31. 08. 10
So, outside of the obvious jokes about people who still use hotmail as their primary email address, we’ve got very small excellent to say about Hotmail. But, Microsoft still takes the project seriously, and they’ve just added in Exchange support as well as push notifications. What’s that mean? You can now have your hotmail account connected to your native Mail.app on iOS devices.
So, you’ll now be connected for every second of every day to Microsoft’s hotmail service, with emails coming in real time, and you can sync your contacts. Pretty nifty stuff.
To be honest, I had no thought you couldn’t already do this stuff with Hotmail. I had assumed that since Microsoft was the driving force behind Exchange that they would have incorporated it into their web mail service a long time ago. I guess it just goes to show how long I’ve been out of the Microsoft game.
If you’re looking for a tutorial on setting up our email account in the native Mail application,
Apple has a brief tutorial here.
In: NewsAuthor: Macgasm (blog)
31. 08. 10
Email is dead? Hardly. Four reasons why email is ideally suited to bring web 2.0 innovations to the enterprise.
Google’s latest moves to extend Google Voice to a complete phone calling service within Gmail and to pull the plug on Google Wave demonstrate that Gmail has become the centerpiece of Google’s Enterprise 2.0 initiative, with far-reaching implications for email users and the industry. What’s clearer now than ever before is that Web 2.0 pundits got it incorrect: email is far from dead.
The De Facto Portal
In fact, email is rapidly becoming the de facto portal for enterprise communication and collaboration. The industry is transforming the email client into an enterprise collaboration interface that aggregates documents, social profiles, activities, team calendars and instant messaging. Google Voice is the latest service built using GMail Contextual Gadgets; others from Google Labs integrate Google Docs and Google Calendars. Third parties such as Gist and Rapportive are quickly jumping on the Gmail bandwagon, bringing Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter social profiles into Gmail.
Microsoft has also gone social with Outlook and its Social Connector, adding a People Pane to the Outlook client to show LinkedIn or Facebook profiles. At the same time, Xobni and Mainsoft added document collaboration and social profiles to Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes, the first email client to offer an extensible architecture.
Productivity Troubles
With the rapid proliferation of social networks and enterprise collaboration offerings, the typical enterprise user is now running dozens of web services in a separate browser tabs, with no integration or preservation of context when switching from one service to the other. Research shows that a typical user switches an average 37 times an hour between applications, thus spending less than two minutes without interruption on the same task. This frequent task switching keeps us in a perpetual mental locomotion, which dramatically reduces productivity.
Transforming email into a collaboration console is a pragmatic step toward a better use of Internet services. The email client can host multiple Internet services within a single window and single work context. For example, an email recipient can see the email sender’s profile and latest tweets, and she can immediately contact the sender by phone, chat or SMS. There’s no need to switch applications or cut and paste contact details in a different browser window. The bottom line? More work gets done collaboratively as users communicate instantly using the most appropriate communications tool while maintaining their focus on the task at hand.
4 Reasons Social Email is the Best Approach
I see four main reasons why the social email is a strong candidate to become the new enterprise aggregated interface to the Internet:
Business users spend the majority of their work day within the email client, reading, writing and sending emails, and managing calendar appointments and tasks.
The “Enterprise Social Graph” is stored in your email client. The people you send to, and receive email from, are the people you connect with most in your enterprise social networks; they are your natural connections. This “Enterprise Social Graph” can be used to boost the adoption of enterprise social network, just as Google Buzz harnessed Gmail contacts and emails to make a social network overnight, with 9 million posts in its first 56 hours.
The vast majority of the enterprise documents are shared using email. Documents remain the main object of collaboration within the enterprise, with the majority of document workflows starting with an incoming email message containing an attachment or document link, and ending with another email or instant message containing a link to the updated document.
Modern email clients such as Gmail, Outlook, and Lotus Notes have embraced an extensible architecture enabling third-parties to develop and distribute their own add-ons.
So email is here to stay. With a new social look, it may very well be the best conduit to bring Web 2.0 innovations to the enterprise.
31. 08. 10
SalesNexus (News - Alert), an online contact relationship management software company, has announced the launch of a completely integrated email marketing suite for giving back the power to sales teams for the purpose of lead nurturing.
Sales teams are many times left to fend for themselves when they are trying to cultivate leads, processing the sales funnel and following up on and nurturing leads, whereas not having access to a complete set of integrated sales automation tools.
In a release, Craig Klein (News - Alert) the President of SalesNexus said, "We can probably all agree that in the long term, it's more valuable to focus on building the relationship with the customer. So how about letting email handle some of the repetitive work so you can have more one-on-one time with the leads that are ready to buy?"
SalesNexus is in the process of expanding its services by upgrading its user interface, adding a full-featured email marketing suite to its Web-based CRM service and at the same time offering subscribers an access to The Sales Mastery Institute, all of the above at no additional charge.
With this latest release, SalesNexus has now become the first online CRM to offer complete email marketing capabilities which the sales teams can leverage quickly and easily. Additionally SalesNexus has been able to remove the cost barriers to email marketing, by offering flat per-user pricing and unlimited email sending.
A sneak preview of its new CRM and email marketing suite will be held by SalesNexus on September 2, 2010. This webinar will guide how salespeople can finally take back control of the sales and marketing process for closing more sales and also effectively nurturing leads all through the sales funnel process.
SalesNexus is based out of Houston, Texas and is a private limited software development company, which has been completely dedicated to customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation and marketing automation for small- to mid-size businesses. The sales teams will be enabled by the SalesNexus web-based CRM for generating more leads, close more sales and keep customers longer. The unique combination of CRM and email marketing technology offered by SalesNexus is coordinated by the industry's most proactive and responsive support services.
