Office 2.0 News

Changes at SpringStage and Texas Startup Blog

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:32 GMT

On Friday March 26th we are migrating each of the startup blogs that are part of the SpringStage network to a Grogger-powered site located at SpringStage.com. Previously we allowed only ‘catalysts' to post content to their area's startup blog. The new system converts our catalysts to curators. On SpringStage.com ANYONE can write posts directly or inserted by their personal blog and the curators can ‘feature' the post or other users can ‘like' the post. Let us know what you think.

Zoho Docs: Reviews, Dashboard & Advanced Search

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:45 GMT

One of the important aspects of online collaboration is easy peer reviewing of one's work. Zoho Docs as an online collaboration tool now provides a couple of reviewing features. Your colleagues can add comments to a file uploaded by you. And they can add their ratings to the file too.

Having a snapshot of your Zoho Docs account helps. The newly introduced dashboard view does just that. You can see your storage space details (how much storage have you used), recently added documents, recent reviews and documents with the highest ratings.

Another new option introduced in Zoho Docs is advanced search. Instead of using broad search (search all), you can narrow down your search by properties that you may know. Like document name, author name, documents shared to you, documents shared by you, tags, groups & content. Makes your search faster and more relevant.

Check out these new features in Zoho Docs and let us know your views.

Zoho Reports: Advanced Summarizing Options in Pivot Tables

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:44 GMT

Spreadsheet users know the importance of pivot tables and the role they play in easy summarizing and visualization of data. With Zoho Reports, you can make pivots by drag-and-drop. There are many summary functions available - Sum, Maximum, Minimum, Average and Count - when constructing pivots. And now, further options are available for each of these functions as shown in the below screenshot.

The options available are

Nornal: Applies the chosen summary function over the data as is
% of Row: Displays the data as a percentage of the total for each row
% of Column: Displays the data as a percentage of the total for each column
% of Total: Displays the chosen summary function as a percentage of the grand total of all data present in the report
Running Total: Displays data in successive cells as a running (cumulative) total of a selected field
Difference From: Displays data in each cell as the difference from value in the previous cell, based on the base field provided
% of: Displays data in each cell as a % of value in the previous cell, based on the base field provided
% of Difference From: Displays data in each cell as a % of difference from the value in the previous cell, based on the base field provided

In the featured 'Super Store Sales' database, we now have some pivots to demonstrate the new enhanced functions. For example, you can use the Running Total option to see the cumulative total over quarters (or months) in 2009-10.

Like Running Total, you can use the other options as well. For example, the embedded report below shows how much each product category in each quarter has contributed (as percentage) to the overall profit.

Do try these new pivot functions in Zoho Reports & let us know your views.

Server Power Upgrade Sunday Morning

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:22 GMT

The fine folks who host our main FreshBooks servers need to make some upgrades to the power systems in behind the scenes this weekend. This will help ensure maximum uptime across all our servers. Our hosts have scheduled this maintenance to occur early this Sunday morning, March 21, 2010, between approximately 1:00am and 3:00am Eastern Time (06:00-08:00 GMT)

We're afraid you won't be able to access your FreshBooks account for several minutes at a time while this essential hardware upgrade takes place. Our apologies for the inconvenience, but we hope you'll understand these kinds of improvements are all designed to ensure things run as smoothly as possible for all customers.

If you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to contact us.

Should You Collaborate With Your Team?

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:00 GMT

As a team leader, where is the line between engaging too much versus not enough? If you are a leader with formal authority or you can be perceived as more experienced or knowledgeable, you should think twice about collaborating with your team. Your involvement may create an effect that is the opposite of the spirit of collaboration.

When you collaborate, you cannot delegate.

Delegation is, in essence, the opposite of collaboration. Delegation means you let another do something with little oversight. Collaboration, in contrast, means you are actively involved. When you collaborate, you ensure that you cannot delegate.

Delegation and empowerment are difficult concepts to put into practice already, without throwing in the complications that collaboration causes. A big hurdle for new team leaders is being able to delegate work and being able to give up decision-making authority. It’s difficult because other people do work differently than you would do it, and it takes time to get used to that. The more involved you get in collaboration, the more difficult it remains to delegate.

Make it a goal to allow your team to be effective without you.

But you need to delegate. As a team leader, your job isn’t to do the work your team is supposed to do. Instead, you want to empower the team to make decisions and take actions on their own. Make it a goal to allow your team to be effective without you. Doing this shows that you have confidence and trust in your team members, and when you have trust and confidence, high performance follows.

Authority stifles innovation.

When someone in power makes a suggestion, a comment, or merely voices ‘a thought’, it can (and most likely will) be easily misinterpreted as a command. So sitting in a collaboration meeting with the team leader can quickly go from, “How can we come up with the idea that will work best?” to “Who can come up with an idea the boss agrees with first?”

Should you NEVER collaborate with your team? Of course not, the world is not so black and white. Collaboration is a tool and there are right ways just as there are wrong ways to use it. In fact, leaders who adopt a facilitative as opposed to a directive style may not run into these problems at all. But please be aware of the effect that someone with power has over a group before you get involved.

Feature: Controlled Access in Zoho Business

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:45 GMT

One of the advantages of using online applications is mobility. You can access applications and your data from any location, operating system, browser or a device. In some specific cases, this 'access anywhere' may not be a good thing. Some companies requested us to provide a way to restrict user access to a pre-defined set of IP Addresses - typically their offices. We now have this feature in Zoho Business.

In Zoho Business' Control Panel, the 'Allowed IPs' option lets you configure the IP Range to which you want to provide access to your users. To configure it, enter the range of IP Addresses to which you want to provide access and save it.

While we expect a small percentage of businesses to use this option, it is important that we offer this flexibility. One of the sub-options available in this section is the ability to restrict Admin access to a certain set of IP addresses. This means, you can restrict the IP Addresses from which the administrator can configure the system. It's basically saying something like - you have to be in the office to make any changes to the system.

The XING Competence Card: Your Skills, Your Experience, Your Network

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:30 GMT

Your XING profile doubles up as a digital business card offering you a very simple way of presenting yourself online in a professional and qualified manner. Not only can you upload your résumé and samples of your work, you can also add a personal touch by completing the ‘Wants’, ‘Haves’ and ‘Qualifications’ fields.

The key benefit of a business network is that you can use it to qualify yourself as a person. In November 2009 we launched XING References which allows you to invite your contacts to write you a reference for a certain position. The obvious benefit of this is that your level of credibility is boosted when other people assess the quality of your work.

After our References app proved to be popular among the XING community, we decided to go one step further and add another app showing your competences and network called the XING Competence Card. This OpenSocial application is currently still at the experimental stage (see the blog entry XING Labs is launched) but already meets the high security and privacy requirements of the XING Partner Ecosystem.

How to use the XING Competence Card

How exactly does the XING Competence Card work? Once you have installed the application you will be presented with an empty field. This is your ‘cloud of competence' that you can use to add qualifications. A number of keywords are automatically generated based on your profile. If you click on ‘Add skill’ you can then enter a qualification along with your own estimated skill level.

Once you've saved this skill you can then add your level of experience. This may include training sessions or seminars as well as on-the-job training and project experience. You can also quantify your level of experience with the best bit of all being that contacts can confirm your experience after having worked with you e.g. on a specific project or seminar you both attended. By adding a confirmation, colleagues, seminar instructors or customers then act as a reference for your qualifications.

Here’s a quick example: One of your qualifications involves programming HTML websites, a skill in which you qualified yourself as being an expert. In addition to your HTML qualification you can add experience such as projects you worked on or HTML training sessions you recently gave. After that you can ask project partners, training session participants etc. to confirm your entries. These confirmations then form the basis for an assessment of your qualification.

A larger font size in the competence cloud indicates a higher level of qualification while a darker color indicates a higher level of confirmation for the respective qualification. This level of confirmation shows whether and to what extent the qualification entered by the user is credible. At the same time, the qualification of the person confirming your qualification is taken into account. So in principle, the higher the level of confirmation of the contacts confirming your qualification, the higher your own confirmation level for the respective qualification. In other words, the more you use the Competence Card, the more weight this level of confirmation will carry within your XING network. So a well-qualified contact who confirms your skills therefore helps to increase the weighting of your qualification.

The competence cloud is also backed up by a list of all skills, experience and confirmations, which in turn allows you to choose which qualifications are shown in your profile. The Competence Card is also available in the ‘Applications’ tab once you add the app to your profile.

We see this app as being an innovative way of linking networking and online reputation management with state-of-the-art technology. The XING Competence Card is the result of a joint research project with ERCIS, the European Research Center for Information Systems at the WWU Münster. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped to make this app work, with a special mention going to Sören Evers, Till Haselmann and Axel Winkelmann.

Spring Surf and OpenCMIS Integration

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:03 GMT

The video below demonstrates a prototype integration between Spring Surf and OpenCMIS. Spring Surf provides a scriptable approach to building web applications. OpenCMIS provides a Java client library for accessing any CMIS compliant content repository. By combining the two, we create a development platform for building CMIS enabled web applications. In the video, a simple web application [...]

How to Be an Intrapreneur

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:00 GMT

Many employees are entrepreneurs at heart and believe they have to leave the corporate world in order to fulfill their dreams. This is not necessarily so. If you’re lucky, your organization is one that supports intrapreneurship – or the practice of entrepreneurial skills and approaches by or within an established organization. Employees, perhaps engaged in a special project within a larger firm, are encouraged to behave like entrepreneurs even though they have the resources and capabilities of the larger firm to draw upon. Intrapreneurs focus on innovation and creativity and transform good ideas into profitable ventures.

Seek sponsors for your idea

If this sounds interesting to you, your first step is to identify a good idea for a new or improved process or product. Then, seek a network of peers and sponsors to help you evaluate it and get it off the ground. You might approach a more senior manager who can open doors or someone with technical expertise who has know-how and credibility.

Do your homework

Before you pitch your idea to a wider audience, prepare a business plan. Address your audience and speak in terms they understand. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and know when to let go. Even if you’re convinced your idea will make the company billions, if you can’t sell it, move on to something else.

Take your time

Starting an intrapreneurial project out of thin air is going to be more challenging than joining an existing committee whose job it is to generate fresh product ideas. You should wait until you’ve been around a while and have proven yourself as a smart, capable employee, and even then it takes guts, because there will always be some higher-up whose mission is to preserve the status quo. Your best bet is to put together a bulletproof case that clearly demonstrates how your concept will benefit the company, and to share it subtly and modestly, one person at a time, until you have enough supporters to counter the naysayers.

Have you tried intrapreneurship? What were the results?

The Benefits of Virtualization and Cloud Computing: An ebizQ Podcast Interview

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:05 GMT

I was recently interviewed by Jessica Ann Mola of ebizQ about “Virtualization and Cloud Computing”. The interview discussed the following points. What Alfresco is hearing from their customers and community on their needs and desires around the cloud How the benefits of cloud computing differ between SMBs and large enterprises The importance of Open Source to the cloud Alfresco’s [...]

Using rails' escape_javascript outside of views

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:22 GMT

Rails provides a handy function to escape string to be used in your javascript code. Unfortunately, it is only available in your views. It is very easy though to make it available outside of views, eg in your helpers, as it suffices to require and include one module:

require 'action_view/helpers/javascript_helper'
include ActionView::Helpers::JavaScriptHelper # escape_javascript is available here.

New website launched

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:21 GMT

Here it is, a brand new website for MyOwnDB. It was really time to abandon the old one, which was based on a custom developed solution...
This new website is based on Drupal and uses its multilingual capabilities to power the websites in different languages, currently:

english at http://www.myowndb.com
french at http://www.madb.net

The dutch translation should be coming very soon.

I expect the design to evolve, but I'm happy with this transitional design based on Drupify.

No, Team Leaders Should Not Behave Differently

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:00 GMT

Do team leaders get to act differently just because they're team leaders? Nope. One of the things you should remember is that your team will pay more attention to what you do than what you say.

Remember when you were growing up and your Mom said, “Do as I say, not as I do.” That is a death trap for a team leader. If you manage your team using the “as I say” approach, you will soon find yourself with a dysfunctional team that's low in motivation and morale. Requiring employees to behave differently than what you demonstrate is like asking them to row upstream without a paddle. It just won’t work.

You can't expect teamwork from your team if:

You spend your day building walls between you and your peers.
You keep secrets that would help others in the company.
You make it a point to talk negatively about the rest of the organization.
You only communicate on a “need to know” basis with select team members.
You foster unhealthy competition between team members.

These type of behaviors undermine the success of the organization and often go all the way to the top. Leading with ulterior motives in mind will backfire sooner or later. Creating silos and unhealthy competition within or among teams will eventually break a company down — no matter how good the people are.

Always remember that no matter what you are doing, someone is watching. Ask yourself how you would feel if you observed your behavior in your company's leadership team. And never lose sight of the fact that if there is no company, there is no team. Your goal is to help your company be successful.

Here are some actions you can take that will make you proud to say you're a team leader.

Communicate openly, often and with your peers and team
Collaborate with others on issue solutions
Establish a method for cross-functional interaction with other teams when possible

Does your organization promote do as I say or do as I do? The next time you hear someone say, “They don’t work as a team,” or “I don’t understand why they don’t communicate with each other,” examine the leadership team’s behavior first.

What do you have to add?

Alfresco Web Editor – Getting Started

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:23 GMT

As we approach the final stages of development for 3.3 functionality, I thought it would be useful to write a brief introduction to the AWE to help people get started. Please note that this article describes features currently found in HEAD, and are subject to change. The Alfresco Web Editor (AWE) is a Spring Surf based web application that utilises the Forms Service to provide in-context editing capabilities to Alfresco repository content (non AVM). Alfresco 3.3 also introduces the Web Editor Framework (WEF), which is a client side JavaScript framework that is a dependency of the AWE. More on the WEF later. The AWE is packaged as a stand-alone WAR file so that it can be deployed to web applications that are remote to the Alfresco application server.

Sridhar Vembu on Mixergy

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:36 GMT

Our CEO was interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

You can also view the interview and the transcript here . The related Hacker News thread is here .

OMG WordPress BBQ!

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:48 GMT

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and developers are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we're throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there's a place for us all to get together.

If you're a WordPress fan attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. We're getting the BBQ from Rudy's and the red velvet cake from Central Market. Yum! Come, eat, talk about the cool things you're doing with WordPress, let us know what we can do better, gossip about Mark Jaquith's new hairstyle, whatever. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. I'll be there, lead developers Mark Jaquith and Ryan Boren will be there, core contributors will be there, plugin and theme developers will be there, and basically all the most intelligent and attractive people from SxSW will be there. You should be, too!

Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you're tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

View WordPress BBQ at SxSW in a larger map

* We'll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We'll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry.

Scheduled maintenance this Saturday

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:32 GMT

Following the issue we had this Wednesday we have to schedule a downtime for this Saturday.

This will happen in 2 steps:

at 9am UTC/GMT (1am PST) we will be offline for 2 hours. During that time we will have to move some databases around and we’ll also use that time to add some new servers to our backend
at 11am UTC/GMT (3am PST) the site will be back but we’ll have to do a maintenance on our flags database. This means all your dashboards, widgets and feeds will be available but during that time all feeds will show as “unread” even if you already read them

Everything should be back to normal at 1pm UTC/GMT (5am PST).

We apologize for any inconvenience. Please let us know if you have any questions.

How Time Warner Cable Reduces "Sold-to-Revenue Cycle" With EchoSign

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:19 GMT

KM World recently profiled Time Warner Cable's very successful 2+ year deployment of EchoSign. From first deployment in early 2008, to 1000+ contracts a month in early 2009 -- to almost 1000 contracts a day in 2010.

All with an average time-to-sign of just 78 minutes.

The full piece below.

KM World: How Time Warner Cable Reduces "Sold-to-Revenue Cycle" with EchoSign Electronic Signature for Sale...

How Do You Pay for Your Platform-as-a-Service?

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:19 GMT

It astonishes me to see that except for Caspio all platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers base their pricing on a per-user basis.

Before PaaS came into existence, people had to write code to make apps. You write the code, you own the app and you can have it used by as many people as you want. You only have to worry about adequate infrastructure to support your users.

PaaS makes the infrastructure an on-demand service. In the case of Caspio it also eliminates programming. However, with or without code, you still create your apps in a PaaS environment.

It seems unreasonable to pay the PaaS vendor for each of your users. A usage based pricing is more appropriate. That's what Caspio has been doing since 2001.

Pricing models remnant of traditional desktop and enterprise software are stuck in the past. Usage based pricing must be the norm rather than the exception.

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Learn How to Connect SQL Server to QuickBase via ODBC

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:53 GMT

You can use ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) to connect your QuickBase applications to other databases thanks an ODBC Connector from Qunect.

If you have data in SQL Server, Access, Oracle, SAP or any ODBC compliant database including Access, Excel and Word you can connect to your data and work with it in QuickBase.

How? Join us on Wednesday March 24th at 2:00 PM Eastern for a demo and Q&A webinar with Claude von Roesgen. REGISTER!

Claude has created a number of stored procedures that do everything from archiving QuickBase application and attachment data to automating a two-way synchronization between QuickBase and SQL Server.

Claude von Roesgen is one of the original founders of QuickBase, the creator of many QuickBase wizards and principal of Qunect.

Image courtesy of Tim Morgan

Firefox Personas, WordPress-style

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:37 GMT

We recommend open source software whenever we can, and the Firefox browser from Mozilla is one of our favorites. Firefox 3.6 recently came out with persona support, allowing users to skin their browsers with favorite designs and brands. WordPress users everywhere seem to love the W symbol (at WordCamps it shows up on everything from t-shirts to iPhone skins), so it was only natural that WordPress personas would come along.

To kick it off, designer Chad Pugh created two WordPress personas based on the WordPress brand: “Vintage Press” and “Inkwell.” These two designs are a great way to show the WordPress love, even if you're only showing it to yourself.

	The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of old-fashioned printing presses and the mechanics of working with type. This persona might appeal to WordPress developers and users who appreciate the way things work under the hood.

“Inkwell” is more of a palimpsest* & watercolor hybrid that might appeal to the artists among us. Music, script and spills of color combine…

Okay, I'm starting to feel like an art critic so I'll stop there. Check out the WordPress personas for Firefox and decide for yourselves.

* I never thought I would have occasion to use the word “palimpsest” in a dev blog post. Never.

Contacts for Company Profiles and More

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:59 GMT

Today’s update includes a number of new features for our platform, many of which are based on ideas you submitted to us via our UserVoice feedback tool. A lot of today’s changes involve the Company Profiles and help you to boost your company’s presence and image on XING even further.

From now on you can assign direct company contacts so that people who visit your Company Profile know who they can contact if they want to apply for a job or if they are journalists and have some questions about the company. Companies with a ‘Standard’ Company Profile can assign four contacts while companies with a ‘Plus’ Company Profile can state ten. The beta version of the XING company quiz for all companies with at least ten employees will also be going live today. How well do you know your own colleagues? Take the test and answer up to ten questions to find out. Maybe you'll even make it into the high score list.

A number of improvements to the infrastructure were made along with an important feature added to the popular OpenSocial application Ask XING. Now you have the option to close a question you think you have received enough answers to. Once a question has been closed it will remain visible and can still be forwarded, but no new answers can be added.

And last but not least – Now you can also add your Spreed account to the ‘My other profiles on the Web’ section.

Do you have any suggestions or ideas? If so, you can post a message in the XING Group or add a comment here.

Day in the Life – How to Manage 4 Jobs

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:00 GMT

You may have heard the phrase, “if you want to get something done, ask a busy person.” In my experience, this is true. For instance, try eating at two restaurants – one crowded and one empty – and notice the speed of the service at each one. I guarantee that the crowded restaurant will be faster every time.

The busier you are, the more quickly you learn how to work efficiently, and you can get more tasks done in less time.

In addition to raising a two year old son and spending one day a week with him, I currently hold four jobs that I am paid for:

Wall Street Journal columnist: My nationally syndicated career advice column, Reinvent, appears online and in print on Sundays. The column features interviews on topics and trends related to career change and reinvigoration.
Blogger: I post on job hunting, careers, and productivity twice a week at my home blog, Water Cooler Wisdom, and weekly here at the QuickBase blog and a few others. As an active participant in the blogosphere, I also read and comment on many other blogs.
Author: For the last four years, I have written at least one business book a year. The publication of each book requires substantial promotional efforts at launch and ongoing publicity and social media engagement post-launch.
Workplace speaker and consultant: Some organizations approach me regarding how they can help their employees succeed in their careers, and work more effectively with colleagues in other generations. I speak about these issues in house as well as at conferences and universities.

I am responsible for completing all of the responsibilities associated with these four jobs in the space of a 45 hour work week. When I worked one job in the marketing communications field, I put in about as many hours – more at times – and certainly had less work product to show for it. I’ve been able to do it through a process that has evolved over many years.

Here are some of my strategies:

Assign jobs to specific days

I have four days in which I’ve reserved the entire day to work. In order to avoid getting overwhelmed, I create a monthly schedule in which I am slated to work at just one job per day. For instance, as you’ll see below, on Monday I am responsible for writing my Wall Street Journal column and weekly blog posts.

Leave two hours per day for last minute tasks

I make sure I only schedule enough work for six hours of each day. This way, I have two hours to devote to unexpected tasks like networking calls, media interviews, and website edits. Because I don’t have a full-time assistant, I often need to complete administrative tasks related to my business during this time. Here’s a screenshot of what my calendar looks like on a given Friday.

Schedule “bulky” tasks three months out

Bulky tasks are ones that require a huge chunk of time, such as attending a conference or traveling out of town for a speaking engagement. As a general rule, I plan assignments that will take me out of my regular routine for at least 24 hours several months in advance. This advance planning allows me to avoid overscheduling a particular timeframe. It also means that I occasionally have to turn out bulky opportunities that appear at the last minute. Unless they are extremely lucrative, they’re generally not worth the stress.

Adhere to generous deadlines

I am only able to write a book a year because in the contract with my publisher, I give myself the entire year. If I were to spend all my working hours researching and writing the book, I would probably be able to finish it in a few months. But because I have four jobs, this isn’t possible. Allowing myself the cushion of a year means that I only have to work on the book 1.5 days a week. Each 60,000 word manuscript develops more slowly but is also much more manageable.

Say no or go online

Getting four jobs done in 45 hours means that I sometimes have to say no to people who want me to help them with a particular task or event. I try to do one pro bono event and three informational interviews per quarter, and if a request falls outside that scope, I’ll usually say no. I might offer people the option of moving an in person event online so that I can participate that way, and when people want to network with me over lunch, I will almost always try for a phone call first.

Repurpose content

As a result of writing five books and publishing hundreds of blog posts and articles over the last few years, I have generated a substantial body of content. I keep my writing in folders organized by subject that I can readily access when the time comes. I try to retain all rights to my content so that even if a particular organization has first publication rights to it, I can re-use it after a period of time. Therefore, the work that I perform might very well be applicable to two or more of my jobs.

Prevent fall-behind by making up lost hours immediately

There are times when an unexpected doctor’s appointment, sick child, or visiting friend threaten to wreck havoc on my work schedule. When this happens, it is very easy to fall behind on the work that was supposed to be completed on that day, and this is where self-discipline comes in. Even if I’d rather watch Lost, I make up the missed time by working that evening after my son is in bed, or on a weekend afternoon I had planned to have off.

It may seem like I get a lot done in 45 hours, but I think I use every minute much better than the average corporate employee. During scheduled work time, I don’t surf the Internet, I don’t chit chat with colleagues in the kitchen, and I don’t go for Starbucks runs. Rather than just showing up in the office and letting the chips fall where they may, I plan what is to be accomplished each day very strategically.

Those of you who who work on a variety of tasks at once – how do you maximize your efficiency?

It is not about our App, It is about the User's Data and Context

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:21 GMT

The title provides a short answer to the question: Why do we integrate with Google Apps? An important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-page or to be more accurate the one-browser-tab approach to design - i.e contextual integration of information across applications, so that whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context. In the traditional desktop and client-server world, data is slave to the application that created it. In the cloud, data is liberated so it can contextually go where it is the best fit. We have used this as our architectural blueprint in Zoho, as we integrate Zoho services with each other (such as our CRM & Email integration), as well as in integrating Zoho with third parties.

Take the Google Apps marketplace announcement yesterday. At that event, there were plenty of demonstrations on how contextual integration works across vendors. Notable ones include Intuit Online Payroll integration with Google Calendar, Atlassian Jira.com integration with GMail/Docs/GTalk, and of course our own Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects integration with GMail/Docs. It is fair to say that every single case of integration demonstrated at the launch even yesterday takes the cloud based ecosystem functionality ahead of where traditional enterprise systems are capable of today. Even more important, we completed our integration with Google in under 2 months, even while they were still refining their APIs. We thank the Google team once again for inviting us to be a launch partner.

Why do we want to integrate with Google Apps? The most important browser tab, in a business context, is the one dedicated to email. Given that GMail is the cloud email provider of choice by far, it is natural for Zoho to integrate our suite with GMail and Google Apps. While we agree with Marc Benioff on enterprise apps taking design inspiration from Facebook (well, not too much inspiration, we are not sure we want to go around "poking" our customers!), we would also like to point out that email is where the majority of business users spend their time. Of course, given that Salesforce has no email strategy, it is natural for them to try to redefine the market away from email and towards social networking. This is Salesforce's third attempt at making their CRM a business app platform, but unfortunately for them, email is a far more natural starting point than CRM - we say that as a company that has a strong CRM suite. Besides, to be a real platform, you have to have a degree of openness, and our experience with Salesforce demonstrates the opposite, and sets up a direct contrast to Google's platform approach.

Now, what exactly is contextual integration? In a nutshell, contextual integration allows for the most relevant information to surface up to the user, regardless of where that information is stored. For years, if you wanted to get information on customers, you had to go to your CRM system. If you wanted to get information on employees, you had to go to your HRIS system, if you wanted to read email, you went to your email client.

The cloud is going to fundamentally change that. With contextual integration, everything comes together - emails, calendars, documents, CRM systems, project management, HR, accounting, all of it - all from within one single tab. In this new vision, application boundaries become fluid, in fact applications in the traditional sense take the back seat, and the user's workflow and context dominate. The benefits are enormous, both for individual business users, as well as for IT organizations. Individual users can get more done faster, with tools that get out of their way. IT organizations reap enormous productivity gains in systems integration.

That second point, systems integration, is an important one. The vast majority of IT spending goes to systems integration/professional services. It is well known in the industry that in the old software model, licensing costs represent only 20-30% of the initial cost. But in the SaaS world, we are already seeing how much easier it is to share data among different, disparate systems. This of course, doesn't mean that system integration costs will entirely go away. In particular, enterprise customers will still need to hire professional services to connect cloud services to their more intricate, legacy systems they still have in-house. While they might not go away, we fully expect them to substantially decrease. Small and Mid-size customers will even be able to do away with them, as cloud vendors are increasingly pre-integrating each other's systems.

I will acknowledge that contextual integration is still in its infancy, but we (by which I mean the entire cloud ecosystem) are making rapid progress. The important thing to note about cloud applications is that, in the beginning, they were just about replicating the desktop experience. Want an email program? I'll give you one, but instead of on a desktop client, on the web. That was step one. Step two was about improving some of the features that the desktop application provided: more storage, better scalability, better security, etc. But now cloud applications go far beyond that. Contextual integration is an example of how cloud applications - Zoho's and everyone else's - are bringing a whole new wave of productivity and innovation.

New Updates for Gliffy Online – Improved Images and Connectors and more!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:37 GMT

2010 has already been a crazy and productive year at Gliffy. We've successfully moved our office headquarters into a beautiful new space that will surely invigorate our creative juices, and we've also been busy improving the quality and usability of Gliffy Online. These improvements include upgrading our server architecture, eliminating many of the rare yet complex bugs that our system and helpful customers notify us of, and tweaking our interface so that you can create more impressive diagrams with ease.

You've probably already noticed that we've vastly improved the output of our exported PNG images and the look of the published diagram landing pages. For images, the text and colors should now be accurate with what you see in the editor, and you can still export up to our 5000 x 5000 pixel limit. Also, the SVG export feature provides inline images (no more zip files) and handles all international characters correctly.

New Publish Page Look

The other big improvement is with our Connector/Line tool. Our old version of the connector tool seemed to have a mind of it's own at times. The new connector tool will now route itself in ways that you would expect, and you can make adjustments to a segmented line and those adjustments will stick when moving connected shapes. Also, you can now add rounded corners to the right-angle segmented lines. This should be ideal for Business Process diagrams or for making your flowcharts look more elegant. With a line selected, you will notice a new “Line Type” property drop-down in the Line Properties area on the top right of Gliffy. To top it off, we've added more connection points to commonly used shapes like rectangles, processes, etc.

Here are links to a vast list of the other bugs we've fixed and improvements we've made:

We've got some really exciting things we're working on in the next few months, so stay tuned!!

Caspio Celebrates 10 Years of Cloud Innovation

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:32 GMT

Ten years ago about this time I terminated my early retirement to get back to the startup world to work on my vision of a code-free application development platform.

A year later Caspio Bridge 1.0 hit the market. It was a modest start, but we had built a Microsoft Access equivalent for the web. Initially the backend was an Oracle database and the middle tier was in Visual Basic. But the front-end was the most sophisticated AJAX user interface anywhere.

Most importantly, it delivered on the promise of allowing users to build web forms and searchable databases quickly and without coding. Our still-unique JavaScript deployment model meant that users could place these forms and apps on their own websites while Caspio remained their database and application engine entirely behind the scene.

The first release of Caspio Bridge went live in 2001. Since then we have kept improving the platform by adding capabilities that our customers have asked us to add. We have certified the platform in several ways including PCI certification that Microsoft Azure lacks, and have made it perhaps the most robust platform for building web applications available anywhere.

Today we power over 300,000 apps for companies as large as Fortune-500 conglomerates to small one-person shops, universities, government agencies and non-profits in the US and over 40 other countries. Caspio is the de facto standard in the online news category where over 80% of the largest American newspaper websites use Caspio to build community applications, publish government and local data and to accept citizen submissions and feedbacks.

I contribute our accomplishments to mainly two factors. First is perseverance. Caspio survived two economic downturns and initially slow customer adoption, but we persevered. In our guts we knew this is the future, it's just that we are early. The second factor is that we never raised any external financing. To date Caspio is free from Venture Capital investment. We don't even lease equipment. Our operation is entirely funded by our own revenues. We have no "run-way" that is about to end. This gives us the freedom to do what we must do, and that is serving our customers. Some of the competitors who raised VC funding are no longer around, because when going got tough, VC's backed out and the company was shut down.

Caspio is now stronger than ever before. We feel that we're just warming up. The world has begun to notice and understand the concept of Cloud Computing. Companies of all sizes realize that they need to establish their own cloud strategy. It's exciting times for Caspio which has been working on this vision for 10 years.

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And now for something completely different

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:13 GMT

Since I've been working on Google Reader, I've told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to announce an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Reader Play adapts to your tastes -- as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you more items we think you'll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we'll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don't even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we'll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.

You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.

Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn't intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It's designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you've read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking "View in Reader Play" from the feed settings menu.

Try Reader Play today and let us know what you think. Send us feedback in our forum or on Twitter, and check out our help article for more info.

Google Apps Marketplace launches with FreshBooks

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:57 GMT

Now, create and log into FreshBooks accounts from within Google Apps.

We're pretty excited to be one of the first applications to be listed in the new Google Apps Marketplace, which Google announced last night. The new marketplace will give the 2 million small business customers using Google Apps today an easy way to access some very high quality third party applications.

FreshBooks is honoured to be one of the initial applications Google selected to launch with. And we're also quite pleased that we're joined by several of our great integrations partners and fellow members of The Small Business Web, namely

BatchBook, Capsule, and Tactile CRMs
MailChimp email marketing
Shoeboxed receipts and business card scanning service

It's great that Google has taken this next step forward in our market. Google Apps has certainly done a lot of heavy lifting to build the market by providing usable, accessible, and affordable online business tools in the Cloud that are used by millions. Moreover, they have been a leading supporter of the Open Web, helping such protocols as OpenID and OAuth come to fruition. These protocols are building the foundation of a richer, more deeply connected market of web applications.

As small businesses need to expand their business by moving online, they are looking for online tools to help them. And because businesses relying on these tools to manage their work flows, they want their tools to work smoothly together. The Google Apps Marketplace is a great step forward in not only helping millions of businesses find new online tools, but also in connecting these tools together. FreshBooks is happy to have been part of the Google Apps Marketplace from the beginning and to be supporting it strongly into the future.

Getting a Delegated Task Back on Track

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:00 GMT

That big report for the executive team is due next week and you just realized that one section you delegated to a team member is nowhere to be found. Checking in with him, you discover the team member hasn't even started on it yet.

Ack. What do you do now?

Don't Panic

Sit down with the team member and determine what needs to be done. Begin with the end in mind. Decide what you are trying to accomplish and determine who will do what, by when. Set up check ins to ensure it stays on track until completion and call in extra help if needed.

Delegation is a great leadership strategy, but done wrong it can end up in disaster.

The key to successful delegation is to remember it’s not abdication.

You don’t just give someone a task and forget about it.

You need to manage the risk, but not micromanage. Sometimes there can be a fine line between the two.

Here’s what you need to do to delegate successfully.

Define tasks to delegate. Start by making a list of those activities that you would consider delegating to a team member.
Determine best fit. Then decide which team member would be the best fit and could be most successful at accomplishing the task.
Delegate the task. Next, meet with each team member you have identified, identify the objective and set out a plan to check in on a realistic basis to see how it’s going.
Monitor for success. Make sure you communicate your expectations for “check ins” and what the team member should do if they run into a road block.

“Once the crisis is over, vow to never let it happen again.”

Delegation can help you become a better leader and help your team members learn new skills.

What suggestions do you have to help other team leaders delegate successfully?

Zoho Launches Business Apps on Google Apps Marketplace

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:45 GMT

Today, Google announced the availability of Google Apps Marketplace where vendors like Zoho can sell applications complementing Google Apps. More information on this announcement is available here and here. Zoho is one of Google's launch partners for Google Apps Marketplace as we integrate two of our business applications - Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects with Google Apps.

Let us directly dive into the meat of the announcement. Starting today, Google Apps users will be able to add Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects into Google Apps. While we have had some integrations earlier, this time, we take this couple of steps further integrating our Apps at the application and data levels with Google Apps extended APIs.

Installing and Accessing Zoho Apps

If you are the domain admin for Google Apps, you'll now have an option to add Zoho Apps to your domain through Google Apps Marketplace. Once the domain admin adds a Zoho application to their domain, all users within the domain will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation.

Selecting the application in Google universal navigation opens the Zoho application in a new browser tab. When you access the application for the first time, we ask you to choose a Zoho username (one time only). Once done, you'll be logged into Zoho automatically and redirected to the appropriate Zoho Application where you can start using the app.

Integration with Google Apps - Application and Data

In the first version, Zoho CRM & Projects are integrated with Google Apps. There are several integration points with Google products. Here are some highlights...

When you add a Zoho application to a domain, all the apps will be accessible from Google universal navigation and users will automatically be signed into Zoho applications.

In Zoho CRM for Google Apps, we let Google Apps domain admin choose the users he wants to provide access to Zoho CRM. Instead of creating users from scratch in Zoho CRM, you can now import users from Google Apps
Zoho CRM allows users to import contacts from Google Apps Contacts
If you have our Zoho Mail Add-on enabled in Zoho CRM, you can POP your email from Google Apps to Zoho CRM. These emails show up in the CRM system automatically for each contact. Emails sent from Zoho CRM will also show up in Gmail in Google Apps. This is a unique integration of its kind between Zoho CRM & Google's GMail.
Zoho CRM & Projects integrate with Google Apps Calendar. Google Apps users will now be able to subscribe/view their CRM & Projects events right within Google Calendar
Zoho Projects and all modules in Zoho CRM let you attach documents directly from Google Apps
We also have multiple OpenSocial gadgets for CRM & Projects which can be embedded in Gmail, Google Sites and other apps that accept OpenSocial embeds

These bullet points won't do justice to the tight integration we have with Google Apps. Here is a video & a Zoho Show presentation that explains this integration in detail between Zoho CRM and Google Apps.

At Zoho, we have a broad set of apps - over 20 Online Business, Productivity & Collaboration Apps. Yes, we compete with Google Apps, but we have more apps that can complement Google Apps than the apps we compete in. We always made it easier for Google users to try Zoho Apps starting with Google Sign-in followed by Google Apps Sign-in and recent integration with Google Docs. We understand the realities of the market and we have a good overlap in customers using Zoho Business Apps and Google Apps.

With this integration, we welcome Google Apps users to try our complementary business applications. We will continue to improve our integration with Google Apps and you'll find additional Zoho Business Apps available in Google Apps Marketplace moving forward.

We would like to thank Google Apps Marketplace team for providing us the opportunity to be a launch partner and providing us early access to the APIs. We hope this integration will be mutually beneficial and more importantly useful for our customers. As always, we are looking forward to your feedback.

Links

Google Chooses EchoSign as Launch Partner for Google Apps Marketplace

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:17 GMT

We're very pleased to announce our customer and partner Google has chosen EchoSign as a launch partner for its new Google Apps Marketplace, which launched tonight.

Google has chosen a handful of best-of-breed web apps to highlight what can be done by its enterprise and corporate customers with Google Apps.

As of tonight, Google Apps customers can also now add EchoSign directly to their Google navigation at the top of every Google page -- and send Google Docs and other documents out for e-signature straight from inside Google or any Google application.

After adding EchoSign to Google Apps, you'll be automatically dropped into, and logged into, EchoSign from your Google toolbar, and be automatically sync'd with Google Docs and Google Contacts.

If you are a Google Apps customer, just click on the icon at the left to add EchoSign to your Google navigation.

If you're not an Apps customer, but use Gmail or other free Google Apps, you can still log into EchoSign in one click -- just click Sign in / Google at www.echosign.com.

We're proud to be recognized by Google as one of the leaders in enterprise SaaS applications, and to now offer full native integration with Google at all levels of our application. More information here.

GigaOm coverage noted GigaOm itself is planning to "happily integrate" EchoSign, which they already use themselves, into their Google Apps org.

OpenSocial: XING Updates from Version 0.8 to 0.9

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:31 GMT

Here at XING we’ve been working on implementing OpenSocial since 2007. In May 2009 we launched the first XING applications on our platform, and have also hosted apps from third-party providers as part of the XING Partner Ecosystem since July 22. Our partner applications add a number of business-relevant functions to the XING platform such as online conferences, project management, calendars and presentations.

And it’s not just our partners who are driving things forward – we are also continually developing the system. You can read about the latest developments in our weekly Release Flash which lets you know about all of the improvements we have made to our apps. For the last few weeks we’ve been working on a monster of a project which involved updating the XING OpenSocial infrastructure from version 0.8 to 0.9. This may only seem like a small step, but in fact it's a proverbial giant leap for the infrastructure.

Our Aim: Silent Migration

So what does updating to OpenSocial 0.9 mean for XING users? Well, nothing for the meantime as we want this migration transition to take place silently. In real terms this means that all existing apps on OpenSocial 0.8 will continue to run on the latest version without the developers making any changes. So a key part of our work is to ensure backwards compatibility within the XING Partner Ecosystem.

Technical Improvements in OpenSocial 0.9

The update to version 0.9 also adds a number of new features to improve the quality of our apps even further. Features include templates for various frequently used areas of the user interface, and tags (small code snippets) that can be added to certain entities using OSML (OpenSocial Markup Language), an SGML-based language, in much the same way as with HTML. This means that the code used for typical OpenSocial app functions is much shorter, with one such example being which is used to select contacts.

So what is the benefit for you as a user other than having access to a standardized interface? Firstly, developers and third-party users have access to these standards, which in turn reduces the amount of time required and the number of potential sources of error. This results in more resources being available to continue developing the app.

The latest version of OpenSocial now also includes what is known as data pipelining, which in principle is a simplified and standardized request within the app based on the user’s social graphs. This was also possible in the past, but only by using wieldy JavaScript routines. User privacy is not affected by the pipeline with users retaining their previous privacy settings.

The switch to OpenSocial 0.9 is due to take place in March 2010. Please visit the OpenSocial Foundation website or the XING OpenSocial Group for more information.

When Will Fax Die?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:25 GMT

A topic we think a bit about at EchoSign is - when will fax die?

The world is obviously moving to 100% web-based processes, with 100% web-based signatures a key part of that migration for businesses large and small.

The question is no longer if (as it was when we started EchoSign), but when, fax will die for signatures, and for most businesses.

No one has won the office pool here yet. Fax is still alive and strong, and EchoSign is proud to offer both a fax signature option with fax lines across the globe, as well as native eFax integration.

But we learned something interesting today from Kodak's presentation at the recent Sales 2.0 conference.

Kodak noted that just over 5 years ago -- 5 years ago -- they were doing $15 billion a year in consumer film. In fact, Kodak's market for film peaked not in 2000 as one might guess, but rather, in 2004 -- almost 4 years after digital photography became mainsteam.

But, today, that number is $200 million - a drop of almost 99%. In other words, Kodak's film business just over 5 years after its relatively recent peak is just over 1% of what it was.

Has faxed peaked? Likely. Will it decline at this rate? Who knows. But it may well be quicker that you think.

Can you imagine going back to analog film? It's just as hard to go back to analog signatures and analog contracting.

Hours/Rate Invoice Headings – Round 2

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:58 GMT

A big thanks to everyone for all the great feedback from our last release where we introduced the concept of invoice headings that showed hours/rate vs item/unit cost. We’ve taken it all in and are now ready to deliver “round 2” of the release and we think you’ll be pleased. Here’s the run down:

Drop-Down “Task” Column

You’ll be happy to see that we have added a “Task” column to the time-based invoice heading template. The “Task” column works just like the “Item” column, allowing you to pull-in tasks, and to create and save new tasks on the fly. This should save you a lot of time.

Also, when generating an invoice from a project, the Task column will now auto-populate with the appropriate tasks.

Finally, if you had been associating time-based activities, like “consulting”, with Items, you’ll probably want to create those activities now as Tasks.

“Tasks Invoiced” Report

To accompany the new “Task” column we’ve introduced a new “Tasks Invoiced” report. It is identical to your “Item Sales” report and helps you break down your revenues by Task – pretty handy!

Item/Expenses on Bottom of Invoice

If you are showing time entries and Item entries we have now defaulted the Item entries to the bottom of the invoice. This way, if you are showing time entries and expenses the expenses will appear at the bottom of your invoice, not the top.

P&L Report – Select your Start Date

This is unrelated to the invoice headings but a neat little addition to the P&L report. You can now specify a specific ending date for your P&L – ideal if your fiscal year is not Jan-Dec.

So that about sums it up. We’re pretty happy with the updates; hope you are too! Always keep the suggestions coming.

Team Troubleshooting: Balancing Tasks and People

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:00 GMT

A high performing team tackles to-dos yet also maintains relationships among team members that optimize collaboration. Performance and relationships; in a team setting you can't have one without the other. Your role as a team leader is to find the perfect balance between the two.

There’s a lot going on when you lead a team. To be an effective team leader, you must be able to balance either the ability to respond or stay out of a particular situation. Visualizing your work through a dichotomy can help simplify things when things aren’t going well (and even if they are!).

Try looking at teamwork in terms of tasks and relationships:

Task functions

These performance-oriented activities help your team accomplish the tactical work:

Achieving goals
Getting the job done
Making decisions
Solving problems
Adapting to changes
Planning for the future

Relationship functions

These relationship-oriented activities focus on maintaining the collaborative atmosphere of the team:

Developing a positive climate
Solving interpersonal problems
Satisfying members’ needs
Developing cohesion

If there is an interpersonal issue between team members, it would be a mistake to adjust the deadline of the project. It just won't work. The intervention needs to be aimed at the root cause of the performance issue, which in this case is a relationship issue rather than a task issue. Sometimes that's a tough call. To make it easier on yourself, first decide if the performance issue is related to people/relationships or if it is related to tasks/things. Then consider implementing the action items in the checklist in the image above until you find a solution that fits.

What have you found that works?

Scheduled downtime tomorrow (Tues Mar 9)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:21 GMT

Your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for approximately 10 minutes at 9:00 am Eastern (2:00pm UTC) on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 while we update the FreshBooks service (hey… that's good news!).

We will be posting updates to our Twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com throughout the scheduled period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and thank you for your understanding.

Texting + QuickBase Makes Buying Girl Scouts Cookies Easier in LA

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:32 GMT

Ever consider sending a text message or email to find out where you can buy your favorite Girl Scouts Cookies? Well, in the Greater Los Angeles County now you can!

The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles - serving Los Angeles County and parts of Kern and San Bernardino counties – are using QuickBase as their online database to track and manage cookie booth sales locations and times for their annual cookie sales. Following the merger of six Girl Scouts councils, the Greater Los Angeles council now serves 45,000 Girl Scouts and QuickBase is playing a big part in streamlining operations for the council and the volunteers. Previously, more than 100 different spreadsheets from across the council had to be manually entered into the cookie baker’s system.

Since automating their systems with QuickBase, the Council has reduced the paperwork associated with the sales for 3.5M boxes of cookies annually by 95%.

In addition to their more traditional use of QuickBase, texting functionality has been implemented to make it easier for the general public in the Los Angeles area to find and buy those highly sought after Thin Mints.

How does it work?

When Greater Los Angeles County residents decide they want to buy Girl Scout cookies this March, they can now simply text or email their zip code to gs@girlscoutsla.org. The system will search the online database and return the exact location, date and time of two nearby cookie sales booths. If you want more locations, simply hit reply and QuickBase will send you two additional locations pulled from the more than 600 sales booth locations and 18,000 sales dates and times that the volunteers had previously entered into the system.

This new text querying functionality is very customized and specific to the Girl Scouts main QuickBase application. QuickBase partners, Dovetail Associates and Juiced Technologies worked together to deliver this customization. For several years, Dovetail Associates has been working with a few different Girl Scouts councils developing and customizing their QuickBase booth sales applications, which the councils now so fondly refer to as Green Beans.

Hungry Yet?

This is a pretty cool use of QuickBase. What are some of the ways you might consider leveraging this kind of customized functionality?

About the Girl Scouts

The Annual Girl Scout Cookie Program is America’s leading financial empowerment and entrepreneurial program for girls, in addition to a money-earning activity. The cookie program is an integral part of the Girl Scout Leadership Experience and a time-honored Girl Scout tradition for more than 90 years. The public eagerly awaits the cookie season every year and this new technology is a way to connect customers with Girl Scouts who gain important skills and confidence with every customer interaction.

Search’d: How do I enable the Sharepoint Protocol

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:16 GMT

This is part of the Search’d series. Topics are taken from Search Engine keyword searches. This second post is coming a bit late, but it is finally here. I’ve been getting ready for our World Wide Sales Kickoff. We will be kicking off our new fiscal year with great sessions for our worldwide group of partners. [...]

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Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:40 GMT

Google Chrome extension for Netvouz

John Pedersen, the developer of the Firefox extension for Netvouz, has switched to the Google Chrome browser. A great browser but something was lacking - no integration with his favorite online bookmark manager. So he decided to develop an extension for Google Chrome as well. We have now been testing this for a while and it's working really well.

Anyone using Google Chrome should go to Chrome extension for Netvouz and install it. When installed a single Netvouz icon appears in the upper right corner. Clicking it reveals two buttons; one for quickly accessing your Netvouz bookmarks page and another for adding new bookmarks.

Many many thanks to John for his work on this!

//Henrik

Our customers love what they do!

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:00 GMT

If you’ve ever talked to the team here at FreshBooks, you know we’re a happy and energetic bunch. A lot of this comes from the simple fact that we really enjoy what we do for a living. What's great about working with freelancers, small business owners and entrepreneurs every day is that they share the same love for their work that we do. Running a business takes a ton of work, so you probably wouldn't be doing it if you didn't love it!

Back in February, we whipped up a little contest for Valentine's to share some of this inspiring passion, passing the love around using Twitter. After all, Valentine's day is about sharing the love, and in this case, the love for our work. We asked people to use Twitter to tell us why they love what they do for a chance to win some nice little Valentine’s Day prizes, given out randomly over the course of the day. Some of the responses were just so awesome, we wanted to share a few of them with all of you.

Our favorites included:

I love being a freelance designer because I can pick up and move to Hawaii
I love my gig because I get to do what I love to do every day
I love my gig because I get to work at home doing what I love, designing websites and writing, while watching my son grow
I love my gig because my morning “commute” takes 15 seconds… except when there's traffic (kids' toys in the way)
I love my gig today because I could win a prize because I love my gig

It was a fun contest for all of us, and we hope that our winners are enjoying their prizes. If you missed out, stay tuned as we're always looking for an excuse to celebrate and give away more cool stuff!

An extensive write-up about Zoho CRM on financial-planning.com

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00 GMT

It is always great to know that your service is sought-after, used, reviewed and recommended by other users, businesses and people. And when we came across the detailed write-up and recommendation to 'Take a look at Zoho CRM' in a recent article titled 'Special Report: Your Practice Management Questions Answered ' on financial-planning.com, we were thrilled.

'Financial Planning' is dedicated to the needs of independent financial planners, whose primary concerns include building relationships with clients and their practice, that is building and managing their business, mainly client's portfolios. Thus, addressing Customer Relationship Management is essential as in any form of Business.

The extensive part about Zoho CRM comes as a response to one of the questions (located around the middle of page 5) the article addresses which is 'How can I start using CRM software, cheap?'. It provides a good perspective to any Business interested in using a CRM, to get an idea if Zoho CRM would suffice for managing their customer interactions and relations. Here is an excerpt from the article:

As you may have gathered, both the Professional and Enterprise editions of Zoho CRM offer a great deal of value. There are plenty of fields, a great deal of functionality and very good granular security. What sets Zoho apart from some of its competitors, however, is the breadth of its offering. While the Zoho CRM Professional edition is very robust and a great value for the money, it becomes substantially more effective when used in combination with other Zoho offerings. To give you just one example, combining Zoho CRM with Zoho email and Zoho Docs gives you robust CRM, integrated email that includes email storage, plus an integrated online entry-level document management solution at an unbeatable price. Add Zoho Business (email hosting plus an Office suite) and you have a fully functional online set of productivity applications, including calendaring functionality.

Many thanks to Joel P. Bruckenstein , CFP, publisher, Virtual Office News for that wonderful write-up about Zoho CRM. It is not easy to get feedback or even small comments from users and it is hard to know where we stand from the outside without them. We hope we see more such reviews in the future so that we can improve on our drawbacks and continue to work towards providing excellent, affordable CRM .

Import credit card data with ExpenseBay

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:21 GMT

ExpenseBay downloads your credit-card transactions on a nightly basis and stores your receipts.

As a small business, you probably have a lot of expenses. When it comes time to recording these expenses, we feel your pain. That’s why we’re pleased to announce integration with ExpenseBay, an expense manager that helps you keep track of your expenses with ease. Download transactions from over 4000 types of credit and debit cards nightly, enter cash expenses on the go from your iPhone, and have your expense reports generated automatically.

With the ExpenseBay integration, you can import expenses into your FreshBooks account. Which means expenses go straight from your credit-card statement, into ExpenseBay, and over to FreshBooks. Attached a receipt in ExpenseBay? A link to the image will show-up in the notes of the expense in FreshBooks. When you’re done, send your new expenses into an invoice, and off to your clients.

It’s a great fit for those of you looking for a better way to manage your expenses. Use the promo-code “EBP89027”, when signing up for ExpenseBay, to receive a free 30-day trial.

A note for our international friends, ExpenseBay is a service primarily for North American businesses. We'll keep you posted if we hear about any international support in the future.

If you liked this post, check out our add-ons page, and learn how you can get more out of FreshBooks!

Zoho Show: Slide Transitions, Animation, Support for Google Chrome and other improvements in Zoho Show

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:08 GMT

Transitions and animations have been one of the most requested features for our online presentations product, Zoho Show. We're happy to release them today. We've added 30 slide transitions and 5 in-slide animations that you can add to your Zoho Show presentation. And just in case you are wondering, when you import a Powerpoint presentation that has transitions, we do import those with it. Same thing when you export a presentation. You will find the transitions & animations menu on the right-hand side in the Zoho Show UI (next to where the Shapes and Themes are, see below).

More than just writing about them, I thought it'd be more appropriate to embed a small Zoho Show presentation where you can see them in action. Transitions and animations (all 30 of them) work whether you're in Slideshow mode or whether you embedded the presentation in a web page.

Since we are talking about embedding a presentation, you might want to check out our embedding options. We've re-designed the entire process to not only add more options, but also make it super easy for you to embed the presentation in your site and have it look just like you wanted. Now, when you go to Publish->Embed, you'll notice there is an "Advanced Options" link. Here you can easily control -no HTML tweaking needed- the size of your embedded presentation, whether you want controls on it, and several other options.

That's not all. We also just released support for Google Chrome in Zoho Show. Previously, you were only able to view presentation when using Chrome. Now, you can also edit them. We are a big fan of Chrome's stability, speed and what it means for online applications like ours. So this was of course a natural step for us.

Rodrigo

Assembling a High-Performance Team

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:00 GMT

A team doesn’t just happen. An effective team is designed, built, and managed. Carefully designed teams have a sense of unity and identification… team spirit, if you will. The best time to ensure a project's success is before you even get started. Especially if you are the leader. Consider these seven guidelines before you even think about communicating the project to your team.

Set a clear goal

Giving a vague assignment is a sure way to failure. The objective for the project needs to be clear. How does your team know if it has achieved what it set out to do? There should be no question about what success looks like.

Unify the team

Even with a clear goal, there will be confusion. As your project gets underway, each team member will get their own vision of how that objective is manifested. Plan on getting agreement on the vision up front. With a common vision, your team will set aside their own agendas and ideologies for the sake of achieving this collective goal. Then later, when the team comes to a fork in the road in making a decision, they will be able to easily and unanimously agree to take the route that will lead to the best outcome.

“After all, your team is not just a collection of individuals. It is an entity of its own.”

Have a mission

The goal of your project needs to be clear. It also needs to be motivating, so team members want to accomplish it (other than because the CEO said so). When a goal isn’t something the team members identify with, personal agendas or power issues will surface, making success difficult.

Pick the right team members

Picking your team is not only about finding colleagues with the right mix of technical skills. “A common mistake in forming teams is to assume that people who have all the technical skills necessary to solve a problem also have the interpersonal skills necessary to work together effectively,” writes J. Richard Hackman in Teams That Work (and Those That Don’t). People working on the project must not only be able to get the job done, they must also be able to collaborate, communicate, and cooperate.

Provide support and resources

Another common mistake is to give a team challenging objectives, but then provide little to no organizational support. If the money isn’t there, if the technology doesn’t work, or if the supplies are missing, the best people with the strongest commitment and the clearest goals will accomplish… not much. Anticipate what your team will need in order to perform at their best. Having systems in place to support work groups will make the project flow smoother and decision making faster.

Encourage collaboration

Team spirit is not a permanent state – it is built up or it is slowly destroyed based on daily actions. Foster team spirit by creating a collaborative culture. Collaboration comes from, first and foremost, trust. As the leader, you need to be trustworthy, but the team members must also trust each other. Hear are three ways you can make sure that it happens:

Honesty – As a leader, have the courage to be honest. Encourage team members to be honest with each other.
Openness – Be open about the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. Utilize team members so that their talents are maximized.
Respect – There is no need for everyone to agree, but there is a need for everyone to be listened to. Encourage teams to disagree, without acting in a disagreeable manner. Without a respectful climate, team members will be afraid to voice ideas they are afraid might get shot down.

“Effective team leaders ensure a collaborative climate by making communication safe, by demanding and rewarding collaborative behavior, by guiding the team’s problem-solving efforts, and by managing one’s own control needs.“ Frank LaFasto & Carl Larson When Teams Work Best.

Set standards of excellence

Just as you set a clear goal, also be prepared to set clear performance standards. Performance standards help define the process that gets your team to the goal. For example, if the goal is 100% customer satisfaction for the month of March, what are the behaviors that will allow that to happen? Define those metrics and then expect all the team members to perform at that standard. As a team leader you can do three things to set standards of excellence:

Set clear expectations and desired results.
Review results and provide feedback.
Reward superior performance.

Creating a high-performing team isn't something that just happens overnight. What have you found that makes your teams out-perform?

Improved Print Version for XING Profiles

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:19 GMT

The latest version of our BlackBerry app was released along with a number of improvements for the OAuth interface, which you need to invite your email contacts, for example. And that's not all – today we've also provided a number of minor optimizations including the much-improved ‘Print profile' function.

Being able to print out your profile and other XING member profiles, which are inserted into our style sheets to visually adjust the layout, is of course nothing new. But now we have tweaked the corresponding CSS data and enhanced it even further so that a profile printout can also be used as a large professional business card complete with résumé.

We have also added a ‘Print profile' button which is located on the right-hand side under ‘Options'. Of course you can only print out contact information for people whose profiles are visible to you, and vice versa.

Orange partners with Netvibes to offer the world’s largest collection of mobile widgets

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:35 GMT

The partnership will bring Netvibes’ widget platform to millions of mobile users across Europe, Middle East and Africa for the first time
Content providers will have access to Orange’s 130 million mobile customers

Orange and Netvibes today announced a partnership to bring the world’s largest collection of mobile widgets to all types of mobile phone user across an extensive range of handsets. Netvibes’ huge catalogue of nearly 200,000 real-time widgets will be available on Orange widgets, a service featuring on 80% of handsets shipped by Orange. It will also be available on djinngo mobile, an Orange service open to any mobile phone user in the world. And soon, mobile widgets will be available to Orange customers in the recently launched Orange Application Shop

The widget collection, known as Netvibes Ecosystem, is a library of popular widgets from the leading content providers around the world. Customers will access Orange widgets with one click from the Orange homescreen. The service has a carousel from which they can chose their favourite widgets and will be available on devices from the majority of handset companies, including basic phones right up to the most sophisticated smartphones.

Orange widgets first launched in July 2009 and was designed to be quick and easy to use – even for customers totally unfamiliar with mobile multi-media services. By providing access to the best, most popular local content, in customers’ own language, Orange is seeking to open a new mobile widget marketplace for everyone.

By bringing a user-friendly widget service to the mobile mass market, Orange is also giving content developers access to an entirely new market of users. To facilitate this, Orange is creating a software developer kit to ensure a simple and efficient process for developers to create new and value-adding widgets.

Commenting on the partnership, Paul-François Fournier, Executive Vice-President, Audience and Advertising, Orange said: “As the largest independent provider of real time widgets across 90 languages, Netvibes was the ideal partner for us. Our strategy is to make mobile widgets a reality for everyone – not just the mobile multimedia fans with sophisticated smartphones. Our approach is to offer diverse local content, in all languages, with an intuitive and simple experience that will appeal to all. Netvibes’ catalogue includes widgets from content developers around the world and this was important for us as we will be offering widgets across Europe, Middle East and Africa”.

“Our vision is to personalize the entire online world and empower consumers to customize their entire Web experience. Thanks to our partnership with Orange, we are bringing personalized widgets to millions of consumers everywhere,” said Freddy Mini, CEO Netvibes. “The era of the real-time, personalized Web has truly begun.”

While the partnership will focus initially on mobile widgets, the partners will draw on Orange’s leadership in broadband internet and IPTV to extend the experience across other screens.

How do customers access widgets from Orange?

Widgets are an ‘out of the box’ experience, meaning customers can simply turn on their phone and choose from a wide range of content-driven services available through what we call the “Orange Widgets”: an on-device client aimed at customers who would like a very simple and straightforward selection of content-driven multimedia services accessed through widgets.

On low-end to mid-end devices, widgets are served though an embedded widget player named “Orange widgets”.
On mid-end to high-end devices, widgets will be served through the Orange Application shop.
Customers will either have instant access to Orange Widgets straight from their Orange homescreen and / or from the main menu of the phone.

The widget selection is then made by choosing the appropriate widget icon within the widget player.
Widgets deliver useful information-led services, like weather reports, news, sports results, encyclopedia definitions and horoscopes one or two clicks always from the homescreen.

In the future we will begin to integrate a selection of widgets with the Homescreen of our Signature devices that customers can easily launch with one click.

How will Orange help developers/publishers to create widgets and Apps.

Orange will offer the widgets SDK, which is a generic toolkit to create widgets and apps.

3rd parties will be able to create widgets that will run in the widget player (Orange Widgets/Djinngo mobile) and can be easily packaged into standalone apps to be distributed in the Application shop

What is the difference between the Orange Widgets and Djinngo ?

Orange Widgets is the mobile client through which Orange customers can access widgets.
It is a widget service dedicated to Orange mobile customers.

Djinngo is an operator-agnostic widget solution provided by Orange that shares the same platform as the Orange Widget Player. Customers can download the Djinngo service onto their mobile, and use the widgets within it, irrespective of which operator they are with.

Is Orange Widgets available across all Orange handsets?

Orange is working to be able to offer its customers a widget experience across 80% of its Signature phones capturing the niche and mass-market customer base.

How will the customers’ experience of widgets compare with that of the Application Shop?

Widgets and apps are similar objects aiming to enhance the multimedia capabilities of the mobile phones of our customers with some slight differences in terms of scope, technology, richness.

Whether it’s an app that can provide a rich search experience with GPS, or a widget for quick and easy access to information, Orange is helping customers unleash the power of their mobile phone in an infinite number of ways.

Widgets are offered to consumers on 80% of Orange devices via an icon on the Homescreen or in the menu called ‘Orange Widgets’.

They are mini-applications with a very simple user interface through which consumers can gain access to basic, regularly-updated information; horoscopes, news, sports results, encyclopedia, traffic alerts, weather reports …
They are usually free for the consumer to download and use (only limited data fees)
A number of widgets (20 to 30) selected by Orange will be highlighted to customers via Orange Widgets. They will also be able to click straight through to a wider catalogue which will include the Netvibes widgets.

Applications or “Apps” are offered to consumers on a wide range of low-end, mid-end and high-end devices through the App Shop client on the Homescreen.

They consist of games, e-books, calendars, maps, recipes, calculators, money converters and more.
Some are free but most are paid-for by the consumer.
There’s a regularly-updated selection available to the consumer to select and use.

Customers can access around 5000 games, apps, ringtones and wallpapers through the Orange App Shop on-device client, all of which will have been selected by Orange.

Why this partnership with Netvibes?

A Widget ecosystem implies a diverse and rich catalogue of content, developers and powerful distribution channels. With this in mind Orange sought out a partner to provide a part of the catalogue of content and a partner which was pertinent to incentive developers to develop on mobile. Netvibes as a leading player in the Widget market is an ideal partner.

What does the partnership comprise?

The contract is built on a partnership principle. At the beginning, Netvibes will bring its expertise on widgets and ecosystem and Orange will bring expertise on mobile technology and user experience.

Moving forward, the two partners commit to work together on a multiscreen widget strategy with a short term focus on mobile interfaces.

What will this partnership bring to end users ?

The idea of the agreement is to democratize content access on all ranges of mobile and not only to the most advanced devices. Thanks to this partnership, Orange will be able to offer to its customers nearly 200,000 widgets available in 90 languages. This agreement contributes towards the Orange mission to offer localized and value added content and services to all its affiliates.

Will you have a revenue share agreement? What is the business model?

The first step in the implementation is to integrate access to the huge widget catalogue into Orange Widgets

Access to Orange Widgets will be included in Orange mobile offers linked to countries data offers.

When will the services be launched and in which countries?

The widgets from Netvibes will be made available to Orange customers via Orange Widgets in the next few weeks.

You say you want to develop new services on other screens. What will you focus on and what’s coming next?

The first step of the implementation focuses on Orange Widgets.

But we also include in the scope of the partnership screens like TV and tabbee.

Will you integrate advertising?

We have a number of routes to offer monetisation options including advertising integration and micro payment capabilities.

How are Netvibes widgets served to Orange Mobile devices? Are these the same widgets as found on Netvibes.com?

Orange mobile widgets are provided and powered by “Netvibes for Enterprise”, the leading enterprise-class widget and dashboard publishing platform. Netvibes for Enterprise lets Orange tap into a database of more than 188,000 different widgets and official content feeds from the Netvibes Ecosystem, the world’s largest library of universal, cross-platform widgets.

How is Netvibes technology integrated with the Orange mobile platform? Was this a joint development project between Orange and Netvibes?

- Netvibes has been working in joint development with Orange since Q2, 2009, to integrate the Netvibes Ecosystem with the “Orange Widgets” library found on 80% of Orange mobile devices and “djinngo mobile”, the Orange widget service that’s open to virtually any mobile phone user in the world.

- With this new strategic partnership, Netvibes widgets will soon be available to more than 130M Orange mobile customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Will Netvibes be acquired by Orange?

This is a strategic partnership, not a M&A announcement.

When will we be able to see the solution? How can they access the widgets?

- Netvibes widgets will soon be available to more than 130M Orange mobile customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

- Users will soon be able to access Netvibes widgets just like any other Orange widget, either from “Orange Widgets”, the service featured on 80% of Orange handsets, or “djinngo mobile”, the Orange widget service that’s open to virtually any mobile phone user in the world.

Will we see Netvibes widgets for Orange broadband Internet and IPTV customers?

- The partnership is initially focused on offering mobile widgets to Orange customers. However, Orange may someday expand this offering to broadband internet and IPTV customers to expand their widget experience across TVs, PCs, tablets, etc.

Where can developers learn more about developing widgets for the Netvibes Ecosystem or for Orange Mobile?

- Developers who want to build widgets for the Netvibes Ecosystem and Orange Mobile can visit the Netvibes developers site (dev.netvibes.com) for more information. Netvibes Ecosystem’s widget database will soon include a new section specifically for “Widgets by Orange” as part of this partnership.

- Furthermore, Orange will soon offer an Orange Mobile SDK and developer community specifically for building widgets for Orange mobile devices.

For more information, feel free to visit www.djinngo.com and follow @djinngo & @netvibes on Twitter.

3 Analyzing Tools for your Netvibes Dashboard

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:46 GMT

After having covered those last weeks 3 Monitoring Tools for your Netvibes Dashboard and 3 Listening Tools for your Netvibes Dashboard we are going to conclude those posts with some analyzing tools.

Having said that, here are 3 free services which will allow you to turn your Netvibes into a powerful dashboard to gather some datas and metrics in order to better analyze and understand what people are saying about your brand or favorite topic. I hope you’ll like those videos.

If you know of more of such analyzing services don’t hesitate to share them with us in the comments.

With Google Trends you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics and also see how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories.

Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches.

Compete provides free information for every site on the Internet including site traffic history and competitive analytics.

Gone Bowling – Our office will be closed at 3:00PM EST today

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:20 GMT

Just a heads up to let everyone know that the FreshBooks office will be closed at 3:00PM EST today as everyone is striking the bowling alley for our Fresh Bowl Madness. We will be polishing our bowling techniques so that we have a chance to shine! As John has demonstrated in the above photo taken at our last Fresh Bowl Madness — Even if you broke your dominant arm, you still have to come bowling.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to leave us a voice mail (1-866-303-6061) or an email at support @ freshbooks.com. We’ll make sure to return your inquiries as soon as possible on Thursday morning.

Until then, remember: If you don't knock a lot of pins down, at least strike a pretty pose!

XING BlackBerry App 1.5 Heralds a Number of Improvements and New Features

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:24 GMT

In July 2009 we launched our BlackBerry application. Since then we have been monitoring which functions have proven most popular and evaluated all of the great feedback we received from users. As a result of this, we have now finished developing version 1.5, which adds to or improves various aspects of the app. All of the previous features such as searching within your own contacts, finding people on XING, synchronization with the BlackBerry address book, and mobile status messaging are of course still available.

Save Time, Money and Traffic

Optimized data management is one of the new developments and is now far more efficient with less data being automatically loaded. This in turn helps to reduce the level of traffic generated and not only leads to increased execution speeds, but can also help to put off the speed reduction that a number of providers enforce when users exceed a certain monthly data volume. This of course helps to save money when roaming.

Improved Contact and Messaging Management

Contact management within the app has been improved. As is the case with the browser-based platform, now you can add messages to and decline contact requests, while unconfirmed contacts now appear in their own tab. As was previously the case, available contact data is intuitively linked to core BlackBerry functions such as the telephone, email, and map application.

The outbox, i.e., your sent messages, is now also available in the application so you can mark messages as ‘unread’ once you’ve read them to make sure you don't forget about them.

When viewing profiles, you can now also see the ‘Wants’, ‘Haves’ and ‘Interests’ fields. And, just like on the browser-based platform, visitors to your profile are displayed in a separate tab rather than in the ‘What’s new in your network’ list.

This ‘interim version’ therefore incorporates a number of application optimizations while adapting handling and usage to that of the browser-based platform. Naturally, data traffic via the application only occurs once authentication has taken place, and personal privacy settings are retained at all times.