For CopierCatalog.com, I needed to get a good live chat software. I wanted to make sure that I was available to talk with clients that needed immediate assistance. Both from a sales perspective as well as a support perspective. I started some research.

I first thought about using Skype as my software because I am in Skype all the time. But the problem with that is that in order for someone to chat with me via Skype, they need to have Skype loaded with an account. I wanted this to be easy for them so I didn’t want them to have to load anything. Skype should consider making an anonymous web client.

I looked at few services. One of the most common (at least that I see) is LivePerson. They have some pretty cool features, but it was more than I needed. They have tracking and analysis and the whole nine yards. But, the cost is $99 per month. Even then, I had to contact them to get the price.

I wanted something free. I wanted something reliable.

I ran across Volusion. They have exactly what I need. I downloaded and installed their free version of the chat software. I get pop-ups (configurable) when someone wants to chat. I can change the appearance with an easy to use interface. It is really easy to use.

The only catch is, I have to have a link back to their site… after all, they want to sell the service. That’s a fair trade off.

If you would like to see how the software works from a customer perspective, here is my chat. if I am online, you can chat… if not, it will just send me an email.

If you only have a couple of people that need the service, it will cost less than LivePerson at only $30 per user. When you are ready for your fourth user, you may consider looking at LivePerson, but I think this is a great service and offers a lot for the price.

I have a lot of clients that need to send me files. It sometimes is a chore to teach them how to use FTP because they first have to download an FTP client, get it configured properly and then upload to the right folder. Not to mention that I have to set up the FTP account on my server so their files don’t get mixed up with other clients’ files.

WinXP made it pretty easy, but as people are moving to Mac or Vista, FTP isn’t as easy as it used to be. So, I decided to checkout a few online storage locations. There are a number of free services out there. I think that box.net is really the best option.

Here is how you do it.

They offer a few plans. The basic plan, the lite version, provides 1GB of space online for free. You can get more space for a monthly fee. With the lite version, the maximum file size is only 10MB. When you sign up for the lite version, you have the option to upgrade to the next level (giving you 5GB of space and 1GB max files size) for 14 days for free. The problem is that you have to provide credit card information and they will bill you at the end of the trial if you don’t cancel it.

box.net is designed for multiple people to have access to your files. It allows you to organize your files into folders and provides an opportunity to keep the files private or invite people to have access to them. You can multiple files and the only reason you would need to install anything is if you want to use the drag and drop feature. Even then, it sets it all up for you automatically.

The best feature, I think, is they have some add-ons that enhance the user experience.

You can add on a lot more like a GMail connector and an eFax connector.

If you have files smaller than 10MB to share, this is a great way to share files. If you have to share files larger than 10MB, you might consider it worth it to pay the $8 per month. But, you can also buy large file credits. If you have only the occasional file that is larger than 10MB, you should consider buying the credit. Then, you can get the free service, but still upload an occasional large file.

Let me know if you have found other files services out there that work for you.

I find it fascinating how often I.T. is assigned to the task of building a website. For the uninitiated, this may seem like a logical thing to do. After all, a website is technology and requires programming and stuff, right?

Wrong.

A very small part of a website is programming. A very small part of a website is technology. Oh, it might take a lot of work. It might be a requirement for the site to function properly, but I.T. should really not have a say in what the customer sees… the face or the marketing aspect of the site.

In my opinion, here are the top five components of a website… in order of importance.

1. Graphical Presentation - all the pretty pictures. All the pretty buttons. This is the first thing someone sees. This is the first thing that can turn them away.
2. User interface - This tells people where to go. What do they do next, etc. this may be second to the graphical presentation, but it is a very close second.
3. Content - Well, you need to content to put on the buttons and graphics, but there is also core site content. People will see pictures and captions of pictures before they ever see this. The may not even read this.
4. Social aspects - Blogs, forums and support features. If you don’t have the core content or pretty graphics, this won’t matter. It especially won’t matter if people don’t know how to get there from the user interface.
5. Programming - programming comes last. Of course, there may be programming required to accomplish any of the above, it is last for one very important reason. If you don’t have the above figured out, programming doesn’t matter. If your designer doesn’t create graphics, your programmers can’t install it. If you don’t know what you want the user interface to look like, your programmers can’t build it. If you don’t have your content written, your programmers can paste it in.

So, get I.T. out of the website design and put marketing on it. Either get it done with an in house marketing team to do it or outsource it. Either way, don’t depend on I.T. to build you a great website. Oh, they might be able to pull it off, but those types of I.T. people aren’t nearly as common… besides, even if they could, should I.T. really be setting your marketing direction?

Okay… so this is really a shameless plug, but I figure I have a large enough audience here that hopefully it will get some traction.

You may notice from my signature line that I maintain the news at OfficeProductNews.net. I have been maintaining this feed for a few months now… pretty tedious work because no one has standardized how this industry publishes information. My growing readership there shows that I am doing something right…

But, I need your help.

I am looking for opinion pieces or news pieces from companies that are related to copiers, printers and document management. I would love to publish your content and provide links back to your blog, company site or wherever.

You can take a look at the post titled Publish your News, Opinions and Case Studies for Free On Office Product News for more information.

If you know of anyone who would like to post there, please don’t hesitate to forward this message on.

It is an easy way to get a link back and get your message out there as often as you like.

I often have conversations with clients about setting up blogs for their employees. These blogs can be for internal use only as a way for employees to have a level of internal communication without flooding email accounts for other employees that really don’t care. These blogs can be on the public internet site allowing anyone to see.

It surprises me how often I hear the concern, "What if the employee says something that we don’t approve? I don’t want to have to police their writing all the time."

To this I ask, "Do you proof all of their emails? Do you listen to all their phone conversations? Do you go to all your client appointments with them to verify their speech?"

You are stupid to think that your employees always say things that are along company lines. You are naive to think that you can monitor and control all of your employee communication.

The fact is, a blog provides you with a level of security that you may not have had before. If the employee is dumb enough to say something in appropriate in a blog, you can address that with written proof. If the employee has a private conversation and says the same thing, you have nothing.

Get into the now and stop living in the past. The fact is, your employees are saying things… just give them a forum that you can monitor and maintain.

When you are redesigning or redefining your company’s image, one of the things that is very hard to do it to step back and understand who your real audience is.

Designing a logo, a website, a brochure or even something as simple as a blog post is not a task to have the attitude of, "I like it, so it is good."

The most important thing about any design is to remember your audience. Who are the people that you want to attract? When you do something personal, it is all about you. When you do something for you business, it is all about them.

So, next time you have to create something… write an article, design a brochure or redo your website… make sure that you don’t let yourself fall into the trap that you know better than your target audience what they need.

Ask members of your target audience then take their advice seriously.

Remember that every time you design anything your customer will see, you are redefining who you are.

Time for a little rant…

In an effort not to offend anyone, people more and more are trying to use more  political correctness in language. Calling someone an African-American because his skin is black even if that person doesn’t have any ties to Africa. Calling someone special, differently-abled or handicapable when handicap is probably the right word for it.

Not being able to use a word because someone somewhere might be offended… even if it is the right word for the job is just plain stupid.

It just dumbs down our language and our ability to communicate.

What drives me most nuts is the use of pronouns.

For example. When I am talking about one person, the proper pronoun is "he" or "she"… not "they."

Wrong: "I was talking to a friend the other day and they were saying…"

Right: "I was talking to a friend the other day and he was saying…"

Okay, so what if we don’t know the proper pronoun? What if you want to apply the pronoun to both mail and female? Using he or she is far more appropriate.

Right: "When talking to a customer you should be aware that he or she may…"

Use the right language for the right conversation and you won’t sound so wrong.

In looking to ways to increase my traffic, I am looking to my friends and social networking to help me out. I decided to start Twittering. Their site is riddled with code problems, but it is a pretty cool service.

I like my blog because it gives me an opportunity to talk about what I am thinking. I have come to like Twitter because it gives me a change to talk about what I am doing. Moreover, it gives me a chance to follow people and know what they are doing right now.

There are many different opinions on how to use Twitter in business. Justin Foster had a post today on what he calls “Twitter Magic.” It was at his recommendation that I sign up.

One thing that Justin suggests is that a company doesn’t need a Twitter strategy. He is referring to the idea that as a company, we don’t want to have a strategy about how to connect with people… we should just connect.

Last week, Misty Khan posted at Arrow Tips her thought on a Twitter strategy. For the most part, I am inclined to agree that personally, you should have a strategy. In my opinion, her strategy is more about being a good conversationalist than about Twitter.

If you want, follow me by clicking on my Twitter badge on the right. If you are interesting to me, I’ll follow you back.

I mentioned last week that communication management tends to be the hardest part about project management. I have also mentioned in the past that I am a big fan of Mac… but I use a PC as my primary computer for various reasons. One of those reasons is the productivity of Outlook.

Communication management is a bear, so there are companies that have added efficiency tools for Outlook. TechHit.com contacted me and asked me to do a review of their product… they gave me a free license on three of their products so that I can put them through the paces. I told them to be aware that I will give an honest review… even if it is bad. I’ll talk about the first tool today.

SimplyFile is the first Outlook plug-in I have tried from TechHit. Installation is pretty straight forward. When you restart Outlook, you get a new toolbar that appears:

First, I need to tell you the basic premise of the application. The idea is that you spend a lot of time filing away your emails into separate folders or scheduling appointments and tasks from an email message.

For example, I know that when I want to file away messages into various folders, I have to first find the folder and then drag and drop. Or, if I want to schedule an appointment, I  will copy the body of the email and then paste into a new appointment.

This toolbar adds some pretty cool functionality to Outlook. It took a little for me to figure out the best approach since I am averse to reading instructions (just ask my wife). But, the first thing you do is click the SimplyFile button on the far right and click "Train SimplyFile…" It will pop up the window on the right here.

When you click "Start Training" it will look at all the messages in your inbox and all your folders and start to figure out how you file messages. If you have a lot of messages, be patient, it will take some time.

After you have trained SimplyFile, you will have a lot of options available in your toolbar to file those messages away. You will notice that when you click on a message in your inbox, the tool bar drop down message will change to indicate where SimplyFile thinks you want to file that message to.  SimplyFile does a pretty good job getting the location right, but you have the option to change the folder location. As you change the locations, SimplyFile will learn your habits and become more proactive at suggesting the right one.

If you get an email that you just want to file away quickly that SimplyFile doesn’t know what to do with, you can click the QuickPick button. What I like about this is that you can refresh the folder list and see the current folders. It shows the full path of the folders, so it takes a little to get used to it, but it does make it easier in the long run.

Of course, there are the "Task It" and "Schedule It" Buttons. I don’t set many tasks from an email (although I probably should - I am still on a pad of paper for my tasks - I know what you are thinking, "That dumb web developer and blogger uses paper for tasks?!?"). But, I do set a lot of appointments from an email. This saves a lot of copying and pasting time. This is a great feature.

My favorite feature, though, is what you can do with sent items. Typically, you have all of your sent items go to one Sent Items folder. Many times, you want to save a sent item for a certain client saved in a different place (some people I know save them in the same folder for one client - all messages for one clients in one folder whether sent or received.)

You can turn this feature off, but I have kept it on. There are many times that I don’t want to save a message when sent. But, it gives you a lot of options that you didn’t have before.

So, my overall thoughts? If you are accustomed to filing messages manually, without Inbox rules, this may be a good product for you. If you use Inbox rules and are happy with them, this probably won’t work for you because this doesn’t route messages automatically, as far as I can tell but you may find that changing some habits can actually increase your efficiency.

The other con: it doesn’t help you with email management if you don’t really have a good strategy for what you want to do or don’t want to take the time to put one in place. If you are happy with keeping your messages in one location or don’t have the discipline to click a button and have it automatically file for you, then it may not be right for you. That is the biggest problem I have. I move on to the next message so quickly, that I forget to file it away.

In my opinion the only real con is the price. It costs $39.95 per user. That seems like a hefty cost. I like some of the features, but I don’t know that I personally would gain enough to cover the cost.

The pitch is that you don’t have to change your filing habits but just make them better. I have to change my habits to make this worthwhile because I am so inefficient in the way I handle email. I am going to use this as the impetus to become more efficient, so later I may think it worth $40… but not right now.

My recommendation to TechHit? Give away a lite version of the app. Strip it down to one or two features that people would like and then sell the rest of the features. Or even sell the stripped down version for $10 with a $30 upgrade. $40 is a lot to bite off when you will likely need to change the way you do things to become more efficient. After all, that is what they are asking their clients to do… change habits to become more efficient.

Try it out on their 30 day free trial and let me know what you think.

When I consider project management, I find that managing what needs to be done in a project is rather easy… as long as I am the only person I have to manage. What really becomes a challenge is trying to manage communication with various people.

I have to manage communication with clients, partners, vendors and employees. It can be a daunting task.

For a professional project manager, there are tools like MS Project that can help bring things together. I don’t like that sort of tool for the projects I manage because it offers far more than I want to learn. I don’t think in terms of a Gantt Chart. I don’t like to worry about some of the things it manages…. especially since my projects have 2 or 3 resources to worry about.

You can go for something online like BaseCamp. It is a pretty good interface that sends email reminders of when something needs to be done. But, it doesn’t answer the real problem with project management… and that is communication management.

I use Outlook for everything. I have it synchronized with my Gmail so that I can get my email on the road or on my mobile phone. The problem is that I receive a few hundred emails in a given day. That means sorting into folders and setting up reminders (if you need them). But, it is still a daunting task.

One of the things we implemented for my web development projects is a weekly development meeting. My project manager and I have a weekly meeting to discuss the status of each site. We have a checklist on each site that we go through in detail during that meeting. Now, we still talk through the week about projects. We still email, Skype or phone each other, but the face to face time provide a significant enhancement to our process.

“But,” you may ask, “how does that help with communication with vendors, partners or clients?”

“Well,” I would say, “I am glad you asked that question!”

We take that opportunity to review what we are waiting on from our partners and vendors. If we have already sent an email and don’t hear back from them, we call them. The same is true for our clients.

Minimally, we compose an email that states exactly where the project is, what we are waiting on from others and what we think people are waiting for us to do. If we have missed anything, it gives our client an opportunity to call us on it.

This is just our attempt at providing a greater level of transparency in what we do.

We aren’t perfect at it, but it has made a huge difference in how we communicate.

How do you manage communication? What have you done that has seen success…. or even failure?