed up in multiple versions of emails... etc.. it usually takes anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to get things going. With Skype - it's a natural extension of their capabilities utilizing the ubiquity of the client, built-in video decoding, perfect voice quality, and easy and flexible conferencing options.

So here you have it - you heard it here first - Skype is the new Web Conferencing sheriff in town - watch out!

Zoho Projects gets big updates

I haven't covered much of Zoho Projects so far as it's been sort of vanilla, par for the course. Not anymore! With the recent overhaul Zoho Projects gets useful micro-blogging, integrates documents, adds wikis (although wikis may have been there prior to the last release) and forums, makes reporting project time easy with time sheets. Overall the experience is very fluid and quick, and makes the app a pleasure to use. Project tracking features are not the most advanced, but above average, with task dependencies and GANT views. So, bottom line - Zoho Projects is quickly advancing to the front of the PM pack and now has a very solid offering here too.

IS THAT MY PHONE? RingCentral, VirtualPBX, and Onebox go head-to- head to be all a small business needs for a competent phone system.

After a long hiatus, I'm ready to start working on the blog again. My apologies to everyone for a long drought.

Today's post I wanted to dedicate to how Web is changing telephony. What prompted this review was an announcement from Google for a long awaited relaunch of GrandCentral (now Google Voice). While Google is targeting the consumer with their service, there are a small bunch of good Web2.0-inspired solutions for businesses. I will look at 3 - RingCentral, VirtualPBX, and Onebox.

The common functionality among all 3 is:

• automated attendant (a prompt to enter extension)
• hunt group and follow-me functionality (ringing multiple lines simultaneously or sequentially in order to reach you where you are)
• schedule-based call routing (play this prompt during the working hours, and afterwars send the calls to voicemail)
• voicemail and voicemail-to-email forwarding
• click-to-call (a web button you can place on the web site to originate a call)
  
• toll-free numbers
• music on hold
• call screening
• web-based configuration and management

Here are some differences though:

1) VoIP lines.
2 of the solutions covered - Ringcentral and Virtual PBX offer VoIP
lines (both to the computer with their Softclient, and to the desk with inexpensive standard-basedphones). VOIP adds another variable which is quality.

2) Queues.
Queues allow you to queue up the callers if the lines are busy. There are subtleties to that feature and out of the 3, VirtualPBX is the only one that offers it. This is the type of feature that used to be unaffordable to the small businesses, and while not all the businesses will need it right away or at all, it's the one that makes a huge impression.

3) Soft Client.
Ringcentral offers a soft Client - a PC-based phone that allows you to take you extension anywhere you can take your PC. Soft Client makes it easier to manage the calls that are coming in as your disposition options, history, etc are always there in front of you.


Pricing

Pricing-wise, most of these Virtual PBX services are comparable, and pricing is a function of included minutes (all the calls are bridged so you will rack up the minutes fairly quickly, unless
you're using it for voicemail only), number of extensions, and number of ACD queues.

There's usually an inexpensive way to start using the service (starts from $10/mo except for OneBox) and an easy way to scale up, usually getting you into $50 to $80 territory by the time you're fully ramped up.

Because these are bridged calls (the service has to maintain both legs of the connection), the minutes rack up pretty quickly and additional minutes are not cheap (averaging 6 cents a minute). One technique to effectively deal with that is to instruct your stuff to call the customer back directly if the call is to take a significant time.

Another option with both RingCentral and VirtualPBX is to go with VOIP lines for the extensions which will give you unlimited minutes, but only if the calls stay on the network.

..and some prognosis

With the proliferation of alternative communication mechanisms (texting, twittering, online chat, etc) and personal cell phone, istelephony still relevant?

It's probably going to take a few decades, but judging by what Gen Y is doind (predominantly texting), I could imaging the use of telephony is going to continue sliding (at least for inbound
communication). Text (cell phone texting / IM / twitter) will be used a predominant method for a customer to get a hold of the business. The communication can then escalate to voice if needed.

If this rings true, the need for a PBX and sophisticated inbound call handling will subside significantly. For now however, these types of solutions are invaluable to small businesses (that seem like big businesses on the phone), and with the trends towards resurgence of small business, the companies offering virtual PBX services should continue to grow and provide their customers with more features and value.


Note on 8x8: I did not include 8x8 because their pricing doesn't fit the web2.0 model
Note on Vonage: I didn't include Vonage because they do not have auto-attendant which I consider to be a critical feature
Note on Skype: While I use Skype a lot for person-to-person and conf. calls for the team, it's missing the call-attendant functionality and other features listed above that would make it a
front-office tool
Note on Phone.com: I originally included them in this review, but then decided to take them out based on the feedback I've found and lack of focus on small business.

Call for feedback: Please comment how the phone services listed here (or the ones you're using if I missed it) are working for you!

Platform-as-a-Service Roundup

I recently came across this comparison table, and in light of Coghead going out of business and selling its technology to SAP, I thought I would post it here to help you, dear readers, in making your decisions when it comes to "applications without (much) programming":

(complete credit for the compilation above goes to SitePoint.com)

Decisions, decisions...

Decisions are at the core of everything we do personally and professionally.

Decisions come in all shapes and sizes.. From scheduling an appointment, to deciding on a color, to which projects to undertake or where to invest the money. Some decisions are simple “yes” or “no”, some entail options. Some are unilateral, some require buy-in from others, whether by majority or consensus. Some involve risk and uncertainties and are subject to risk tolerance. Some involve sequences of decisions, and require evaluating each branch separately. Some rely on statistics, others on expert opinions.. Some can be made loosely and others have lots of money and even lives at stake.

Web is an excellent medium for decision-making applications due to their inherently collaborative nature. A few relatively simple decision-making apps have sprung up recently, with some pretty good options, with I’m sure many more to come..

Scheduling decision-making applications are focused on finding mutually agreeable time (setting up appointments, events, etc)

Timebridge and Jifflenow are two examples of such scheduling decision making applications. Both provide a way to coordinate schedules with others using existing calendar solutions.

Idea Management solutions are concerned with democratic system for ranking ideas and suggestions

These tools use among other things the “Digg” approach by allowing others to vote others ideas or suggestions up or down. Some, like Kluster are starting to build in more sophistication by allowing to assign weights and filter on importance criteria.

Apps: Kindling, Kluster, SalesForce Idea Exchange

Workflow system concentrate on getting a decision through a series of check-off’s
Sign-offs are the necessary parts of the workflows. Several tools have recreated the processes involved in getting something signed off on. Instead of having to chase everybody down for a decision, let the software do that for you.

One such tool is Zapproved – it’s a simple, yet effective way to get the sign-off’s you need to push the project forward.

I believe this web application category provides a lot of room for growth and will be one to watch carefully. Now, what will it be, tea or coffee?

New Features Make LiquidPlanner Faster, Easier, More Efficient

Liquid Planner keeps improving their usability. I got this update from them today..
In case you didn't see my previous post on them, Liquidplanner is the most sophisticated and thought out web-based project management system that has a potential to be MS Project replacement.

If you're a seasoned LiquidPlanner user, you've probably been pining for these features. If you're new to the club, you just might forget you're working in a web browser. In either case, enjoy!

Multi-Select - It's finally here! You can now select multiple items and edit, move, or delete them -- and more. Not only does this speed initial project setup, but multi-select improves the speed of day-to-day operations by an order of magnitude.

Email Integration - It's easier than ever to add tasks with our new email integration feature. Enter the task name, owner, and estimate in the subject line of your email and send it to a custom LiquidPlanner email address. Attachments and images will be captured in the collaborate tab. Give it a try!

Right-Click - Right-click on any item to access to the most common operations in LiquidPlanner, like adding or deleting items, filtering your view, and printing your schedule.

We also added new ways to watch items and rolled out a big batch of improvements to the scheduling engine, printing, virtual members, and more. New and improved sample projects provide insight into optimal workspace organization. Browse around and check out the new features. As always, we appreciate your feedback.

Do you know your aaS's?

Wondering what all those announcements about cloud computing are all about and how they relate to you? Getting lost in the jargon? MS Azure, EC2, S3, Grid, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS? Don’t worry, you’re not alone! IT industry is notorious for making up acronyms and focusing on themselves when explaining things. I’m getting ready to review some new products that fall into some of the new categories, so wanted to do a post putting things in prospective.


IaaS stands for Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It used to be that to build a web application, the designers needed to worry about which server model to go with (co-location, managed, etc), which hosting provider to go with (affecting the uptime, system reliability and physical security), setting up and maintaining the server software (good Linux system administrators are extremely hard to find), worry about scaling the system past one server (database replication, load balancing, and bunch of other nasty technical stuff). IaaS solves most of those issues by providing a virtual server environment that is automatically scaled and kept up to date. This is a big load off the application provider shoulders, allowing them to focus on the application itself. Solutions in that category are represented by Amazon EC2 (virtual servers), S3 (scalable storage), SimpleDB (scalable database), Rackspace’s Mosso, and newly announced Microsoft Azure.

PaaS stands for Platform-as-a-Service and takes the concept one step further. In addition to providing the basic building blocks (servers, database, storage), platform-as-a-service provides a ready-to-use application environment a developer can use to build their applications. Similar to Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications, by using PaaS, developers can raise their development up a level, creating data collection forms, reports, lists, workflows, and various other applications without as much as installing an application. This creates leverage from the reuse and speed of development angles. Examples of PaaS are SalesForce’s Force, Zoho’s Creator, LongJump, and a few other interesting new entrants such as Wolf Frameworks. I believe this category is the one to watch for the innovations with largest leverage.

Finally, SaaS is an older category that includes any web-based, ready-to-use application like most of the things I've reviewed so far on this blog: CRM, project management, wiki, PIM, or any combination thereof.

Big new Highrise feature: Deals

37 Signals announced a new feature, Deals - which is a welcome addition to an otherwise good "Service CRM" alternative.

Now, deals (or opportunities as they are called in traditional CRM's) are nothing new, but 37 Signal's Highrise CRM does it with style (which is what sets them apart from the traditional CRM's in the first place).

This got me thinking about how exactly does style (usability) affect the technology adoption. I haven't seen much research on this, really; but it strikes me as a critical component, although I've seen systems that were adopted widely where the interface was horrendous. Care to weight in on that? How important is style? Does it become more important as the number of choices for particular functionality increase? (thinking Apple).. Meanwhile I'll dig around for some scholarly papers.

Come to Office 2.0 Conference in SF next week

My apologies for not highlighting this event sooner.

Ismael Ghalimi and other members of Office 2.0 community have been working tirelessly on putting this event together. It's going to be a great display of Office2.0 technologies. I will be there as well so if you want to set up some time to chat, let me know.

The event is on September 3-5 in San Francisco (I know, it's coming up quick). Registration fee is $1,495 but you get a HP 2133 Mini-Note PC out of it, so essentially your cost is few hundred bucks.

Hope to see you there - http://www.office20.com