We were pleased to roll out another release recently with a whole bunch of new features.
The level of positive feedback across all our channels and countries has been excellent, from phone calls, emails, twitter, skype, instant messenger and more.
There have been so many positive comments and it has only been out a few days - have a read below and you will get the idea. Try it and tell your friends!
Sure, there were a few areas that needed a tweak or two, but 90% of reported issues were cosmetic and the vast majority are already fixed and live. This the great thing about SaaS - continuous improvement and community driven quality and ideas. We love it!
Faster. Better. Easier.
That is what we live for - saving you time and helping you do more while simplifying your life. It is being made available to all users immediately. No upgrade hassles, no effort no additional cost. That what I call Good SaaS.
The main areas of improvement are listed below the comments from our fans.
Fans love it
The new stuff
- Speed - some of screens in our top 5 have been reduced by 60%
- Look and feel - most screens make better use of real estate and improved readability
- Transact - cleaner, simpler faster transaction screens that work faster and make your keying easier but have more features
- Activities - manage your to dos, meeting minutes, docs and more. Do the same for your team. Show the boss how much you do every day. Rack activities at the project, client, tag and even transaction level (complex quotes are now easy). This was talked about earlier.
- Catch - the quick way of capturing activities in seconds, now you can easily remember those five action items from every phone call.
- Just one click - extended the number of features that are one click away to over 90%
- Reports - better access to loads of reports, lists, views, exporting and more
- Tags - No more inflexible categorisation, use one or a dozen tags across the whole system to file, group, filter, list and more. Probably a world first(?) for online accounting we think.
- Get social - one click access to around 200 million entries in professional and social networks like face book, linked in, my space, bebo, orkut to see info on your prospects, partners and more. This was pre-announced recently
- Get connected - see maps of addresses on Google maps, search from the dashboard using Catch, connect to salesforce.com for advanced CRM, connect to 88miles.net for project timesheetings, connections for more banks, improved security logging, improved security reporting, improved security control for system-to-system connectors.
- Get control - improved role based security to span one or more businesses and subscriptions, franchises and corporate
- Payroll - drop your old payroll provider and get online, email payslips, automated bulk processing and banking
See it scream
See the new features page for more details and screen shots or watch the new quick tour video.
By the way, it looks sensational on the Mac, and screams on Safari and firefox on Mac OSX, Windows XP and Vista. The best thing? This just the beginning 
This release is timed to coincide with CeBIT too so make sure you come on down and see the greatest technology and business show in the southern hemisphere. Our stand and a little of our presentation will be featuring the new release.
Introducing Saasu BlogMech. It’s a place for new bloggers and those already up and running. An educational platform to assist you in starting, managing or improving your blog.
We don’t profess to be blogging experts but the crew at Saasu find a lot of useful information and ideas in our online travels. We want to be sure you don’t miss out by passing things on as we find them, saving you some research time.
Initial coverage:
- Blog Networks
- Feed Management Platforms
- Blog Feed Readers
- Blog Publishing Platforms
- Social Tagging & Marketing Platforms
- Blog News Services
Hugh Macleod just posted an excellent overview of blogging for business in preparation for a talk he gave to PR firm Edelman.
The piece is an excellent primer for anyone that’s trying to get their head around blogging and social media for business. The advice comes from someone who has first hand experience building what he calls “global microbrands” for Stormhoek wine and Saville Row tailor Thomas Mahon.
One of the key pieces of advice, in my view, that he offers is point 5:
The growth will come, I believe, not by yet more increased efficiencies, but by humanification.
It’s an interesting dichotomy - one that I’m just starting to grapple with. I’ve been involved with the successful Earth Hour campaign, and one of the key challenges was “humanifying” what is in essence a large organisation - through both email responses and a MySpace profile.
The dichotomy is: how do you humanify and grow a company, especially when you have limited resources? How do you grow the resources to support the (when successful, ever growing) responses you get from a successful product or campaign?
My friend Kris wrote the other day about how educators (teachers and trainers) might use the “social bookmarking” service, del.icio.us. Reading his post made me think that perhaps it might be worth looking at how a business could use such a tool.
What is del.icio.us?
del.icio.us, recently acquired by Yahoo!, is a free service that makes it easy to save your bookmarks online. Once in del.icio.us, you can access them from any computer that is connected to the web. If you work on multiple computers (say, one at work and one at home), this can be very helpful.
To bookmark a site, you can use what’s called a “bookmarklet” - which is a special link that you drag to your browser’s bookmark toolbar - to bookmark a site with one click (more information on del.icio.us’ bookmarklets can be found on this help page).
Alternatively, if you are using the Firefox web browser, you can use one of two extensions to integrate del.icio.us into the browser - one from Yahoo! that replaces Firefox’s bookmarking system with del.icio.us integration, another that extends (rather than replaces) Firefox’s standard bookmarks facility.
When you add a site to del.icio.us you can label the bookmark with a number of “tags”. Tags, if you’re not familiar with them, are short text descriptions (similar to “keywords”) that you can use to categorise your links with. Rather than a fixed and formal set of categories, you can tag a link with as many free-form tags as you like - just use as many tags to describe the link as required.
As you add more links, you will naturally get more and more tags. del.icio.us allows you to then view all of your links by tag, or search them. This makes it easier to find tags in the future - rather than having to remember exactly where you saved the link (in one specific folder for example), you can look through any number of relevant tags, or use the search function.
What makes del.icio.us a “social” bookmarking tool?
When you go to the del.icio.us home page you’ll see a list of “What’s Hot”. This list is generated because del.icio.us can tell when a specific link has been linked by a number of people. Sort of like how Google uses the number of links to a page to help determine if it is useful and relevant, del.icio.us uses the number of links to a site to identify sites of interest in the current moment.
Although this is kinda cool, it’s not the only (nor necessarily the most useful/exciting) way that the social nature of del.icio.us can be used.
Each tag also has it’s own page. If you were looking for what people are linking to about, say, laptops, you can look at the del.icio.us listing for the “laptop” tag to find out what other people are linking too (or use the model name/number to be more specific - “MacBook” for example). If you use an RSS news reader, you can also subscribe to a specific tag or del.icio.us user so you can keep track of what’s being added without having to visit the del.icio.us site all the time.
When you add a link to del.icio.us you may also see that it’s linked to by other people. If you click on the “saved by X other people” link next to your bookmark, you can browse what those other people have linked to.
Additionally, if you tag something using the “for:<username>” syntax, that will appear in the “links for you” section of that particular user’s del.icio.us profile (you can see this as a link at the top of your del.icio.us profile page after you have signed in). For example, my del.icio.us username is “grantyoung” - so tagging something as “for:grantyoung” will appear in my “links for you” section. This is a great way to share bookmarks with colleagues or friends. Sending a link this way means that only the “grantyoung” user (me) will have access to the link.
As you can see, there are many ways that the collective value of using del.icio.us’ bookmarks emerges - all from individuals saving their own pages for future reference.
But how can I use it for my business?
The most basic way that del.icio.us can assist you in managing your bookmarks across multiple computers, or simply make it easier to find a bookmark through tags or search.
If you have multiple people in your business that use del.icio.us, you can check out what your coworkers are linking to by checking their bookmarks page (you’ll need to know their del.icio.us username - then append it to the del.icio.us URL. For example, you can view my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/grantyoung), or you could use the “for:” syntax to share links through del.icio.us, rather than sending emails. You may instead want to simply all agree on a specific tag that you use when you want to share your links - then everyone can simply watch that tag - rather than having to use multiple “for:” tags to send to individuals.
You can monitor tags related to your area business to get insight into what’s happening online, and even watch tags related to your business or product name. For example, to see what people are saying about Yahoo!, you can check the “yahoo” tag. Using an RSS news reader makes this even easier to check. You can use this as a form of market research - seeing who’s linking to you, and what people are saying about your business or product(s). (You can do similar sorts of research with blog trackers like Technorati, but that’s a topic for another post…)
If you are running an event (like a conference), you can suggest that people tag their links with a specific tag related to the event. For example, the organisers of the Web Directions conference suggested that participants use the “wd06″ tag. (You can do the same for other popular services like flickr and YouTube.)
You can also share your links via your website or company blog - there are a number of widgets and tools for various blog tools (like WordPress) that allow you to add your del.icio.us links to your site. There are other tools that will take a daily snapshot of your del.icio.us links and post them to your blog. Some tools allow you to specify a specific tag to link to.
You might use a widget like this to link to reviews of your product(s), to sites related to your area of business - to any site that you think might be of interest to your target audience.
Other services
There are services other than del.icio.us that have additional features to del.icio.us, such as ma.gnolia, reddit, Furl, and Google Bookmarks. del.icio.us, while not particularly visually attractive, is quite fast and is widely supported by other tools, and is my preferred choice. However, you may find one of these alternative services more to your liking.
May 7
Peter
1 Comment
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