In my experience most businesses have more than enough technology. The biggest failure is that they are not using the technology to be more productive. What I see as the biggest inhibiter to improved productivity is ‘old world’ thinking around siloing information rather than sharing it.
Take a look at all the correspondence you made today, emails, phone calls, faxes, the lot. Now most of these are siloed conversations between two people. However, if you closely examine these conversations I would suggest to you that at least one other party, not in the conversation, would have benefited from the information in that siloed conversation.
As an example, let me take just one email I sent today. In that email I shared some links about working with external users in Office 365. Such information would have certainly helped many others looking to answer the same question. However, that information is now only accessible by myself (in my sent items) and by the recipient (in their inbox). That means if someone else asks me the same question I have to forward the email. Luckily, I write this blog and share such information with everyone.
Now wouldn’t it make much more sense if I had posted that information publically and then told people to look there? Doing so also allows people to discover it via search. Best part about it? I don’t have to recreate the information because it is now available for all to see and use. Even better, they can add to and build on what I initially created to make it even better. Inside email the information simply dies a digital death.
Yes, email is a handy business tool but it has its limits. The overuse of email has effectively trapped much of the information within a business, much of which could and should be public. Don’t believe me? Take a look inside your own business, inside your own inbox. How of what you see there should be available publically and could help others? Lots, I’ll bet.
I can’t tell you the number of businesses I see where you hear people asking the same questions al the time. “Where is this?”, “How do we do that?”, “Why is it done this way?”. If you hear such questions more than once inside a business you know that not enough information is being made available publically.
There are so many tools available to businesses today to make information public. Social media, blogs, Twitter, Wikis, FAQs, etc, etc. Yet very few I see actually make it a point of their business to SHARE. Most business people seem intoxicated with accumulating as many unread emails as possible, viewing that as some badge of honour.
Welcome to the new world of ‘sharing’ people. Successful businesses share information within and outside their business. With their customers, employees, the public and even their competitors and you know what? Doing so gives them a competitive advantage. Why? Because they are more productive and more trusted. Ask yourself, why do you do business with certain companies? Typically because you trust them in some way shape or form.
Take an honest look at your business and ask yourself if it is being a productive as it could be? I’ll bet the answer is not it isn’t. Now ask yourself whether your business is sharing or siloing its information. Again, I’ll put my money on siloing.
Want your business to be more successful? In a word, SHARE!
Tag: Business
Key to success is networking
I have just returned from TechEd Australia and I get plenty of questions about whether it was worthwhile. The problem is that most of these questions are only concerned about the content of the presentations. To my mind the most important things about these sort of events is networking.
It amazes me at how ‘old world’ many business still approach marketing. They waste all their time doing things like flyers, attempting to optimize SEO and so on. If you really reckon flyers work then can I ask you how many YOU read and act on? None, I’ll bet. As for SEO, do you really want random people typically shopping around for the cheapest price as a customer? Not me.
If it is one thing that I have learnt over my time in business, and something that I should have a adopted much sooner, it is business networking. These days that typically also means engagement with social media.
The first place you should be starting is Linkedin, which you can probably best consider as business to business social media. Make sure that your profile there is complete and contains as much detail about yourself. Next, start connecting with people you know. Then start asking for testimonial and endorsements.
If you look at my profile you’ll see that I have over 500 connections (actually well over 700 actually). How would you ever achieve that without social media?
Apart from written testimonials you’ll find others endorsing your skills. As you can see from my current list above over 99 people have endorsed me for SharePoint and Cloud Computing. These endorsement have been made by my contacts without solicitation by me. Those numbers are pretty powerful when a prospect starting looking you up and see’s how well you are endorse by others! Speaks much greater volumes about your skills than a flyer you put together I reckon.
The real secret to being a business success I believe is attracting people to you. As I have said before, you want to be the moth not the flame. You cannot of course be the flame if you simply sit there and do nothing. You have to work out a strategy that will attract people. How do you do that? Simple. Work out what they want and give it to them.
You can’t be everything to everyone so pick a niche and then niche that niche and niche it some more. You want to aim to be an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around. The only way generalists success is by selling HUGE volumes.
So:
1. Work out your target audience
2. Work out what you target audience needs
3. Create offerings for the needs of this audience
4. Starting networking and attracting this audience to you
The tools for successful networking are now so cheap. Social media is typically free and probably the most expensive outlay when it comes to networking would be shouting someone a cup of coffee when you meet face to face.
And you really want to spend thousands on SEO optimization? REALLY?
If the secret to successful business is networking then the secret to successful networking is helping people. If you help people, they will continue to seek you out. In most cases they’ll be happy to pay you for this help. Simple eh? Why does it have to be any more difficult than that?
The fundamental difference between Office 365 and Google Apps
I see a lot of chatter out there about whether Google Apps is better than Office 365 and you know what? I think they are overlooking a very fundamental issue. You can debate the various technical merits of each solution, compare the features point by point but I think this missing a far greater business distinction when it comes to these products.
I covered this in a recent podcast I did on Eagle Tech Genius podcast but I’ll reiterate it here because I think it is very important.
As a business, everything I generally do is focused in helping my business succeed. Success is generally measured via profit. Thus, this blog, my publications, YouTube channel, free downloads and so on is aimed at promoting my business with the aim to generate it more profit.
Likewise Google and Microsoft are businesses. They have shareholders and it is their fiduciary responsibility to maximize the profits for these shareholders. However, what most people overlook is that Google generates the vast majority of its profit (over 80% I believe) from advertising.
Now there is nothing wrong with this business model and it is very successful, however you need to appreciate that products like Google Apps are aimed at assisting the maximization of advertising revenue and thus profit for Google. I am not saying they are doing anything nefarious with Google Apps when it comes to advertising. What I am saying is that products is one of a suite that Google has whose aim is to generate additional advertising revenue.
Microsoft on the other hand generates the majority of it revenue through selling software. Thus, it’s business model is about selling more software.
As a business that chooses between Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 you need to be comfortable what the business does who makes the product you use. Like I said, both products solve problems for customers but as a business are you more comfortable with a product from an adverting company or a software company? At the end of the day, how are they looking to maximize your contribution to their profit?
I’ll be at TechEd Australia will you?
During the first week in September I’ll be up on the Gold Coast participating in Microsoft Tech Ed Australia. While I’m there I’ll be giving the following sessions:
Managing Microsoft Office 365
Date:Wednesday, September 4
Time:9:45 AM – 11:00 AM
Room:Theatre 2
Session Type:Instructor-Led Lab (ILL)
Technical Level:300
During this lab, tour the Microsoft Office 365 admin and user portal. Throughout the lab, review areas of the user interface and perform tasks highlighting administration features of Office 365 Technical Preview. You are encouraged to explore all areas of the portal covered and not covered in the lab in order to become familiar with Office 365.
http://techedsessions.cloudapp.net/SessionDetail.aspx?id=6977
Administering Office 365 for Small Business – 74-324
Date:Wednesday, September 4
Time:3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Room:Exam Cram
Technical Level:100
The Administering Office 365 for Small Business Exam Cram session will prepare you to take the 74-324 Certification exam through a mixture of course work and real world exam questions. These skills are key to administering Office 365 for Small Business clients and are especially designed for Microsoft partners looking to achieve a Small Business Competency. This session will also provide you with a greater insight on the capabilities and opportunities around the Office 365 product for SMB customers.
http://techedsessions.cloudapp.net/SessionDetail.aspx?id=6986
Deploying Microsoft Office as a Service
Date:Friday, September 6
Time:9:45 AM – 11:00 AM
Room:Theatre 3
Session Type:Instructor-Led Lab (ILL)
Technical Level:300
During this lab, you prepare for, deploy, and manage a Microsoft Office 365 Professional Plus deployment.
http://techedsessions.cloudapp.net/SessionDetail.aspx?id=7010
So if you are also attending TechEd please let me know (director@ciaops.com) and we can catch up. Even if you are not going but will be in the area I’d love to hear from you. So again get in touch.
I get a lot of questions from SMB resellers about whether TechEd is worth attending. So my initial response to that is to go and have a look at the session content. From there you’ll probably see that much of it is enterprise focused. That doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant for SMB but you should be aware that it is more ‘M’ than ‘S’ here.
There are still heaps of sessions that are totally relevant and anyone who works in IT field will learn something. However, from a business side you need to factor in the cost of attendance, travel, accommodation, meals and finally time away from your business. That can be tough for a smaller reseller to justify.
Finally, I would also tell you that many of the sessions (especially from other TechEd’s around the world) are recorded and made available online for free after the fact. So if you like the content just keep an eye for when the presentations are posted online.
However, the major benefit in my experience is business networking, the people you meet and the relationships you build during the event have the greatest value. If you are keen to build and you’ll be in the vicinity during the first week in September, let me know, I am always keen to catch up with people. If you are attending TechEd I hope I’ll see you in one of my sessions.
Lesson in selling Office 365
I see so many IT resellers now realizing they need to sell and support Office 365 because their clients ARE asking for and using it. Unfortunately, most have sat on their hands, denied the momentum of the cloud and so. They find themselves in a world of hurt, falling further and further behind the eight ball in terms of what Office 365 offers.
The simple answer to understanding how to sell Office 365 is to USE IT! All Microsoft partners are eligible to qualify for a free partner Office 365 tenant of their very own. Get, configure it and use it. Simple.
One of the easiest things to get up and running is Lync. Lync allows messaging, video conferencing and more. It is also something that few clients have seen so it has a real impact when you show it to them.
By default Lync only allows connection to users within your Office 365 tenant, however you can enable ‘federation’ with outside parties also using Lync or even Skype. To my way of thinking you should enable this ‘federation’ immediately and being to connect with others.
To enable federation to external parties login to your Office 365 portal as an administrator.
Select the Admin menu item from across the top and then the Lync option that appears in the drop down menu.
In the Lync admin centre select organization from the menu on the left. You should then see the options for external sharing as shown above.
It is recommended you set external access to On except for blocked domains and enable public IM connectivity.
Once you have made these changes it will take 15 or so minutes for the federation update to flow through the system but once complete you can now connect up with others using Lync or Skype.
If you now select the users menu on the left you will see all your users who are licenses to used Lync.
If you select and edit any of these users you will find that you can control their individual rights to external communication if desired as shown above.
If you return to your Office 365 portal and look at a users license you will see whether they are enabled for Lync. In the above example, this user is enabled for Lync as part of the E3 suite. Remember, you can always remove the Lync option here to prevent access to any of the suite products. However, also be aware that removing a single product from a user doesn’t magically give you one more license you can assign to a new user.
With all that enabled you can now install the full Lync client on your desktop (it comes with Office 2013) and then login with your Office 365 login details.
Once you have logged in you can search for other users via their login details within your organization and externally if you have enabled that (and you should).
All CIAOPS Office 365 and SharePoint Guide subscribers are free to connect with me via Lync and use that as quick and easy method to contact me for support if needed. If you are not a Guide subscriber (and you should be) then feel free to email me (director@ciaops.com) and request to be connected via Lync.
Now that you have Lync working, spend some time learning how to create and schedule meetings. Work out how to do remote presentations and record them. Work out how to share files and chat online all directly from Office documents. You’ll find an eBook on Getting Started with Lync Online in my publications area. It is only AU$4.99 and it will show you everything you need to know about getting up to speed with Lync options.
Once you have those skills go out and start showing clients. Start running webinars. Start demonstrating your knowledge of the product. Look at how a product like Lync can be used to improve your clients business. Once you work it our for a few I’m pretty sure you’ll find it applies to just about every other one in the same way.
Office 365 products are extremely powerful, full of features that most businesses have never seen and ultimately full of endless opportunities for those who sell and support them. So stop procrastinating, get in there and USE them, because that is the best way to work out how to sell them. Simple.
Office 365 plan selector flow chart–Version 2
Well that didn’t take long now did it? Yesterday I announced the release of version 1 and today I’m announcing version 2.
The main change in this version is the incorporation of SharePoint Online storage limits which I find trips up many people. Many seem to believe they can copy their 90GB+ of data up to the cloud and turn off their server. Apart from the bandwidth limitations there are limitations around the maximum amount of space within certain SharePoint Online plans. Hopefully now with those limitations built into the flow chart people will be able to make better decisions.
The Office 365 plan selection flow chart is a free download and will be updated regularly so make sure you check back to ensure you have the latest update because I have feeling version 3 won’t be far away.
Office 365 plan selection flow chart–feedback requested
I am starting to put together some flow charts to help people with the process of selecting the right Office 365 plan. If you have a few minutes I’d really appreciate your feedback on my initial iteration which you can find at:
http://ciaops.squarespace.com/storage/o365-plan-choice.pdf
Initially, I’m keen to make sure the decision process flow is correct (so let me know any mistakes I’ve made) but any feedback around how it looks or what enhancement you’d like to see would also be greatly appreciated. Also, I’d be interested to hear whether people find this of value.
You can leave your comments on this blog post or email me direct via director@ciaops.com.
Guest on Eagle Tech Genius
Just for a change, I’ve swapped my podcast hosting mike to be a guest on Eagle Talk Radio. You’ll find the episode here:
http://eaglewavesradio.com.au/2013/07/eagle-tech-genius-11-july-2013/
I’m actually the second guest on for this episode so might need to fast forward just over half way to catch my segments on SharePoint and podcasting.
Thanks to Belinda Luby and Peter Moriarty for the opportunity to be a guest on their show.
CIAOPS 