Wireless technology: Believe it or not, it is still in the early stage for companies. Companies shy away from it because of the security problems, but wireless is only going to become more prevalent.

This brings me to the next tip: Security. This is completely important and as wireless and telecommuting become more popular, security will be front and center. It could also cause lots of problems if the security skills of the IT teams are not kept as up-to-date as humanly possible.

Remote User Support: Many companies have been offering telecommuting to their employees for awhile now, but there are issues at hand.  The IT staff needs to be able to support these workers remotely while keeping full security of the internal network. Skills relating to VPN technologies and technologies for quarantining of remote users who could put the network at risk are going to be increasingly necessary.

Software as a Service (SaaS) will become increasingly important to businesses and this will affect IT departments. Traditional administrators will want to acquire skills with an emphasis in planning and convergence, service provision, and multi-tenant architecture. SaaS and Cloud Computing are making businesses more flexible: IT professionals will need to be just as flexible in their skill set.

Perhaps the most important, however, is gaining the skills and expertise needed to provide Mobile User Support.  Security will be an issue here as well and IT professionals will need to support email configuration and connection to the company LAN.

There is certainly a lot going on out there in IT right now and things are moving very fast. Businesses and their workers expect to be able to do many things, from many locations, many different ways and this will require a great deal of innovation and flexibility on the part of IT staff.

Discuss your ideas and concerns about security, cloud computing, etc. by joining our forum and following us on Twitter!

SEO is a must, especially for small businesses who don’t have large advertising budgets to get top spots in Google PPC Ads. We have implemented several strategies  to imrpove our SEO at OfficeClip, but I have not seen SEO broken down into these nice categories before; makes it very easy to understand.

On-Page SEO is your page title at the very top, which should have keywords that match what is on the actual web page. Also, it is important to have a clean URL, headers throughout your HTML code (the search engine picks up on these and it can make the content easier for visitors to read!), relevant, thoughtful content, and Meta descriptions. Yes, you still need meta tags and the Meta description is important because it is what the search engines will display in the organic rankings.

Off-Page SEO refers to inbound links, which act as recommendations for your website and product. Inbound links are URLs on other sites that link to your website and search engines look favorably on this, as it implies your website is important. You can have a link to your site listed on another site and you can also have Anchor Text which is if the website mentions a keyword of yours and links to the page on your website that contains those keywords. This is very powerful, as it shows a great match for the search engine as it goes in to rank your site. Finally, getting links to your site from big, trusted sites like Cnn.com or Business.com are good. If that is not possible (which often isn’t for us very small businesses!) then a page that is at least ranked by Google will be a great alternative.

It seems like a lot of work, but the payoff is that you can show up in organic rankings, ideally on the first page. When people click on your link, you are not charged as you are with PPC Ads! So good luck implementing SEO and check out this great site,  http://www.bruceclay.com,  for more info on SEO and some great free tools!

Although Bing is no Google, they have started a massive advertising assault to get people to begin using it. It is already the #8 search engine in the UK, with users spending 8 minutes there before moving on. Not bad. The design of Bing is also something that could pay off for advertisers (this is the kind of thing we at OfficeClip are currently considering) and Andy Beal of SearchNewz gives a good explanation for this:

“Bing uses a three column design for its search results page. Having just returned from Microsofts Search Summit, I can confirm that this wasnt just done on a whim, but very carefully thought out. One of the driving factors for the design, was the ability to give Bing users a vast array of data and refinement options. In essence, Bing gave that left hand navigational column a prime time spot.”

On the more descriptive side of what Bing is and its functions for users, not advertisers, David Berkowitz from the Advertising Age defines Bing as a Search Portal as opposed to the Decision Engine it claims to be. The Search Portal gives the user all the information it needs from one place so they won’t have to go anywhere else. Bing offers users the ability to keeping redefining and refining their searches so they don’t need to leave the site until they have found what they are exactly looking for and go to that website.

I like this idea because Google has problems giving really up to date information; I rely a lot on that “Back” button because I end of clicking on things that are not even close to what I want. I am really excited about Bing, both to use for my own searches and to get into for advertising OfficeClip and all our web-based products! Be sure to keep your eyes out for us on Bing when you use it!

Follow us on Twitter and check out our Forum

To fill this gap the Web Contact Manager provides the ability to create arbitary relationships between various entities in OfficeClip. For example:

• For Real Estate transactions, a Broker can be a relationship between two Contacts
• An Account can be a Partner of another Account

Relationships are shown as the “children” of the object (for example Contacts, Accounts etc.) to which it is attached. A relationship is always created between two objects and OfficeClip shows this relationship as a “child” of both these objects.

To create a new relationship, go to the object that you want to create the relationship with and click on the Relationship link (on the object detail screen).

For other tips on using the OfficeClip software and the Contact Manager in your business, check out our forum.

The tough economy is forcing companies to restrict travel while keeping distributed teams in touch. In addition, changes in the composition of the workforce mean enterprises must find ways to capture the knowledge of retiring Baby Boomers and provide Gen Yers with their favored tools to work efficiently.

Web management software, like OfficeClip, is a great solution to the current reductions in travel that businesses are doing, as it allows users to have access from anywhere and supports contractors and partners as well. Once businesses begin using collaborative web software, it will more than likely remain an integral part of their customer and employee management strategy even after the recession ends.

Online project management software such as timesheets, contact manager  and issue tracking can also be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis for hosted versions. According to Meridith Levinson of CIO.com, these tools will not require companies to make a large inital investment so the risk and the cost are less than if they were installing the web software on their own servers. Both types, hosted and installed, are still much more cost effective than traditional software, as they are online and collaborative, providing great flexibility and ease of use.

We all hope the recession ends soon, but there are ways to improve your business without spending a fortune and collaborative web software is one of those ways!

To use it the administrator must first set the mileage rate from the Expense Report > Profile screen and create a expense type called mileage.

Whenever a user fills up an expense report and selects the expense type mileage, the number of miles entered will automatically be multiplied by the mileage rate.

Mileage Calculation for Web Expense Report

We are confident that this new feature will help OfficeClip users to better track the expenses for their projects. Inadvertent errors will be significantly reduced and the automatic calculation will save time from entering the mileage rates manually.

To see other new features and enhancements for OfficeClip 8.1.1, check out our blog article that describes them in detail!

We have been working hard to improve our software and we are excited to introduce some great new features with the release of OfficeClip 8.1.1!

OfficeClip Interface

In this release, OfficeClip has a completely new interface. The look and feel of the software has been changed to improve the user experience. The main toolbar has been shifted to the left side, from the top. All the colors and tones have been altered throughout the software to make it more appealing to the user.

New Interface for OfficeClip

Contact Roles for Opportunities

When you create Opportunities in the OfficeClip Contact Manager, you can now add multiple Contacts to each opportunity. Additionally, each Contact can be assigned a specific role, such as Manager, Contractor, Associate, etc. To enable this feature, go to Opportunity > Admin > Children.

Manage Campaigns More Effectively

You can now associate your campaigns with other objects. This will enable OfficeClip Campaign users to have documents,  notes etc. associated with each particular campaign. Using these objects with campaigns will allow you to be more organized.

Automatically Track Mileage Expenses

We have added a new feature to the Expense application that enables users to enter a mileage rate and have the expense amounts automatically calculated. The feature will save users the time of having to manually enter their mileage expenses and also eliminate inadvertant errors associated with entering it manually. Learn more about this feature.

What is coming?

We soon plan to add the following features:

• Full fleged Project Management
• More useful reports
• Addition of Relationship Manager, Contract Manager and Products

OfficeClip Resources for Your Business

We are continuously building our online community where current and prospective customers can learn about our software and receive ideas for improving efficiency in their businesses. In addition to our fairly new Twitter account, we have created a forum where OfficeClip users can go for support, share tips and ask questions.

OfficeClip Forum

Network with us online and be part of our conversation to help small businesses become more efficient!

OfficeClip works with the Internet Information Server (IIS), so it is a matter of making the machine with the IIS available outside your organization.

If your organization has a VPN connection

If your company already has a vpn connection, then you can use it to access OfficeClip.

If you are using DSL/Cable Internet connection

1. Make sure you have a firewall rule on the OfficeClip machine that states that TCP/IP Port 80 is accessible outside your organization.
2. Log in to your Dsl/Cable router and go to the port forwarding option.
3. Open port 80 (TCP/IP) and forward all traffic to the IP address of the OfficeClip Server.

If you do not have Static IP Address

Get a free dynamic dns service. There are many free provider out there. We have tested it with a service called no-ip.com. This service allows you to use a real name (instead of the dynamic ip address) to connect to the OfficeClip server from outside your organization.

So far we have been serving our customers and prospects using direct email, phone and our product knowledge base. We have known for awhile that we wanted to implement a forum, where our OfficeClip customers could discuss their own findings with the software, such as easier ways to use web timesheet or web contact manager, how to set up issue tracker, etc. In effect, we want to create a community for our users so they have some place to go to find answers. This will make their satisfaction with our product even better and allow us to easily look to the conversations to see what we are doing well and where we need to improve. Additionally, prospective OfficeClip users can look to the forum to gather their preliminary information and talk with current users about their experience. This does put pressure on us though, because we want the word-of-mouth comments to be positive!

Our next step was to find a forum for us to implement. While researching for an online support forum, we found that there are many inexpensive and open source forum products out there. To my surprise the free and open source are almost as good as the paid ones.

We selected the YAF (Yet Another Forum) to implement our support forum. The advantage of being open source is that we could make some minor tweaks to the source code to make it work exactly like what we want.

When using open source, it is important to remember that developers of these open source programs need to be supported through donations (many of them have donation links on their website) or contributing to the open source product (if you are a developer and want to add more features to the product).

Please visit our OfficeClip Forum, let us know what you think and let us know if forums are working for your business. And if you like our community and want more discussions, follow us on Twitter, too!