Syncplicity, SlideShark Integrate to Provide Real Time, Mobile Power Point Presentations

In highly competitive markets, presentation counts and Sales Reps want every tool and ever bit of information available at their fingertips to help them win business.

iPads and content-rich PowerPoints are points of entry; high fidelity animations, fonts, graphics and colors come next. But customers care about one other thing as well, accurate data. And these days, data that’s a day old just doesn’t cut it. Nor does a group of sales reps sharing different figures with different people at the same company. Organizations and sales teams need to be in sync.  

While smart enterprises may have the diligent staff to keep PowerPoint files up-to-date and available for download, what if a sales rep wants to change the order of his deck, a color, client name or accentuate a feature? It can lead to confusion. And even if everything on the backend is done perfectly, downloading at the client site can be a problem. Whom among us hasn’t been at a presentation where the speaker couldn’t download his files?

Keeping Teams Up to Date

The innovators at Syncplicity, EMC’s cloud-based Sync &Share company, and SlideShark, an award winning app for presenting and sharing PowerPoints on the iPad and iPhone, have integrated to enable mobile teams to have access to all of their presentations in the cloud, to keep them in sync, and to be able to present them professionally, reliably and in full fidelity from iOS devices.

“It (the integrated solution) keeps everyone singing off of the same page,” says Leonard Chung, Syncplicity’s Chief Product Strategist.

The integrated solution works by storing all the presentations in Syncplicity from which users can access their own PowerPoints and those, inside and outside of the firewall, to which they have authorized access. This is done Cloud-to-Cloud, there is no downloading required. Syncplicity eliminates version control challenges, ensuring that users have access to the latest version of presentations on all of their iOS mobile devices.

The SlideShark app is then used to access the presentations and to provide a unified view across all devices in high fidelity complete with animations, vibrant colors, graphics and fonts. Users can control and navigate content, as well as connect to TVs and projectors to deliver truly powerful presentations.

Add to that that SlideShark has a built-in ability to track engagement on copies of presentations distributed to prospective clients. Not only can it tell when and for how long each presentation is being re-reviewed, but also how much time is being spent on any particular slide, giving sales reps behind the scenes insights that they have rarely had before.

Keeping Teams Compliant 

Companies in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences, financial services, energy and utilities where presentations require extensive approval processes and audit trails can be assured that changes are not being made on-the-fly in the field via use of the recently released Syncplicity Connector for Documentum.

SlideShark/Syncplicity users can also leverage Syncplicity’s “remote wipe” capabilities which come in handy when devices are lost or employees part ways with their employers. It should be noted that wiping is done on an individual file basis and does not impact other SlideShark presentations.

What all of this means to Sales Reps and Sales teams everywhere is that you now have the tools to show-up with top notch, up-to-date, compliant presentations without needing to download a thing. A far cry from struggling to make PowerPoints from your PC look good on an iPad and from being anxious while you wait for downloads at client sites hoping that you grabbed the right file.

And, as an added plus, you have the analytics you need to gain insights into your customer by knowing when your PowerPoint is being viewed, by whom and how much time is being spent on each slide.

It’s an easy to gain strategic advantage that wasn’t at your fingertips this time last year.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

9 Ways to Stay Productive on SharePoint

When I paired up with fellow SharePoint expert Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) last year for a presentation at SPTechCon Boston, we decided to create a fake company as part of our effort to create use cases and working examples without having to rely on the Microsoft-provided generic company Contoso. During our working sessions, somehow the conversation degraded (if you know Geoff and I, this is not surprising) into a wild and silly fake company, where our characters (yes, we created characters) were also in a band together. So we found ourselves in Boston, presenting several beginner scenarios on how someone new to SharePoint could quickly become a "rock star," with all of our examples based around the activities two fake employees in a fake rock band called Horse's End.

Why Horse's End? Our fake company was called Hoffman Ruler Supply of South-East North Dakota, with the acronym of HRSSEND. Hence, Horse's End was born. Check out our fake 'Behind the Music' video. 

All silliness aside, there was actually some good content that came out of that well-attended session, where we provided a quick walk through of some of the basic Information Worker activities in SharePoint that can make you more productive more quickly. However, a couple conversation threads came out of that event around end user adoption, and I thought I'd expand on that topic.

One of the difficulties for any organization in trying to get a solid return on investment in any collaboration platform is getting their employees to use the tools. Many IT organizations treat productivity issues as a technical issue — they think that somehow more tools and more IT spending will solve many of the problems they face, but the problems organizations have are typically cultural issues, not technology issues. And the way to solve those issues is to change the culture around the platform by talking about it, sharing experiences and making change management (issues, feature requests, business alignment efforts) more transparent. 

At the core, however, it takes proactive end users who are seeking ways to improve their skills and overall productivity. In our SPTechCon session, Geoff and I outlined nine ways that end users could stay productive on SharePoint as follows: 

1. Use it

Sounds simple enough, but breaking the bad habits of managing documents through email, or sharing files with team members using web-based free tools, can take time. Make a concerted effort to move your content and activities into SharePoint, and get familiar with all of its capabilities.

2. Keep using it

Consistency is key, as it is very easy to slip back into those bad habits. Make an effort to use the full capability of the platform — don't just use it as a glorified file share, but add your content, tag it with relevant keywords, share it with those within your project team or organization, and slowly expand your knowledge around forms, workflow and social so that you can get the most out of the platform.

3. Solve one problem at a time

One mistake many organizations make is trying to solve all of the business problems at once. Don't try it. Instead, outline the business processes you would like to improve, and then prioritize them, attacking them one by one. This will allow you to learn from your mistakes, and refine your plans as you go. You'll also learn what can be done out of the box, so you won't rely too heavily on customizations.

4. Learn from others, share your experiences

Whether through forums, at conferences or within your company halls, share details on what you are doing with the platform, and look for how other teams have deployed similar solutions so that you can share your best practices, and learn from theirs.

5. Get involved in your company user group

Make SharePoint a social activity. Attend your company's weekly or monthly SharePoint user groups, or start one up. It might be two people getting together over lunch once a month to talk SharePoint best practices, but you'll be amazed at how much you can improve what you are doing — and learn about new functionality — by talking with others who understand your business, your industry and your company culture.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Jive's New iPad 'Present' App Keeps Sales Professionals Up to Date

Enterprise social software provider Jive Software is introducing Jive Present, a tablet application designed to assist sales presentation and training efforts. The company is also releasing new enhancements to its core platform.

There's reason we constantly see Jive in the leader position of reports like Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social CRM and for Social Software. It's because the social business software provider is constantly updating their platform to include features necessary for a social enterprise.

Making Tablets More Social

Jive Present extends the Jive social business platform to sales professionals who use iPads and gives corporate managers the ability to monitor how end-users consume data, comply with best practices and regulations and follow educational programs.

Jive Present

The app can:

• Distribute data including rich multimedia, audio and visual content
• Centrally manage the distribution of customized data to individual end users
• Mark up and distribute specific sales content to customers and prospects in the field in real time
• Enable real-time mobile collaboration among end users 

Essentially this iPad application gives sales professionals who are on the go, direct access to the most recent content they need for sales presentations. There are automatic notifications of updates and the app is integrated with the Jive network so you can share and get information from other team members or departments quickly.

Jive Present Notifications

Jive Beefs Up Platform

Jive is also making what it says are “hundreds” of enhancements to its core platform (including updates to many apps we talked about back in May). Some of the more noteworthy upgrades include Jive Anywhere, which provides platform access from any website or app, Jive App Experience, a feature that enables app integration into Jive with one keystroke, the Jive Edge social intelligence engine, which offers customizable “attention streams” that allow focus on specific processes and people within activity streams, the Jive for Teams group collaboration solution and a redesigned user experience. 

Jive Drives Engagement

Jive’s new tablet app and platform features, such as Jive App Experience, are part of what appears to be a larger strategy of driving higher engagement with the Jive platform. Earlier this week, we learned about partnership between Jive and gamification software maker Badgeville. The new Badgeville for Jive integrates game mechanics into the Jive Software social collaboration platform as a method to increase engagement and encourage adoption for those using the system on a daily basis.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Customer Experience: From Customer Satisfaction to Customer Action

On the Web we need to measure whether customers are actually successful, not whether they are satisfied. 

Professor Jim Saker of Loughborough University writes about a presentation he was at where “the announcement was made that the franchise customer satisfaction index had gone up by a whole five percentage points in the past year. There was wild applause and self-congratulation until it was pointed out on the next slide that sales and profitability had gone down by an even larger percentage.”

I remember once testing a website with a woman who had a really hard time completing basic tasks. At the end of the test, I asked her how satisfied she was with the website. “Really satisfied,” she replied.

This sort of response is not unusual. The question is: what will most affect a customers’ likelihood of returning to a website? The fact that they were able to do what they needed to do quickly? Or the fact that even though they failed miserably at their tasks, they told the nice researcher that it was a nice site?

In an article entitled "Stop Delighting the Customer," Matthew Dixon, Lara Ponomareff and Anastasia Milgramm explain how a division of American Express found that “customer retention rates remained flat even as satisfaction rates rose.”

Often, satisfaction is not a good measure of whether a customer will do more business with you. However, it was found that American Express customers who experienced “low-effort or effortless experiences were more likely to complete future transactions than customers who had high-effort experiences.”

Reliant, an American energy company, became committed to reducing customer effort. As part of this new strategy, “Reliant removed the talk-time metric,” according to Dixon et al. This metric measures how long a customer support rep stays on a call. The result of such a metric is that “reps paid more attention to the clock than to customers' concerns, rushing customers off the phone when they had hit their limit and leaving the customer without full resolution.” By instead focusing on reducing customer effort, Reliant has significantly improved key metrics such as first contact resolution rates.

The equivalent of ‘watching the clock’ in the web content world is a culture of producing large volumes of low quality content. A great many content authors get paid based on the quantity of content they publish rather than on how many customer problems it helps solve.

Recent studies have shown that satisfaction with Facebook compares very badly with other social sites such as Google+. Does this mean Facebook is much worse than Google+? Or does it mean that when you have almost a billion members it’s hard to keep them all feeling satisfied? McDonalds has the same customer satisfaction problem. And we all know, of course, that nobody is satisfied with Ryanair. But if there is such dissatisfaction with Facebook, McDonalds and Ryanair, why are so many people still using them?

In many situations, satisfaction is not a good measure of future customer behavior. 

About the Author

Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994. His latest book is titled The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Apple Launches New iPhone 5, iOS 6 Features and Apps

 Yes, Apple has unveiled its latest range of gadgets to an eager media scrum at Yerba Buena in San Francisco, but with the same old presentation and incremental approach, the magic seems to have gone. 

At the Apple's Core

You could have written the script for Tim Cook's presentation today, just by changing a few words from recent Apple events. "Here's some pretty new stores, with glass staircases and eager customers. Here are some huge numbers and now our new products with every element carefully refined." Everything looks shiny in the world of Apple, but it is the becoming the same story, regardless of location and product. 

Expecting Apple to innovate its socks off with some new mega experience every 12 months is asking quite a lot, but for a company that sets its standards so high, that's the pressure it faces. Sure, Apple has improved every bit of the iPhone 5, but its now just another smartphone, scrapping over the same feature sets and specifications. 

So, there are now 380 Apple stores in 13 countries. Apple's notebooks now account for 27% of US sales and it sold 17 million iPads in the quarter to June, bringing the total to 84 million with its market share up from last year, despite the efforts of many rival products. That makes for a grand total of 400 million iOS devices sold. 

On To The Good Stuff

Phil Schiller took over to introduce the new iPhone 5. Made of glass and aluminium it resembles all the recently leaked images, it is 18% thinner and 20% lighter than the 4S. The key features are the new 4-inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, running at 1136 x 640 with a retina display of 336 ppi.

That extra space adds an extra row of icons, while all of Apple's apps have been updated to take advantage of the extra space. Some key developers have also been allowed to update their apps ahead of the bundle (expect your App Store update number to start pinwheeling on 19 September when iOS 6 becomes available).

It is not just the size that's improved, the touch sensors are built into the screen, with one less layer, allowing for improved color saturation, up to 44% claim Apple. There's also improved wireless chip with improved WiFi and LTE finally making it into the iPhone. 

Heart of the Machine

At the heart is the Apple A6 processor, which offers double the processing and graphics performance on the A5 chip. Again, Apple brought out a games partner, this time EA to show off its wares, Real Racing 3, powered by the new chip. But how big are these, admittedly impressive, games with their increased storage requirements?

They've also improved the camera, adding a dynamic low light mode, To cope with all this extra horsepower, the battery is an unspecified improvement on the iPhone 4S model. To take nice photos, there's a new Panorama mode, as if we don't have enough apps for that already? The front camera is now also HD, allowing for high quality FaceTime, which can be sent over a cellular link (CSP dependent). 

More fiddly updates include the use of three microphones, noise cancelling features and wideband audio from the speaker. There is also the new "Lightning" connector lead, to go along with the Mac's Thunderbolt. So much of this must be exciting for the engineer, but as a customer and user it's just so much fluff. 

Into the End Game

As expected the iPhone 5, for all the power and beauty is just an upgrade and an end to a means. iOS 6 is what us Apple owners will actually use every day and get a better experience from. As expected, there is the new Maps app with over 100 million points of interest and turn-by-turn directions. 

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Closer Look At Amazon’s New Kindle Serials: Part Dickens, Part T.V.

The story behind the emerging genre of digital serial fiction, from the writers producing it.

When a slide showing eight book covers popped up in Jeff Bezos’s presentation on Thursday, Jennifer 8. Lee--who was following along on a live blog from New York City--gasped. The books are part of Amazon’s new Kindle Serials format, and she published three of them: Hacker Mom, The Many Lives of Lilith Lane, and Love Is Strong as Death.

Last year, Lee, a former New York Times writer and author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, co-founded a literary studio for digital serial novels called Plympton. The studio began commissioning books, but distribution proved an obstacle. With no book subscription model in major online bookstores, Plympton would have had to publish individual shorts sold separately (something that digital publisher Byliner has now done with serial novels as Quick Reads in Apple's iBookstore, as Nook Snaps at BarnesAndNoble.com, and as Short Reads at Kobo). Could readers be sure an author selling an episode of a book would publish its ending? How would the company make it clear that only one episode was being sold at a time? There was no structure in mainstream bookstores for selling this kind of fiction.

Kindle Serials provides a neat solution for Lee and other publishers who want to try their hand at serial fiction. Once readers subscribe to a Kindle Serials book, new episodes appear at the back as they are published. Customers pay a flat fee for each “season,” starting at $1.99. Lee knew she was part of the program's launch, but she didn’t know it was part of the same giant press event at which the company would announce the Kindle Fire HD and the Kindle Paperwhite.

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Serial fiction made sense 100 years ago, when authors such as Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy published some of their most famous works in weekly installments. And, says Plympton co-founder and editor Yael Goldstein Love, it makes sense today for many of the same reasons.

“Few books were actually published before they were serialized for much of the 19th century. It was a way to see if it had commercial viability and also see if there was an audience for the story,” Love says. “I think the same thing is true today. Publishing houses are cutting their publishing lists, sort of slashing them.”

She argues publishing serialized fiction gives writers a way to show their books can gain followings, even if a major publishing house doesn’t initially take a bet on them. For authors like E.V. Anderson, who wrote a Plympton serial novel called The Many Lives of Lilith Lane, this is welcome relief. He says he’s had a screenplay and a memoir fall through after promising breaks, and he is happy to see something of his actually published.

You don’t have to look back as far as Dickens in order to see success in episodic storytelling. Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Wire will do just fine. Many authors of Plympton’s books compare the experience to writing a television show. Many of them have screenwriting backgrounds. All of them we spoke with say it’s different than writing a book.

“I think it is the difference between a movie and a television show,” says Austen Rachlis, another of Plympton's authors. “The goal is that each episode or segment is its own satisfying experience. You feel like you heard a whole story, but you also want to hear what is going to happen next.”

Adds Dani Amore, the author of serial novel The Circuit Rider, who says he heard about the kindle serials program through the Kindle Direct Publishing program: “It’s stories within stories. It’s not a true linear story as other novels are.”

But it’s not just the way books are structured that makes them more like TV, it’s how they’re read--with space in between each episode.

“Part of what makes [Television shows] possess our mind so much is that we have to wait between episodes and between seasons,” Love says.“We speculate, and we think about what the characters are going to do. It’s much more similar to what we do with each other. It’s that instinct for gossip that I think makes us love fiction in the first place.”

Two of the three books Plympton has published as part of the Kindle Serials launch are already fully written. But the idea is that authors will be able to interact with audiences as they write. They’ll read the reaction to their first segment while they’re writing their ending. They can use reactions to season one while their starting season two. Plympton is taking the idea of reader input a step further and allowing anyone who pledges $25 or a more in its Kickstarter campaign to become a voting member of its advisory committee.

“How much I’ll factor it in, subconsciously or not, I don’t know,” Amore says about reader feedback. “I’ll definitely try to read it and see what happens.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com