What's Online

Do you maintain a spreadsheet of all your various usernames and passwords? Do you store passwords using your browser's function, but worry that if your laptop was lost others might gain access to sensitive data and wreak havoc in your name?

TriCipher's MyOneLogin may be the solution you've needed. Use a single secure username and password to login to a centralized location where you can access all your various SaaS accounts.

This browser based solution (which requires no downloads or configuration). At only $30 per user per year, it is an affordable solution to managing user identities for your entire staff from a centralized location that a system administrator can control. Add or remove all web-based accounts for new or departing employees within minutes.

Google Apps, SalesForce.com, Citrix, and ADP are just some of the vendors that support MyOneLogin access. It can also be used for your company's VPN network access. Find out more on the company's site at MyOneLogin.com.

Labels: Recommended_Apps, SaaS

As air travel gets more and more expensive and workforces get more and more decentralized, businesses find they have more and more reason to use online services to conduct meetings, demo products or services to potential customers, and share information with anyone possessing internet access.

Let me begin this review by saying that I really wanted Zoho Meeting to be the ultimate winner in my "battle of the online meeting services." Everyone likes to root for the little guy, and I was hoping to cut my $49/m service bill down to Zoho's very attractive $24, while simultaneously bumping myself up from 15 max meeting attendees to 25. If only.

I was even willing to overlook the fact that conference calling wasn't fully integrated. I signed up for a free conference calling service through InstantConference and was all set to start sending out that number as my static conference call number for all meetings. My clients would even prefer that, I argued, not having to call in on a different number each time we would meet. (Actually I may still wind up using that free service for any meetings that don't require screen sharing.)

But then I sent out a meeting invite to another one of my own accounts so I could test the service. That was the end of my consideration of Zoho as a meeting interface for my corporate clients. Here is what the email I received (which a client would receive) looked like:

Not only is the graphical presentation cheesy (what's with the psychedelic green?) but there is more screen real estate dedicated to promoting Zoho Meeting than there is to providing meeting information. The Toll-free number provided for calling Zoho Support is highlighted way too much, particularly given that there is no call-in number integrated into the service. It would be likely some people would call that number thinking it was the conference call number.

If you start a meeting using a different technique (instead of start now, schedule for later) you have the chance to put in text that includes whatever number you want attendees to call in on, including the option of using the Rondee service which Zoho recommends. The problem is that this information is still not nearly as highlighted as the tech support number. Is Zoho that convinced that someone is going to need to use that number during the meeting, or are they just that focused on promoting their company regardless of the impact on their users?

My company's reputation is simply worth more to me than $25 a month. Which brought me up to the next least expensive option, either GotoMeeting or ReadyTalk, both costing $49/month on a month-to-month service plan. Both are pretty similar, with the key difference I found being that Ready Talk limits you to 14 particpants, including the presenter among the 15 max participants, while GoToMeeting allows you to actually invite 15 people, plus the organizer. That may seem like a small difference, but having to tell clients that only 15 people can attend the meeting is limiting enough as it is. So why 14? Can Ready Talk really not afford to let that one last computer synch in so that they can be competitive with GTM?

I wish there was an individual user plan with GoTo that would allow me to invite 25 participants. To get that you have to have a corporate account with at least 5 organizers. For most companies that will be the option they will take, as it is definitely the best available option if you can make use of it.

Citrix, the makers of GoToMeeting, also offer a service called GoToWebinar that can have up to 1000 participants, and costs $99/month. When you consider the potential revenue generated from the unlimited number of such a webinars one could hold each month for that price, it is a real winner. Also, when you purchase GoToWebinar, you get the meeting service included for free, for your smaller meetings.

Unlike Zoho, both Ready Talk and GoToMeeting include integrated, free conference calling. A unique phone number and access code is provided for each meeting, and there is also the option of using VOIP calling features so that every participant can call in for free using their web phone. Both also integrated scheduled meetings into Outlook Calendars or iCalendar, so you get meeting reminders just like any other meeting in your Calendar. Lastly, you can record any meeting and publish to the web so that people who couldn't attend can view it later.

Moving up the price scale we come to the mother of web meetings, Cisco's Webex. What do you get by choosing Webex instead of GoTo or Ready Talk? Everything provided with either of those, plus 25 max participants per meeting, and a monthly price tag that is $20 higher.

For any business with at least 5 staff members organizing meetings, GoTo corporate is the way to go. You get the 25 participant limit, all the cool features of online meetings, and pay $20 less per month per user than with Webex. If you fall into the in-between, needing 16-25 participants in some meetings and having 4 or fewer people in your company who need to organize meetings (as opposed to simply attending those organized by other staff members), then Webex may make sense.

Here's the breakdown of key factors:

I've been using GoToMeeting quite happily for the last couple years, and though I had hoped to cut my bill in half by switching to Zoho, I'll be sticking with GoTo. It is the most respected and pervasive meeting service out there aside from Webex, and is a reliable, cost-effective option for showing whatever is on your screen to anyone anywhere who has internet access... even working with 3G smartphones.

You can get a free 30 day trial of any of these software services to check them out for yourself. (Webex's front page currently says it is a 14 day free trial, but if you navigate through the site you see you can find several 30 day trial links.) Let me know what you think of them yourself when you do. Happy meeting.

Labels: Recommended_Apps, SaaS

Confession, I avoid Apex like the plague. I don't want to know it myself, and don't expect any of my clients' in-house SFDC Admins to want to know it either. Yet whenever an Apex solution is created for them (by someone else at AspiraTech, never me) the client is forever dependent on a developer to maintain that functionality for them as their business process and related needs change over time. That is just not the way I like to work. I am all about teaching a person to fish instead of just giving them a fish. I love the ongoing relationships I have with my clients, but I want those relationships to be focused on my assisting them with additional solutions, not just tweaking the ones they already have because they are unable to adapt them themselves.

So I look for solutions that are provided within creative use of the standard user interface, VisualForce pages (which I then teach them to maintain), and AppExchange applications that have any needed Apex baked in.

One of my favorite Apps is Form Assembly. Though the product was originally created as a standalone website form service like Survey Monkey, it has grown to be something far more powerful than that with its SFDC integration.

With Form Assembly you can update any object in SFDC through your company's website. Want to collect feedback from your customers and have it added directly to their Contact record? Create a form using FA. Want to have forms on your website generate new records on a custom object you created, such as event registrations? FA feeds directly into custom objects. How about those pesky "Stay-in-Touch Requests" that send Contacts to a form to update their contact information, but then submit the form results to you as an email, requiring data entry to get the new info into their Contact record? Once again, FA to the rescue.

FA even offers PayPal integration, conditional fields (which SFDC does not offer), and calculated fields. I could go on and on about the many things I love about the app, and one of the best is its amazingly affordable $34/user/month price tag. Remember, the only user who needs the FA license is the one who will be creating the forms.

Honestly, the only thing I can say against FA is that they have made the puzzling decision not to make free trials available for even a week. I was therefore unable to demonstrate any of the SFDC integration for you in screenshots. The only trial I could access is one hosted on their site that is not integrated with SFDC, and even then you only get 2 hours of access, beginning as soon as you click the "Test Drive" button in AppExchange.

Come on folks. What do you think we are going to do, create a bunch of forms week one then not buy the service? It's only $34 per month! And it's such a great product, of course customers will want more than a week's access --though not us developers; hence our need to be able to access it to test use cases for our clients before putting them live in their systems. Give developers ongoing access without the ability to host forms on any site other than FA's and no ability to receive data from some critical field, like email, if you are really afraid of folks stealing access. And give the general public full access for just a week so that they can try it out without having to spend any money up front.

Apart from the irrational paranoia of the vendor, it really is a no-lose product, one every SFDC user should really consider implementing. With Form Assembly you get cross-object action without needing any Apex. One form can feed into multiple objects, creating needed records that are interdependent at the click of a "submit form" button. Skip the Apex and get Form Assembly.

Labels: CRM, Integration, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

Keep your reader recommendations coming. It is reader feedback that led me to Intervals, a truly superior solution for project management and client invoicing within one integrated web-based application. If you’ve read this blog in the past, you will be well familiar with how much I love Harvest, appreciate Basecamp, and loathe eProject/Daptiv. Enter Intervals, the killer app.

Time Tracking, Tasks & Invoicing

Intervals is both a project management and invoicing system. Its conception of the word "task" is more a part of project management than invoicing. Compared with Harvest, a pure invoicing system which views a "task" as something you charge for, Intervals requires a lot more work to get out an invoice.

Intervals forces you to plan ahead to create tasks in advance, or else feels like dual entry (task and time) when you go to enter time towards an invoice. Annoying when you are spontaneously deciding on tasks to do and just want to quickly enter the time, the way Harvest works quite well.

In Intervals you can track billable time within a “general time” bucket that includes no task, but that can be confusing if you are jumping between activities and want to detail them on the final invoice. I prefer Harvest’s quick and easy way to create new tasks and track time against them at once, rather than as two separate steps.

Within Intervals, you can just click an icon to start tracking time on the very next screen after creating the task, but at that point there will be no access to the "work type" drop-down list, unlike when you select the button “add time to this task” after creating the task or start the time recording on the "Time" tab. And then after you stop the timer and want to actually "apply" the time to the task, it is necessary to then enter the worktype info in another dialogue box, so basically it is the same as using the button in the beginning and having to complete two screens.

In Harvest less is entered when creating the task and the click of an icon button applies that first set of entries to populate all the data that will later be invoiced. That approach is much more streamlined, involving only half the data entry for each task, which really adds up.

I like that Intervals includes due dates on tasks by default, which Harvest doesn’t, since it isn’t thinking of a task as a “to do” so much as a billable unit of time. Instead of having it be so easy to create new tasks and log time against them as in Harvest, one is more prone to have fewer tasks and then keep returning to them in order to log time against them over several days. It isn’t that you can’t use Harvest in just as “organized” a way as Intervals. It's just that it is so easy to be sloppier in Harvest that there is a greater likelihood you will be.

In Intervals time tracking is a part of project management, and invoicing is an outgrowth of the fact that you already logged the time against a project. In Harvest time tracking is done solely for the sake of invoicing. If all you need is well organized, super quick and easy invoicing, Harvest is your solution.

Project Management Evaluation

Just as Intervals can be compared to Harvest when it comes to time tracking and invoicing, it can be compared to Basecamp when it comes to project management. Basecamp also includes time tracking features, but since they don't extend to include invoicing, it is an incomplete solution, requiring the addition of another app like Harvest to complete the job.

Project management is the one area in which I thought Intervals might not outshine the competition. User interface preferences vary a great deal from person to person, as do business processes from company to company. I recognize others may have a very different view of this, but when I compared the Basecamp and Intervals user experiences, again I wound up solidly preferring Intervals. The user interface is more intuitive, easier to read, and easier to navigate. There are also a number of pre-made reports that can be quite helpful.

Like Basecamp, the Intervals project management approach is more about organizing communication around tasks that have been done or need to be done by different people. It is less Gantt oriented than a software like eProject/Daptiv, which seeks to imitate MS Project within a SaaS app. I don't mind losing the Gantt view, but the one thing I couldn’t find in Intervals that I did want was a way to make one milestone/task’s start dependent on another’s completion. When one task gets pushed back, this affects all subsequent tasks, but how do you show this in Intervals without having to manually edit all subsequent tasks/milestones that should be dependent? The answer is found within their user forum:

“We used to use Microsoft Project heavily for all of our projects and we found that we spent too much time tending to and tuning the schedule. Intervals deliberately does not have task dependencies the way traditional project management solutions work. Via trial and error we found that Gantt charts are great at scheduling and articulating the steps to build something, but aren't that useful managing the day to day tasks of getting the work done. Intervals is very strong on the task tracking and getting things done side, but weak on the scheduling side. The milestones and light scheduling piece we [have implemented] strengthen the scheduling side quite a bit. You [can] create a milestone, attach tasks to it, and manage the tasks and milestones via a calendar view. You [can] drag and drop and move tasks and milestones around. It is definitely not traditional task dependencies, but it is a different way to approach the issue.”

The other major feature of traditional PM where Intervals takes a different road is resource allocation. To quote their user forum once more: “Intervals does not feature traditional resource allocation. We are working on a periscope report that will show how much work has been assigned vs. how much is done, but it is different than the resource allocation found in traditional project management (no resource leveling for example). It is meant to answer the question of "how much work do we have on the books" and can be filtered by client, person, project, etc. It may or may not do the trick depending on your needs.”

Like Basecamp, Intervals is taking a non-Gantt approach to project management. I find that the calendar editing function within Intervals is easy enough to use to make it pretty easy to manually move dependent tasks when you want, and at least with Intervals I can pick any timeframe I want to see in calendar view (unlike Basecamp).

To sum it up, as one of Interval’s customer testimonials proclaims: “At the end of the day, the core platform of Basecamp™ did not focus on time, work flow and reporting, which is where Intervals excels.” Amen.

The Costs

Pricing of Intervals is done by the number of projects, whereas in Harvest it is done by the number of users. With Intervals, for only $20 per month I get up to 15 projects with unlimited users (both staff and client users). In Harvest I get unlimited projects, but am on a plan that allows for only 1 user and pay $12 per month. Of course, since Harvest isn’t a project management app, you may not need more than one person to be able to log in, just whoever generates invoices. Still, the Harvest price point jumps from $12 for 1 user to $40 for 5, so if you do need more than one person entering their time in the app, you're going to pay for it. You can’t pay the same $20 as for Intervals and get 2.5 users, and this is just the time tracking and invoicing feature set we're talking about.

Basecamp's pricing for a plan that includes time tracking on each project, but no client invoicing, is $49/month for unlimited users and 35 projects. So combining Basecamp with Harvest would cost $61/month, and get you project management, time tracking related to projects that can be exported into the invoicing app, invoicing, a 35 project limited, unlimited PM users, 1 invoicing user, plus 10GB of document storage.

With Intervals, for a third that price I get the features of both Basecamp and Harvest within one integrated package, and the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. At that price, I do get fewer projects and less document storage - 15 projects, 1 GB storage - but there are still unlimited users, so clients can be invited to contribute to mark tasks as done and view project progress. For my company, 15 projects is sufficient, since you can activate and deactivate projects at will, and we are never working on more than 15 projects at once. It would be nice to have more native storage which would obsolesce our use of ftp to share files during data migrations, but it's not a deal breaker.

Needless to say, I will be canceling my Basecamp and Harvest subscriptions at the end of the next billing period, and making the switch to Intervals. Try Intervals out for 30 days yourself to see if it is an approach that will work for your business.

(Special Nice-To-Have: Intervals creates a permalink page for each task, so that contributors can conveniently be directed to that specific task page.)

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

Even if today's posting of leaked Twitter confidential information that was accessed through Google Docs has filled you with apprehension about relying on that platform for any sensitive parts of your business, hopefully you are not hesitant to use some great low-threat features like Google Calendar. SalesForce just put out a very straight-forward and instructive how-to video on integrating your Google Calendar into SFDC, and having it display on your home page instead of the SFDC internal calendar.

With this feature, if you have 20 employees sharing a Google calendar, but only 10 using SFDC, you can still see a calendar within SFDC that represents the entire company's calendar.

Link to: Google Calendar Integration How-To video

Labels: CRM, How-To, Integration, SaaS

In a desire to present diverse points of view on what various online business technology products and services have to offer your business, What's Online presents articles from guests. The below article is comprehensive and though I can't say I agree with all his final assessment (for example, customization of the SalesForce.com CRM software can cost a mere $1-2000, which I hardly consider "a hefty price"), I do find a great deal of value in many of his recommendations. You be the judge for yourself.

And if you are an expert in a particular segment of online business apps, please contact us (use our About Us page form) to submit an article to be shared with our readers.

ERP on Saas Model By Girish Manekji

Software as a Service (Saas), a model of delivering software applications to customers over the Internet, has today reached and inflection point and is poised for a powerful take off. By 2010, Gartner predicts around 30 percent of new License purchases (In APAC excluding Japan) will be in form of Saas, or delivered through the Saas model. In a recent survey of 1,017 technology decision - makers, Forrester found that worldwide adoption of Saas in large enterprises is now at 16%, up to 33% from the previous year's 12% Coming into the Picture is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) on a Saas model. It is becoming the next big thing in enterprise software and offers enterprises of all sizes a viable, scalable and flexible model that will take them to the next level in terms of technology.

Why ERP on Saas Model?

Pay for what you use: Saas model offers just the "right" functionality because 80% of people don't need 80% of the functionality is software. Secondly, with Saas, there is less of a culture of big discounts based on big upfront payments as there is in perpetual licensing, so it also is less of an incentive to buy more than you need, which then turns into shelf ware. Thirdly, the Saas provider knows how much you are using on a real-time basis. Although the charging is immediate, there is no exposure to lengthy and often painful on premise audits, which are the main mechanisms on premise vendors rely on to check compliance. Faster Implementations: One of the primary reasons for quicker implementation is because organizations do not have to concern themselves with installing underlining in-frastructure and all SaaS implementations are purely platform - independent. Configuration of application data occurs often via a browser. Simplified application integration: Built on open standards and Web services standards, inter- SaaS application integration is considerably easier than the integration of propriety applications, While on-premise to on-demand integration is still a challenge, the overall integration burden is considerably reduced through Saas.

Reduced Infrastructure investments:

Acquiring software has traditionally produced the requirement to acquire new infrastructure (hardware, middleware, networks and so forth) to enable it. Through a Saas model, much of this investment is unnecessary and can be eliminated.

Reduced operational management requirements: Saas can be a boon to resource-constrained companies that do not have the resources, such as database administrators,to implement an on-premise application.

Lower upgrade costs:

The Saas model reduces the cost of upgrading from one version of the software to another considerably compared with on-premise costs. Since the model is a multi-tenant architecture, the cost of all software, in-frastructure and expertise is shared by a large number of customers.

Lower switching costs:

The Saas gives the customer the freedom to easily make the switch from one solution provider to another. This freedom to easily walk away from a provider, works as a motivator to introduce better features and ensures optimum performance. Many customers would have invested a considerable amount of money in implementation,integration, customization, testing, training, maintenance and upgrades (sometimes five to seven times othe amount of money spent on licenses). Despite of the problems in the set-up, the on-premise ERP will exist as a necessary evil and the difficulty arises when the customer wants to evaluate any new vendor.

Increased Accessibility and Productivity:

Web based applications gives the freedom to access the information from any part of the globe at the click of a bottom.

Why Ramco On Demand ERP

Ramco OnDemand ERP is the first ful-fledged ERP catering to the needs of growing business. A wolrd-class software, delivered as a service, it helps to streamline and integrate the business processes. As easy to use as e-mail, it requires minimal training and can be accessed from anywhere. For an affordable subscription, Ramco takes care of all the infrastructure, maintenance and support needs. Ramco OnDemand ERP is configured to meet the business requirements and typically takes less than a week to deploy. As the business grows, the solution can be scaled up to accommodate multiple locations, currencies and business units. It integrates multiple functions and systems into one solution which gives total visibility and control of operations. In the process, it helps to focus on growing business.

This piece looks at software on demand or software as a service (SAAS) option for startups and medium enterprises looking to reduce their upfront technology investments as well as technology management headaches.

Technology investments form a significant part of the expenditure of any organization, big or small, If you listen to the pundits, without technology investments, you are dead. And if you listen to those who have tread the path, then the headaches associated with even a simple setup can leave you with a similar feeling. This is why many startups and medium businesses either avoid technology investments or spend too much of their time, money and energy on the subject. Web technologies and bandwidth availability have now matured sufficiently for us to look as hosted, managed applications as a way out of being caught between the devil and the deep sea.

How does it work?

They go by different names- managed software services, software as a service (Saas), cloud computing or the older, application service provider (ASP), But the basic business model is the same. With SasS, you do not buy, install or run the application at your end, all that is taken care of by the vendor at his data center. As there is no installation, there is no need to buy expensive hardware either. You pay on a per-use basis (times number of users, messages, documents, etc.), usually every month, in advance. Depending on the service, there may be a setup and configuration fee. For some services, customization is also possible, that at times could end up being higher than the annual fee. In most cases, it is as simple as going to their website and signing up. You pay with a credit card, configure the service yourselves and you are ready to go. And in most cases, you get a free trial period, which I would strongly advice you to use to get a feel of what can be done and more importantly, what cannot be done.

What is the Advantage?

SaaS takes away your upfrong investments, which in most cases can be fairly heary; and converts that into smaller monthly payouts that would be easier to organize and manage. As your business scales up, (or God forbid, down), you can change your usage slab and payouts, mostly instantaneously. There is no lead time to buy and install new systems nor are their associated capital costs. Finally you are free to concentrate on your business and not on how to get particular software or hardware working; and to that extent, you need to maintain only a leaner team (less lots of IT people)

Budgeting:

Are you amongst those who are sick of budgeting with spreadsheets? Where increasing complexity leads only to increased frustration? Where you lose track of versions with everyone finally carrying a different set of numbers? Adaptive Planning probably hasan answer for you.

The software extends the paradigm of spreadsheets, but brings in SBU level flexibility to add specific budget heads as required. It also does modeling and sales planning and workflow (Enterprise Edition) amongst other things. There are three versions-express (free),corporate and enterprise. Pricing models are comparatively more complex depending on the number and types of users, support levels, training needs and son on. So, you are best advised to contact them or their partners.

Lower switching costs:

The Saas gives the customer the freedom to easily make the switch from one solution provider to another. This freedom to easily walk away from a provider, works as a motivator to introduce better features and ensures optimum performance. Many customers would have invested a considerable amount of money in implementation,integration, customization, testing, training, maintenance and upgrades (sometimes five to seven times othe amount of money spent on licenses). Despite of the problems in the set-up, the on-premise ERP will exist as a necessary evil and the difficulty arises when the customer wants to evaluate any new vendor.

Increased Accessibility and Productivity:

Web based applications gives the freedom to access the information from any part of the globe at the click of a bottom.

Why Ramco On Demand ERP

Ramco OnDemand ERP is the first ful-fledged ERP catering to the needs of growing business. A wolrd-class software, delivered as a service, it helps to streamline and integrate the business processes. As easy to use as e-mail, it requires minimal training and can be accessed from anywhere. For an affordable subscription, Ramco takes care of all the infrastructure, maintenance and support needs. Ramco OnDemand ERP is configured to meet the business requirements and typically takes less than a week to deploy. As the business grows, the solution can be scaled up to accommodate multiple locations, currencies and business units. It integrates multiple functions and systems into one solution which gives total visibility and control of operations. In the process, it helps to focus on growing business.

Collaborations, Meetings and Conferences

In these days of soaring travel (and other) costs, web-based conferences go a long way in bringing your budget back to shape. What if you could take a potential client through a discussion on your engineering drawings without actually flying out and physically displaying the drawings in fron of him? What if you could do a quick sales conference without having to get the full sales team into the same room? What if you want to play around with an idea with your team that is in different cities? In today's world of managed services, all of these are possible, and at a cost that is only a fration of a Delhi Chennai return ticket !

Webex brings to the table web meetings, desktop sharing and audio conferences (and a few other services) on a pay-as-you-use model. So, if you have a sales presentation to make to a client in another city, you could share the presentation over the net with the cleint. alternatively, you could have an interactive employee conference without anyone having to travel. Pricing depends on a number of permautations and combinations and typically you enter your details on the website and then someone contacts you.

MindMeister is an online mind-mapping tool. Mind mapping? A mind map is a visual representation of ideas, tasks or thought processes. A mind map helps you express (and change) graphically, the logical sequencing and relationships between events and ideas and anything else. Mindmeister offers three plans- a basic plan with six mind maps is free and comes with advertising, a premium plan at US$49.9 per year and a team plan that includes a team administratoin interface, pre-populated friends lists and custom sub-domain. The team plan starts at US$ 235 per year for five users.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)/Sales Management :-- So you got a small sales team out there and you need to ensure that they are making the requisite number of calls. You need a handle on the status of each caller and finally, when one of them leaves, you need the replacement to be able to step in quickly and seamlessly and start from where the other person left. In short, you need a sales management application.

The most famous and perhaps the most successful of all managed applications, available at falls in this genre. You can extend Salesforce partner to customize the application to suit your specific needs. Be aware that customization comes at a hefty price. Appexchange offers additional applications that you can buy (some are free) and install onto your part of Salesforce to increase or improve functionality. Another SaaS application in the same genre is SageCRM.

Document Management

If your business revolves around documents and it is important for you to manage and track document creation and use, then you are in the market for document management services.

Knowledge Tree has a basic offering of 1GB storage and three users that is free and has a premium option of US$ 15 per month per user and ofers 10GB storage per user.

Email Management

All businesses have catch-all email addresses - ones like or And you need to allow many employees to access and reply to these mail addresses. Employees also need to know what mails have been answered and what the previous mails from a given sender have been.

Sproutit's Mailroom service attempts to do exactly that. The Sproutit mailroom, which calls itself a "simple email helpdesk", is very much 'work in progress' with many rough edges. It sometimes gets tracking information wrong, and does not have facilities to print or to backup locally. But at a base price of US$ 9 per month for three users and 500 messages (free for 100 messages and an ad inserted into every mail out) that is worth living with. We use sproutit.com's mailroom to handle mails [email protected].

Market Research Surveys

One of the major elements of cost (and time) in a market research project is the survey. Reaching across to all the respondents takes both time and money. And that is where online surveys come in. You set up the survey online and invite respondents to come to the page and fill it up. You can set it up as an open survey that anyone can answer or a closed one that, only those who get an invite from you can fill in.

Survey Monkey is an online service that lets you configure and run online surveys.

SurveyMonkey offers three plans, a basic free one and a monthly plan at US$ 19.95 and an annual plan at US$ 200 per year. The key difference between the plans is the number of responses you can get per month and the number of questions for a survey .

Survey Monkey offers multiple (15) question types and questionnaire templates. The paid versions also offerthe ability to download your responses to a spreadsheet (or database).

Zoomerang Basic is free and is limited to 30 questions and 100 responses per survey and the responses are available only for 10 days. Otherwise you have professional education and non-profit plans. Professional comes at US$ 599 per year (US$ 799 with mobile, including 100 mobile credits), Zoomerang also does cross-tabs, filtering and customizable charts.

Network Monitoring

If your organization runs on a smallest to Medium network, then someone has the added headache of ensuring that everything is up and running; that everyone's mail is synchronizing and everything from printer toner to bandwidth is available. Good network monitoring tools are few and far in betwen and are costly; way to costly for a medium or even many large businesses to implement them on priority.

Time to welcome Spiceworks Spiceworks is many things- network monitoring tool, help ticketing system, IT asset managment, and more, rolled into one. You download and install a small piece of software onto a PC and then run it from your browser to get started. The Spiceworks website states that it works well with up to 250 devices, and slows down with more. And the good thing is that it does Windows, Linux, and Mac! spiceworks is free, supported by ads. If you do not want the ads, then there is a monthly free of US$ 20. As for me, I am happy with the ads!

Newletters and Email List Management

If you are in the habit of keeping in frequent touch with your audience- customers, potential customers, well wishers- then you must be doing a lot of emailing. Do you know how many of the indented recipients have opened the message? Or how many have clicked on which link? or even how many email ids are no longer working? Newsletter managers help you do all this. They let you manage your address lists, manage bounces and provide you with open, and click statistics.

Constant Contact charges montly, based on the size of your contact list. You can send as many mails as you want to these contacts. Plans start at US$ 15 a month for 500 contacts.

Aweber communications get you started as US$ 19 for a 500 database and includes signup forms on your website, auto responders and analytics of recipient responses.

Project Management

Project management is a particularly critical need for startups and other organizations that have to manage feature lists and schedules and fast approaching milestones. But they often have to resort to spreadsheets instead of good project management software, simply because of affordability.

Dream Team from DreamFactory comes in two versions- Pro and Enterprise. Pricing is not that straightforward. There is a monthly subscription fee and separate fees for storage, data transfer in, data transfer out, and different types of requests. It also requires the DreamFactory player to be installed.

Liquid Planner allows three project members and 2 GB storage for free. Users above three require payments of US$35 per month or US$ 300 per year. Paid accounts get 50 GB of storage. Basecamp comes in three versions. Basic (US$ 24 per month), Plus and Max. There is also a free option with one project and no file sharing. Base-camp offers to-do lists, file sharing, group message boards, milestone lists and tie tracking.

Shared To-do Lists

If you are working in teams,then keeping track of shared or delegated to-do lists is a pain. And if the team is spread out, then it becomes an even greater pain. To-do lists that are shareable are a good way to avoid this pain. Remember The Milk is a service where you can not only maintain to-do lists, but also share them and have them finished by others. The location of your task can be noted on Google maps from within the application itself.

You can have taks sent in as email by anyone who knows your Milk Account email id or have them added to your calendar. The basic plan is free, while the pro account costs US$ 25 per year.
Web Analytics

Google Analytics is free and many websites use it, Google Analytics is easy to set up and you can be up and active in minutes literally. the service gives you an overview of the visitors to your site and you can drill down to get more details, including where the visitors came from, what lead them there, what browser they were using, what screen resolution and so on. IT also gives you a map with drill down, which shows you where your visitors are coming from.

Google Analytics tracks pages at the page level. If you want to go even finer, like, where in a page users are concentrating, then you need something more. And that is where ClickDensity comes in. ClickDensity does clickmaps, heat maps and hover maps. All of these help you track where on a page users are clicking. With ClickDensity, you have plans ranging from a starter pack of US$ 5 all the way to a premium pack at US$ 400. The key difference between the different plans is the number of clicks stord to create the maps and the number of sites tracked.

Web Server Monitoring

If you have one or more servers or sites up on the net and you are managing them on your own, It isimportant that you be alerted when any of them go down or otherwise become inaccessible from any corner of the world. Server monitoring services do exactly this at specified intervals from locations across the world and alert you over SMS, email and other services when problems arise.

Pingdom offers a number of reports including uptime and response time along with monitoring. Pingdom offers nine different checks including HTTP, TCP, Ping, DNS, UDP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP checks and you can set up different checks to alert different people. You can be alerted, both, when a service comes down and when it comes back up. You can also set up the check interval to vary from one minute to sixty minutes. They also have a check location in Mumbai. Pingdom offers two plans, Basic and Business at US$ 9.95 and US$ 39.95 per month respectively.

We use Pingdom to monitor all servers and services that we run and I must confes to an occasional false positive that has made us wake up and get connected in the deep night.

Host Tracker offers many more plans, has more monitoring points and is cheaper but offers only basic HTTP tests.

Inventory Management

If you have inventory to track (like infield service parts, multi-restaurant consumables or IT infrastructure. Particularly at multiple locations, then SeeControl is worth looking at.

The See Control website, unlike other SaaS vendors, does not have any price or plan lists or a place where you an sign up. You need to contact them through a form on the website and they will bet back to you.

Human Resources Management

HR is an area that gets divided into further niches, with each having its set of players. Thus, you have services that do online tests for profiling and those that do e-learning. Then there are payroll services and of course, the recruitment portals. Our primary focus here is on basic HR- employee information (HRIS), appraisals and payroll being available in one place.

Empxtrack from Saigun offers HRMS, applicant tracking, employee self service (leave tracking, HR help desk, employee handbook, personal data update), employee portal and appraisals as a managed package. Pricing is on slabs of number of employees and you have to contact them to get started. Adrenalin from Polaris also offers a hosted variant of their HR package.

ERP

ERP, the big daddy of enterprise applications, is also available as a managed solution from many vendors. Here the offerings, typically tend to be industry or process-specific.

Ramco for example, offers process- centric solutions (vendor management, customer management, storage and distribution, accounting, planning and stock management) and have particular focus on selected verticals like auto components, chemicals discrete manufacturing , distilleries, electronics, engineering, etc. .

Delantt Consulting offers hosted SAP BASIS , including sandbox hosting (evaluation stage), development hosting and production hosting. Pricing is dependent on type of hosting and number of user ids. SAP offers its own hosted solution, Business ByDesign at

Before You Choose

Before you choose a provider, there are some points to keep in mind that will ensure a better experience as you go along.

Do The Trial

Almost all SaaS vendors will give you a free trial, usually of thirty days or of a limited number of users. In fact, many, like sproutit and 01.com offer a mandatory free trial period of 30 days, during which you can delete your account without being charged. It is a good idea to use the trial to check out how the service works, and to find out what is missing. If a service provider does not have an upfront free trail offer, ask. you will most likely get one.

Choose The Right Plan

You signup for one of the many available slabs and the vendor will have an over usage charge, which is normally somewhere in the small print. Typically, charges for using extra will be many times the standard rate. So, when you go for a hosted server, you may signup for a server with 1000 GB per month of data transfer. Any usage above 1000 GB in a month will have an extra charge per GB, and this varies from service provider to service provider..

Let's take the example of Sproutit, which provides a shared mailromm service and charges US$ 0.05 for every message sent or received above plan limit. so, if you sign up for a personal plan with them (US$ 9 for 500 messages in and out ) and just happen to do 900 messages instead, you would end up paying US$ 29 as against the US$ 19 that you would have paid with the next higher plan that covers 1000 messages. So with all SaaS signups, it is important that you choose the right plan and monitor your usage as you go along and adjust plans if required.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

An SLA sets out what level of service availability is being promised and what make good you will get in case the stated service level is not met. Yawn! Who wants to read boring legalese? However, you will be surprised. Let me give you one recent example. I was negotiating with a leading regional data center for managing emails. Somewhere buried in the middle of the proposal was the SLA and in it were a few gems. How about "Intermittent downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any downtime periods" or "There will be no more than twelve hours of scheduled downtime in a calendar month." Give me a break. Schelduled downtime of up to 12 hours a month for an email service? And if the mail is down for nine minutes after every two minutes, that will be fine? Wait. That is not all. "All burnouts are exclueded and shall be charged on actual." Excuse me! You burn your equipment for whatever reason and then want to charge the customers for it? Obviously, this service provider has some serious rework pending on their SLA contains. Give it a look once over before you sign on. At least the known devil is better than the unkown angel !

LOOK OUT FOR "OTHER CHARGES"

Many SaaS services run on a sign-on-and -start model. But many like email services have set up fees. But you also come across some fees that are let's say, unexpected. Take the case of LuitDox, a document management offering. You need to pay them in advance, either for six months or for a year. That may be okay. But every time you make a payment, there is a processing fee of $35!

Salesforce.com will have their partners do some customization of the site to meet your exact requirements. But most customization quotes I have come across have been equal if not more than the annual charge for a small organization. (Such customization charges are of course open to negotiation)

INTERGRATION ISSUES : One of the problems with opting for multiple SaaS providers is the lack of integration across vendors. Your users will have to login to each of the services separately, using separate pass words and possibly user names. And you would have to create, delete and otherwise administer users at each service separately. It would have been nice if all services could acept logins using some thing like OpenID or and LDAP- based directory service like the Windows Active Directory Services (ADS), Until that happens, we are left with having to manage a different user name and password at each vendor.

WHEN YOU LEAVE : When you leave a service that you were using (and paying for), ensure that you have confirmation from them that your account has indeed been terminated and that you will no longer becharged. Else, you may have the unpleasant experience of your credit card being charged even when you are no longer using the service.

CAN YOU CONVERT YOUR VENDOR INTO A SaaS MODEL?

Finally, if you cannot find a hosted model, can you make your selected vendor offer a pay-as-you-use model? We were negotiating for the implementation of a new HR system. And the final question we had of the short listed vendor was whether he would implement it at a data center of his choice and manage it for us, against monthly payments instead of an up-front payment plus annual maintenance charges. The first reaction was one of incredulity. But a month of cajoling with an assurance of a three year contract and a year's payment as advance cheques helped them to agree to the deal. For us, a huge one-time payment got converted into more comfortable monthly payouts, and we did not have to bother about having to manage the backend. The funny part is that today, they sell a hosted model based around what we cajoled them into doing just for us, and I am not getting anything for the idea!

http://www.bestsaas.info contact : Girish Manekji http://www.bestsaas.info

Article Source: Girish_Manekji ERP-on-Saas-Model

Labels: Guest Bloggers, SaaS

As of today, SalesForce.com is offering it's platform for free to companies that need just the platform (not SFA). You will be able to create up to 10 custom objects per user and one website with up to 250,000 page views each month. All this for free, indefinitely.

To get started go to SalesForce.com Free Edition, or to learn more first, read their official press release.

Labels: CRM, Database, SaaS

I'm very much liking Basecamp for most project management tasks, but I'm just not seeing where the extra expense is justified to get the time tracking included. Not only do I not report on time in the same context as I track projects, but the Basecamp time tracking feature is pretty lame.

You basically just enter the number of hours and a note about what you did. That's it. The system puts in your name and there is no other info you can include. If you want an invoice to be created off the time tracking you can export a csv file, but then you have to manually create the invoice out of the stack of records with these random notes signifying what was done.

Compare that to Harvest's time tracking service, which feeds directly into an invoice that the system will even send to the client for you, along with follow up notes after a pre-determined period you set, until you mark the invoice as paid. Harvest allows you to set up standard tasks for a given project or all projects, enter the rate charged for the task (my company uses hours, but could be by other units also), then log your time on your desktop by selecting the task from a drop down then clicking a button in a widget to start the timer. When you are done simply click the timer again to stop it, and presto, your hours have been entered in Harvest for that task.

You can also log in to add time, and add notes to any task to supplement whatever is in the task name. Then invoicing the client is as simple as selecting what time period to invoice for and pressing send. The invoice goes out with your logo, messages, and invoice as PDF, plus imbedded in body of email. Perfect! And all for anywhere from just $12/month for one user to $5-9/month per user for 10 or more users.

True, Basecamp's time tracking comes at an extra cost of just $26/month for unlimited users, but in this case you truly get what you pay for. It is simply too limited an option in it's utility to be worth even $26/month, no matter how many scattered employees I was trying to track time for.

The fundamental Basecamp approach is the reason its time tracking feature isn't all that great. They offer all around collaboration as a project management method. For my company, time tracking is a part of invoicing, not project management. But for some companies they want to see the time being logged against a project within the context of the project itself. Instead of for invoicing, they track time to see how many hours are being done on a project by all the people involved.

The good news is, Harvest can receive time tracking information from Basecamp, so if you do have a reason to want time tracking in the project management system, you can still send the info over to Harvest for invoicing. You could then have just a single user Harvest account for the person who generates the invoices.

Another cool integration is that you can even use Twitter to send time updates from the road from your mobile phone. So if you aren't going near a laptop with wifi access anytime soon and don't want to have to write your time down somewhere for entry later, just twit it straight into Harvest from your car!

With the use of Harvest for time tracking, I can use the $24 monthly Basecamp account, and have a complete time tracking and invoicing solution. If one only worked on one or two projects at a time he/she could even use the free Basecamp account, though that is not the case for me. I am a real fan of both software services, and don't mind flipping between them to get the best of all worlds, instead of limiting myself to an integrated service that causes me to compromise on each feature.

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

It was years ago that the company at which I was SalesForce Admin decided they wanted me to also become the Go-To person for the new eProject software service they were purchasing. A consultant came in to train me and one of the PMPs for a week and then went home each day to work on our config based on the info we had shared and his experience with other clients.

As a SalesForce.com implementer myself now, I definitely know the value of having a consultant guide a business through the implementation of a complex piece of software. But should project management be considered in that category? Having no background with MS Project (to which I would compare eProject, in terms of its Gantt chart focus, etc.), I never did really groc eProject. Neither did any of the Product Managers who came to me in that first month with questions about how to get the reports they wanted out of the system. And that's what you get for $50 per user per month.

Now let's turn our attention to Basecamp. I set up a Basecamp account for my consulting business in about 20 minutes -- that includes 3 minutes deciding which service plan I wanted, 2 minutes entering all my information, 10 minutes watching the introductory video, then 5 minutes uploading my logo and customizing the defaults to my liking. Here's what that first customization screen looks like:


It's a small image showing a wide screen, so you may not be able to read all the type, but I'm sure you can see that it's a pretty simple setup. Within just minutes you upload your logo, choose which default items you want to delete (click the trash can beside them) or add (type into the little box then click "Add" button). You can also customize display colors and add unlimited additional users. Did you hear me right? I said UNLIMITED additional users, both from within your company or if you want you can allow access by your clients.

I chose the $50 monthly account which is the lowest amount that gets you time tracking. There is also a free account you could use to try it out, though it won't give you a chance to test the time tracking feature. All Basecamp's accounts come with the first 30 days free, so I would suggest doing the $50 account for the first few weeks so you can explore all the features, then downgrade to a cheaper or free plan if you don't think you really need the time tracking (or in the case of the free plan, don't need considerably more features, such as file storage, multiple users, or multiple projects).

For all you Gantt-heads, you are probably stuck with MS Project, eProject and their ilk. The Basecamp approach is entirely different. Once you've created a project (also very intuitive process), here's a screen you will see for tracking milestones:


As you can see, this is quite different from a Gantt chart. The idea behind Basecamp is to focus on organizing how people interact and share information (verbal info and files) on a project so that everyone knows what they are responsible to do when, how what they do or don't do affects others, and what others are doing and when they did it. So instead of a sole project manager who is responsible for herding cats (I mean managing project participants), everyone on the project shares that responsibility. Social rules apply and no one wants to be so obviously revealed as the one person who keeps pushing the project back when everyone else is working together well.

Basecamp does allow tasks to cascade with dependencies, just like in a Gannt, but if you really need to show all your project timelines and milestones within a Gantt chart, Basecamp won't be the solution for you. It presents the information more in the week appearance of a calendar than a full spreadsheet view that can show large numbers of items across a long time period.

But for those who can adopt a different way of thinking about what it means to manage a project for successful delivery, here's one last screenshot, Time Tracking:

Basecamp consists of To Do lists, Milestones, shared files, Time Tracking, Messages, Writeboards, and if you use 37Signals' other product, Campfire, integrated Chat. By combining these features it aims to keep everyone synchronized with each other so that milestones are known and achieved on time and within budget. If you are new to project management or open to an innovative approach, you will be joining the ranks of USA Today, Addidas, and Warner Brothers (a few of Basecamp's many customers) in opting for what I think is a great online project management solution.

I tell all my clients about Basecamp and for any that want it without investing the minimal time it takes to set it up I'll do it for them for a charge of about 100 bucks. It's always the case that I'm already familiar with their business process from designing whatever other service I'm providing them, so it doesn't take me long to translate that into a customized project management solution. There are 2-3 minute videos within Basecamp on each object's screen, and the system really is pretty intuitive, so most users self train, but with a few clients I've also tacked 30 minutes of Basecamp training onto whatever training I am already doing for their users, just to make it a seamless process.

Whether you dive into Basecamp on your own or have someone help you, you will be glad you did. Even if you decide to stick with another service to get your Gantt fix, for just $50 a month for unlimited usage, I would urge you to check out Basecamp and see how you might integrate its benefits. If you do, please come back and post a comment to let others know how you are working between the two and how it's going.

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS