DisTribute

Business Collaboration via the Web

Social networks have revolutionized the way people communicate and collaborate—not only among friends and family, but also in the workplace. Many companies are now implementing social communications in their business, especially those with multiple locations, to help them stay connected and simplify people's ability to share expertise, ideas and corporate information.

The good news is that there are a wide range of free or low-cost social collaboration tools to meet your business needs. This article for Open Forum by Leyl Master Black describes the benefits of eight popular tools for small business social communications, such as:

• Campfire - a Web-based, group-chat tool that can be password protected
• Present.ly - provides a secure and private way to share updates, images, documents, video and audio-clips with colleagues, without them being visible to the outside world
• Yammer - which allows you to set up a private social network for your business locations to communicate, collaborate and share expertise via an easy-to-use, Web-based interface
• and Socialcast – which allows companies to integrate their traditional systems (such as CRM and ERP) with its social software platform

The newly released Podio, unlike the more social networking focused collaboration platforms, follows Spaces, not users and allows you to add an infinite variety of free apps. With good write ups by Mashable, TechCrunch and GetApp.com, it's worth a look.

Along with all the tools to communicate with your colleagues and clients, there are now some handy ways to consolidate all your business & social network information in an interactive online contact card.

• Flavors.me is a simple and elegant way to aggregate all your online presence into one place. This site is simple to use and has a great tutorial that shows the unlimited creative ways to make your online home page.
• DooID has been around the longest and so is one of the most popular. The nice thing about DooID is that you are allowed more than one tiny section, basically expanding the idea of a mere signature area and turning it into a mini-website of links back to you.

Join us at the 2011 Tribute Users Group Meeting in Nashville!

This year’s Tribute Users Group Meeting will take place on June 19-22 and will be located at the beautiful Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. The Gaylord Opryland features 2,881 stylish guest rooms, nine acres of indoor gardens, cascading waterfalls, and an indoor river with its own Delta flatboat, along with a fitness facility, and a world-class spa and fitness center. It’s within walking distance of the newly refurbished Grand Ole Opry and has free shuttle service to Music Row and other Nashville attractions.

We have some great speakers this year that will provide valuable and cost saving information for your business. Jim McDonald, Craig Dunn and Victoria Basham of United Parcel Service will be discussing the services UPS offers for the domestic and international supply chain and methods you could use to lower costs on inbound and outbound freight.

3Delta Systems, a leader in online credit card payment and business-to-business (B2B) data tokenization solutions, will be speaking about how to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) and help you understand the importance of Credit Card Tokenization. Integrated with Tribute and TrulinX software, Tribute’s customers will be able to reduce their cost and scope of complying with these security requirements and better protect their credit card data from a possible breach.

Rubber Tree Systems, our mobile app partner and a provider of "push" technology to give sales people and management direct access to orders, quotes, and other mission critical data on their Blackberry or smart phone, will be presenting their new customer portal, Customer Connect. This is a mobile app that Tribute/TrulinX customers can install on their customers mobile devices to allow them to check order status, quote status, recent shipments, purchase history and more.

WarehouseTWO, a cost-effective inventory-sharing solution available to manufacturers and wholesaler-distributors that is integrated with Tribute and TrulinX software, will be leading a session on Excess Inventory: How to Prevent, Identify and Reduce It, with practical activities and processes that you will be able to implement immediately. And Tim Reynolds, Tribute president, will be giving an overview of cloud computing.

The Welcome Reception will be held Sunday evening, June 19th, with the general meeting taking place Monday through Wednesday morning (June 20th - 22nd). Join Tim Reynolds for the golf scramble at the Gaylord Springs Golf Links, with its Scottish links-style, par-72 layout bordered by limestone bluffs and enhanced by federally protected wetlands, planned for Wednesday morning.

Along with training and networking opportunities, we will have great breakout sessions filled with the knowledge you need to work efficiently, improve your business, and use your software to its full potential. And we will again have a forum on "Going Green" where you can share your tips for reducing costs and waste.

So join us for the 2011 Tribute Users Group Meeting at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. You’ll find the opportunities for gathering cost saving and useful information coupled with the benefits of networking with your peers invaluable. Visit the Tribute website to register.

Keep Your Legal Budget In Check

Many small businesses accept ambiguous pricing from the legal industry. Often, when we have a legal problem, we just want it to go away, no matter what the cost. There is also a lack of understanding of the level of effort that goes into certain legal tasks, not to mention the complexity of America's legal system. However, there are strategies to help control your legal costs. In this article for the OPEN Forum, Mike Periu offers four suggestions:

1. Don't take no for an answer. Request a detailed budget which includes the rate per hour and total number of expected hours, plus fixed fees that may also be necessary. If an attorney isn’t willing to give you a budget, it could be a sign that they haven’t performed the type of legal work you need and therefore aren’t sure how much it will cost.
2. Break it down. A large legal project can be divided into manageable pieces. Manage each stage as a mini-project.
3. Work with specialists. Because attorneys charge for their time, as a client you want to use only the amount of time necessary to achieve your goal. Working with a specialist ensures that.
4. Benchmark. Many legal tasks are procedural in nature. Use your company's past projects and experience from your peers to benchmark your proposed budget.

To read the full article, click here.

The FindLaw website is a good resource for legal matters, and they have an entire section dedicated to the needs of small businesses. For example, click here for a basic article on the types of legal costs you may see on your lawyer's bill.

NorTech Elects Tim Reynolds As New Board Chairman

NorTech's Board of Directors has elected Tim M. Reynolds, president of Tribute, Inc, to serve as the organization's new chairman. NorTech is a regional nonprofit technology-based economic development organization serving 21 counties in Northeast Ohio and is dedicated to promoting Northeast Ohio’s success, assets and skilled workforce.

NorTech’s mission is an apt one for Ohio as the technology career finder website, Dice.com, lists Cleveland and several other Ohio cities as the fastest-growing areas for technology-related jobs. President Obama, during a recent forum of more than 100 small-business executives at Cleveland State University, stated that northeast Ohio is reinventing “the rust belt as the tech belt”. As a catalyst for growing Northeast Ohio's emerging technology industries, NorTech is leading efforts to develop regional innovation clusters that create jobs, attract capital and have a long term, positive economic impact.

Tim Reynolds has been an active member of the NorTech Board and is a member of the organization's Finance Committee. He is also on the Greater Cleveland Partnership Board and Executive Committee, and on the board of the National Small Business Association, a Washington, D.C. - based advocacy group. Mr. Reynolds has previously served as Chairman of the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE) and Chairman of the Northeast Ohio Software Association (NEOSA).

The success of NorTech’s initiatives is demonstrated by the appointment of Rebecca O. Bagley, president and chief executive officer of NorTech, to the US Department of Commerce Innovation Advisory Board by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. (Click here to see some of NorTech's success stories.) The new Innovation Advisory Board will guide a study of U.S. economic competitiveness and innovation to help inform national policies at the heart of U.S. job creation, competitiveness and global strength.

Energy Management and Power Protection

We rely on energy to power the computers and equipment in our businesses. It is critical to run these systems as efficiently as possible while making sure that the power source is reliable, with minimal interruptions.

In today's post we have collected some resources to help you with various aspects of energy management and power protection.

A long-term energy management strategy will save your business money and reduce energy use. The SBA has a list of energy management steps for small- to medium-sized businesses here.

Computer Power Management features — standard in Windows and Macintosh operating systems — automatically place monitors and computers into a low-power "sleep mode" after a period of inactivity. ENERGY STAR has an informative FAQ document here with lots of information on power management for computers.

In an ideal world, electrical utilities would deliver clean, reliable power to business critical
systems. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. It is imperative to have a power protection system for your key servers and other equipment. Emerson Network Power has written a useful white paper with five questions to ask before selecting power protection for critical systems.

On this blog we have written before about backup power sources for small businesses. Click here to read our blog article.

Spiceworks is a free network management software package used by IT professionals to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. Spiceworks has recently teamed with Eaton Corporation to provide free power management software that allows users to remotely monitor and manage your uninterruptible power systems (UPSs).

Reliability-Centered Maintenance

Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a framework used to analyze a system's failure modes and define how to prevent or find those failures early. RCM can be used to create a cost-effective maintenance strategy to address dominant causes of equipment failure.

Proactive maintenance tasks consume time and resources, so they are not something you want to be doing unnecessarily. The Reliability-Centered Maintenance framework helps ensure that the cost of proactive maintenance does not exceed the cost of the consequences of failure. This article by Brendan Casey of HydraulicSupermarket.com describes an example where preventative measures paid off in the long run.

This article from IDCON, INC. warns that Reliability-Centered Maintenance can be overkill for some pieces of machinery. The author believes it is most useful when designing, selecting, and installing new systems in a plant, and when setting up preventive maintenance for complex equipment.

Reliabilityweb.com offers this detailed article with specific steps for both preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance on a hydraulic system. They also provide several tutorials geared to the subject of Reliability-Centered Maintenance.

 

The Versatile QR Code

Have you seen these funky little squares popping up nearly everywhere looking like your teenager’s pop-art project? They are QR Codes (short for Quick Response Codes) and were originally created by Japanese company Denso-Wave to keep track of inventory in the mid-1990s. However, with the popularity of smartphones, QR Codes are being used by businesses as a low cost tool to attract customers and share information.

QR Code is capable of handling all types of data, such as numbers, alphabetic characters, symbols, binary, and control codes and when accessed by your phone can link to anything from your website to contact information to your GPS location.

The creation and placement of QR Codes is simple and cost-effective and the use is growing exponentially. In fact, this data prepared by BGVision, speaks to the escalating global growth of barcode scanning. And for the first time, the US is now leading in the number of scans. It takes less than a minute to create the QR Code using Kaywa, QRStuff, or one of the many free QR Code generation services.

 

Woody Myers explains QR Codes in his blog, The Raco Pulse, and has links to some good articles regarding their use.

Helen Leggatt of Biz Report reveals 10 ways you can use QR Codes now ranging from marketing to charitable efforts.

Bernard Martin, author of the blog Manufacturing Supply Chain, has a great article on the combined use of Twitter and QR Codes in Managing your Mobile Sales Force.

QR codes are malleable and can be redesigned in truly extraordinary ways, while still maintaining their scan-ability. The truth is, QR codes no longer have to be checkerbox in appearance. This article by Hamilton Chan for Mashable explains how you can colorize and customize your QR code.

The uses of QR Codes are limited only by your imagination. You can use them to link to specific instructions or spec sheets on how to assemble products. Embed QR codes on your sophisticated equipment with links for spare parts, SOP’s, maintenance procedures and trouble shooting aids. Use to link to your company’s service and repair hours and schedule. It’s time to check out this inexpensive format for disseminating information and advertising your product and services.

Tips for Keeping Remote Workers in the Loop

Employing a team of remote workers has its benefits, but communication can be difficult. In addition to the usual advice about regular calls, emails, news bulletins and group chat rooms, here are five tips for successfully keeping your remote workers in the loop, courtesy of this article by Amy-Mae Elliott for Mashable:

1. Be Hyper-Aware of Misinterpretation of the Written Word. Written communication can easily be misinterpreted. It’s extra important to keep your messages clear of ambiguity and avoid causing any offense.
2. Share Informal News As Well as Company News. Be sure to share personal news from within the team so coworkers avoid feeling left out.
3. Be Open About Less Positive Developments. Communicate less positive developments with your staff as openly and honestly as possible.
4. Use the Cloud. Ensure that all relevant information your staff could possibly need access to is available, securely, in the cloud, 24/7.
5. Always Make Further Actions Crystal Clear. Management should make certain that everyone is clear on the results of a call, virtual meeting or emails.

Finally, remember that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for keeping your remote workers in the loop. It’s important to monitor how effective your company’s communications are and adapt your methods accordingly.

For the complete article, click here.