We’ve been using Xero for over a year now and it’s transformed the way we view doing the accounts in my business, it’s no longer painful. In fact it’s such a transformation that I have to call out MYOB the platform we used for 5 years as the cause of much angst, grey hair and to be frank cost a small fortune to use in time and therefore money.

There’s an overlap with Xero and Harvest in that the latter also handles invoicing and expenses but these are weak compared to Xero. Harvest excels in time keeping allowing us to have multiple clients, projects and tasks that we can switch between with ease using a Mac task bar menu or iPhone App.

This timesheet data is uploaded to the Harvest service, the Mac app even detects idle time and asks if you want to remove it which is fantastic for those forgetting to turn the timer off!  One very useful feature was being able to manually enter historical time against clients at the start of the free trial and include that in the first invoice.

When you get to invoicing time simply create an invoice in Harvest first then post it to Xero, this isn’t ideal but it works. I’d have preferred a big button that said ‘Create Xero Invoice’ without having to create it in Harvest but as I don’t have to create it in Xero the net effort is the same so I can live with that.

My main issue is that Xero doesn’t provide the next invoice number, Harvest does and of course it starts from 1, which is a pain. A nice update would be the ability to start invoicing at a number the trial user chooses, or let Xero do it.

If you’re wondering how Xero is saving us time I’d have to say that it’s via the bank reconciliation features. Xero is hooked into bank feeds and presents new statement items against sales invoices and spend so it takes just five minutes a day to stay on top of this normally time consuming activity. It’s also brilliant that our accountant can log in and check out the numbers prior to lodging our quarterly sales tax returns.

Having tried many time keeping apps I can say that this combination of Harvest and Xero will do us just fine for a while yet, in fact if I’d found these apps 5 years ago I think we’d still be using them today. I’m now able to spend much more time on chargeable work and less on time recording, book keeping and bank reconciliation.

Both Harvest and Xero have trial accounts so if you’re struggling with that old skool account package installed on a single PC and using a spreadsheet to record your time then you really should jump into the cloud, you won’t look back.

Twitter have a good article up on their support site, go have a read and you’ll soon be filling your Twitter stream with relevant local tweets which you can use to start to build local networks, great for retail and local service providers.

Postini customers who choose not to transfer their accounts to Google Apps will have their Postini service terminated, which will leave inboxes open to many email security threats such as spam and phishing attacks.

The transition to Google Apps is worrying for many customers as it will mean considerable changes to the current Postini services. Google has announced that “the new features in Google Apps will operate differently than those in Postini. Some Postini settings don’t have an exact equivalent to the new features, so you will want to re-examine your business requirements.”

As part of these changes Google plan to phase out the Postini Message Filtering service and Small Business package.

Furthermore, Postini customers who are due to renew their services in November this year have only been notified of these changes this month which has left them little time to consider their options.

As opposed to the few ‘minor’ changes that have been made to the Postini offering from the Google acquisition, Maildistiller as a growing leader in the email security space have continually and openly shown their commitment to product development and better technology with an ever-expanding feature list and an unwavering concentration on R&D. As a result, both the Maildistiller technology and the enthusiastic, expert team behind it are ready and poised to help any exPostini users, who want more for their email security than a stripped down version of what they used to rely on, with a quick, smooth and hassle-free, managed migration.

Earlier this year when Webroot exited the email security market Maildistiller became partner of choice for their customers and to date have successfully migrated over 60,000 exWebroot customers. Which we hope stands testament to our product offering in a crowded marketplace!

However, please don’t fear a pushy sales pitch if you get in touch with the Maildistiller team. Yes we’d love the opportunity to welcome you on board the MD ship, that’s a given, but in a somewhat revolutionary (perhaps slightly crazy) standpoint, this is also a secondary goal. In the first instance we’re genuinely more than happy to take information calls from any anxious or distressed Postini users who would just like some friendly advice or have their queries answered in the interim – think of us as the emergency services number that isn’t listed or that big red panic button that doesn’t seem to have made an appearance like it does in the films.

Give us a call, offload your frustrations, evaluate your options and then when you’re ready make the decision that’s right for you and your business – that won’t always be Maildistiller, we know that, but hey, sometimes being friendly and helpful is just much more important.

via Maildistiller

If you would like more information on the unique Maildistiller solution you can them on +1 800 830 7416 (US) +44 (0) 844 800 8456 (UK) or alternatively email us (Cleartext) and we will get back to you asap.

1. Business As UN-usual. Wow!If your employees are working remotely don’t let that be at the expense of your business – especially your customers.). Telephone contact is still the favoured method of communication for many consumers so it is vital to ensure calls are directed to the right resources within your company, then answered and dealt with swiftly, no matter where employees are.

   Intelligent Call Routing Based on CRM Information
   Natterbox gives your business an instant competitive advantage. It knows everything about the caller from their phone number (based on information within the CRM system). Natterbox allows callers to get talking to the correct contact, first-time, every time – no matter the size or geographic scale of your organisation.

2. Listen UpStaff are a business’ most valuable, yet costly, asset. Every conversation that takes place on a mobile or landline is priceless voice intelligence about your business. How many times have you experienced a situation like this… you have a disagreement with a supplier over a price that was quoted to you on the phone? Or a customer complains that the technical guidance they received was inadequate during a recent call? To resolve these issues or any that are similar in your day-to-day, you need to be able to access and listen to the call recording.

   Access & Listen to Call Recordings within the CRM
   Natterbox automatically populates call recordings to the correct contact, opportunity or account within your CRM for mobile and landline calls. Don’t panic that your staff are working in remote locations during the Games – with Natterbox every call recording is only a click away through your centralised CRM system.

3. You Can’t Change What You Can’t MeasureIf you manage others you’ll know the headaches it can bring – especially monitoring their activity. Are they making progress? How efficient are they? What are they saying on the telephone to customers? Prospects? Suppliers? Or even competitors? Then there’s the regular training, the list goes on… To make the best decisions – you need the right information at your fingertips.

   Voice Reporting & Dashboards within the CRM
   Natterbox automatically populates call data into the CRM system such as call duration or time of call. In real-time, within the CRM system, you can either run specific call reports or bring call statistics into your wider business reporting metrics. For example, the marketing department now has visibility of voice so it can run reports on how many of the top 10 leads were called in the last week; they can then drill down to find out who made the call and even listen to that call recording.

4. Simplify to AccumulateIf your business requires that your employees immediately write up summary notes after a call there is a simple way to make sure it gets done – make it easy! To enhance data quality on any scale – save employee time and automate the process. If you remind your employees at the end user CRM interface level by simply screen popping information – you’ll find this CRM admin stops getting missed.

   Customisable (& Automated) Summary Call Notes within CRM
   Natterbox allows administrations to customise call wrap up notes such as ‘1st Call Complete’ or ‘Presentation required’. These notes have 3 key business benefits:

   1. The instant reminder at CRM-level means that notes are always entered so data quality improves
   2. Call notes are standardised so they are now available for reporting
   3. It’s a big time saver – CRM records are updated in a few clicks

by Neil Hammerton, CEO Natterbox

There’s a saying that ‘you don’t get anything for nothing’, and in Facebooks world that’s also true. You the average user or business using Facebook may think it’s a great free service but in reality Facebook is a business and they are in the business of selling your ‘eyeballs’ to advertisers.

Google created a fuss when they started offering ‘free’ email and then put advertisements into the webmail page that were placed partly based on the content in your emails, Facebook obviously think this is working for Google so they’re copying the idea (where have I heard that before about Facebook) by trying to persuade people to use their email system.

This is the same business model used by almost all businesses that have ‘free’ services online, but to get the most out of your value as an ‘eyeball’ Facebook needs to try and target you with specific advertising, just like Google does. So in the end there’s an arms race here, between users who value their privacy and Facebook who want to know as much about you as possible.

In general Facebook is winning, if you take a look at the graphic in this article titled ‘Visual Guide To Facebook’s Privacy Changes Over Time’ you can see this. So as always with things on the internet the rule of thumb has to be put as little (accurate) information about yourself online as possible if you are using free services because;

• trusting the owners of these services is probably not a good idea as they will use your information
• if the free service gets hacked your personal details maybe used by bad guys for things like identity theft

To coin another phrase, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially if you’re in a walled garden.

The easy parts are the common DNS records like A, CNAME and MX.  Some of the newer additions like SRV and SPF are what they call text records and not so common, the former is essential if you’re deploying XMPP (Jabber IM) or VoIP (voice over IP) services but the latter is also important if you’re tackling email spam. Something many of my clients used to do, until they signed up with Cleartext.

So to get back to the subject of this article The DNS (Domain Name System) for Beginners, here’s a quick run down of the essentials in the order that you’ll likely to come across them.

Two other things are worth remembering, the first that each record has a TTL (Time To Live) which tells DNS when to update from the source, so a good trick if you are changing any records is to change this to something really low like 3600 (seconds) a day before any change so that changes happen quickly. Once you are happy with the changes return the value to it’s default.

The other thing to consider is that generally you’ll be using your ISP’s DNS servers and ISP’s being what they are, cost cutting outfits they don’t put a lot of horsepower into these servers. You can often get better performance using a third party DNS provider, for example OpenDNS.

Using OpenDNS speeds up the process of looking up domains so your computers internet apps, like your web browser may appear to be a bit quicker. OpenDNS also have a paid option to filter out domains that are compromised by spammers, trojans and viruses etc so that’s a great side benefit.

If you want to read more then as always a good starting point is Wikipedia’s DNS entry or contact me and I’d be happy to help.

But even so it’s a bit cheeky to have the default setting as on so as to allow this, so I’ll just turn it off.

In the post ’911 era there’s much talk about business continuity services and I must say that here at Cleartext we have sold a good number of seats on email business continuity services. But business continuity is about more than just email so here we’ll cover one of our partners solutions as well, Business Resilience from Tango Technology.

Email Continuity

We’ve always had a services bundle that comprised of spam and virus filtering along with an emergency inbox, this proved to be popular with IT Services companies looking for a way to give their clients a backup email service in case of an email server failure or other event that could cause email access issues.

The good news with the migration to our new Maildistiller platform is that the emergency inbox feature is now available as part of the Business Package meaning customers migrating from Webroot will enjoy this important feature whether they had it before or not.

There’s another reason to migrate to Cleartext’s new preferred managed email security platform and it’s called ‘Instant Replay’. How many times has someone asked if you can ‘find an email’ that they have ‘lost’?  Instant Replay allows you or the email user to replay a message from the clean email queue, isn’t that smart.

Emergency Inbox and Instant Replay are both included in the Business Package, that really is something for nothing.

Business Resilience

Business Resilience is far more than a simple tape or online backup – it’s a complete operating copy of your IT environment, including data, files and applications, running on a secure, external server – which you can access via any web-enabled device.

Next time you have a power outage, server failure, system crash or other office disaster, you won’t need to wait days to rebuild your environment and restore your lost files. With Business Resilience, you can access your full, operating ‘Business Copy’ via the net in less than 2 hours.

Business Resilience is enterprise grade Disaster Recovery for SMEs. To make an enquiry please contact Tango Technology on;

+61 (02) 9993 3300

or email Tango at enquiry@tangotechnology.com.au.

Business Continuity

It’s great to be able to showcase a service from a business partner, especially one that bundles our email continuity services with their own product.  Is now the time to ask yourself what would happen if your or your customers IT systems went down at a critical time?

Now’s a great time to migrate to Cleartext’s new managed email security platform and make the most of these new services before you get that call, ‘…the mail servers gone down’.

What follows is our own story on carbon pollution reduction.

Where do you start?

In 2006 we realised we could do more to reduce our carbon pollution footprint when one of our clients, Carbon Planet, offered to do a part contra deal, carbon reduction services for email filtering services.&nbsp That sounded like a sensible deal!

Carbon Planet conducted a comprehensive audit of the greenhouse gas emissions accountable to Cleartext for the 2006/07 financial year and updated this for the 2007/08/09 years.

The aim of this process was to define and establish an operational boundary to account for direct and indirect GHG emissions (scope 1, scope 2, scope 3) that constitute to Cleartext’s inventory for the purpose of removing those emissions with carbon credit offsets.&nbsp A further aim was to identify areas where GHG emissions may be able to be reduced in subsequent years.

Carbon Planets CO2 free audits are in accordance with the standards outlined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol in the Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (2004) [1] and ISO 14064-1 specifications for quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

Elucidation of the activities and items contributing to GHG emissions involves obtaining an organisational inventory of services and processes used as a result of operations within the established organisational boundary.

So each year we purchased carbon credits from the NSW Greenhouse Gas Reduction Scheme (GGAS) to offset our carbon ‘burn’. We also embarked on an aggressive reduction campaign by working through our carbon audits to find more gains.

This led to doing at least the following in our daily activities;

• Where possible we turn _off_ all electrical devices when not in use
• We have reduced the amount of (recycled) paper we use by around 90%
• Use public transport for business travel
• Purchase carbon offsets from travel providers
• Purchase environmentally friendly products and services when possible
• Champion the cause by encouraging clients and business partners to ‘go green’.

Post 2009

We looked hard to see where we could improve upon our carbon reduction program and the conclusion was that we’d all but exhausted our options when it came to changes that would lead to tangible reductions upon previous years.&nbsp The only thing to do was eliminate the largest consumer of carbon based energy consumption, our physical office!

So in mid 2010 we took the decision to move to a teleworking model and worked hard to ensure a zero impact on the business.&nbsp Almost all services had already been outsourced and all business systems were already in the cloud, we’d already gone 95% paperless and harassed our suppliers.&nbsp This left very little to re-organise, the only major thing being phones so we’ve moved to a virtual hosted PBX arrangement.

There are other things to consider, like travel, but we buy offsets from the airlines anyway, and working from home offices eliminates carbon burn via fuel use. The last part of the puzzle was to ensure moving to teleworking didn’t increase the carbon footprint at home.&nbsp We sold the classic oil burner and bought a low emission one, one less car and it’s a lot more efficient.

Conclusion

The interesting thing about being part of a carbon pollution reduction program over a three year period is that we’ve learnt a lot from our carbon minimisation partner and their team, spent a small amount on carbon credits and finally reached a point where we truly believe we’ve ‘bottomed out’ in the drive to reduce our carbon footprint.

For those of you still on this path I’d like to recommend Iain Smale (+61 2 8005 6300) of Pangolin Associates, apart from being an all round nice guy he’ll help you reach your own carbon pollution reduction targets with an honest straight forward review of your business. I’m also sure he’ll tell you I’ve over simplified the issues here.:)

Good luck, now turn off that light and all those home entertainment devices on standby mode.