Vol. XII No. 9 - Suntower Systems

Three Quick Social Networking Features Of Ollie/X!

Many of you are starting to dip your toes into social networking and wondering what it’s all about. We are as well. So far? It seems to be as much the thing to do as it is actually useful for many businesses. Nevertheless, it does seem to be inevitable that if you are not currently, you soon will be interacting with customers, vendors and peers using these tools. To demonstrate some of the ways we’re on board, here are three easy things your customers can do with Ollie/X:

Your blog can be set to share posts and links via RSS Feed to all the main social networking sites (as well as people’s e-mails. The more you interact with your customers via your blog, the more they hear about you on their FB, Linked-In or MySpace pages.
You can also allow users to ‘Like’ a product or you company in Facebook and in Windows Live. To ‘Like’ something means to post a link to something on user’s walls. This can be as controversial as it is powerful. But often, one ‘I Like This’ from a satisfied customer can translate into many sales opportunities. Why? Because that one click now advertises your company or that specific service to all their ‘Friends’.
(Now since this sort of thing can be touchy with some clients—us for example! — this feature is turned off by default. Each user has the option to activate it from their own Ollie Options page. That said, we have been quite surprised at how ready customers are to use this sort of thing once you ask them nicely.)
From SAFE and the Ollie/X Management page you can ‘tweet’ users with important updates. These can include one-time posts (think blast e-mail) or you can send similar updated for FMS users (Reorder Notices!) Again, these posts are seen by everyone following those users which can translate into many more contacts for you.

Til Next Time!

SAFE: Free Optimizer For SQL 2008!

Starting immediately, we will be providing free SAFE Query optimizations for all users of SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2.

As we’ve discussed many times, the programming we’ve done in SAFE (starting with Version 8) utilises specific improvements in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. The trick is something called ‘Automatic Parameterization’. Basically, it allows us to work with SQL Server to continuously optimise the database. As you run various reports or open various windows, SAFE and SQL Server 2005 learn about them and continuously re-sort the data and memorise the fastest ways to access information. So, as you run most functions, they get faster. And the more often you run a particular Query, the faster it will execute. In other words, SAFE is able to work with SQL2005 to prioritise which tasks you do most often and give those precedence.

We’ve also talked about how some Queries cannot be automatically optimized. You may have certain reports or tasks that are out of the norm (but still very useful) and which require hand-tuning. Typically this has been done by us as a billable service. But the dramatic speed improvements have made this fee seem pretty small for almost all users.

However, we’ve decided to drop this fee for users of SQL 2008 SP2. Why? The new service pack has made this optimization so easy for us to do that it almost never requires more than a few minutes to achieve. Therefore we’re simply making it part of your regular RSS suport.

Note that this change only applies to users of SQL Server 2008 SP2. If you’re still using SP1, you should definitely get the latest service pack from your SQL Server dealer (or Microsoft directly). If you haven’t upgraded from 2005 or 2000, this is yet one more reason to get going!

Til Next Time!

Ciaran’s Corner: State Of The Industry

For most of you in the ‘print’ business, your job was, to say the least, rough in 2009. Some of you have told us that recent years have felt like that old expression ‘arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.’ We don’t see it as bad as all that—there’s still a lot of money to be made in forms, labels, imprinted items, et al. But the theme keeps returning again and again: commoditization. It seems that everything is getting automated and turned into a commodity item. We’re in on the action ourselves! Ollie/X is all about saving you from hiring people to do a blog or a messaging system or any of a number of web design services. Almost all of us are being downsize (at least a little) by smarter and smarter task automation.

So again, I’d suggest that you look at what you do that cannot be automated. And I’m going to propose that it isn’t what you may think. I know you’re constantly be told that it’s your expertise that is what makes you special. But perhaps that isn’t what is most saleable in the current environment. In other words, you are a true forms expert, but maybe fewer people now need a true forms expert; just like fewer and fewer people need a real web designer (yeah, people in the once high flying IT community are also feeling a lot less special these days!)

Maybe what you can leverage right now is who you know. Or rather, who the people you know know. (You know ? For example, maybe you’ve been selling to a hospital and that account is slowly drying up for various reasons—electronic record keeping for example. You can see this trend developing. Still, you know these people and they may be your best resource for finding the people you don’t know. It’s the people you don’t know who are your new customers. Why? First because they don’t have the resources of the large print buyers to downsize their purchases in the same way (they don’t have eForms.) Secondly, they are a potentially much larger pool of clients. And finally, they are duly impressed by the fact that you successfully advise and manage these large accounts. So when you can use the large accounts that are dwindling to leverage a myriad of new opportunities with the people they interact with? That’s social networking!

In our headline article we talked about how Ollie/X can be linked into your favourite social networking pages. We’re not yet convinced that this is all that useful for many of our customers. But it will be. As you get your customers ‘sharing’ what you do with their ‘friends’ you’ll find more and more people to connect with that you couldn’t have found with a thousand cold calls.

So: we encourage you to join Linked-In and Facebook and so on in the same spirit as businesspeople used to join The Rotary and Elks and so on. Although you may not see immediate benefits, we’re sure that, over time you’ll start developing relationships that will be profitable and perhaps even meaningful in a broader sense. And also in a broader sense, I personally hope you’ll start thinking more and more about how you can leverage your existing accounts with new customers who may have once seemed unrelated. They are now.

As always, I am interested in your thoughts, good bad or indifferent. We’re just as anxious to find new ways to market as you are!

Ciaràn Marron

Technical Support Manager

cm@suntowersystems.com