Blogs

Okay, confession time:  this blog is late.  I usually publish my blogs on Friday’s and an endless number of things have gotten in my way.  However, the biggest thing that has gotten in my way is simply this:  Writer’s Block!  Oh yeah, good old Writer’s Block!  But then, recent events have brought me to thinking about the Cloud Office of today. 

To quantify this, I am speaking of the physical office and how it can be fully deployed in the Cloud.  Is it reasonable to expect a Cloud solution to be fully deployable at your office?  My recent conclusions are:  yes. 

It is recent that I have had the need to investigate some of the critical elements of a Cloud office that until now have been undefined.  The critical element missing has been an online phone system such as Lync Online.  So we begin there:

In my quest for the Cloud Office, my first line of thinking is to look at the first line of communication many companies receive:  the telephone.  Most phone systems of the past were very costly.  They were also very specialized and very maintenance intensive.  Sound familiar?  This is like many of the servers your company has and shares the same fate as many servers.  For many years we have had VOIP phones with providers such as Packet8, Cisco and Altavox.  However, integrations to the Microsoft Office productivity system (Office 365) have been lacking. 

Recently, my partner and I have researched the possibility of using a Lync Communications Server to accomplish the same functionality as Cisco, Packet8 or Altavox.  However, Microsoft’s recommended configuration of Lync requires many servers, software and services itself.  Not being discouraged, we have done further research into this and have found several providers of Lync VOIP services as a service.  This provides you with an integrated environment between Lync LiveMeeting, VOIP calls from your desktop, screen sharing and real-time presence information. 

Office Communications is necessary in order for your team to collaborate.  To bring the whole Cloud Office together, Office 365 with Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint and many other applications provides you with the functionality to create the office documents you need.  However, using Office Communicator will further enhance your communication with an instant message environment where office persons can ask quick questions securely and quickly.  Further, to enhance the experience, the integration with the phone system as available with Office 365 Levels E3 and E4 will give you a more integrated environment. 

How we track our external communications such as Leads, Customers, Opportunities and other CRM functions is fully available with NjevityToGo CRM.  When looking for a CRM system, it is important to ensure that you have the proper phone integration to “pop” the contact information when a call comes in.  This functionality means that you will know who is on the phone and have an idea as to the reason they are calling.

To bill your customers, the use of NjevityToGo Dynamics GP (Great Plains) or SL (Solomon) will accomplish this nicely.  The difference between the two applications will depend upon your business needs.  Dynamics GP will give you robust financial, distribution and manufacturing functions.  Dynamics SL is ideally suited for distribution and project or professional services companies.  Having an integration between your ERP and CRM System is a must and the NjevityToGo Integration will provide you with robust, deep and complex functionality not normally seen in a Cloud Office environment. 

To collaborate and share documents, SharePoint Online (part of Office 365) provides you with the ability to collaborate with your colleagues, customers, vendors and others.  Couple this with Business Intelligence available through Business Analytics and you will be able to provide your team with the latest information available on the health of your company and where your business stands.  Further, combine this with Mobility and you now have anywhere, anytime, any device access to the information necessary for your business.

On a final note, there are hybrid environments that exist that can help you get to a Cloud Office with many features listed above.  It’s important to meet with a trusted advisor to get a vision of your Office in the Cloud!  

When you are considering ERP or CRM software, what factors do you weigh when thinking about deploying on premise or in the cloud? Do you like the flexibility of deploying in the Cloud with scalable users and fixed monthly billing? Are you more confident with the perceived security of deploying on premise? Who owns your data and how do you receive it back from a SaaS provider like NetSuite or Salesforce.com if you decide to make a change to an on premise solution in the future?

The question you should be asking yourself is, “why should I have to lock myself into an on premise or cloud deployment?” Consider solutions that offer flexibility to move back and forth between on premise or cloud deployments depending on the changing needs of your business or your preferences. Njevity offers this flexibility by giving you the power of choice to deploy on premise or in our NjevityToGo Cloud. We only provide ERP and CRM solutions with flexible deployment options that can be tailored to meet your changing business needs. Our software solutions include Dynamics GP, Dynamics SL, Dynamics CRM and Acumatica which all offer flexibility in deployment. Flexibility means you can choose the best deployment option for your business at any time but always have the option to switch between deployments if necessary.

The value in choosing a software solution that offers flexibility in deployment over products that are only deployed online is significant, yet often overlooked until it is too late. Consider who owns your data and how you receive your data back if you ever decide to make a switch to another software solution. What if your business needs change and requires an on premise deployment? For example, we have moved customers from Salesforce.com to Dynamics CRM. The move becomes very cumbersome and time consuming because Salesforce.com provides your data through hundreds of spreadsheets that require an excessive amount of detective work to decipher. We have found the same with other SaaS providers like NetSuite as well. The reason they do this is to keep you a customer by making it too much of a hassle to switch to another solution regardless of business or deployment needs.

Njevity is structured to grow and adapt with your changing business needs. We have customers who prefer on premise deployments and we also have customers hosted in our NjevityToGo Cloud. All of our customers have the option to move to the Cloud from on premise or from the cloud to on premise depending on their business needs. Data belongs to customers and is easily transferred between the two deployment environments. Njevity has also acquired Dynamics users who were not Njevity customers but they recognized the value of flexible deployments and the cost advantages of Cloud Computing. It was as easy as backing up their data and customizations and then deploying in our NjevityToGo environment. Contact us to learn more about our deployment strategies and we can help determine the best deployment solution for your business needs.

In today’s electronically connected world information security is vital to our financial security both in the workplace and at home. This means we have to juggle multiple user names and passwords. Here are a few ideas on making your passwords hard to crack and easy to remember.

First - don’t make it obvious (like leaving the combination to your brief case as “0000”). “P@ssword” or “passw0rd” or even “p@ssw0rd567” will be guessed.

Second - don’t use words and numbers that are easily associated with you. If you were born in July of 1985 “0785” is a bad pin for your bank card. “julie0785” is and equally poor password for your online credit card accounts.

Third - Don’t share your passwords. Many hackers use social engineering to obtain access. Rather than trying to pick a lock they will ask for the key. This could be as simple as a phone call from someone claiming to be with your bank asking you to reset your password.

Fourth – Don’t make them all the same!

So what makes a password good?

One – use lengthy passwords.

And two - mix lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and special characters. If my password is four characters long and contains only lower then there are 23,751 possible combinations. It won’t take long for a quickly written program to try 23,751 possibilities even if it has to wait 15 minutes after every three tries. If I include uppercase characters then the number of possibilities becomes 341,055. Make it an eight character password with upper case and lower case letter and the possible combinations increases to 2,217,471,389. Adding numbers and special characters only increases the possible combinations.

So how do I remember that password? Make it something you can remember. If my bank is Applewood State Bank then I might think “Applewood” is like “apple seed” like “Johnny Appleseed.” Then I might make my password “Johnny”. To make it more complex I can choose to replace the “o” with a zero, the “y” with an “i3” (using the 3 for the “e”) and capitalizing the “H”: “j0Hnni3”.

Pick simple substitutions.

Another trick is to pick the lyrics from a song. You can even use a song you don’t like. I’m not a fan of “Hotel California” by the Eagles. I could use the line “This could be heaven or this could be hell.” mangle it a little; “This could be Denver or this could be Cleveland.” (Sorry Cleveland, nothing personal) Take the first letter of each word, “tcbdotcbc”. Mangle that a little “tcbD0tcbC”.

A little imagination can make passwords easy. And, the only downside is that you may start typing numbers for characters.

Ch33rs,

Tud0r

Why do we care about Cloud Computing and Mobility?

Where are you now?  Are you at your desktop?  Are you reading this on a tablet?  A phone?  What is your preference?

The same considerations need to be made when considering your consumption of business data.  Let's face it, we are all (or at least in my circle of friends and colleagues) afflicted with some sort of attention disorder.  Most of us, as business people, will be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we live, breathe and eat business.  That means that during our business meetings someone will bring up a topic and we'll wonder to ourselves "how is my cash position?" or how are my "receivables"?  How we answer that depends on where we are at and which device we have at our disposal.  

Microsoft at their highly successful Convergence 2012 with a record attendance of 10,500 people, announced that their strategy is to provide many new applications that are development platform agnostic in order to answer your most pressing questions.  Microsoft announced an 'all of the above' strategy that means that they will no longer limit their apps to just one platform or development environment.  This means that Microsoft will no longer box themselves in with just the tools that they, themselves, have created.  

Instead, as you will see with Windows 8 and other deployments of the OS that Microsoft will deliver to you the content most meaningful and in the most used platforms.  Therefore, you won't be limited to consuming the information on a Windows device but instead, on any device.

Couple this with increasing scrutiny of Droid and iPad applications and you will find that the future of mobile applications will change the way you perform your work today and well into the future.  Stay tuned for additional reviews of Microsoft apps and how they affect business today and tomorrow.

I recently came across an article called “Building the business case for a server refresh,” written by Daniel Eason, an IT Executive who strategized how to justify a hardware refresh to stakeholders and decision makers. A typical refresh should take place every 3-4 years, however, when the economy dipped in 2008, many companies have put off upgrading hardware. In this blog article, I will discuss that although his reasoning for a server refresh is sound, moving to a Cloud environment better answers his points as well as providing a solution to where a server refresh never has to be considered again. First, let’s look at an excerpt from his article and his main points when presenting the argument for a server refresh. To see the whole article click the link below: http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/tip/Building-the-busines...

“Server refresh strategies can be difficult to justify to business stakeholders. And when your existing servers were approved only three or four years ago, building a solid business case for new purchases gets even more difficult. Another challenge is gaining trust among stakeholders, especially when the perception is that a server refresh strategy has been proposed purely for technology’s sake and not to benefit the business.”

“When building a business case, consider the following factors:”
• Operational cost reductions
• Maintenance cost avoidance
• Service reliability
• Better server consolidation ratios
• Application licensing
• Breaking the vicious cycle

I do not disagree with this article in that the typical server refresh time frame should be every 3-4 years. Hardware, like anything else has a lifespan. Pressing it beyond that, in the long run, costs you more money because it needs more maintenance and is not as efficient as it could be. With all of the advances in technology including servers and computer hardware, each of the arguments are grounded in fact and in the long run will benefit the company. However, what this article does not touch on is that in another 3-4 years the company will have another large capital expenditure negating the savings you gain. The main objective of his article is to give pointers to IT professionals to break the vicious cycle of putting off server refreshes past the recommended 3-4 year time frame. I argue that you consider breaking the vicious cycle of refreshing hardware ever again by moving your business applications to the Cloud. In this article, let’s take each of his arguments and apply them to Cloud Computing and prove why moving to the Cloud is a better answer than just a server refresh.

Operational Cost reductions
Moving to the Cloud means you pay a monthly per user fee for business applications on hosted virtualized servers. This also means that you no longer have to house servers on premise and can reallocate your IT staff while diverting cost savings to another area of your business. This has a much greater impact on operational costs than simply refreshing servers for lower power consumption and connectivity costs.

Maintenance Cost Avoidance
By moving business applications to the Cloud, in most instances you no longer have to pay maintenance costs. Maintenance costs are usually necessary when applications are deployed on premise. In a cloud hosted environment, the service provider is responsible for all maintenance costs and upkeep to the system.

Service Reliability
All Cloud environments have an uptime guarantee through a SLA (Service Level Agreement). For example, our NjevityToGo Cloud environment guarantees 99.9% uptime. That means that during a given year, there can be no more than 8.75 hours of unscheduled downtime. This is provided by redundant power sources, redundant connectivity and failover processes that provide users with maximum uninterrupted service. When you really think about it, you probably experience more downtime than this when hardware is housed on premise being serviced by a full time IT staff.

Better server consolidation ratios
One of the biggest advantages of Cloud Computing is gained through economies of scale. Economies of scale refers to reduction in costs as the size and usage levels of other inputs increase. In cloud computing, through pooling application users and maximizing server space through virtualization, costs are reduced and savings are passed along to the users.

Application licensing
Through advances in virtualization, the ability to pool application resources allows for monthly pricing opposed to having to actually purchase software licenses. Rather than owning the software, you pay for software as a service for a low monthly fee. Another advantage of deploying in the cloud is the ability to scale users as needed. In addition, upgrading business application software to the current version is simpler and more cost effective in the cloud than having to purchase and re-implement the latest version of software on premise.

Breaking the vicious cycle
Server refreshes are a vicious cycle that should be done every 3-4 years. The author’s point is once your business puts off a server refresh, they will continue on the vicious cycle of thinking it is ok to keep putting it off. However, you can break the vicious cycle of a server refreshes all together by moving to the Cloud where you will never have to worry about another server refresh again.

The takeaway is that although refreshing servers is important if your business has an on premise deployment strategy, Cloud Computing is a much simpler and more cost effective way to deploy business applications. Even with the significant advantages presented, IT’s biggest objection to moving to the Cloud is, “data is not secure.” Check out the link to a previous blog article I wrote that addresses these security concerns and why IT may not be as objective as you think when considering the Cloud. http://njevity.com/blog/how-secure-your-premise-application