Better Way for SMBs to Collaborate Online

Do you know, is there a better way for businesses to meet online, present projects, and share calendars and ideas anytime, from anywhere? Are you ready to share your experience?

Small- and medium-sized business owners can compete for a chance to win up to $2,000 in a reward card and a free consultation with marketing expert Guy Kawasaki -- by entering The Better Way Challenge.

The challenge, a video contest presented by Verizon and Cisco, is designed to encourage businesses to use new collaborative tools to maintain their competitive edge in a fast-changing environment.

"Innovation and technology will power us out of this recession," said Kawasaki. "The Better Way Challenge enables entrepreneurs to share their victories and defeats, tips and tricks, joys and pains of running a business. Online collaboration and social media can generate business, and these videos will accelerate the learning process for entrepreneurs and business owners."

Entering the Contest is Easy
Just submit a video of less than three minutes that describes "the most challenging part of getting your whole team on the same page."

Contest participants must either be subscribers to the Verizon Collaboration Center, located at the Verizon Small Business Center, or they may sign up for a free 30-day trial. Entrants whose videos are accepted for judging in the contest will also receive additional free six-month subscriptions.

In addition, any business that signs up for the free 30-day trial subscription will automatically be entered into a monthly drawing for a chance to win a Flip Mino HD Camcorder. As many as 90 camcorders will be given away during the six-month promotion.

Profiling Advanced Collaboration in Action
A panel of judges will select three contest finalists, based on the originality and relevance of their videos. The grand-prize winner will receive their free consultation with Kawasaki via Cisco TelePresence.

The second-and third-prize winners will each receive a reward card for $1,000 and one-on-one consultations with industry experts from the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group -- which designs innovative processes and strategic plans for businesses.

All three consultations will be tailored to the specific business needs of the winners and focus on ways in which collaboration and online resources can make their businesses more efficient and competitive.

Monte Beck, Verizon's vice president for small-business product strategy, said, "Small businesses need a lot more than e-mail and Internet access to stay competitive. They need to move fast and utilize tools like the Verizon Collaboration Center that can help them grow their businesses, run them more efficiently and, reduce the cost of doing business."

The Verizon Collaboration Center, powered by Cisco WebEx, offers voice and Web conferencing. It enables users to instantly and effectively collaborate with colleagues, clients and vendors in a virtual environment that is accessible from any web browser.

Managed Services: The Ultimate Small Business Contingency Plan

Today could have been a really bad day for my one-year-old company, Nine Lives Media Inc. My New York office suffered a broadband outage.

If our Web sites, network, email, phone and application systems were all centralized in that office we would have been dark all day. But our small business didn't skip a beat. Why's that? The three-word answer: Redundant managed services.

Our New York office has a redundant managed broadband connection. Plus, we depend on a range of decentralized managed services and SaaS (software as a service) solutions to keep our business growing. Here's a look at the services we're leveraging today -- and a few that we hope to leverage in the next six months.

Managed and SaaS services we're currently leveraging:

• Hosted Email: I don't know why any small business would consider an on-premise system these days. Hosted email is cheap (it's a commodity, in fact), reliable, fast and accessible from anywhere in the world. It's so cheap I can't remember the annual price.
  
• Hosted Web Sites: At my first start-up, all of our web servers were located in our own data center. Our network administrators wanted to "touch" the servers and work on them right in our own offices. These days, the smarter option for many small businesses is to pay a low monthly fee for a shared or dedicated server managed by a data center provider. We started our business using a shared server (about $89 per month) but recently moved to a dedicated server (about $250 a month) because our traffic has been growing fast.
• Phone service: We depend on hosted voice-over-IP and we don't own our phone equipment. Our service provider does. Over time, I expect our service provider to introduce new unified communications services, which will ease my life from the road. (Scroll down for our future plans for unified communications).
• Software as a Service: This list is getting pretty long. We're depending on a range of SaaS solutions to build our customer database and drive viral marketing. Inexpensive, reliable options include SurveyMonkey (free for basic service, about $200 annually for unlimited service), a great way to survey existing and target customers; WordPress (free open source content management, which you can customize); WebEx and FreeConference (online collaboration and teleconferencing; MyPodcast.com (hosted podcasts).
  
• Mobile Broadband: If you drink coffee and travel a lot, sign up for Starbuck's WiFi service. It's a life saver when you're on the road and your hotel or conference center has lousy Internet service. For about $30 per month, you'll be able to find a strong WiFi signal in virtually any Starbucks location.

Future Managed and SaaS Services: We're evaluating the following managed and SaaS services for 2009.

• Public TelePresence: For about two years, I've been predicting that TelePresence (next-generation video conferencing) would find its way into hotels and conference centers. Our small business can't afford to build out a complete TelePresence location. But we can -- and will -- use Public TelePresence centers. Cisco is introducing such centers right now, and signing up to use one sounds easy. As more public locations launch, I suspect we'll use managed TelePresence to communicate with clients across North America, Europe, India and Australia.
• Mobile Unified Communications: I fell for the iPhone the day Apple started selling it. I love the iPhone App Store. And I generally like the iPhone user interface. But I want better integration between the device and a range of services (hosted email, hosted VoIP, remote application access). Slowly but steady, those services are coming. Azaleos and other managed service providers are introducing Microsoft Exchange-to-iPhone integration. And the iPhone also supports Cisco's VPN technology. So I'm seeing progress. But I want to see more and more corporate services, managed services and "follow me" unified communication services touching the iPhone.
• Hosted Customer Relationship Management: We're looking at a range of options here. Salesforce.com is the best-known option. But Zoho (which often competes with Google Apps) has an interesting on-demand CRM strategy.

I suspect we're using a dozen additional managed services and SaaS applications to keep our small business humming along. Sometimes I forget just how many managed services we leverage. And that's a good thing. While we're focused on our business, somebody else is focused on managing and maintaining all the back-end technoology.

Unified Communications: An Entrepreneur's Best Friend

I'm in Orlando, Fla., this week "on vacation." As a small business owner, I can't afford to fully unplug from my business. Sure, managed service providers keep my company running even when I'm focused on family time. However, I still need a mix of unified communications and mobile technologies to really keep the business optimized.

Here are three key technologies that can give me -- and my customers -- peace of mind while I'm (mostly) unplugged from my business.

1. iPhone 3G: I wasn't a big fan of my iPhone 3G when I initially purchased it. Dropped connections seemed quite common during the first few weeks with the device. But the iPhone 3G has proven to be a great device for my business travel. I can monitor our company Web sites, Internet traffic patterns, reader loyalty, reader comments and more from the iPhone's browser.

My family cringes when I open a laptop during vacations. But smart phones can let you quickly check in with your online business operations during long waits in amusement park lines or during other natural "breaks" in the action.

This week, my laptop hasn't escaped from my travel bag. And I'm typing this blog from a multi-user terminal at the hotel. Thanks to Web 2.0, most of the applications I need to access live up in a cloud rather than down on my laptop.

2. Managed Services: Our company Web sites serve thousands of readers worldwide each day. I don't have time to manage those systems during vacation. Nor do I want to worry about optimizing their performance, keeping systems patched, and safeguarding everything from probing eyes.

Our managed service provider hosts everything for us; automates system patch updates to our database, application server and content management systems; and backs up all of our systems daily as part of a fixed monthly fee.

We know exactly how much our managed Web services are going to cost every month, and we don't get distracted managing system optimization efforts. We leave that to the experts.

3. 'Follow Me' Unified Communications: I must admit, I'm not using this service yet. But I need "follow me" unified communications to make sure urgent calls and inquiries are routed automatically to me. Customers with urgent needs don't care if you're asleep or on vacation.

For urgent matters they want rapid response. I've adjusted my voicemail to let customers know I'm on vacation. But some sort of follow-me service -- routing urgent calls right to my iPhone or my current location -- is a natural next step for my next vacation.

And that reminds me: It's time to get back to vacation.