Save a couple $grand$ on email every year…

For the past several months, we’ve been converting some of our customers over to Office365.  In fact, we’ve been able to prove savings of $2k to $5k per year for each customer (over 3 years), depending on the number of users converted.  This product is a serious cost-savings tool.  And now, Microsoft is making it easier than ever to switch.

Until June, Microsoft’s Big Easy 8 sale is going on.  This means you can get a E1 plan (Exchange, Sharepoint, and Windows Live meetings) for just $8 per user, per month (less than $100 per year per user!).  Or, if you also could benefit from upgrading all users to Microsoft Office 2010, then get the E3 plan at just $20 per user, per month.  This means that for price of Office 2010 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access) you get hosted Exchange and Sharepoint for free!  Microsoft will even give you some additional cash back to use for future training like our Outlook Productivity training for Sales and Operations staff.

We’ve been using Office365 here for about a year.  We switched from Lotus Notes.  For us its a no brainer – we no longer are in the “support” business for our email, and can just get after the business of helping our customers.  We’ve even done it in such a way that we still leverage our Lotus Notes applications as-is – only our email is switched to Office365.  And its been rock-solid reliable, just like Lotus Notes was for us.  (Why did we switch from Lotus?  Simple – momentum.  Most of our customers switched to Exchange/Outlook, so we needed to better support and train them.  The best way to do that is to use what they use.  Sad for Lotus - their job is marketing, our job is helping customers.)

If you haven’t checked out Office365, or haven’t seen a demo, click on our link here to start a free trial.  It will basically set you up with a 25 user E3 account so you can see how easy it is to use its online collaboration features (Sharepoint) for your team.  You can even setup temporary email accounts to test the email features as well.

Or, if you would like someone to just walk you through it, please do not hesitate to give me a call or shoot me an email.

Get more value from Microsoft Outlook…

Meet Chuck:

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

Outlook 2010 reminders not popping up

For our users that use Outlook 2010 and have the CRM 2011 Outlook Connector installed, have an issue with their calendar reminders popping up. After doing some research and testing possible solutions, I have came up with a work around until Microsoft comes out with a Solution.

The work around is to uninstall Microsoft Office 2010 SP1. Once this was uninstalled, all of the reminders from the past couple of weeks popped up.

When Microsoft comes out with a solution, I will update you on what that is.

Did your Outlook 2010 ribbon disappear and can’t get it back?

Did your Outlook 2010 ribbon Disappear? Do you have the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook connector add in installed?
I recently upgraded my co-workers office product to 2010 and after I installed the Outlook Connector add in, her ribbon disappeared. This seems to be a bug in the connector and is a known issue. If you cannot get your ribbon to reappear by clicking on the carrot next to the the help button (?), then follow these instructions.

1 – Close Outlook 2010.
2 – Go to your registry. Go to Start –> Run –> type: regedit
3 – Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{2DF8D04C-5BFA-101B-BDE5-00AA0044DE52}
4 – Right click on the 2.4 regkey and click export. Save this export someplace where you will remember it is saved. This will be a backup.
5 – Once you have the backup, right click on the 2.4 regkey and click delete.
6 – Launch Outlook 2010.

You should now be able to see your ribbon.