You have industry experts in your business, but does anyone beyond the office walls know? Do your potential clients know? How do they know?

This is where the new social media and social networking tools on the internet can be of huge benefit to your business.

In the age of Google, people are able to search for information like never before. And when they find the information they need, the person or organisation that provided the information gets raised in that persons estimation.

The person or business that provides someone with the right information at just the right time gains “social capital”. And that can’t be bought, and it is vital as you can imagine to bringing a new client from prospective customer to happy customer.

But, are you as a business helping your employees create these opportunities? Is their knowledge and experience being made available in ways that clients can easily find and use it? And how can you share expert knowledge with out “giving away the farm”?

It’s is of course, a balancing act… and something that needs to be planned and implemented and reviewed.

You will want to sit down and decide your internal policy on what is okay to share publicly and what must remain confidential. You need to decide policies on how you share, who shares and what they should be sharing. You will want to develop a policy that staff need to understand that explains what the objectives are of their sharing, what tone is acceptable, what information is acceptable and what is not. You will also need to decide what tools you use and how they are used.

For example, YouTube is a great tool. You can use YouTube to share product demonstrations or to let one of your influential, well spoken staff talk about a topic, service or product. The reach of YouTube is amazing, millions of hits daily. It costs nothing and can be hugely powerful.

BUT….

Some businesses block YouTube completely. You might consider using a less popular, but more “corporate” video hosting service; or post the video on your own website directly. This may involve a larger cost and removes you from people finding you on YouTube; but if it means that people can access your video from their network it may be important. It depends entirely on your target audience.

Blogs are now very common, they provide a way of sharing regularly. A well written and well maintained blog can create a priceless asset for your business. But again, there are decisions to make, do you host all your blogs direct on your company website? Or use a free service like BlogSpot? Is the blog the businesses or the staff members? Should staff blog anonymously via a corporate blog or have individual blogs?

Also you want to consider what tone the blogs have, how often will they be updated? Who will update them? What processes will you need in place to ensure that the blog entries are created to benefit your business best? For example, how often will the company blog(s) be updated? Weekly? Daily? Who will update them? What subjects will be written about? Who will respond to comments left on the blog, or comments about the blog written elsewhere? What will happen if the blog posts are not done on time, or are not appropriate as per your policy?

We would recommend investigating all these questions and writing down the answers. Next get a wall planner and schedule in when you want blog posts and start adding what topics will be covered. Obviously, what people write is up to them and and you will want to write about things that are topical at the time perhaps; but a plan of what to write, when is a great idea we find.

Next you might want to consider Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites.
How do these sites fit with your market? Are you selling to the general population or to other businesses. What sites and services are they using? A FaceBook presence might be great if you sell to the public, but might look terrible if you are selling to large corporates. You might decide that LinkedIn is the right tool.

With all these sites and services, you will want to discuss their use internally and make some decisions about how they should be used by your staff.

We would not recommend and banning of use, but you may want to explore defining standards on the use of these and the new sites that pop up in quite a generalized way. For example, perhaps you decide that all staff may use any site they like, as long as they do not discuss work matters on their personal accounts. Combined with this you might decide that staff should create company specific accounts for these sites and do all their sharing about business things via these work only accounts.  For example a twitter/joebloggs_at_companyname account rather than a twitter/joebloggs account for talking about business.

It is a complicated area, that has great potential for your business, it really is!
HOWEVER… like anything there are issues to be addressed properly before use, enVirtua is here to help you navigate this minefield and ensure that you get all the benefits without getting “stung” by some of the errors that many people make. Please drop us an email or give us a ring to have an informal chat about this subject and how it can potentially work for you.

Samantha is an athlete, she is working with enVirtua whilst also training at Camberley Judo Club hoping to make the London 2012 Great Britain team. Her chosen sport is one where Britain excels and she is already an international level athlete and we hope will make 2012.

As well as understanding elite performance and having the work ethic of a champion, Samantha understands and uses the Internet, social media and technology generally.

She has practical experience in how tools like FaceBook, Blogs, Twitter, Podcasts, Youtube, etc can have positive benefits for organizations and individuals.

Samantha will be involved in contacting new prospective clients and trying to gain an understanding of their business and deciding if what enVirtua does would be of benefit.

If your business (or other organisation) is interested in exploring how web technologies might help you develop, please give Samantha a call on the office number. You can reach her via email at sales@envirtua.com also.

Hits is a very common metric for websites; probably the best known and most used statistic for websites. Basically, hits is a count of the number of requests to your webserver. Each time a page is requested a new hit is generated.

It is very different to measuring how many people have visited your website, how many pages are viewed or how popular your website.

Hits are very commonly abused as a statistic, by search engine optimization (SEO) companies and by staff inside businesses. Sometimes innocently, but often we see businesses being lead astray intentionally.

For example, we have seen a internal IT manager hit a performance bonus by setting the home page of every pc in the office to be the company website. Resulting in a cash bonus because of an increase in hits.

A client we worked with had been “conned” by a SEO company. They charged a large amount of money and “optimized” their website. What the SEO company actually did was run a programme on one of their servers that visited our clients website regularly, increasing the website hits.

Hits are useful, they provide a very corse measurement of traffic to your website. It can show some important elements like small numbers of visitors revisiting pages over and over. But on the whole, there are better metrics for a business to track.

So if hits are not good how do we know the site is working?

This is our view; decide what the objective of your website is, then measue that. So if your website is there to attract new clients, measure (via hard metrics) how many new clients come via the website. If you sell via your website, measure sales NOT the hits.

Many websites are about influencing an audience and having impact in your community/industry.

We have an experience working in sport, where influencing/informing people in the sport is often what matters.

A real life recent example we had, was a conversation we had with a communication manager. They questioned if blogs were worth it, asking specifically about the hits of blogs in their sport.

Our response was/is that it is not about the hits rather the impact. A website/blog has an audience and it can be large or small. But, if that small audience includes the important people to your business it is much more valueable than a huge audience (lots of hits) of people that don’t matter to your business.

If all your hits are from North America; but you only trade in the UK your website is not working. If you have a small hit rate, but the are all from the city you do all your trade in; the site may be more valuable than lots of hits from China.

Summary:
Hits are not a great measure of website success, they are a very rough measure of traffic. Success should be based on your business goals, not raw hit figures.
The impact on your target audience/market is more important than hits. One hit by the right person is worth a million hits from the wrong people.

enVirtua is looking to work with businesses who want to develop their business via websites. We would like to work with you to define your success criteria, build/rebuild your website and refine ovetime to achieve your business goals.

Please contact us by phone or email to start a conversation about what your business wants to achieve.

The Apple iPhone is a phenomenon, a real change in the way people use their mobile phones. The AppStore is an interesting innovation which has the potential to put your business right in the pocket of your clients and customers. Within a week of the release of the iPhone application we recently developed the web traffic for the organisation has doubled. This was in part due to the release publicity, but as weeks have gone by we are observing a continued growth in the traffic.

The application we developed has no sales function built in and purely a service offering. It extends the organisations current website and provides a faster, more iPhone version of what was already available via a iPhone formatted website. The iPhone application is faster; but in terms of features it is identical to the existing website.

By creating a iPhone application, you expose your organisation to anyone of the millions of iPhone users who might come across your application. Currently, very few small niche businesses seem to have developed applications; which is a great lost opportunity for them. A niche iPhone application is likely to be successful as people who have an interest in you specific area are likely to find your app via the appstore search and install it on their phone.

For example, if you are a sporting organisation, you might create an application that allows users to get the latest results for the league. You might charge a small amount for the app, which would be pure revenue. Or provide it free so as to build an audience  which you can quantify and use to support sponsorship or grant applications.

If you are a business, perhaps you too can share the latest news. Or provide a tool to calculate the correct type of product and quantity a customer might need. You can incorporate ordering and customer service. If you are a service business, perhaps you’d like to show via your app which of your staff or teams are currently available to assist.

Imagine something that your clients might want from you and create an application that helps them give you your business.

Our recommendation, find a simple service you can deliver. Then create a simple iPhone application that delivers that service with the absolute minimum of fuss. Later, if the application works, add more features or create another simple application.

We are excited about the potential iPhone applications have and would love to work with you on developing an iPhone app.
Contact us and lets have a chat about your ideas.

What we have been finding is that often prospective clients find it difficult to make the right decisions, becuase quite simply, they don’t know enough about your area of business.
You know that the tensile strength of your widget is greater than your competition and that this is why your widget is superior. But your potential clients don’t necessarily appreciate the importance of strength of widgets and are looking at the shape of the widget handle instead, which has no revelance to the operation right.

There are two ways of tackling this problem, telling people and helping people learn.
You can stand their and tell them till you are blue in the face that the stength of the widget is what matters and they will probably not believe you.
Or… you can educate your potential customers before they even talk to you, and this is where your website and your approach to your website can have a big impact on your business.

Most businesses we have been working and speaking with know huge amounts about their business sector. Their staff know everything about widgets there is to know, they know the history, the technical details, everything.
But their sales team then have to go teach prospective clients about the widget business before they can do business with them. Why? Because the customer wants to make informed buying decisions and not get ripped off.
However, often the only way to get some knowledge is to talk to lots of suppliers and try and seperate the sales pitch from the facts and compare info to find the most honest supplier.
Wouldn’t it be easier if your potential next customer knew that widget strength mattered, that handle shape was unimportant and that using adamatium instead of unobtainium was a wise desision due to the fact that unobtanium has environmental issues attached that could lead to hidden costs.
This would mean they would find your company with it’s adamantium widgets with great tensile strength and know that they are the best. Then they’d just want to get to know your company a little before placing and order.

So here is the idea, use your website to educate people about your industry (where appropriate).
On your website, share the story of the creation of the original widget. Tell them about that disaster back in 1866 when wooden widgets were used and broke because they were too weak.
Tell them about how your company moved to widgets with greater strength because you have this special machine that can build them stronger.
Share the experiences of how Jane in your office was involved in writing the ISO standard for your widgets becuase she is a world leader in the area of widgets.
Write about how your other customer Ajax Inc. is using your widget to raise the Titanic one crank at a time becuase your widget was the only one strong enough to do the job.

You might also want to tell them about the time you had a bad batch of widgets come from the factory and your QA department caught them before they went out to customers and then
worked through the night to make sure that all orders were sent out on time, with widgets tested by you.

Moving away from the widget analogy, consider the difference between a company website that has great information that teaches potential customers about your industry, your company, your products and
the website that just tells them that your sell products X, Y and Z. Which company seems like the expert in the field? Which one seems more worthy of your trust and your business?

The other issue we find when we explain the above ideas to businesses is that they often don’t appreciate how uniquely positioned their business really is.
The often can’t see where they have good information to share, good stories to tell.

This is where enVirtua can assist; we can help you identify where you can educate, how you can share that knowledge effectively; and importantly, how you can grow your business as a result.
We can help with design, technology and also with helping your business share and educate online. We can lead you through using your website, blogs, podcasts, youtube, twitter, FaceBook etc in effective ways.
enVirtua can work with you to plan out what you will share, how you will share it and help you create the content.

We would welcome the chance to speak with you about all these areas, just give us a call on 020 7193 8987 or drop us an email on sales@envirtua.com

A big question you will face is what phones to support and what approach to take. For example, should you create a simplified version of your website that works on all small screen browsers across most any phone? Or should you go the Apple AppStore route and build an app that only works for those customers that have an iPhone?

The answer depends on your customers and on what you are offering. And why.

Here are some ideas to help you decide.

1. Consumer or B2B?
DO you sell to the consumer market or to businesses? If it is businesses perhaps something targetted at BlackBerry is more worth than iPhone? Though, this is a subjective call.

2. Local or International?
Are you able to do business with people world wide or just in your city? If international, then maybe a more encompassing option is requred. If you are targetting your local community, perhaps they all have the same sort of phone?
3. Pay for app or free service?
If you want to make your service available for free, then you can decide on most platforms including the Apple iPhone AppStore. If however you want to charge for your app, then you are probably limited in which platform to attack.

4. Whats hot!
Lets face it, the iPhone is hot. Nokia phones are not. Building an iPhone app is cool and may be worth doing simply to be in the appstore. Thousands of apps are being looked at and downloaded right now, even just having an app on the store might help business through more poeple seeing your business.

5. Building on the shoulders of giants.
One of the big advantages to say an iPhone app is that much of the work has been done for you. The iPhone SDK ensures that your App will look pretty good no matter what quality it is inside. Those whizzy transitions and so forth are available to you automatically. The nice touch interface etc is all there, you don’t have to invent it. So you can build on top of Apples massively successful design work.

Summary:
Here at enVirtua we are confired iPhone users (the latest design of the site told you that right?). We areworking on more than one mobile application at present and see more in the furture.

We do see a difference between web applications designed for mobile and native mobile apps and specifically the iphone apps. All have there pros and cons, we are happy to discuss the differences with you.

As you might have guessed, the staff have been suffering from performance issues and our client has been exploring solutions to improve the WAN performance. When we became involved they had just trialled the popular RiverBed WAFS solution… but it made the situation worse!

Why did it make the situation worse?

The problem with WAN traffic is often not about the simple amount of data going across the WAN, more often it is about the response times and “feel” of using the link within specific user applications. In our client’s case, the RiverBed did a good job, it compressed the traffic traversing the WAN quite well. Reporting a 50%+ “increase” in bandwidth, so in effect creating a 3MB virtual pipe where the actual link was only 2mb.

But the users complained MORE bitterly than before… why?

The reason is that that user performance is about more than raw data compression or TCP/IP optimisation. It is about how long it takes to open or close a file. How fast an application refreshes, how long it takes to load a SharePoint page. None of these examples were noticeably improved by the RiverBed’s configuration. And in fact made it worse.

It made it worse because it added latency as the RiverBed devices at either end processed the data traffic. It also provided a faster conduit for “chatty” protocols and for “greedy” applications. And based on the experiences of the staff it didn’t prioritise the traffic that mattered to them.

How to improve the situation?

What we would always suggest to a client is that they start by benchmarking the performance users perceive in both subjective and objective terms BEFORE any changes are made. You’ll want to benchmark across a variety of days and times. So first thing, last thing and say at lunchtime. On a Monday, a Friday and the last day of the Month, etc.

You will want to discover what traffic matters to your users and to your business (they are often different). And have your benchmarks ready to provide metrics on the level of performance of the network.

Then… and only then… do you want to make some changes. Once you have made one change, you will be well served to then re benchmark performance of the WAN, to see how the changes have changed the situation. Sometimes (as in our clients case), a supposed performance improvement change actually causes a decrease in performance. Often because solution vendors and their resellers, do not bother to benchmark with you; so have no idea what their product will do in your environment.

So what to change?

Here are some tips that we have used on many organisations networks and depending on their environment have worked well.

1. Try traffic shaping before traffic optimisation and compression.
Your WAN is host to a wide variety of applications, from recreational web surfing through to email and onto database traffic and  sales systems. Some applications are “greedy” and will use all the WAN bandwidth they can and this is a really common cause of performance issues, a web download or upload can quickly kill the SAP traffic leaving your users tearing out their hair!Traffic shaping can limit how much bandwidth each application is allowed to use, prevently one traffic type from effecting another. You can also prioritise one traffic type over another, so that for example your internal Intranet can be given priority over an external website(s), or audio streaming etc.

2. Limit don’t block.
The temptation is to block bad traffic (like Audio and Video streaming, IM traffic, Skype, etc). But this can often be the cause of bigger problems. Simply severely restricting (say down to 25 kb/sec or lower) the users and applications will not detect that traffic is being blocked, just that it does not work well. This is more likely to prevent them using it than if you block the traffic and the application or user finds a way around the block and suddenly the traffic is unlimited again.

3. Protect the important before restricting the bad.
Think about what matters to your users and your business and protect that traffic first. Simply doing this is often enough, forcing less important and bad traffic/applications to fight for bandwidth below you important traffic will often give you all the improvements you need.

4. Think about what users experience.
Our most common suggestion is to severely limit the bandwidth that email is allowed to use. Which often comes up against resistance as email is often “mission critical”. The confusion here is about if the is important in terms of transport across your WAN. If an email takes 30 seconds or 90 seconds to reach a recipient is not noticeable to users as they are normally only told that it has arrived after the transport has occured. Also most email clients only poll for email on a 5 minute or more cycle. So limiting email traffic (so it takes longer) normally has no effect on user perception but can have a huge impact on the performance of the applications that need live updates (web apps, SharePoint etc).

Above are four tips that we hope you with your thinking about the problems you will encounter working over a WAN. Again the most important suggestion we have is to benchmark before, during and after implementing changes and solutions. You need subjective and objective reporting on performance to know if the time, energy and money you are investing is actually helping improve your situation. If your vendor(s) are not including some benchmarking, warning bells should be sounding in your head.

If you’d like some assistance in tuning your WAN, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

With the Cloud Backup solution installed on several machines you have the ability to setup a shared drive via the configuration screens, which you can then use to put shared documents. Obviously as they are stored on our system, if your PC oryour colleagues machine dies, your data is safe and secure still.

Below is a video showing you about the shared network drive feature:

The cloud backup and shared network drive services are complimentary and do not conflict with one another. You can start with either and then add the other (at no additional cost) at a later date. Please give it a go and let us know what you think.

In the age of the internet, your business may be global and you might be missing a real opportunity! In this article we want to explore how your business large or small might be international and how you can benefit from it… and how to help ensure you take advantage of the opportunities offered to you.

There are millions of people on the internet, all over the globe. And many of them are in need of the service or product your business offers. They might be in your town, or they might be in Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe or the Americas.

Perhaps your biggest market may not be where you think it is. Maybe there is a whole group of people that need your business that are geographically separate from you. Your next customer might be coming from the internet; is your website AND your business ready for that?

A good first question is this, can you actually deliver your product or service to someone overseas?

Do you have the processes and service partnerships in place to deliver a product (service) to someone buying overseas? Can you process an Indian credit card? Do you have a courier company that will deliver to Samoa? Do you have staff (or business partners) that can liaise with customers who don’t speak English?

The next question is, could someone who does not speak English use your website?

Do you have your website in English only? Do you have a french, German or Japanese version of your site? If you are trying to be international, does your website shopping cart cope with different currencies, languages, etc.? If you have a online service, can your service run in different languages.

So how do you get started?
Well, you can start by using something like Google Translate to machine translate your website. This won’t give a great translation, but will at least allow people from a different language to navigate your website. A better method is to have actual different language versions of the site created, so that search engines can index your site in your potential new customers language.

Next you might look at fuller Internationalization and Localisation features in the code behind your website.

What else? The most important thing is that if you bring in customers from overseas, you can serve them properly. This will need you to implement procedures in the office and with your partners to ensure that you can process an order, deliver the service and deal with any communication you need to do with the customer.

Need help?

As a widely experienced firm, we can help you with both the technical side and the practicalities of the office procedures.

The problem with large projects is that there are always issues that arise that push back deadlines. As deadlines get pushed back, revenue can be affected as your project fails to deliver on time. This is bad news for any business (or project), so ensuring you have planned for problems and have processes in place to fault find, design solutions and implement the solutions is vital! Key also is having processes in place to document all the issues so that you can identify and understand the root cause of the problems and ensure that these sorts of issues don’t happen again in the future.

Managing all this is difficult and needs quite a bit of effort, which often is not planned for or resourced fully.

On our current project, the client appreciated that they needed to bring in some extra resource to deal with the growing pile of issues and also to help put processes in place to lessen the resource required to deliver their product on time. There is always a balance betrween “fighting fires” and fixing the underlying causes of the issues.

One of the big issues every business faces is that the “fire fighting” normally takes precedence over the underlying problems. Which is not the way it should be, fixing one underlying problem might decrease your “fire fighting” by 25%.

And example is configuration management, a common problem in many organisations. I have lost count of the number of corporate networks I have worked on where the documentation showing how things work is poor or non-existant. It will almost always be out of date (if it exists). This does not cause a problem… until there is a problem. Without an accurate map of the system, it is very VERY difficult for people to try and fix complicate root cause issues.

Creating a documentation process is often a good starting point for any effort to solve issues.

In a previous organisation, we started small with a simple Wiki used only by two engineers. Later some of the management started using the wiki and then followed all the technical people. That initial effort to document via the wiki resulted in a combined effort that delivered a detailed map of the companies infrastructure.

In another organisation, documentation of the infrastructure was not the issue, rather documenting what issues were occuring. This we resolved by implementing a simple helpdesk application, that allowed the IT people to keep track of problems they were solving day to day. Everything from pulling paper out of printers to finding and fixing bugs in software started being recorded. The upshot of this was the IT guys were able to identify trends and focus their “sparetime” on trying to improve areas that were causing underlying issues. It also gave management visibility as to the amount of work being done by the IT team and which departments productivity was being affected the most by problems.

So having ways and means to document structure and issues is key to supporting any technical solution. The final piece of the puzzle is ensuring that you have enough resource (people) and the right resources to solve the fire fighting and underlying issues you will encounter. This is partly an HR problem and partly a process problem. You need useful people, but you also need to ensure that these people have the right tools and the right organisational structure and support to do their job well and in the best way for your business.

Many years ago, I worked on a large support team within a multi-national company. The IT support team at one stage was not balanced properly. By this I mean we had too many people in the team digging deeply into the underlying causes of problems rather than applying quick fixes (band aid solutions) to keep staff working. This happens all the time if management does not carefully select IT people. You need a mix of persoinality and competencies, you need some people who will sit and read logfiles all day to solve one issue and some people who will reboot a server in a hurry as they know it will get the system working ASAP, though not solve the underlying issue.

The other key element in all this is effective management of issue. You need to know when to dig deeper into a problem and when to solve the symptom and move on. In enVirtua’s current angagement, this is primarily what we are getting paid to do. It is vital to the project that issues be resolved quickly so the project milestones are met, but equally root causes need to be identified and solutions to these issues found and applied proactively and restrospectively. This current engagement requires that enVirtua does some quick fault finding on issues that come in via two seperate helpdesk systems and do triage, determining how best to resolve the issue. Also, issues need to be clustered and root cause analysis work is part of what we are providing along with finding the resouces best suited to making improvements to solve issues and maintaining a gentle management role over suppliers to and staff of our clients; despite our lack of real authority over those people.

It has been a challenging project, which has sharpened our senses when it comes to support structures and how they work well. Of course it has meant looking at enVirtua’s internal support structures and identifying some holes in what we do ourselves. Over the next few months we are making changes to improve our customer care and issue resolution processes as a result of working for this client.

To summarise, the “Issue with Issues” is that too often issue management is not something that is carefully planned and managed. It is left till last or not planned for at all as people (wrongly) don’t expect many/any issues to occur. If we had one thing to say to people it would be that issues always occur, always! You need to plan on problems happening and not neglect to have processes in place for when things go wrong. It will happen one day and the amount of preparation you have put into place will determine how much your companies profits are affected.