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Cost effective technology for your organization - Part 1

eBusiness Team - Friday, September 11, 2009
Microsoft Office Communications Online delivers robust instant messaging (IM) and presence functionality that enables real-time person-to-person communication via text, voice and video, across an organization. Through presence awareness, staff can quickly detect a colleague's availability for a time-sensitive consult or business-critical decision—and then connect rapidly using a reliable, security-enhanced IM solution. 
 
The purpose of this article to highlight some of these features, in order to increase the adoption rate of this cost efficient alternative to long distance calling, quick-click video conferencing, and article threads that can be cut down to quick IM conversations.
 
OCS can be used as a standalone application, on your mobile device or on the web. It provides real-time collaboration capabilities within Microsoft Office programs.
 
All these applications are part of the technology suite available to your entire staff with Managed Company Business Suite
 
OCS Features
Click-to-call (voice) feature prerequisites:
OCS Voice How-to
This is a quick video on how to utilize the talk/video functions of OCS http://screencast.com/t/ZZBLXBY3W 
 
Resources
Access OCS on your browser (recommended for Mac users):
In addition to MS Office Communicator client installed locally on your machine, you can access OCS using Communicator Web Access specifying your email address and password to login.
 
Download Office Communicator on your Blackberry Device: http://www.managedcompany.com/products/ocs-mobile
 
FAQ's
For more videos, tips and updates follow us via twitter @managed @emailhost
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The Seven Pillars of Email Security

eBusiness Team - Tuesday, April 07, 2009

SaaS and the importance of email security

Software as a Service (SaaS) has quickly become the standard delivery model for critical business IT software and services. Business customers realize many benefits by leveraging SaaS services. The On-Demand model ofSaaS infrastructure provides benefits to the customer by lowering their overall costs, while increasing flexibility, reliability, and overall solution security. However, as new businesses begin to evaluate SaaS software and services, many still have concerns about security, fearing that hosting their critical business applications and data with a SaaS provider will expose them to greater risk and loss of control. This concern is particularly acute for businesses’ messaging and collaboration needs around email and instant messaging. As business email is now a primary method of inter- and intra-corporate communications, including the exchange of sensitive financial data and intellectual property, businesses are growing increasingly concerned about the need for secured email and messaging services.

Microsoft Exchange is the leading business email and collaboration solution for the small, up to the large, business markets, and this post provides you with the seven pillars of email security. By choosing Managed Company as their Hosted Exchange SaaS Solution Provider, businesses can achieve email and total messaging security,  as well as a piece of mind, by leveraging Managed Company’s infrastructure and experience with running a secured messaging platform.

 

The Seven Pillars of Email Security

The properties that make Microsoft Exchange a powerful communications and collaboration tool also make it vulnerable to different types of threats. A comprehensive security strategy protects against these important threats:
  • Viruses and malware – Attackers who use email as a conduit toinvade corporate networks for the purposes of either stealing information, or taking control of computers for other illegal activities.
  • Phishing – Attackers who lure users into submitting personal or business information by convincing them they are interacting with a legitimate vendor or business partner, when they are in fact communicating with the attackers.
  • Malicious employees & employee negligence – Employees or ex-employees who inadvertently compromise sensitive business information, or worse, purposely try to access and/or steal privileged information.
  • Corporate Espionage – Attempts by competitors to gain an unfair advantage by accessing internal company information including product designs, launch plans or financial data.
  • Hackers – Internet pirates looking for valuable information that they can either use to illegally profit or sell on the “black” market.

To properly secure email against these threats, business must employ a multi-tiered security infrastructure across seven pillars:

    1. Physical Security
    2. Logical Server Security
    3. Network Security
    4. Client Security
    5. Antivirus and Antispam
    6. Administration and Policy Security
    7. Backup and Recovery

In-House vs. Manage Company's Hosted Email Services are you covered

Email is a powerful platform for communication and collaboration, especially in distributed environments. But with these benefits come serious inherit security risks that require ongoing attention. A comprehensive security strategy employs multiple layers of defense from the physical to the digital, and up to the process and policy layers of an email solution. Employing this comprehensive strategy is costly and time-consuming as both an initial investment and on an ongoing basis. Managed Company is a thought leader on email security and offers one of the most comprehensive and effective security programs for hosted business email, all included in the low monthly cost of its hosted Exchange offerings.

Learn More at Exchangeasaservice.com

 

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5 Tough Questions for Tough Economic Times.

eBusiness Team - Tuesday, December 23, 2008

You don't need another reminder that we're working through a period of slow economic growth and a jittery business climate. But amongst all the doom and gloom, this stormy cloud comes with a silver lining for people working in Online Marketing and Web Design which are traditionally B2B consulting services.

Your prospects and clients probably realise that when times get tough they need to get creative and innovative with their products, their services and, most importantly, their marketing. It's a time to invest in the future and look inwardly at how you can improve, all so you can prepare for the next boom.
Despite this fact, it's no secret that you're finding it harder to close deals. But lets go back to basics: your pitching needs to begin with education, and education begins with asking the right questions. Here's some questions you should be asking your prospects to clinch your deals:

1. What's In Your Marketing Inventory - Is it working for you?

One simple activity I like to do is pull out a spreadsheet and line up all my advertising spending and how many leads each one is generating for me. 'Leads' can range from anything to phone calls, inquiry forms, direct emails, site registration for forum participation, leaving comments - whoops, there's one problem - I don't actually know how many customers I'm getting from all my offline advertising...

The point is that print ads like classified ads in the local paper and yellow pages ads are expensive and have declining reach and readership.
Most importantly, it's hard to measure how much business they generate for you. This is not to say they're valueless - but contrast this with an fully fledged online business. With concrete and clear metrics, you know the exact ROI of your online marketing campaigns. Best of all, you can optimize and redeploy online campaigns in a few hours - dollar for dollar, online is where the smart money is.

2. People are staying home, and staying online more - what are you doing about it?

Tight belts and high gas prices mean people are spending a lot more time at home in front of the TV and the computer. Where are they hanging out online? Have a think about this - you need to be advertising in their space, participating in their blogs and becoming an authority in their forums.

For example, let's  imagine you sell model train kits. You could be sponsoring some train modelling blogs and forums in return for some inexpensive and targeted advertising. These banners can link back to pages on your website which could be designed to educate, sell and encourage online community participation. All of which is 100% measurable, so if it's not effective - just cut the spending.

3. What's your Freemium Strategy?

People love free stuff and they love it even more when they haven't got much to spend. I'm not asking you to give away your products for free but what about online 'cash' coupons or discounts that they have to register on your website to receive? And once they've registered you'll be able to market to these customers in a monthly e-newsletter. We all have to move stock and attract new customers - so think about some clever online marketing strategies to do it...

4. Have you Cleaned your House yet?

Back to basics once more - now's the time to be pushing business branding and website makeovers. Is the website from 2003 looking a bit tired? Does it match up with your bricks and mortar branding? Does your customer service live up to your promises? Is your content up to date? Are your landing pages and catalogs well laid out and easy to use? Lets spring clean your whole online business 'house' and entice those customers back.

5. You are the Online Business Hero.

Working in a B2B industry, you're going to get worried business owners looking for advice and solutions to their problems. You can gain their trust by giving your expert advice for free. And to your clients?

Well you can tell them that anybody can make a dime when times are good. But true to the old saying, when times get tough...the tough get going.
So ask them: What are you doing to toughen up your (online) business?
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New Web Form Credit Card options streamline and automate your business!

eBusiness Team - Thursday, December 18, 2008
We've added 2 new credit card options to our web forms feature that'll help you streamline and automate your online business. Currently we have one credit card option that simply allows you to collect and process payments in real-time, e.g. collect donations. The 2 new options allow you to:
  • Process existing invoices - If you are using the Order/Invoicing framework in this system, then you can manually or automatically send invoices to your customers and have them visit a specific page on your website, enter the relevant invoice number and pay for it in real-time using their credit card.
  • Update credit card details - This feature is particularly useful if you are using our recurring billing engine. You can now put the 'Update Credit Card Details' form on any web page and have your customers visit this web page as and when they need to update their credit card details.
To learn more please go to: Modules->Web Forms.
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QuickBooks Integration is Live

eBusiness Team - Tuesday, December 09, 2008
It's been in the works for some time but our first release of QuickBooks integration is now live and running. This new feature allows you to push all your online sales and related customer information directly into QuickBooks as required. To learn more please refer to the QuickBooks article in the Wiki.

To get started go to: eCommerce->QuickBooks.
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Want to sell recurring products in your online shop?

eBusiness Team - Monday, November 03, 2008
Ever wanted to sell recurring products in your online shop? Now you can. For any given product you can choose its recurring cycle and have the system automatically create orders that recur when a customer purchases such products.

To take advantage of this new and exciting feature:
  • Go to eCommerce->Products and choose a product
  • Click on "Show More Options" and locate "Cycle Type" drop down
  • Set the appropriate recurring frequency for this product, you can choose between Once, Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half Yearly and Yearly
Now for example if a customer buys a handful of products in which a couple have a monthly recurring cycle, then upon successfully paying for the order the system will create a new recurring order with the recurring products. The system will use payment details from the initial order for subsequent recurring orders. Also the original shipping charges will apply to subsequent orders.
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Silence the noise

eBusiness Team - Saturday, February 23, 2008

Not sure what project you should work on next? The All About Agile weblog's got a pragmatic method for setting priorities: by charting your projects on an importance/difficulty matrix, pictured above.
Once you've got all your things on the grid, think about the four quadrants. Things in the top left are "No-Brainers". These things are clear priorities. Things in the bottom right are potentially for the bin, as these things are of the least value.

How do you get your priorities straight? Let us know in the comments.

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