He’s your “average employee” – struggling to navigate today’s wild-wild-west of daily information, and simply get his work done.  His problem?  He hasn’t been taught how to do that.  He’s been given Microsoft Outlook to be more productive, but unfortunately has only gotten as far as sending emails and booking meetings (lots and lots of meetings!)

Fortunately, we can help.  We have recently developed a class for sales, service, and support teams that helps them immediately become more productive.  The class is delivered in both On-Site or Video/Webinar format – so we can help companies in any location, not just in Michigan.  It is designed to help teams organize their world, get more done, and spend more time “working” – instead of searching for information and drowning in Inbox Overload.

If your team or company may benefit from some low-cost Outlook training, please give us a call.  It’s a quick-win, with topics such as:

Organizing your world 

• Email & Calendar – Setting & Using Categories to track open items for Customers and Projects
• Email – Organize Sent email (not just Inbox) before it goes out
• Email – Creating Cool Rules to cut rough Inbox Overload
• Email – Creating Search Folders to build action lists
• Email – Setting up your Favorites for quicker access
• Calendar – Adding all tasks as “Time” for better productivity
• Email – Junk Filtering for less non-value-add email

Working with people

• Email – Tracking and Managing incoming and outgoing follow-up
• Email & Calendar – Exchanging calendars with external customers and internal teams
• Calendar – Working with multiple calendars, and creating and sharing Team calendars
• Email – Polling users with Yes/No tracking, Approve/Deny, and other Voting

Other Magic

• Email – Multiple signatures for condensed Reply/Forward, new prospects, and more
• Email – QuickParts – Creating, managing email templates for sales, service
• Email – Making custom QuickSteps to automate repetitive actions
• Email – Emailing your vCard, making a QR Code, and other quick tips
• Email – Quickly adding screen prints to emails

We’ve all hate getting them - the dreaded “reply all” emails.  Too often, employees and co-workers continually use and abuse this button, to the extent that email is now “broken” in many companies throughout the business world.  Its sad really.  One little button can essentially ruin a function that was created to actually save people time.  Now however, it is one of the bigger time-wasters in our daily lives.

It’s the equivalent to spam in the business to business world – only you can’t opt-out.  You can fight back, however, and set up your life to better manage these CC’s (and BCC’s) and get back to the world of the important and urgent.

The goal of this post is to:

• Make people “think” before hitting the reply-all button.  Should it go to a shorter distribution list, or does everyone really need to know this?
• Punish those (a little bit) with an immediate confirmation “Thank you” back to the sender.  So, if they reply-all to 20 people, they will get 20 emails back saying “thanks!”
• Explore the use of Social tools within the enterprise to try to curb the reliance on Email for non-critical / non-actionable information within the company.

Setup a Rule

The thing about email systems that most people forget is – you can make rules.  Rules are great – they automate the movement of emails and information as its sent to you.  It can be moved and replied to.  So, if you make a rule to move CC, BCC, and “Reply-All” emails

To set this up in Microsoft Outlook, go into your rules.  You will need to add  separate rules for this.  This is due to the fact that the “reply” rule is a Server-side rule , and the “Move” rule is an Outlook (Client) rule, and Outlook will not let you build a rule that combines both.  But it still works fine with 2.

Hi!

Thanks for including me in your “Reply All” or “CC” email. I like to read these emails once a week (usually Friday afternoons), but sometimes it can take even longer based on my schedule.

If there is something “actionable” that needs my immediate attention, please copy that piece out and resend it back to me (directly). Otherwise, I will read your email when I get a chance.

Have a great day!
_____________________
Joe Wichowski
Traction Consulting Group

The same thing can be done in Lotus Notes as well.  However, you will also need to make an Email Agent (since the Lotus Notes rule system does not have an “auto-reply” capability).  But it still works pretty much the same – 1 rule to “move” the email, and 1 agent to “reply” to the originator.

So, with this rule setup within your company, the next time someone CC’s 20 people, they will in fact get 20 emails back – right now – saying “Thanks! But I won’t be reading this anytime soon”.  If it is truly important, it will be up to the sender to re-send the information if it truly needs to be acted on.  However, more than likely they will just address the new email to those who need to see it (the remaining 18 people will be spared).  AND, the benefit for you is – you didn’t even see the email.  Its waiting for you in your “FYI” folder – when YOU are ready to read it.

Implement Social Tools

The thing about Reply-All’s and CC’s is that those emails are the pieces of information in the company that could truly benefit from Social tools.  If you this in terms of Facebook; what does Facebook really do for you?  It keeps you updated on your friends; it lets you see what they are working on; it lets you know their discoveries; it lets you know their challenges.  But the biggest thing Facebook does for you is – it lets you do all of this on your own time, when you are ready for it.

So twist that around, and apply that to the business world.  Reply-Alls and CC’d are an attempt by employees and co-workers to keep you updated; let you see what they’re working on (or did); let you know their findings and resolutions; let you know where they are stuck.  It’s essentially the same goals.  But when it comes to your Inbox, it does not give you the choice of reviewing it when you are ready.  Instead, it often hinders productivity.

To resolve that, a tool like Chatter or Lotus Live can help migrate these conversations within a context that matters – a social engagement tool that keeps people well-informed, while preserving the Inbox for immediate and urgent things.

A Note On Customer Etiquette

Often, my customers will “reply-all” to me.  I don’t mind.  But I don’t “reply back” to them either.  I usually build 2 sets of “reply” rules – one to reply to my internal staff, and the other to simply move the CC or Reply-All email into a separate “Customer FYI” folder.  I usually quickly scan those headers once a day, to see if anything really demands my attention.

Bottom line for me – Customers always come first, but work needs to get done.  I think by creating the proper set of rules within your email system, and engaging in a social tool, will put your company on the healthy path to better productivity.

If you would like to discuss your productivity challenges, and get some insight into Social tools that may help your organization, please don’t hesitate to give me a call.

For those in the Detroit area, we will be exhibiting at IMPACT 2012 at the Automation Alley headquarters in Troy.  We’ll have some of our new Mobile stuff on display (namely BizBoard Mobile).  If you are in the area, you should consider attending – the agenda looks really good.

IBM has announced a couple interesting items at this week’s Lotusphere – namely, the new “Social” edition of the Lotus Notes client, as well as extended email capabilities within their IBM Connections product (their Social Business tool).

I’ve summarized some of the highlights below – if you would like some additional information on them, please don’t hesitate to shoot us a call.

IBM Connections 3.0

Social in the business setting is an interesting proposition. Most notably, it can help larger corporations engage disparate resource teams, and help them better mine innovation that already may already exist within another business unit.

IBM’s version of Social is pretty much the same as Facebook – users can make profiles of themselves, tell colleagues “what” they are working on, share files and start discussion threads with specific groups, and so on. However, one thing that sets Social Business apart from Facebook is in the “Activities” department.

IBM Connections allow you to create centralized activities, and “invite” other users to participate in the task in a Social way. So if you envision the “email overload” that most companies face, this might just be the solution – If your users can take an incoming email, and turn it into a larger “work effort” through Activities, you can essentially eliminate all of the spreadsheets and “FYI” emails that cripple today’s Inbox’s.

What makes this more compelling is that before you were required to have Lotus Notes email in order to “move” an email into IBM Connections. Otherwise, users were required to “copy and paste” the email information inside the Activity. Now, with their direct “Inbox app”, IBM Connections can link directly to the Inbox of Microsoft Exchange as well as Lotus Notes & Domino. So just about any company can now benefit from the Workspaces and Activities apps within IBM Connections.

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.4 – Social Edition

The new Lotus Notes release, called “Social Edition”, has a new feature set called “Embedded Experiences”.  This capability should let developers make applications that can “live” inside a Lotus Notes email message.  For example – if a customer emails in an order into your Customer Service Inbox, there can be an embedded “What would you like to do?” type application directly inside the email.  The embedded application could prompt the user what to do – automatically initiate the order inside ERP, start a new collaborative Activity regarding the order, “snooze it” for later review, and so on.  These embedded applications can be dynamic to the content that it is “reading” – so you can make Smart Email by comparing the From of an email with your CRM system, to provide different actions and capabilities for Vendors and Customers alike.  Pretty powerful stuff.

Lotus Notes Plug-In Lets You Run Standard (Legacy) Lotus Notes Applications Inside A Web Browser

Also in 8.5.4 will be a Firefox plug-in to let you run Lotus Notes application directly inside the web browser (no conversion required).  This can help companies eliminate the Lotus Notes Client entirely, yet still utilize their old Lotus Notes applications unchanged.  From what they are saying, these will be standard Notes applications.  This poses some difficulty, as a lot of the development in Lotus Notes is now utilizing XPages and Composite Applications.  The plug-in will not work for these apps (which is why we believe the plug-in will not work for Lotus Notes email).  In addition, it will be a 100meg download – not huge with cable modems these days.  But the size is something to consider (to be fair, Java is about 125megs, and Adobe Reader is close to 70megs – so the idea of a “small plug-in” has been abandoned long ago).

IBM XWork Server

On a side note, IBM has a new, “slimmed down” license for IBM Lotus Domino.  If you have moved off of Lotus Notes email, but still have some applications running inside the Lotus Notes client, the IBM XWork Server allows you to reduce your cost.  The charge is $2,000 fixed-price yearly.  So if you have over 100 users, this would make sense.  Or, if you have an old Domino server that is not currently under maintenance, this is a good way to get back to current without having to repurchase full Lotus Notes client licenses.

 I added this function to Region #1 of the CS file for the page:

Once this is set, I just call this function passing in the top level control on the page from the prerender event if the record was flagged as an “Order” and the current user was not an administrator.

We have just released our Talend Components for Lotus Notes.  What is Talend?  It is an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool, that allows us to perform better data integration than just utilizing tools like Lotus Domino Enterprise Connection Services (DECS).

With Talend and our components for Lotus Notes, we are able to offer true integration to just about ANY system – cloud services, web services, Big Data, traditional databases, excel worksheets, and more.

If you have a project that requires data integration, give us a call.  We’d love to explain how we can eliminate the “swivel chair” within your company.

Download the components here:

• tNotesInput - Reads data from a View (or @Function Select formula) and exposes as rows within Talend.
• tNotesOutput - Write data to a database (Inserts and Updates)
• tNotesRunAgent - Runs a background agent in Lotus Notes

Recently in The New York Times, it was reported that Noah Kravitz was being sued for taking his 17,000 Twitter contacts “with him” once he left his employer.  This raises an interesting question – if a company has a signed non-compete and an intellectual property privacy clause, is it possible that they could still “lose” their IP on Facebook and Twitter because they don’t personally “own” the account?

Certainly, PhoneDog will have its hand full. It appears they let this go on for some 8 months. Unless they have some “cease and desist” emails they can dig up, they will have to explain why it took them so long to actually care about it.

On the other hand, this leads to the more important issue – as companies leverage free Cloud tools to reach out to customers in new ways, are they selling their IP claims short? In the end, will this only come back to bite them when their employees leave for a competitor?

It is our belief that companies should keep all Twitter and Facebook accounts of the company as “house accounts”, only giving access those marketing people who need to connect in that manner. Also, the email addresses linked to these accounts should be reachable by IT. This way, as an employee leaves, IT can simply “request a new password”, with the request able to be fetched within the companies email system directly.

Going further, specifically stating Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on in your non-complete can help eliminate the “gray area” that currently surrounds these types of lists. What do we do when a sales guy “connects” via LinedIn to all of his sales contacts? What happens when a salesforce leverages Google+ Hangouts for monthly video conferences with customers? Who owns that data?

Leveraging these new social connections can definately help you market and sell more.  In fact, if you are not doing it, then you are already way behind the curve.  But this doesn’t mean we should lose our IP.  Until the courts rule in July, we just don’t know who truly “owns” the information.  Stay tuned…

(If you are looking for alternatives – we use WordPress for our own private blogging/twitter-like stuff.  We own it, we control it, and if someone leaves the company, we retain it.  For social/facebook type features, have a look at Salesfore.com Chatter.  Its easy to set up, its free, and it allows you to make “private” groups to engage and discuss issues and services with clients.)

1. BizBoard – Our streamlined web-enabled metrics system is ready to engage your management team. With it, teams will be able to combine metrics from ERP, CRM, Spreadsheets, and other database applications – all into a single dashboarding solution. In addition, each metric will have an associated “Action List”. So not only will the metrics help you better understand your company, but they will also prove as a central hub of activity to improve where there is work to be done. This solution works from any web browser, including iPads and other tablets.
   
2. BizBoard Mobile – We don’t want your iPhone or Android to be left out.  To that, we have created BizBoard Mobile, specifically formatted for phones with web browsers, to better react to just-in-time information while on-the-go.  Alerts are set up to push to users on a daily or hourly basis.  For example: customers and orders requiring follow-up, salesmen not performing to goals, opportunity not closing, and more.  Users can then interact with these alerts, and track them over time, giving them mobile tools to quickly react to changing business data.
   
3. Traction LMS- As part of our ongoing focus of Mentoring & Training as an extension of the Development & Support services we perform for our customers, Traction has created a Learning Management System (LMS) to help customers gain traction within their educational initiatives.  No longer will your employees struggle to find policies, procedures, instruction, and expectations.  With our LMS, teams will find a one-stop-shop for everything – Instructions and procedures, policies, how-to’s, tips and tricks, videos, and more.
4. Traction Alerts – Don’t hunt for information – have the information find you.  Our alerts/reporting system for Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, and SugarCRM delivers just-in-time information directly to a user’s inbox.  So instead of salesmen “searching” CRM for information, the information is pro-actively delivered to them.  We have many generic reports, like:  This week’s customers & activities, Customers you haven’t visited in a while, This week’s birthdays, and Opportunity Follow-up; but we can also customize these or add any additional as needs arise.  We also include these services free-of-charge with our Managed CRM Service Agreement.
   
5. Traction Intelligence – For Microsoft CRM Online and Salesforce.com customers, it is often best to have a “local copy” of the information in order to do extended reporting, analysis, and data integration.  Traction Intelligence provides you with exactly that – a copy of your Online information, directly in a local database your resources can quickly reach.  You can choose your database – our data pumping system does the rest.

Thanks again for all your support in 2011, and we look forward to continuing our rock-solid quality, service, and value for you in 2012.

For a field on the main form you can use a simple javascript statement to apply the result value from the stored procedure to another element after the autocomplete item is selected. Since the ID of the design element is always there and doesn’t change you can write something like this:

$get(‘<%# ProductDescription.ClientID %>’).value = results[0];

In the table controls, however, you can’t use this statement because the elements are different for each row, and they are created on the fly. So we need to use getElementById, the problem with this is that the IDs for each row are slightly different and they change as more rows are added. We were able to get around this issue by taking the value of the autocomplete ID  in javascript and just replacing the unique value from this ID with the unique value of the ID we needed to populate, this way we know that we are applying the results to elements in the correct row (each element in the row has a number unique to that row baked into the ID).

It can be accomplished with a simple function like this:

function OnProductSelected(source, eventArgs)

{

var results = eventArgs.get_value();

var product = source.get_id();

product = product.replace(“ProductAutoComplete”, “ProductDescription”);

document.getElementById(product).value = results;

}

In this example the autocomplete element is called “ProductAutoComplete” and the results we are getting from the stored procedure needs to be placed into the “ProductDescription” field.

I was reading an article about a new EU cookie law that took effect in May of this year. Cookies are basically ways for companies to track your activity on their website. Have you ever been on a site and they make suggestions of other things you may like? This is because they see you have purchased an item and it may go with another. So, they bring that to your attention in hopes to that becoming an impulse buy. Take Walmart for example. You view a couple of items and leave the site. A couple of days later you visit Walmart.com again and if you look on the left side of the page it will display “recently viewed items”. These are the items you just viewed a couple of days ago.

Well, EU has implemented a new compliance law stating that if someone visits your site, you have to ask them if it is ok to put cookies on their computer. Companies have one year from when the law took effect, to become compliant. Or else they could be fined a hefty amount of money.

In one sense, I like it because then you can keep track of all of the sites putting cookies on your computer. In the other sense, that is one extra click I have to do in order to go to a website. I want to get to a site, do what I need to do, and then leave. I can always delete my cookies or set my browser to delete my browsing history and cookies every time I close my browser.

Hmm.. So how are the average non-technical users going to take it? Are they just going to accept it and continue on or get scared and leave the site? When I get pop ups, I examine them, look them up, and go from there. My mom would either be calling me every 5 minutes asking if it is ok or would be scared to go on the internet.

With that said..
Are you all for the EU Cookie law?

What methods would you use to inform visitors to your site?

Do you think that it would confuse most of the non technical visitors?