Unless your New Year’s resolution included getting more email in 2012, especially the kind with large documents attached, you may like file collaboration systems. One that we’ve been using with some success is Box. It works with Macs, PCs, tablets and phones.
Though Box not hard to use, “easy to use” is perhaps too easy to say. Here’s a brief tutorial.
The success of a complex product depends on customers knowing how to use it well enough to succeed. Whether you’re selling devices, technology, or services, a knowledgeable user is a better prospect. Sometimes selling is teaching.
Manuals, white papers, and other content may help, but they seldom get the naïve customer from zero to sixty. Workshops or classroom teaching are expensive, inefficient, and inconvenient.
There is another way. Recent progress in on-demand training (ODT) is a promising way to get your team, your customers and yourself up to speed on a wide range of topics. ODT is typically a step or more up from the simple How-To demos common on YouTube.
Unlike a traditional classroom, ODT leaves you in control. Learn at your own pace and schedule. If you didn’t understand all of a particular lesson, you can pause and repeat it. If you have a question, you may be able to post it to a forum, email it, or use online chat. Like conventional courses, graded assignments are often included.
Business models of on-demand learning vary. Some charge by the course, others charge a fixed fee per month, during which you may take as many courses as you wish. Some include textbooks, and some offer tiered pricing for extra services.
Prices tend to be a small fraction of tuition at colleges. At the ODT sites I visited, they ranged from free to $250. A typical price is about $30. These exclude on-line degree programs, which can be expensive. What you pay for with ODT is knowledge – not credentials. Despite the low prices, many on-demand portals offer money back satisfaction guarantees. How many universities do that?
I’ve been testing a number of ODT providers studying everything from Graphic Design to Online Marketing to Electronics to Database Programming. Here are some favorites:
This popular site states it has delivered millions of lessons through over a thousand short (generally less than 10 minutes) lectures on math, science, engineering, economics, finance, business, and even on unexpected subjects such as art history. Most sessions are given in clear informal style by founder Salaman Khan, which gives them a consistency of style. All courses are free.
Hundreds of courses focused on how to use popular software and programming languages but also on subjects such as photography and design. A typical course is four to eight hours divided into lessons of ten minutes of less. The service costs $25 a month or $37.50 a month with downloadable example files. There are discounts for annual subscriptions. Quality of the instructors ranged from excellent to uninspiring.
This library of online books and courses is primarily for web developers and designers. Courses include lectures, downloadable content, and access to a Q&A forum. Far fewer courses than Lynda.com, but only $17/month and includes unlimited access to an online library.
As in “You Academy,” has wide indeed eclectic variety of subjects. In addition to instruction in technologies, it offers hundreds of courses on topics ranging from entrepreneurship, marketing, psychology, languages and music. Quite a number of the courses are free including live recordings of university courses.
If none of these services
offers just what your customers need, consider imitating them by creating your own miniseries. There are a number of free or inexpensive utilities for drawing (MS Paint), narrating slide shows (slideshare.net,) and making web cam videos (jing.)
Get yourself a directors chair and enlighten your customers.
How do you keep on top of a marketing program as the client and team members each change and refine their contributions? How can you avoid the jumble of disjointed email and out of synch attachments, which convert what should be straightforward project management into an exercise in detective work and archeology?
There may not be a magic bullet for this common problem, but here are six free tools which save time, keep focus and often deliver a better result. Many nifty services save time after you’ve invested in learning them. Not so with these. You can get to know any of them in a few minutes.
All these services are cloud based and this enables real-time cooperation. Except for DropBox, there’s no software or app to install. A computer and an up to date browser are all you need.
Elaborate project plan documents may impress clients. They can also take lots of effort better spent on actually doing the project. The old “solution” was to buy copies of Microsoft Project for team members, invest significant time learning how to use it, and then try to coordinate the different versions from each computer.
What you often need is a simpler tool to create Gantt charts and enable team members to update their portions. Enter Tom’s Planner. It hits the sweet spot between intuitive ease of use and enough features. Tom’s is entirely web based and works impressively well on a variety of browsers including on the iPad.
A fruitful exchange often starts at a whiteboard. Suppose you can extend the collaboration to those not in the room at the time, save the conversation and keep it going? Essentially what you get is multi-user chat, which you can store, share, or export to a read only web page. Its easy yet surprisingly useful.
As useful as it is, Writeboard is text only. Sometimes a “back of the napkin” sketch gets your idea across best. Flockdraw is a very basic tool. No instructions supplied or needed. With it you can draw straight lines or freehand, change the color and thickness of the pen and share the result.
If you like sticky notes, this ultralight website lets you share them with team members on a virtual cork board. If you change, delete or add a new note, all those with whom you share a workspace will see the updates.
A project plan is overkill for some things. In this case a task list may be enough. Ta-Da is one list you can’t simply loose or leave at home. Making it sharable and editable online may help get the items done.
Your project will likely include more elaborate documents – graphics, layouts, brochures, word processing files, etc. – any of which go through multiple revisions. This nifty file synchronization service allows you to manage document versions and ensure that you and your team members work on the same one.
DropBox requires a free app, which is available for Windows, Mac, Android, iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry.
I could have mentioned other tools, but all these are fast, functional, and free. You can get to know them all over a lunch hour – which may be better than a free lunch.
Customers read your collateral and visit your website, because you have something which interests them. Moreover, Google and other search engines find you because of relevant content on your site. Have paltry content or let it go stale and you’ll loose visitors, search rankings and customers. No surprises there, but curating and managing content can be awkward and time consuming. Who’s going to do it? More importantly, how do you make it easy for those on your team with something to contribute – be it Arthur in accounting, Sally in Sales, or Wally in the warehouse – when they have real jobs to do?
This may be a job for a content management system (CMS). A CMS is software for collaborative building and publishing be it of websites, internal information systems, blogs, or even physical documents such as books. It accomplishes two kinds of tasks:
1) It separates information from format, so that a contributor, who has some “content” may submit it; for example, by entering it into an online form.
2) It organizes contributors into a team, in which members have different roles such as reader, author, editor, designer, editor in chief.
The result can be surprisingly powerful. CMSs can accomplish these without programming or technical expertise from users. Their output is assembled like Lego blocks rather than programmed. Putting content originators in charge through a CMS offers the potential of much more rapid development and maintenance. IT is less involved if it is involved at all. This last is crucial for smaller businesses, which lack IT infrastructure.
Many CMSs are now available. They range from free open source tools to proprietary enterprise systems with enterprise prices. As in other aspects of technology, open source no longer means home made or compromising on quality. They are built on scalable databases and mature programming languages like PHP.
I’ve been using a few of these open source CMSs for clients recently and on the whole, I’m impressed. This glass is half full. They do enable building a useful, content rich, collaborative site without having to be a programmer. Creating a professional website can be pretty easy, if what you do is built into the system. That said, figuring out how to make each of these CMSs do just what you want is not always obvious.
If you want your CMS to do something out of the ordinary, you’ll probably need to get some custom programming. Customization can be a strength of open source systems. Unlike proprietary technologies, open source CMSs are designed to be extended. All the underlying code is available and they depend on proven scalable Web standards. They are popular enough, so that an ecosystem of books, training, and implementation consultants has grown up around them.
Let’s consider some CMSs you can start using today.
WordPress has the image of a blogging system. Indeed WordPress powers millions of blogs, but the current version is much more than that. You can build a showcase, online store, portal, or corporate site (with or without a blog). Multiuser capabilities are built in. If you don’t care to host WordPress yourself, most hosting companies already support and maintain it.
This is the most straight forward of the three CMSs and easiest to launch something quickly, especially if you have to do it yourself. WordPress has a very large library of themes and “plugins.” Themes allow you to change the look and layout of a site. Plugins – essentially snap in modules of code – enable you to add functionality. For example, there are plugins to create image galleries, block SPAM, and create polls. Some industrial strength WordPress sites include Spotify, Tribune media Group, and Network Solutions.
Joomla.org states that it is “award winning,” “popular,” and “requires almost no technical skills to manage.” That may be a bit optimistic, but it’s certainly worth a look. Its mnemonically named modules are straight forward. It has an intuitive icon interface, which made it easy to get a simple site off the ground.
Joomla sites include Barnes and Noble’s Nook Developer , GE Transportation and Europe’s Orange Mobile.
Drupal’s elegant architecture was designed for content management. After a decade of development it appears robust and full featured. It’s very richness, however, makes it less clear what to do next. Even without programming, managing a Drupal site takes a learning commitment.
Examples of Drupal sites include Fastcompany, Popular Science, and Yahoo Research
“Easy to use” is easy to say. Unless you or someone on your staff loves getting under the hood, you may encounter challenges. With a proprietary CMS you pay for and hopefully get support.
Support can be problematic with these as with other open source applications. The umbrella organizations, which oversee these CMSs are largely staffed by volunteers. They do have online documentation and forums, and you can submit questions. This is generally with no charge and no guarantee of results. If you want to be able to pick up the phone and say “fix it,” or have someone build the CMS for you, you’ll have to hire a third party such as Acquia (Drupal) or CloudAccess (Joomla) or one of numerous WordPress consultants.
Any of these tools are waiting to help you liberate your content and get it to a potentially interested audience. Why not go for it? The price, as they say, is right.
It is difficult to categorize this estimable book by social venture capitalist and former senior tech executive Andreas Widmer. It combines threads of principle-based leadership and work-life balance with mission, organizational and personal value definition. Readers of the business press will have encountered many of these concepts before. For example, that effective leaders are first of all servants. However, Widmer tells these in a fresh and innovative way.
The author has been profoundly influenced and inspired by the life and work of Pope John Paul II. In this he has the company of millions – Catholics and non-Catholics alike. However, in addition to having observed John Paul II’s public career,
he brings a rarefied inside perspective – that of a Swiss Guard. As a Guard, Widmer had a behind the scene vantage on how John Paul communicated, influenced, led by example and, in a holistic sense, taught.
The book is more than anecdotes and cases, but also a training manual with actionable exercises. These begin with personal and introspective tasks, but evolve into a social and communal sphere. As such they become relevant to managers and executives. Thus, in a chapter titles, Know Where You Are & Where You Are Going; we are enjoined to think about the goals and aspirations of our staff and our organization and what specifically we do to promote them.
The ideas are clearly informed by its author’s Catholic faith and experience, yet this is not a book only for Catholics or even those, who think of themselves as religious. It’s intriguing to speculate how business, politics and daily life might change if more people practiced the principles of The Pope and The CEO. You can find an excerpt at ThePopeAndTheCEO.com as well as a WSJ interview with the author and decide for yourself.
