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Recommendations for SMB and Mid-Market Enterprises

February 7, 2022   Technology   No comments

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and contract terms. In cloud computing, customers give up some control to the vendor. When evaluating on-demand versus on-premises options, review the fine print of the contract terms before making decisions, and get answers to the following questions:

  • Does the contract require an upfront long-term commitment?

  • How easy is it to change the number of users? What penalties or per-user price changes are associated with these changes?

  • Does the SLA supporting the uptime guarantee for these business-critical applications of at least 99.5%?

  • What security features are supported?

  • Investigate cloud vendor’s disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

  • What options and penalties does the vendor provide if you terminate the service? For instance, if you terminate the contract, how do you get your data back?

    • Address data security concerns upfront. Understand how the cloud vendor stores data, who can access it, and what safeguards the vendor has established to ensure that data is only accessed by authorised personnel. The vendor should be able to provide an audit trail on data access.

    Application customisation requirements. Most SaaS applications are customised via configuration, instead of source code customisation. For affordable customisation of cloud computing solutions, aim for the 80/20 rule. Can the solution can get you at least 80% of what you need, and how much needed customisation cost?

    Customers with very heavy customisation requirements may want to consider a packaged inventory software solution to achieve deeper customisation or SaaS technology implementation and customisation via third-party.

    Invest more upfront in the evaluation and selection process. Most companies are under-investing when it comes to thoroughly evaluating business solution requirements and options. Seek the help of independent consulting organisations to better understand the total cost of on-demand and o-premise options as they relate specifically to your company’s unique needs and budgetary constraints.

    Carefully consider the benefits provided by a third-party VAR or SI. Many cloud computing vendors offer customers the option of purchasing the solution and consulting and support services directly from the vendor, or through a VAR or SI. In some cases, VARs and SIs may be a better fit for your company than the vendor in terms of their ability to provide industry-specific customisation, integration with existing applications, migration of data from existing applications, training and coaching for ramping up usability.

    Assess the trade-offs of deploying an integrated suite vs. integrating applications from multiple vendors. With an integrated suite, all core management applications run on a common code base, and share the same database, providing a single, integrated system of record. This means that many front and back offices workflows are pre-integrated, enabling a higher degree of integration “out-of-the-box”, additional custom coding or integration connectors and frameworks.

    However, organisations that are happy with an existing front or back office solution may find it less disruptive and costly to integrate new functionality from another vendor, rather than to simultaneously deploy an entirely new front and back office suite.

    Conclusions

    By packaging all of the application software, IT infrastructure and services together in a Web-based, multi-tenant subscription model, cloud computing vendors have the ability to contain variable costs much more effectively than packaged software vendors-and pass these savings along to customers.

    SMB and mid-market enterprise resource planning need solutions that enable them to meet their business goals, and also help them to conserve capital and reduce ongoing costs. Although one size does not fit all, for many customers, cloud computing business solutions can help organisations to achieve these requirements, and provide added flexibility to scale as business demands require.

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    Search Engine Optimisation – What Makes it So Important

    October 18, 2021   Search Engine Optimization   No comments

    If you have a website, then it’s likely you’ve come across the term ‘SEO’ (Search Engine Optimisation) before. But what does this confusing little acronym actually mean? And why is it even important to know about it? Many people are saying that SEO is one of the most crucial factors in a business marketing strategy today – but is this relevant for your company? After learning a bit more about SEO in this article, you will hopefully be able to make an educated decision.

    What does SEO mean?

    SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. When you use this term in relation to your website, blog, or other forms of online material, you are saying that the content (words) in your online material have certain ‘keywords’ or ‘key phrases’ in them which people are searching for on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or any of the other major Search Engines. Further than this, you are saying that (hopefully!) the keywords in your content are ones that have been chosen strategically to attract already qualified customers (people who want what you are selling) to your business – probably through your website.

    Since the keywords people search are directly linked to the website which pop up in response to their needs, it’s pretty easy to see how having a website or online marketing material which is SEO ‘friendly’ (i.e. specifically geared towards those particular keywords) is important to make sure that they find you on the web.

    How does it apply to your business?

    If you currently have a company website, your site will have a ‘ranking’ i.e. a position it holds in a Google search for any combination of keywords. For example, if you are a florist you might be sitting at number 10 for ‘red roses Christchurch’ or number 50 for ‘online flower orders’. The problem here is that you are only appearing on the first page of Google for the first set of keywords, and much further down the list for the second set.

    Ideally, you want to be listed on the first page for as many relevant keywords as possible. This ensures that those who want your product or service can find you. SEO plays a very big role in achieving this.

    Can you learn SEO by yourself?

    The field of Search Engine Optimisation is a sea of information. There are many tips and strategies out there which may or may not prove to be useful for your business marketing plan. Sometimes it is best to seek out people who specialise in SEO and have spent many hours finding out what works and what doesn’t. DIY can be a tempting option, but probably won’t have a long term pay-off.

    SEO can make or break a business in this internet-dependent world. Make sure you put it to work for yours.

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    Article Submitter v3 The facts and myths

    July 10, 2021   RSS / Link Popularity   No comments

    What is Article Submitter and does it work?
    The fact you are reading this article is proof enough that Article Submitter does work as this article was submitted with the software. But beware!! There is much to do before this submitter software can be used without crashes.
    The Article Submitter software is quite good really, its sadly let down by its database of article websites that will accept your articles. Having spent days taming this beast and forcing it to do what it should do anyway, I decided to write this article about Article Submitter so others could make wise and informed decisions about buying submitter software.

    Like I say, the software does the job, but needs a day or two invested into making it work to acceptable standard. If you are not prepared to spend this time then Article Submitter is not for you. As it simple does not work out of the box! If however, you are prepared to give up a couple of days and fine tune Article Submitter, you can submit articles all day long on virtually auto pilot. And submitting articles does work. You get loads of good backlinks, the search engines will love you and your site will rocket up the search engine listings. Creating and successfully submitting informative articles about whichever product or service your site offers, will generate high quality visitors and increased affiliate or sales revenue.

    Why on earth the guys (or gals) down at Article Submitters office dont clean up the database is a total mystery to me. I used the latest Version 3 with the latest (supposedly cleaned) database to try out. The database had over 400 article sites listed when I got it. After deleting out the bad url’s, hacked sites and just simply badly set up sites, there were only just over 200 sites left. What took me two days would have taken them a couple of hours to sort out.

    Basically, once you have created the author information page, you register it. Have a big sheet of paper and pen at the ready.

    As this software goes through the automated process of registering a new account with all the article sites, you will need to note the failed ones. There will be 404’s, php / script loading faults, hacked by MOu34d, stuck pages or just times out. Note these urls in Article Submitters menu (left top) Where ‘Directory:’ will show the submission sites url you are on. In the
    travel category for example we found initially around 40 dud sites for one reason or another. Close down Article Submitter and open up the file directories.cdb with note pad (Make a backup copy first in case you mess up). Scrolling down the list of directory sites, find the bad ones and delete everything beginning with containing the bad site. You can find some worked examples at my website linked at the bottom of this article. Save the file and open the program again. Click ‘Manage article directories list’ the page will then show in pink any sites that failed for some reason to register the author details. Note all of these and after closing Article Submitter, open up directories.cdb with notepad again and delete all those sites as before.

    Next, choose your article and start submission. Have the pad and pen ready again as there will still be quite a few missed first time round and some will time out with bad php or poorly hosted. So note all these down again. When a site freezes or shows blank page or does some other weird php badly written script failure, just click the ‘Skip url’ button after noting it.

    By now, you will have been working on the software for some hours and probably wondering why the heck you bothered. Well, Ive tried a few article submitters over the years and this one is brilliant once you’ve made the changes, it will work like a dream on virtually auto pilot.

    Article Submitters database is stored under C:/Program Files/Submit Suite/ in that folder you will find a file named directories.cdb. This is the main file that Article Submitter stores information about which article directories to submit to.
    Modifying it is a breeze once opened in Notepad.

    For a complete worked example, go to the main article at bottom of this article. You can also download a cleaned Article Submitter database from there as well as a free trial copy of the software to experiment with.

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