Martin Hannah

Blogging is now a well established technique for organizations and individuals to share information and collaborate on topics, that a Business website with its more rigid structure cannot match. For most organizations publishing a new page on a website will involve a design, copy writing and approval process, whereas a blog page is well accepted as a person or company viewpoint at a given time, and most readers accept that a blog page is a view at one moment in time and subject to change. Organisations have to manage the content in the public website closely because all content in your site is more often than not interpreted by visitors as an official statement of capability or policy, whereas blogs are now-days well accepted as a view at one point in time.

So for any organization their is less effort to publish a new blog post than there is to create new pages on the corporate website. It is for this reason blogging has taken off as a convenient  company information dissemination and collaboration tool in recent years.

Even organizations who were previously concerned about the negative impact of any of their content or opinions have learned that articles or posts that attract criticism are an opportunity for the organization to correct, change or refine their policies publicly and enlist the loyalty and support of their customers and community as a result of demonstrating their willingness to listen and act on the opinions of those they serve.

But maintaining a website, social media services and a number of blogs designed for each of the interest groups or communities can be a lot of work, so Coresoft has provided a simple solution by giving you the ability to manage multiple blogs from within it’s cloud application.

Your first impression may like mine will be that this is not a new idea, but when you actually start to use this feature you see why people need this capability.

In short when you first start to use social media to promote, you see all the results of your hard work appearing as expected, but you soon learn that you also need to maintain that constant stream of information for it to be effective. When you like most people are also required to do a “real job” needing to login, update, measure and keep your Internet presence “current” gets hard to maintain when your busy.

Using Coresoft as both a business application, CRM, Productivity tool and your Marketing control center, means you are already using the system each day, and maintaining multiple information distribution and collaboration channels does not require you to use your precious time.

For most business professionals their hourly cost, as an employee or the income they can generate in just 1 hour of a working day, more than justifies the monthly subscription. In fact from experience I previously needed about 4 hours a week to keep my content current in a small number of social media account and now I find myself managing many more blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Linked in accounts in about 30 minutes a week (and doing a much better job than I could justify the time to do previously).

So why is it worthwhile ?

The main reason is it’s all their in front of you inside the same business applications your using for Productivity and CRM, and it’s easy, the software teaches you, prompts you, guides you as you go about normal daily activities.

I noted that at the time of writing this article they offered a 30 day trial on the product, but in my case I contacted them for an extension (and explained i had not had enough time to fully explore the software in the first 30 days), and their policy was to give additional extensions if your actively using the product on a regular basis. This obviously works to their advantage because the more you use it, the more information you start to collect, the more tools be become effective, and at some point you will as it did need to become a paid user.

So as you are using those every day business tools, and your customers and communities respond or interact through your website, you can create a post, copy and paste into an article, send out a survey, talk to your community through Twitter,generate traffic effortlessly with just a few clicks. No passwords, no extra login’s, no needing to learn and master all these different software interfaces from different vendors.

Managers you need to pick up a few new skills, and to change old habits, but in practice it takes less effort and resource to communication through Coresoft’s on demand social platform, that it would take to send email to staff or co-workers and for them to do it for you.

Ref: Blogging features integrated into the webCRM application

Coresoft customers have mixed results with the use of Website Forum in recent years, and the role of Forum software along side Blogs, Linked in, Facebook and Private (member only) social networks and/or groups has been redefined.

Forums have always been a worthwhile tool to enlist collaboration between members with similar interests. Organisations have struggled with the supervision of those discussions, mediating feedback and comments and controlling scope of discussion so as not to reflect on their organisation.

Forums often attract a certain type of participant which might be willing to invest the time to participate, but these participants may not always carry the bulk of member opinion, so they are not always an accurate reflection of member opinion.

Linked in Facebook Blogging

In more recent years many Member based organisations have found Linked in, and Google Groups an effective tool for enlisting member to member collaboration, but the time required to supervise these groups is not insignificant.

Further the role of Blogs as an information sharing mechanism has exploded, with more and more organisations using Blog to promote ideas and News as it comes to hand. Clearly a blog is a better way to share these information snippets as hey are easy to create and publish, and don’t need to same effort and process they would normally be required for a web new page to be published on the corporate website.

Private Social Networks

The newest entrant to this expanding array of collaboration tools is software that replicate Social Networking functionality of the big players like Facebook/Linked in/Google in a private network exclusive to members of the organisation. Products such as Higher Logic, Dolphine offer a paid services with great features, while ELGG, Buddypress are free/open source equivalents with varying degrees of functionality.

The advantages with a private network stem from the way they enlist people to collaborate in small groups, mentoring or assisting each other. The Private network is easier to mediate content posted by members because must login and identify themselves, and as a result are help accountable for what they say. The results are encouraging s it seems that members are less inclined to make unqualified comments in front of their piers.

Private networks can include functionality similar to Facebook, Linked in, and will provide members with their own personal “blog space”, ability to upload/download files and share resources, so they are gaining popularity quickly.

Private social networking systems need direct integration to your Member Administration system to be effective, and Coresoft applications are providing direct integration through the Coresoft API.

Summary

The role of the Forum would appear to of been eroded as more and more on line tools have replaced it as an information sharing tool, but the forum is still an excellent tool, and a great place to debate issues and develop ideas. Perhaps the roles it once provided have been replaced with better tools, but the forum itself still has a purpose in a modern business communications, that is best understood once the organisation has implemented the more popular tools Public and Private Social networking facilities.

A fresh solution for Organisations with Multiple Memberships

Most organisations have multiple memberships, with varying rates for the type of member, but in cases where the organisation is managing multple memberships, each with their own due dates, subs scales, and potentially income recognised in seperate entities, there are a range of very different obstacles that emerge, especially where members can join on line, and or hold several memberships at the same time.

Coresoft recently released its Multiple Membership version of its Member Administration system, which holds a number of essential features to help cope with this situation.

Unlike the standard Member Administration systems, the new Multiple Membership Module has been developed to enable associations to manage their muliple membership and associated services with maximum efficiency and with minimal administration.

With this new capability, the member can have any number of memberships and or any number of subscribed services registered against them for payment together with their membership fee or if required for payment at any other time. These memberships and additional services can be billed simultaneously or separately and either annually, monthly, quarterly or at any other desired frequency as they fall due.

The memberships can be grouped into Membership offerings, and then promoted as a package, so regardless of the entity that is delivering the service, the member sees their memberships as a simple package.

This type of administration system is going to appeal to organisations where there are a number of state or regional centres providing slightly different services, and or requiring independant financial management systems, and / or where joining the local state or regional centre entitles the member to services provided by any of the other states or regions.

Coresofts latest addition to the cloud series is purpose built Marketing and Communications application. Leaving out all the other features (which can be added in later if you wish), this neat little application has all the juicy features of the Busines communications and Marketing Suite.

Firstly it comes with a simple CRM, basic opportunity and sales management, web site, Blogging, Surveys, iMsg (Social broadcasting), Bulk email, bulk SMS and campaign measurement and with visito tracking.

A well rounded Marketing system for sales professionals from any industry.

Check it out at http://www.coresoft.com.au

The Coresoft AVETTMISS compliant training administration system is a fully integrated Training, CRM, Marketing and Financial Management system fully integrated with Coresoft Web applications and Membership series applications.

During the past 3 months a series of changes have been rolloed into the product to help streamline administration and simplify reporting.

These changes include:
- Change in attendee process to facilitate transfer, deferral, withdrawal and re register of students in order to improve auditing requirements
- Streamline the assessment process for unit assessment
- Able to include external units of competency
- Online assessment process enhanced to be able to capture date of engagement into course or unit

In addition the system has been enhanced to display on screen tips of what data fields are required, manditory for reporting.

A Hybrid system is one where an Enterprise wide business application is coupled to a range of self service Cloud applications used by Customers and staff.

Its not uncommon today for an organisation to have the ability provide access to staff via mobile devices or a web browser, or even for customers to interact through the public web site. What is unique is for Customers and Staff to have seperate discrete data repositries on a host system, so each organisation can run independant systems, yet be able to collaborate and share information or documents where applicable. Typically cloud applications work on the basis of a Subscriber signing up to use that on line service which includes a seperate data storage area and workspace, whereas Enterprise systems are all about sharing the corporate data so people can use or contribute to that data as they perform daily functions.

The other significant decision by Coresoft the decision to make the Browser based interface the one that has all the web 2.0 features, and Workcentre will remain the back office transaction processing system (which is does very well). This is an significant realisation in that it avoids over complicate Workcentre trying to be both a back office and also a best of breed CRM and Martketing tool. In a similiar way it means Coresoft will not try to introduce into the Web based interface all the back office transactional features found in Workcentre. The result is both interfaces can be kept simple because if you examine this decision cloisely you will see the interfaces are intended to satisfy entirely different business functions performed by users in an organisation.

In this way the cloud applications if free to be all it can be without any restrictions, and the licencing policy is that users with a Workcentre access licences also have a Cloud user licences included, because the cloud licence model is based on the server component not named users.

Cloud applications offer unique benefits over enterprise applications in that they:

• Are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Are designed to be more intuitive, so users can use them with little or no prior experience or training
• The features in Coresoft cloud applications are not easily reproduced in the GUI workcentre application, and so Workcentre may have features that control a web service, but the user access is via the Browser interface
• Allows to take advantage of all the new Web 2.0 services suc as Twitter, Google and Facebook
• Users store, access and share documents view the browser interface, from any Web browser based device including Windows, Unix or iOS based PC’s and mobile devices

Multi Tenancy providing Member cloud as a service

All Coresoft applications are Multi-tenant meaning a single database can literally several companies side by side without introducing additional databases, services or machine overheads. Cloud applications are built on the subscriber model, and Customers can (under a new licencing model) sub let a partition with accompanying software to their customers.

A current example of this is an well known Australian Membership organisation who has rolled out “Cloud space” as a service to its members where the members will have a simple CRM where they can manage their customers/staff/calendars/service appointments. These member companies can add additional Coresoft software components at any time for Service management, Fixed assets and equipment management, Productivity, Business comminucations, marketing, even a website all managed within that same application. The cloud container they use has business objects within it that exchange data “real time” with the partent organisation so when they update their account details, change contact details it all flows through to the parent organisation.

The members literally interact with their Cloud application daily and the parent organisation has unique opportunity to provide greater levels of service to their members that ever before. The parent organisation outsources support, and obtains an income stream under a JV agreement.

In summary Hybrid applications are positioned to dramitcally enhance the way Associations service their members, and enhance any Member based organisations position as the peak body for their industry.

By way of introduction, the traditional role of software companies like Coresoft has always been to create an application that provides user efficiency and productivity gains when performing specific daily duties. Depending on if that user function is repeditive data entry, investigative, analytical or creative the software user interface has to change to make that task as easy as possible.

Like all things, the internet and in particular Cloud “style” technologies have influenced our opinion on what we consider to be included in our software, in way we never imagined 5 years ago, and users see other applications incorporate new Internet based facilities such as Social Media, sharing and/or collaboration and are soon keen to see these appear inside the applications they use as well.

For example, almost every application sold today has features to send emails, create PDF documents, integrate with Microsoft office products and as these facilities become common place there is a new range of “must have” features software vendors are scrambling to adopt. Many of our customers as asking about the introduction of Social Media capabilities, even when they freely admit they are not entirely sure what they will use it for at present. What these customers are actually sayng is they need to get access to new technologies now so they can learn how to master them before it becomes essential to their business to have that “know how”.

Progress Open Edge version 10 introduced a technical capability to use a very specific styles of software development often referred to as Object Oriented or OO. Unfortunately the term OO does not adequately explain the specific Uniqueness of this technology because its key advantage as I can see is the speed at which software programmers familiar with other languages can pick up and become productive with Progress V10.

Setting that fact aside for a moment, if you look at the world of software developers there are enormous pools of developer resource learning and working with Open source tools. With the Universities and contractor communities able to get access to Open source tools for ZERO upfront cost, the reason why Open source has grown so quickly is obvious. On the other side of the equasion is Microsoft with its .Net / Silverlight development and Azure delivery platforms, it has the lions share of the corporate base, and in terms of the number of developers working with .Net development platforms, had up till late 2009 the larger pool of software developers.

However in 2010 the Open Source developer community overtook the .Net community is shere numbers and for the first time positioned open source as the Growth area for new products and innovation.

So every day of every week, new “components” are created that Coresoft can introduce into its product that will improve the efficiency or user experience if the product. The time it taks to integrate these technologies is largely dependant on how eaily that can be linked to Coresoft. Take a simple mechansism like an SMS gateway, a few years ago that was only possible with an ActiveX, but today a simple REST based call will do the trick. If your non technical what this really means is todays its quicker, a few years ago it was more difficult and expensive. So when its easier Coresoft is able to increase the rate of innovation and improve its products more rapidly.

Moving back closer to home, there are benefits to the Coresoft customer if Coresoft itself is able to use any / all of the developments coming from Open Source or .Net developers if those technologies are built in a manner that allows them to plug into the Coresoft application, and that is one of the primary benefits of Progress Version 10.2B.

The way Progress have implemented their version of OO, has provided the technical capability to utilize other technologies very easily. For example using the Eclipse development environment developers (which is well known to developers) they are able to use familiar tools and develop in Progress, Java, C++, PHP or whatever language makes them happy.

This coupled with the ability to then utilize Open Source as many “best of breed” components in a project as is needed, allows Coresoft to rapidly incorporate new innovations or technologies into the product at a lower cost that is then passed onto our customers as a benefit.

Lets say your organisation has handed down a mandate that you need to upgrade and modernise the website.Common sense is telling you to canvass the stakeholders in your organization for their business requirements, but you know from experience that there are two types of stakeholder, one that has fixed ideas on the way the site or functionality on the site should operate, and others that wont comment and are needing guidance, stimulation or education, in short they do not know what is possible. 

So here are some ideas on where to start, what to educate yourself on so your making informed choices, and not wasting time and effort on aspects that are of marginal importance. 

Lets say for arguments sake, your organisation is currently a fairly plain style and its primarily an information only website, with little or no on line eBusiness capability. 

1) Basic understanding of using CMS 

You need a Content Management System (CMS). If you don’t have one then there is no excuse they range in price from FREE to thousands of dollars and packages such as Coresoft contain functionality designed specifically for the Not-For-Profit organisation. 

So why pay when I can get it for free you ask? 

The answer is the free packages still need the Not-For-Profit aspects added, so you can either pay a programmer to add these or buy something that’s been proven “of the shelf”. 

ACTION: 

a) If you currently don’t use a CMS (which is increasingly rare these days) subscribe for a free trial using a third party CMS (use Google and search for CMS to find plenty of options) start using it and gain an understanding of why it is needed. 

b) Then start to research CMS software that will integrate to you Membership systems, and has a wide range of functionality you can use to service the member through your website. 

2) Visual Appearance of website 

Lets face it your organisation will only get one chance at first impressions, and if your site is bland, the perception your broadcasting is that your organisation doesn’t think its website is important. Your also broadcasting that you don’t want to use the website for recruit new members or offer anything of value through the website. 

ACTION: 

a) Engage a local designer to come up with a set of modern visually compelling templates for your website. These usually come in the form of wire diagrams (you ask the designer to give you these) and images of the design concept (which are just pictures of what it could look like so you can pick colour schemes, themes and operational simplicity) 

b) Survey stakeholders and find out what they are expecting 

c) Identify the Web objects and points of interaction you intend to make available in your website, and install the appropriate Web objects to facilitate this functionality (Don’t worry about blogs, forums and Social media just yet, get the basics in place first) 

3) Website tracking 

You are going to need something to monitor your site, this software is usually referred to as Website tracking or Website statistics software. 

It can come in many forms, and it is important to select a product the provides information that is pitched at a person who is performing a job function similar you yours. You can consume a lot of time mining information and get very few or even misleading results. So a tool that provides reports in a well accepted format is a good place to start. 

ACTION: 

a) Read article on website statistics http://www.coresoft.com.au/blog/martin/?p=79 

b) Join the forum on the topic: http://www.coresoft.com.au/coreforum/index.php?topic=59.0 

4) Inbound Marketing – Phase 1 

Now its time to begin the Optimization of the website, and the first step is prepare the site to be an effective Inbound Marketing platform. 

In this step of the project you will start to put together an understanding of many of the terms you may of heard (SEO, Social Media, Content optimization and more) and you will start to form your own views on how these facilities work together. Remember what works for you may not be the same as the next person, so you will also be filtering through the ideas and suggestions looking for gems. 

However learn from others as their realisation may be more advanced than yours, and you can overlook those gems by not fully understanding the principles of marketing that now apply to you. 

ACTION: 

a) Participate in Coresoft Webinar, Seminars especially parts 1,2,3 that will give you the foundational principles involved. 

b) As an experiment create Adwords, research the targeted keywords, develop landing pages for these Adword groups and monitor the results 

c) Concurrent to the above start to indentify possible inbound links and develop these relationships 

5) Community DevelopmentYour member communities are of extreme importance to cultivate and their perception of value can be greatly enhanced using Social Media style technologies. One such technology is the ability for your organisation to have its own (exclusive) Social network. 

Why would you do this ? 

If you were to for example use Twitter and Facebook for this, it detracts from the exclusive nature, and the value of membership. It also makes anything shared very public so people cant mentor each other and / or ask sensitive questions of each other. 

Public Social media has an important role (covered below), but the introduction of a private social network is a way to provide some real value to members, and is helpful for the development of the disciplines needed for the consistent creation of quality content that we will reuse in the sections below . 

ACTIONS 

a) Implementation of one of the private Social Networking Products 

b) Develop member awareness campaigns to promote its use 

c) Develop data collection points for the farming of content, into content reproduction procedures (which at first is simply the discipline to see what people are talking about and participate with a view to helping people understand how to share with each other) 

d) Implement a similar community for staff 

e) Promote the use of this community from mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry etc) 

6) Inbound Marketing – Phase 2 

Next step is to create more channels through which people can find and access your information. Now we will be improving this in a manner that improves search engine rankings. The techniques we will be using are called Search Engine Optimization or SEO, but this step is not only about SEO its about building value for members and the industry you serve. 

The details for steps 6 onwards are covered in the next posting for this article.. 

For over a decade the Coresoft application platform has handled multiple tenancy and been used in numerous on line and multiple entity projects. 

Coresoft was the first to come up with the multiple entity / shared wherefore circumstances where an organization serviced it’s customers through several separate business entities, and the financials for the companies had to remain separate, but s single CRM, Event / Conference / Training, Marketing systems were used to manage the customer and supplier activity shielding the user from the need to alter procedures to book activities into the separate legal entities. 

Progress has incorporated many valuable enhancements to its OpenEdge version 11 platform that will assist applications in the transition and management of large multi tenant environments, many of these help the software provider and administrator manage large volumes of tenant data as a single entities that can be moved, stored restored quickly. 

Today we have a number of hosted service providers offering high availability cloud based hosting alternatives, and the characteristics of these technologies warrants the alteration of the software itself to leverage this different approach to hosting.

These companies are the providers of infrastructure, computer hardware operating systems and tools, you need to choose the business applications that are to run on these machines, and not all business applications are ready for the cloud.

Firstly the cost of hosting large numbers of clients sharing an application quickly rises if the software application does not employ multiple tenancy databases. Multiple tenancy allows a single database to service multiple customer clients. Without this the software is run on a separate database for each client, and as a consequence the computer hardware spec for running a small group of let’s say 20 on line businesses moves from perhaps just 1 average specification server to 5 or 6 average spec servers. The point being that the duplication of server caching and management services (that are running in the computers memory) are not shared between clients so the machine quickly “runs out of horse power”.

The absence of true multi tenancy also creates a severe problem in the cost of maintaining more server hardware than should be required.

So with so much interest in Cloud based solutions it’s time to also examine the technologies used in the software platform and which of these work best for High performance, maximum up time, flexible cloud based solutions.

The characteristics of the platform should at the bare minimum include Single databases for hosting multi tenants Ability to shift tenants between database silo’s with ease Ability to keep tenant operating while being shifted to another database silo Ability to stretch and reduce the tenants costs as volumes increase / decrease Ability to increase / reduce tenant performance during peak / reduced load periods Ability to use on line silo replication to another silo or Bucket Ability to recover just 1 or multiple tenants from an off line silo Load balancing of performance between “Buckets” and within “Buckets”

Reporting solutions from a single client company Secure storage so one client cannot access anthers data Flexible user interface control platform, so client customizations remain separate Flexible business logic definition platform allowing unique business rules for each client entity Flexible user interface control platform allowing individual users to customize their desk top to match the way they work Centralized software update management with 99.9% uptime Before image and are image backup Secondary site after image roll forward Ability to backup / restore a single tenant 

The points above along with the many others I did not choose to include constitute a true multi tenancy business application platform. Without first making substantial changes to a software application it will not be “multi tenant ready” and whilst it might look good in an on line demo the subsequent effect of not being a true multi tenant database is passed onto the consumer down the line disguised as new fees, support charges, slow support, lack of new product innovation or wise still insolvency. The expression “there is no such thing as a free lunch” seems to sum up my point nicely.

If you search on line today, it seems there is a world wide epidemic of companies bowing to the temptation to take an existing application and place it on cloud equipment, so it’s a case of buyer be ware. Do your homework, and compare “apples with apples”, otherwise you could become a part of a large statistic group of customers who lost time, resources and valuable data trying to make the “wrong solution” work for them.