Key Smadi Sonwi Technology News

The basic premise that defines a business phone has been simple and well stated for many years. Business phones, unlike home telephones, need to be able to handle a large call volume and provide functionality that is useful to the end user. This usually includes the ability to field several calls at the same time, put people on hold when necessary, and direct phone traffic to wherever it needs to go. Business phones have accomplished these tasks with flying colors going all the way back the earliest models. Even more impressive, however, is the ability business phone manufacturers have shown to incorporate new and expanding technologies into their products.

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds, especially in the last two decades. From faxes to cellular phones and the dawning of the computer age, changes that have affected phones in general, but particularly business phones, have been varying and abundant. Looking at other industries where technology has influenced design and protocols, one can easily see that not all manufacturers share the same competitiveness that business phone manufacturers share in relation to keeping their products as current as possible. Digital telephones were available before the digital alarm clock, digital wrist watch or the digital thermostat.
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A solid knowledge of your customers is vital to succeed in today’s modern information driven business world. Small businesses are widely considered to provide a better customer service because the decision makers are closer to their clients than in much larger companies. Managing customer relations has grown increasingly complicated as market forces and trends change at a much faster rate than in the past, and with the internet revolution, that is set to continue and accelerate.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition is designed to work with other Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, Outlook, Word, Excel and Publisher. Working together, the Microsoft Dynamics Suite greatly helps your staff to build closer customer relationships and achieve new levels of productivity and profitability.

Here are 5 ways Microsoft Dynamics Suite can help your small business save time and money:

1. Centralize all your customer information

Microsoft Dynamics Suite captures all customer contact information from your sales, marketing and support sections of your business and houses the information in a central repository. Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 provides instant access to whoever needs the information, wherever they are and when they need it. This reduces costs by minimizing non-productive time wasted, increases profitability by maximizing cross-selling opportunities and enhances customer relations with a more personalized approach from all staff in contact with customers.

2. Protect your customer information

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has built-in security features to ensure your customer information is protected and kept confidential. Employees are only given access to that information on a customer that is required for the role they need to perform. By combining Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 with Small Business Server, a powerful firewall is provided that allows mobile employees and remote locations to have secure and enhanced access to customer information while out of the office. The ability for mobile and remote workers to access customer information out of the office allows them to continue to be supported and productive as well as spend more time where they need to be – with customers and prospects.

3. Integrate with Microsoft Office Outlook

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has been designed with Outlook in mind, and can be enabled to let your employees work directly from their Outlook email client. This close integration with Outlook and other Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel means that all staff with client contact can look up customer information, manage email communications, arrange appointments, record customer and prospect contacts from within Outlook and share this across the business with the Microsoft Dynamics Suite. This makes staff more productive, generating greater revenues and reducing time wastage dealing with administrative customer affairs.

4. Tailor Microsoft Dynamics Suite to your small business

The Microsoft Dynamics Suite contains a configuration wizard so you can tailor the customer relationship software solution to meet the particular needs of your business. You can customize and modify forms, construct your own data entry fields and arrange how information is to be presented while an intuitive engine allows for automation of repetitive tasks. An alert system raises flags when you need to perform a task so nothing need ever fall down between the cracks. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon first digging into Adobe Photoshop CS3, a few features have really popped out at me as incredibly useful. I would like to offer a brief overview of some of these new ways of attacking your creative challenges using the latest version of Adobe’s flagship app. PsCS3 will run you about $649 to buy it outright if you do not own any previous versions. If you own Photoshop 7, CS, or CS2, you are eligible for upgrade pricing – looks like $199 for the upgrade. Check Adobe’s store on their website for more info. For more information about what comes in the different versions of CS3, and what your suite configuration options are, see my previous post.

My current favorite five new PsCS3 features in order are:

1. Nondestructive Smart Filters
2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge
3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
4. Automatic layer alignment and blending
5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

Feature Overviews:

* Nondestructive Smart Filters

Adobe has finally given us non-linear, nondestructive filters. Can I just say “HOORAY!” In the past, you applied filters and effects in a linear order: one filter would alter your image, and the second filter would alter your now altered image, and a third filter would alter the altered altered image. The problem with that workflow is that if you decide you want to slightly tweak the second filter, you’d have to either undo back to that point (losing your subsequent edits), or use the history palette to step directly “back in time” to the point before you added the second filter, add your “revised” second filter and then add your third manually. All too often, you don’t quite remember what exact parameters you had set on that third one – or worse, your real world project involved applying 20 filters instead of the 3 in my example and changing the second filter would mean redoing the 18 that follow it. What a drag. Because of this issue, people developed many work arounds (often involving saving off multiple “partially completed” versions of files all over your hard drive with iterative file names, hoping that if you needed to go back to a certain point in time you’d be able to figure out where you needed to be), and while these workarounds were clever and well-conceived in many cases, there was a perfect, real solution, waiting to happen.

The real solution to all this is what we have been given in CS3: Nondestructive Smart Filters. In this new version, each filter and effect that you apply to a layer, remains live and continually re-editable, in real time, and the parameters that you adjust will all cascade down through whatever subsequent filters or effects you might have added to your layer. These are savable, movable, copy and pastable, and most importantly scalable.

* Quick Selection tool & Refine Edge

A design mentor of mine once told me “Photoshop is all about the selection. You select something, and then you do something with the selection. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that, and you’ll never go wrong using this app.” Almost 10 years later, I must say she was absolutely correct. Using Photoshop is all about “the selection.” There are more tools in Photoshop for selecting than for any other single task.

As in just about every version of Photoshop that has ever been released, CS3 has made even greater strides in the area of “making your selection” than comes to memory in recent years. The new Quick Selection Tool used in combination with the Refine Edge palette is about the most helpful and clean way of selecting the edges of an object in your image that I have ever seen. This new revised Quick Selection tool is so smooth. You basically set the parameters of your Quick Selection tool – as if it were a brush – and paint the general area of your image edges (like trying to select just a kid and his soccer ball out of the photo of the big game) and Photoshop is watching what you do, and interpreting what you consider to be the general edges of what you are wanting to select and it figures out what’s kid and ball and what’s grass and goal posts and sky and crowd and selects just what you want it to. It’s VERY fast and clean. Then, you can invoke the Refine Edge palette, and you have seemingly infinite control over exactly how the edges of that selection behave. Check out the palette to the right to get an idea of what you could do to “refine” that edge. With radius, feathering, smoothing, and various display settings, I believe this new combo will cut down on my masking and selecting time in a quantifiable way.

* Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending

Ever tried to stitch together a series of images that you took, that you intended to “put together” into a panorama? Even with some of the stand alone tools that have been available over the years—even those for doing quicktime VR’s—are clunky and difficult to use – with mixed results at times. I have always wanted something built into Photoshop to let me do these “photo merges” – I never expected that Photoshop would actually be able to automatically do it for me. This feature floored me. The technologies involved in my number four choice “Automatic layer alignment and blending” are at work here in this feature as well, and the new auto layer alignment features in CS3 are far-reaching and crop up again and again in different areas of the application. It’s really one of the revolutionary things about this new version.

All of the things that have made making panoramas a difficult task in the past are all done automatically. The primary among these being 1. those times when you have to actually distort, rotate, skew or transform one of your elements because the perspective is screwy, 2. those times when the sun or lighting or a window made the white balance, color space or over all wash of brightness and contrast different from one image to the next (especially when doing 360′s) and of course 3. actually finding and aligning those overlapping areas of consecutive elements. Photoshop CS3 does these all for you and with surprisingly amazing results. It’s not just about the typical “panorama” either… I saw a demo of someone standing “too close” to a building, and taking pictures zoomed all the way out, of the front door, windows and window-boxes, front brick walk way, tilting upward and taking a picture of the balcony and roof line of the second floor – in other words, many elements that were WAY out of whack in terms of perspective, lighting and color space, and these 4 or 5 images were distorted, tweaked, rotated, matched, blended, lighting and color density matched… and I was amazed in like 5 seconds, there was this “wide angle” almost “fisheye” photomerge of the front of the building, from brick walkway to roof-line, and it looked incredible.

* Automatic layer alignment and blending

Another powerful application of this new alignment and blending technology is with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let’s say you wanted to take a picture of a statue in a park somewhere, or a huge fountain, or the front of a monument or building. There are always people walking through the frame – if you can’t close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it’s beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements – what are you to do? In the past, it was a painstaking process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the “closest” one to your vision of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your “randoms.” There are artists who are very good at this process, but I’m fairly certain they would agree that if there was a way to not have to spend all that time, they’d take it. Well, it’s here. Photoshop CS3 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, figure out which things are permanent (things that appear in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the image are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack and building an advanced composite of all the images and doing 90% or more of the work for you. There’s even a set of “fuzziness” sliders letting you say “eleminate things that are in X% of the images in the stack or less.” This is so impressive to see in action. You have to try it on some of your own images. It’s really hard to believe that it’s this easy to do this sort of process now. This is one of those new areas that I’m sure we’ll see artists finding incredibly creative ways to utilize this feature. Again, this one floored me when I first saw it.

* Vanishing Point with adjustable angle
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Do you need help overcoming sales objections?

Do you sell computer networks, or other IT-related products and services to small businesses?

This article provides tips and hints so you can be overcoming the most common sales objections heard when selling networks to small business prospects, customers, and clients.

The problem generally begins when you start talking about a network upgrade. Around the time, many small business prospects, customers and clients will dwell on cost.

These small business prospects, customers and clients often neglect to consider the soft costs of not properly investing in a network… such as lost employee productivity when imprudent corners are cut, downtime when fault-tolerance is an afterthought, and service costs from computer consultants when difficult-to-support or “dead-end” solutions are selected primarily because of their low price tag.

No matter how thorough your initial consultation, IT audit, site survey and network design reports, some unforeseen client objections may pop up just before you get the client’s authorization to proceed (generally a signed contract and retainer or deposit check).

Why Overcoming Sales Objections is SO Crucial

Because one relatively minor concern might threaten to derail the entire sale, you need to gain the critical business development skills for overcoming sales objections, with some of the biggest small business network deal-closing obstacles.

Empowered with these strategies for overcoming sales objections, you’ll be much less apt to get emotional, defensive or just plain annoyed. You can then stay focused on keeping your eye on the ball and figuring out the best way to solve the prospect’s or future client’s problems …and of course, close the sale. Remember, your company isn’t in business to solve prospects’ problems; only those of paying clients.

Overcoming Sales Objections: Apathy

I hope you get a good night’s sleep before this sales objection rears its ugly head. You need a powerful force to overcome apathy.

If small business decision-makers have an apathetic outlook toward the prospect of implementing a network, your decision-makers might take weeks, months, or perhaps even years before feeling a sense of urgency about your proposed network project.

However, once you discover the roots of this apathy, you’ll be better able to push (or at least nudge) the approval process along.

Here’s a typical example you’ll find in the field: The small business owner sees no problem with their existing peer-to-peer network. One or two seemingly innocuous foul-ups, however, can cause the small business owner to see the “light”.

With a Microsoft Windows peer-to-peer network, for example, the “server” seems perfectly reliable until the person working on the PC functioning as the server inadvertently hits the reset button with his or her knee.

If you need to be overcoming more of the common sales objections, you must be very adept and recounting these kinds of cautionary tales with the right timing, delivery and empathy.

Using Network Reliability to Overcoming Sales Objections

PC/LAN network reliability can also get called into question when the user of the peer-to-peer server inadvertently performs an unannounced, unscheduled shutdown and restart because a software setup program prompted a reboot.

With peer-to-peer networks, protecting data is usually also an afterthought. If the peer-to-peer server isn’t protected with fault tolerant hard drives, a reliable tape backup drive, a server-class UPS, and updated antivirus software, a peer-to-peer server becomes an accident waiting to happen.

So while any of these factors can turn apathy into your opportunity, sometimes a little divine intervention steps in to help you in overcoming sales objections.

One day a lightning storm and blackout pushes your client’s “server” over the edge. When power’s restored, the server cannot even boot up to its welcome or logon screen. So now, the small business owner is scrambling with the internal guru at 2 a.m. trying to restore the company’s corrupted contact management database, which contains 25,000 records and three years of data.

Fear of Catastrophic Data Loss and Overcoming Sales Objections

Situations such as catastrophic data loss, although horrible tragedies for those affected, are great motivators for combating apathy and overcoming sales objections. All of a sudden, the small business owner becomes extremely receptive to your suggestions about your proposed networking solution, which of course features centralized security and data protection.

Discontinued technical support is another powerful counterforce for overcoming apathy-rooted sales objections, especially when you’re talking about vertical, industry-specific software, such as niche applications designed for accountants, attorneys, physicians, realtors, auto body shops and restaurants.

After a certain point, the independent software vendor (ISV) selling vertical, industry-specific software draws a line in the sand and stops providing technical support, annual updates, and patches for older versions of their product.
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