July 13th, 2012 by Brian Cors
I recently returned from the Mitel Business Partner Conference that took place in San Diego at the end of June. The weather, of course, was perfect. But my biggest thrill, as always, was the opportunity to spend quality time with some of our existing clients. Our very first clients were Mitel resellers (I worked at Mitel just before I started CorsPro), so it’s a pleasure to catch up live with folks who in some cases have been with us for several years (one of the things I’m most proud of is our 95%+ client retention rate).
The hot topics at this year’s conference were financial strength (of Mitel), virtualization and the brand-new Mitel UC360 Collaboration Point. Compared to many in the industry, Mitel’s profitability and balance sheet are Read the rest of this entry »
June 1st, 2012 by Hazel Lychak
These days, there’s an app for everything! And there are plenty of productivity apps that can help you streamline and organize your work and your life. Check out CRN’s The Daily App to read their reviews of some of the hottest apps out there. One of this week’s reviews features ‘Totes m’ Notes for iPad’, with functionality that allows users to customize paper and font styles, store and organize meeting or presentation notes on a bookshelf, send with a one-click share button, and receive notes as well. Not an iOS user? There are reviews for android and other smart devices as well. Check them out to get more productive with your gadgets.
February 25th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak
The decision to implement a sales productivity tool can really pay off by delivering significant benefits to your business, such as a major reduction in quoting errors, increased efficiency and increased revenues and profits. These benefits certainly sound appealing, but what about all of the other priorities and must-have technologies that you’re considering to move your business forward? Should sales productivity be put on the back burner, or should it be put at the forefront of your 2012 initiatives, alongside some of the major enterprise-wide projects? The answer is…you’ve got to do the math! If the proposed benefits from the tool are high (and quantifiable), implementation and training time are low and you can expect ample support from the vendor, then you can implement quickly and capitalize on immediate benefits, even when more extensive projects or technologies are already in the works.
Consider these items as part of your equation: Read the rest of this entry »
December 8th, 2009 by Brian Cors
Awhile back, I posted an article about AirSet, the free online calendar-sharing service. My wife and I have been using that service for a few years now and, with our busy lives (including a teenager and a pre-teen), I don’t know how we’d survive without it.
After having tried unsuccessfully to manage shared calendars for CorsPro within our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, we’ve recently switched to managing our calendars using AirSet. After just a few days, I’m here to tell you that it works great, and it provides an ideal blending of managing BOTH your personal calendar and your work calendar without feeling like you’re giving up the privacy of your personal life for all of your business associates to see.
Figure 1
The key to managing calendars in AirSet is the concept of being able to view multiple calendars and sub-calendars all at once, and to tag others as participants in events so that the events appear in their calendars. For example, my personal calendar for November 19th looked like Figure 1. The event descriptions are a bit cut off so that they can fit neatly into the calendar day’s square, but you can easily see the full details of each event simply by floating your mouse over the event.
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November 13th, 2009 by Brian Cors
I love my Blackberry. It’s a great phone that synchronizes nicely with my Outlook (calendar and contacts in my case), enables me to call my contacts hands-free using my voice (e.g., “call Joe Smith mobile”) and – best of all – enables me to send and receive emails wherever I am. But as a text messaging platform, it’s not so good. It takes way too many keystrokes to send a simple SMS text message. I’d rather call someone instead of texting them.
But I have a 14-year old daughter. My response hit rate is much higher when I send a text message rather than calling her (it’s embarrassing to have dad call you on the cell phone when you’re with your friends), and there are other folks in my contacts list who respond more often and quickly to a text message.
Fortunately, after much searching, I’ve found a little $6 application called QuickText that makes it fast and easy to send a text message. From the main screen, I simply press the “Q” key, then the key that I’ve assigned to the person I’m texting. Now I can immediately starting typing my text message. Two keystrokes to get to the composition screen…not bad!
If my intended text message recipient does not have a key assigned to them, then after pressing the “Q” key, I can press the space bar to bring up my address book where I can select the recipient and immediately begin typing my text message. Fast and easy, like text messaging should be!
You can download QuickText, which is made by Cannon Software, from Blackberry’s App World or from one of several mobile software websites. I downloaded mine from www.MobiHand.com.
December 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Everybody has a different approach to keeping track of all of the tasks that they need to accomplish, projects they need to manage and people with whom they need to follow up.
In the old days, the only choices available to us were paper-based. The best systems out there were from Day-Timers and Franklin-Covey, and they helped you to organize yourself by encouraging you to group items into different categories that were separated out into different pages. They worked well, but the planners themselves were somewhat bulky and it was a laborious process to carry forward and reorganize your tasks as you went along.
Today, we have numerous options to electronically manage our tasks. Yet very few people systematically use electronic task management tools. The most widely-used tool is Outlook, which enables you to add tasks to its task management database, then filter and sort those tasks by due date, category (if you assign one) or other criteria. To me, this approach quickly becomes overwhelming as the tasks begin to mount, and re-prioritizing and re-dating the tasks within Outlook is a time-consuming process.
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November 10th, 2008 by Brian Cors
The cost of cyber-threats such as viruses, spyware and phishing schemes is truly staggering. The Consumer Reports National Research Center estimates that 1 in 4 people have encountered a major virus attack, resulting in an average cost of $109 per incident and a nationwide cost of $5.2 billion in total damage. Spam, spyware ($2.6 billion in estimated damage) and phishing schemes ($630 million in estimated damage) have also caused tremendous financial and productivity losses.
There are a variety of measures that everyone should take to protect themselves from cyber-attacks…
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October 28th, 2008 by Brian Cors
A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zaslow published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed two ways that people handle their email inboxes. There are the hoarders – those who keep every email that they’ve ever been sent – and the deleters, who religiously clean out their email inboxes and delete as many emails as they possibly can (then go back to the hoarders if they need to reference an email from the past).
Jeffrey’s original article hypothesized that your email inbox strategy reflects who you are and how you handle the rest of your life. He surmises that if you’re a hoarder, then probably you’re a hoarder and untidy in other parts of your life.
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October 2nd, 2008 by Brian Cors
For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a web-based calendar-sharing service that makes it easier to coordinate schedules with others. I also needed this service to be able to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook and my Palm Treo.
After months of searching, I’ve finally found a service called AirSet (www.airset.com) that meets these needs and works great. It’s also free (AirSet makes their money by extending the AirSet functionality to cell phones).
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September 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
About a year ago, I purchased a Palm Treo 650 with the hope that the device would not only combine my cell phone, calendar, contact list and email inbox into a single device, but that it would allow these elements to interact in ways not possible with separate devices.
I haven’t been disappointed.
In particular, I like the way I can search through my entire list of contacts to find and dial the person I’d like to call. I also like the way that the Treo uses the phone number of an incoming call to look up and display the name of the contact who is calling, enabling me to decide which calls to answer and which calls to send to voicemail.
The Treo 650 uses the Palm operating system. Relative to what I’ve seen and read about with regard to Windows-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), the Palm operating system is much simpler to use and requires fewer stylus taps to accomplish the same tasks.
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