OfficeClip Blog

12 productivity tools for 2012

skdutta — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 08:17:00 -0500

I tried to compile twelve good productivity tools that I plan to use in 2012. All these tools are free and some of them have professional paid edition.

1. Join.me

This is a great alternative to gotomeeting and webex web conferencing system. I have also used it many times for customer support. The free version is powerful enough for your team meetings across geographically boundaries. The pro version, that costs $15 per month, makes it very usable for running webinars for upto 200 people.

2. Evernote

Here is one of the best tools for taking your meeting notes or jotting down ideas when you are on the move. It's camera interface allows you to take picture from your mobile camera and store it on the cloud. I have found it as a simple and usable tool for small business. The pro version allows more storage and ability for other people to change your notes.

3. Logmein

Managing various computers from one place is a challenge, even with software like Remote Desktop that comes bundled with the Microsoft Operating system. The reason is that very few tools of this kind works purely on the web. Logmein does not need you to do any setup and create firewall rules or router passthrough settings. It just works on the web. The authentication seems to be solid.

4. Dropbox

This is a simple tool to sync your files in the cloud. Why do you need such a thing? if you are working on various computers, like your office and home, this software allows you to automatically share and keep files and folders in both places in sync.

5. Skype

Skype is a useful software for communication between teams. Be it audio, video or plain phone calls. It works on desktop and mobile phones. It can replace all your telephones and gives you the convinience of having one telephone number following you everywhere.

6. Pickpic

A nice tool for you to take a screenshot, write some comments on it and send it to your boss, vendor or customer. It just makes this process so simple! A competing tool is SnagIt which is a paid software and has more features.

7. Pidgin

Having to keep too many Instant Messenger(IM) open is a pain. Pidgin combines all your IMs into one. This could be Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, MSN or Skype. It connects with most of the popular IMs available today. So, you can keep only one application open, separate your private and office stuff (using groupings) and use it for your business. It still does not support gtalk file transfer and voice calls though!

8. FreeMind

It allows you to express complex ideas on your computer by diagrams. This mind-mapping software has most of the bells and whistles of a commercial mind mapping software but does not have a price tag associated with it. It frees your mind from remembering complex ideas and helps you expand your thoughts.

7. IPlotz

A free/paid screen mockup and wireframe software that will allow you to make quick screen mockup for developers. This is one of the best free software I intend to use regularly. The free version has limits on number of active wire-frames.

8. Filezilla

Even though file transfer with FTP is becoming a thing of past due to proliferation of cloud based storage, this tool is simple to use and should be at your desktop to do quick file transfers.

9. Toodledo

This is a great tool for Getting Things Done (GTD), the simple web 2.0 interface allows you to keep track of all your tasks and deadlines. There are plenty add-ins for various browsers, iphones, android etc. that makes it easy to access your tasks on the go.

10. Syncback

Helps sync your files between various systems using the direct copy or ftp protocol. Once you set it up, it will remember to sync your important files at regular intervals.

11. 7-zip

In my opinion this is the most useful compressing program that replaces winzip, winrar and the compression algorithm bundled with the windows.

12. Xenu's Link Sleuth

This checks website for dead and removed pages and images. Helps to improve your web visitor experience and enhances your SEO rating.

So what are your favorite productivity tools?

Image Creative Commons Attribution Stockerre

New OfficeClip Release (9.2.5) with lots of new features

skdutta — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 21:23:00 -0500

We have now released the newest version of OfficeClip 9.2.5, that incorporates, in addition to numerous bug fixes, implementation of many feedback that you had been giving us in the past few months. Thank you for all your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

To explain all the features will make this newsletter long, so I have decided to highlight the salient points here. I am planning to offer a webinar next week to go through all these features, check your email for the invitation.

New Application: Competitor Tracking

Tracking competitors in an organized manner is key to a successful implementation of your marketing plan. OfficeClip Contact Manager now adds one more member to its family, the Competitor module, which allows you to do SWOT analysis on your competitor. You can also link opportunities with the competitor to help find who you lost your bid to or fine-tune your strategy for winning an opportunity.

New Feature: Daily Call List

This is one of the most wanted feature requests in OfficeClip. The Daily Call List allows you to organize who you need to call and when! You will be able to set up weekly calls to any of your contacts or, if you wish, can set to call them arbitrarily. The Daily Call List module shows all the contacts you need to call on a particular day in an easy to use interface. It shows all the pertinent information on one screen. Try it and let me know if you think we could make it better!

New User Interface

We have heard from you about how easy it is to use OfficeClip user interface. This time we have made it even better. Some buttons and links have been changed to tabs. Other buttons have been made more expressive by adding images to them.

Feature Enhancement: Contact Manager Search

IIf you have been enjoying the Contact Manager Search, you know that it is flexible enough to allow you to search with AND and OR condition on either one or all fields. Now we have added a Google like Exact Search. You can now search for exact words by enclosing your search word with a double quote (").

Showing Deleted Users

When a user is deleted from OfficeClip, organization information that was created by the user will not be removed. The timesheet or expenses of deleted users were not shown on the search screen for user timesheet; however, due to your feedback we have implemented a feature that will allow you to view and search deleted users in the timesheet and expense search screen and reports screen.

How to Track Relationships in CRM

imran — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:52:00 -0500

In most CRM you can relate Contacts with other entities like Accounts or Opportunities. What if you wanted to relate a contact with another instance of contact? Why this is important?

These kinds of relationships can come handy in many business situations where you need to keep track of relationships. Suppose you are a real estate agent and you want to track a buyer (Contact), his agent(Contact), the broker(An Account) and the sale(an opportunity).

Data security when working with a partner organization

skdutta — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:57:00 -0500

Yesterday one of our customers wanted to know how he can invite the employees of a new outsourcing company (he is working with) to OfficeClip but keep them from seeing internal information of the company.

Sometimes people have to go extra mile to hide their information. For example, if you want to give access to somebody to your personal computer, you may want to make sure that they do not have access to folders or files on the hard drive.

OfficeClip has a simple way to accomplish this. In OfficeClip, you can create multiple organization (or division) that are isolated from each other. Effectively, it is equivalent to having multiple OfficeClip installed. Only users of a particular organization has access to all the information within that organization. So, if you put yourself into multiple organization, you can manage them and at the same time isolate information from other people who are not a part of your organization.

In addition to the organization security OfficeClip provides other ways to manage security. Role Based Security allows users to define roles and create privileges in the organization. For example you may want to people in Accounting Role to create an accounting report. Object based security allows users to create security token for each objects (like contacts, documents etc.) and control them with various levels of granularity.

Image courtesy Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution

Apple from Newton Pad to iPad

skdutta — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:01:00 -0500

Although this board is used for making our product announcements, I could not help reacting to the news.

Steve Jobs departure from Apple is a well anticipated event since his leave of absense back in 2004. Although I do not personally own any Apple devices (except the company owns a few for testing purposes) and not too many of my friends do (yes I am branded out of fashion and opted for open android), I still could not part with my, now unusable, Newton Pad. I had hoped that Apple would bring back Newton after Steve Jobs came back as CEO and felt sad when he killed it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

It was revived many years later with iPad, which was a category creator, and I would say is "Newton done right". Then we saw the years of copycats (per Steve Jobs)! There were windows based tablets before iPad but nobody understood the opportunity of bringing it for masses for a resonable price before Apple (Microsoft failed a few times!). It was a combination of innovation, think different branding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different), vision of Steve Jobs and well executed marketing machine.

Now looking at how investor confidence showed up in the market post Steve's departure, it seems that Apple is under pressure to continue to innovate for the next few years to shift the brand focus away from Steve Jobs as continuous innovator and CEO. We all expect from Apple to come up with innovative products every two years or so. If they stay with +1 improvements it will create opportunities for other competitors to come closer.

Maybe HP killed their tablet too soon!

Get 10X more disk space in OfficeClip

imran — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:54:00 -0500

If you are currently using OfficeClip Document Sharing, Contact Manager, Time Tracking or Expense Tracking then this post will be useful for you.

Let us know how you are using OfficeClip and we will increase your disk space 10 times. Just write a couple of paragraphs on one or more of these:

How OfficeClip is helping you in your business (compare with what you had before OfficeClip) and how excited you are using OfficeClip.
One or two tips or tricks on using OfficeClip

Put your story on a page on your website or your blog and send us the link. If you do not have a blog yet, you can create one in 5 minutes in wordpress (https://en.wordpress.com/signup/)

Photo Courtesy pobre.ch, Creative Commons Attribution.

Inexpensive Hosting Options for OfficeClip Suite

skdutta — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:39:00 -0500

OfficeClip is an all-in-one suite of Software that allows management of Employees Time and Expenses, keeping track of your Prospects, Customers, Opportunities and Issues . It also has feature to send Invoices and get paid on-line.

Many of our customers choose the installed version (where your install it on your own server) of the software as compared to the hosted version (on the cloud) because they want full control of their data. Some of our installed version customer wants to host OfficeClip on a shared hosting or dedicated hosting at a service provider. With OfficeClip 9.1 it has become easy to install in a shared or dedicated host using manual installation.

We looked around for cost effective hosting providers for our customers so that OfficeClip can be installed outside the firewall. the top 2 are given below:

Arvixe - They provide shared hosting for the .net platform. I am pretty impressed with their offerings and services. You can host OfficeClip here for $5 per month (if you sign up for 2 years or $8 month to month). You can create upto six sites and do not have limits of space or bandwidth (as long as you are using it for your site). They do have other offerings like virtual hosting and dedicated hosting in case you want to upgrade. To test their service we have created a test account at http://OfficeClip.us. Let us know if you want to play with it and we will send you the login credentials.
1and1 - They are arguably one of the biggest hosting provider based out of Germany. They have two packages that we found interesting and cost effective. The first one is virtual server which is $29 per month for 1GB RAM and 20 GB disk space and the other one is a dedicated server that gives 250GB disk space and 2GB RAM for $70. We have tested OfficeClip on their virtual server and it runs fine. The advantage of having your OfficeClip hosted in virtual or dedicated server is that you get to control your machine via remote desktop and can install software that is not possible with shared server (although OfficeClip does not need such things). Note that I have shown the least expensive options where OfficeClip is tested to be working!

Note: OfficeClip provides installation services for these third party server. Contact us if you need assistance.

Photo courtesy Flickr Creative Commons Attribution

TIG: OfficeClip provides more feature than anybody else!

Golden Scott — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:00:00 -0500

Terra Information Group Inc. (TIG) needed a cost effective Web Time Sheet and Expense Tracking software to manage employees and projects across their offices in many cities. One of the requirements was that they would be able to track time across various projects, teams and geographical locations.

TIG chose OfficeClip Timesheet and Expense Tracker after comparing many other similar software in the market. After completing evaluations and due diligence for a few months they finally decided to settle with OfficeClip's Timesheet Software. "OfficeClip provides us with more feature than anyone else in the market," says Mamta Aggarwal, Consulting Manager of Terra Information Group.

TIG, is based out of Warrenville, Illinois, with operations centers in Illinois, Colorado and Florida and even international offices in Canada and India. Their expertise includes functional areas and key enterprise application modules for each area of SAP.

"Prior to OfficeClip we have been using Excel spreadsheet to do our time and expense management which was getting very complicated and difficult to maintain with our fast growth. We found the need for a hosted Time and Expense Management System for our employees who are not in the same location and sometime mobile" says Mamta.

Working with TIG is more like a partnership. In the initial phase of installation, TIG made a number of suggestions that were considered for implementation by OfficeClip. Majority of the suggestions were applied and within the new release these features were available to all users. The remaining suggestions are still in the works of being developed.

"We are excited to try out the new OfficeClip features like Employee Paid Time Off (PTO), Accrual tracking and Invoices," says Mamta.

Changes in OfficeClip New Release 9.1

skdutta — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:54:00 -0500

We are excited to announce our new release of OfficeClip 9.1. This is a major release and has been made possible because our users have provided us lots of feedback in our feedback site. In this release we bring you a new Application called Paid Time Off. It is now possible to track employee paid time off (PTO) and manage vacation accruals. Other major enhancements include ability to control the page size and using template to create the login screen. In addition to this we have made a lot of small enhancements and many bug fixes.

New Application: Paid Time Off and Accruals

When an employee requests a time off, depending on the settings, it will show up in the group calendar. The entire group will be able to see the status of the time off and who has requested it. This helps the team to know who will be available at a particular point of time. Administrators can also set who can approve the time off.

Accruals rules can also be set for each time off category and the system automatically calculates the accruals. For example, a rule can be created such that "each employee can accrue 1.25 vacation days every month but can only carry over 5 vacation to the new year".

Controlling the Page Size

Based on the popular suggestion we have made it possible for you to control the page size of the Contact Manager pages. The page size once set is remembered in the program.

Templates for Login Screen

The login screen has been made more configurable, you can now select from various templates as a starting point of what your login screen should look like.

Lots of other enhancements and fixes

We have made lots of other enhancements and many bug fixes. Some of the important enhancements are:

Invoice currency now works for many other countries other than US and UK
OfficeClip now has a separate Enterprise Edition. All existing users will not see any change in the functionality. Click here to see the difference between various editions of OfficeClip.
OfficeClip now has a separate enterprise edition. All existing users will not see any change in the functionality.
The entire codebase is changed to .Net version 4.0, this will not affect any functionality but our installed version user will see slight delay in upgrade if this framework is not available on their machine.

Use OfficeClip Invoices for Payment Processing

skdutta — Tue, 24 May 2011 07:03:00 -0500

The OfficeClip Invoice application can now accept payments via credit cards, debit cards, Paypal and your customer's bank account (ACH payments available only in the US).

OfficeClip creates a seamless workflow for the entire process. An invoice is created and sent to the customer via OfficeClip extranet. The customer can then open the invoice by clicking on a link on their email. Upon presentation, the customer can pay for the invoice by clicking on the Pay button. Payment can be made using a credit card, Paypal or bank account. Upon payment, an email will be sent to you and the customer as the receipt for the payment.

To accept credit cards go to Contacts > Invoices from the left menu, click on the Admin > Payments from the top menu and then enter your account details.

The following gateways are currently supported:

Bluepay
Google Checkout
Paypal

To enable one of these gateways you will need to create an account with one or more of these providers.

Bluepay

Using Bluepay you will be able to accept Credit Cards and Bank Account payments from your customer. You can also accept recurring payments. In order to do this you will need to setup with them and also have a merchant account.

Click here to setup a Bluepay Account

Paypal

Paypal, an ebay company, is widely used method of payment for on-line transactions. With Paypal your customers will be able to pay you using credit cards and also from their Paypal account. In order to do this you will need to create a merchant account with.

Click here to setup your Paypal Merchant Account

Image courtesy The Consumerist