Using Jing Project Screencast for Training

November 5, 2008 at 9:00 am · Filed under Distributed Work, Reviews

Screencasts, where you capture in a video something that appears on your computer desktop, along with audio and/or text, are growing in popularity.  For instance, among the “how to” and business videos at YouTube.com, I’ve noticed more and more screencasts this past year. 

Camtasia software by Techsmith, is a popular choice for creating screencasts.  But during 2008 I’ve bumped into several new screencasting services. 

I’ve found a perfect use for these screencasting services: to train staff and/or create an operations manual. 

I’ve been using one service, Jing Project, to record small bits of information and instructions for my virtual staff, who are scattered in remote locations.  Sometimes you just need to “show” someone how to do something, especially anything that involves computer software or websites.  It’s easier to demonstrate what to do, all the while talking verbally, using your cursor or tools to highlight, and explaining what you are doing real time.  After all, show-and-tell is most likely how you would train an employee if he or she worked in your office.

I was compelled to try Jing Project after another entrepreneur, Travis Campbell, recommended it for training a virtual assistant.  I’d been frustrated with writing down step by step instructions for some activities, because it just takes so darn long. Trust me, that cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words is pretty accurate — especially when you have to type every one of those 1,000 words as part of your operations manual. 

Recording a 3 to 5 minute screencast is far faster.  Another advantage of screencasts is that you communicate much more clearly, too.  The recipient is able to get information in two dimensions (audio and visual) instead of just one (in writing).

Here is a Jing Project video screencast that I recorded, about how to use Jing Project:

Video Review of Jing Project

With Jing Project you simply download the app (Windows or Mac version) to your computer.  Once installed, at the top of your desktop a little yellow “bug” sits there ready for you to click a couple of buttons and start recording.  You can do video or just take a static image of your desktop.  I find that the video version is best for training purposes.  You click to start recording the video, put your headset on, and start talking and instructing. 

If you choose to do a static screen capture image, after you are done you can put text labels on the image. 

If you choose a video instead, you can save the video on your computer, FTP it to your website server to load on your Intranet, or send it to Screencast.com automatically where it is loaded online and you can share the URL.  Loading the screencast online is the most hassle-free way to send a screencast to someone.  You get a complimentary Screencast.com account with Jing Project, and 2 GB of storage.

Overall the Jing Project works well.  It’s convenient, being right there for you to launch in an instant.    It’s easy to use, requiring very little instruction other than a few buttons on the tool itself or information on the Jing Project blog. 

On the downside, you have very limited ability to edit the file using Jing Project — you’d need a video editing tool to do that.  So if you need to create edited professional videos, you’ll need something more robust — perhaps Camtasia. Also, it doesn’t play nice with WordPress, and I have not been able to embed the video code.

Also, I noticed that occasionally if I have several applications open at once, Jing Project has sometimes caused Internet Explorer 7 to freeze up.  So I wouldn’t leave the “bug” open all the time on my computer — it only takes an extra two clicks to launch anyway.

Oh, and did I mention it’s free? 

The Real Reason to Go for Paid Apps Instead of Free

November 2, 2008 at 11:15 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web Apps

A few weeks ago I wrote about The Downside of Free Apps.  I pointed out how it can be difficult to get customer support in a timely fashion sometimes if you are a user of a free app. 

It’s not that I am against free stuff.  On the contrary, say the word “free” and I’m salivating just like one of Pavlov’s best puppies.  In fact, it would have been a lot more expensive to start my business had I not had the use of so many wonderful free online apps.

But now that my small business has gotten legs and is moving past the startup stage, I really have to think long and hard about whether I can continue to run the business when some of my key business tools are free.  Maybe, just maybe, that’s being penny wise and pound foolish.  Perhaps opting for that upgraded paid account is the least risky and least expensive option, after all.  Then if I encounter a problem, at least I’ll have the chance to get real customer service to fix it.

That thought brings me around to a blog post on The Official Google Blog by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise. He makes a pretty significant announcement, noting that Google is now guaranteeing 99.9% uptime for all its enterprise Apps (Premier Apps), including GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk:

Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

This is a significant move by Google. I think it helps.

But you know what the biggest selling point to me is? It’s this line in the Google Apps for Business section on “Getting Help” where it says, “For one-on-one help troubleshooting critical issues, email and telephone support is available from the control panel.”

That’s what businesspeople really want — especially small biz owners and managers who don’t have an in-house tech staff to go to with tech issues. If an outage happens or our account is incorrectly disabled or unusable, we want to be able to call someone at the app provider. We don’t want to have to pay our contract tech help $100/hour to try to troubleshoot the issues and end up with an unexpected bill for $500. And we’re busy and don’t have extra time to go over to discussion boards and compose questions and see if someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will answer you (without insulting you for your supposed stupidity, which sadly happens all too frequently at the Google User Groups).

We want to be able to make it someone else’s priority to fix.

And that is the real reason to go for paid apps, instead of free ones, in your business.
 

Small Biz Sees Value in Social Media — Says Survey

October 29, 2008 at 12:00 am · Filed under social networks, social tools

The majority of small business owners say there’s gold in them there social media sites. Well, maybe not gold, but at least something to look into that’s potentially valuable to businesses.

SurePayroll, the online payroll service, conducted a survey asking small business owners if they believe social networking has business value. A majority, 55%, said yes. What’s more, the survey indicates that one out of every five of the small business owners polled had actually obtained at least one new customer as a direct result of using social media.

When asked which social media sites they have heard of, it’s no surprise that the 3 largest social media sites (here in the U.S.) are the ones most have heard of.  Over 80% had heard of  Myspace, YouTube and Facebook.  This chart of survey data shows that brand recognition is high for those 3 sites among the small business people surveyed.

Interestingly, though, when asked which social sites they actually use for their businesses, the picture looked different.  LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace were the top 3, with YouTube and Yahoo Groups tying for 4th place, as this chart of survey results shows:

What’s the bottom line?   Notice that LinkedIn is the hands-down favorite for small business owners to actually use.  Digg is none too popular with the small biz crowd despite being the “poster child” of social media sites.

SurePayroll’s Online Marketing Manager, David Rohrer, says small businesses need social media to stay competitive.

“It is no longer just an outlet for personal use — it’s rapidly becoming a must for business success,” says Rohrer. “Big business is tapping into the blogosphere and posting their company profile pages in online communities. Small business owners need to do the same. What’s so great about the online world is you don’t need a million-dollar marketing budget. In fact, the most effective online connections are free personal communications from a business owner to their community.”

The SurePayroll press release on this topic is here.

A Master List of Big Brand Social Media Uses

October 28, 2008 at 8:58 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, social tools

Here’s an example of crowd-sourced intelligence in action, when it comes to social media:

Peter Kim put together a big list of business uses of social media.  Then with the input of his readers, he’s expanded the original list and as of this writing there are 279 brands listed, with references to how they are using social media. 

The list includes everything from Daimler’s Slideshare account, to Intuit’s Tax Almanac wiki, to the Progressive Insurance traffic widget on Yahoo.  There are non-profits, media, government and military organizations represented too.

Now you might wonder, “what’s so unusual about a list that readers have contributed to?”  Nothing, actually.  Happens all the time on blogs and wikis.

But it did not stop with one list. 

Then another blogger sliced and diced his list.  You see, Peter had divided his list according to brands/organizations.  Then Ray Schiel of the Global Social Media Network divided the list according to applications and functionality.  Thus, if you want to see which big brands are podcasting, for instance, it’s easy to see at a glance.  Want to know which big brands have a YouTube channel?  You can find that out too, with the list of organizations involved in online video.

The Downside of Free Online Apps

October 20, 2008 at 1:34 am · Filed under Distributed Work, Web Apps

I don’t know about you, but I’m a big user of free online applications — everything from Netvibes, to GMail, to FeedBurner to Twitter.  You could say that I run a significant chunk of my business on free apps.

So it was with a twinge of horror that I read this piece by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal about having his GMail account disabled today with no advance warning:

Google, I am a very lucky American who is living the dream of owning or being a partner in several small businesses. Each of these businesses utilize Google’s GMail and Google Docs, in an effort to cut down on infrastructure costs and keep an open stream of communication between all employees, contractors and clients.

Since Google has decided to take my account away from me, the nucleus of our company communications has been taken away and now is replaced by a black hole. My small business communications are now ruined until my account is reestablished.

An even bigger problem is that Google now combines all the Google services you use under a single account. That means that more than his email is affected. Loren is not able to use his Google Analytics account nor his Google AdSense account, either, while the account is disabled.

With any luck it will turn out to be a temporary glitch and everything will return to normal soon. But it does point out one issue that more and more small businesses will face, as they rely heavily on free cloud-computing apps. That is, one day those apps could be gone, along with all the accumulated data and the functionality you used them for.

Some of the comments to Loren’s post were quite interesting, including this one by Nick Wilsdon which provides in part:

The problem with a cloud computing setup is that you have to rely in third party apps that are out of your control.

The lesson here … not a smart move if you are relying on free apps. There is little consideration towards free account holders - support is terrible to non-existent across a range of well known Web 2.0. apps.

Others have pointed out that you can sign up for the corporate version, Google Apps, for $50 per year. Relying on it for business presumably would be a better solution because as a paying customer you could get customer support.

That could at least help you with your email. But for most of us who are active online, GMail is just the tip of the iceberg. I use a couple of dozen free apps in my business, and I know many other small businesses in the same boat. Those online applications have been integrated into our procedures for running our businesses and sometimes are tied directly to our financial success. Losing any of those apps and the data in them would bring varying degrees of angst.  That shows the downside of relying upon free apps.

Of course, the countervailing consideration is the way so many of us run our businesses. We have a need for personal mobility, for apps we can access from a laptop while on the go. We have a need to give access to these apps to a distributed work force and remote contractors. These online apps fit the bill for the way we work. And sometimes the free services are the best in class.

Still, this calls attention to the free versus paid debate.

You Know that Directory of Web Apps? Found It, Sort of …

September 30, 2008 at 10:56 am · Filed under Management, Web Apps

A while back I wondered aloud about where to find a directory to look up Web apps.  A variety of sites and blogs have posts that cover SaaS apps / Web apps.  But I was looking for THE definitive place.

Mashable.com doesn’t give us the definitive directory, but it is getting closer, with its list of 270 Web apps for running a business.  That’s in addition to an earlier list of 230 Web apps from last year.  Add them up and you get 500 Web apps between the two posts.

They range from accounting apps, to calendar apps, to project management apps, to virtual office apps, to email apps, to voicemail apps.

Both posts do a good job of pulling in the smaller providers.  However, many of the industry leaders are missing. So are some of my favorite apps.

For instance, while in last year’s article I saw QuickBase, still I didn’t see other standards such as:  QuickBooks Online; ; Billing Manager; Email Center Pro; eXpresso for sharing Excel spreadsheets; and several other familiar names.

The posts definitely are worth checking out to find some new apps you may not be aware of.  However, there’s still a need for a directory in my view. 

Will the Economy Mean More Telecommuters or Fewer?

September 28, 2008 at 11:53 pm · Filed under Web Commuting

Two recent articles about telecommuting bring up an interesting question:  in tight economic times, is it better to be a telecommuter, or work in an office?

One point of view says it’s better to be a telecommuter.  Businesses can save on office space expenditures, and employees can save $1,200 a year on gas (assuming $4/gallon gas).  Brendan Koerner writes in Wired.com:

“Given that it costs more than $15,000 per year to provide an employee with 200 square feet of cubicle, the savings would be significant — so great, in fact, that companies would still come out thousands of dollars ahead after springing for workers’ broadband and VoIP expenses.

Ditching the office could also provide businesses with a leg up in the scramble to recruit and retain talent. For starters, location would no longer limit a company’s employment pool — gifted Kansans wouldn’t be forced to uproot their lives for opportunities in, say, California. Also, based on the average American’s commute time, driving speed, and vehicle specs — and assuming that gas costs $4 per gallon — a telecommuter would save around $1,200 a year on fuel alone — an instant salary bump, of sorts.”

So, save money on gas and office space — that’s one point of view.

Now here’s the other: in times of layoffs, it’s risky to be a telecommuter because the first to go may be the telecommuters. Karen Burns suggests at U.S. News and World Reports’ On Careers blog that in tough times being a telecommuter can be risky:

“Employers are only human. Humans tend to take the easy way out. And it’s easier to lay off someone you only see rarely than to lay off someone you see every day and who has become an integral part of your work life.

You may have fought to earn telecommuting privileges. You may love the savings in gas and wardrobe expenses. You may know in your very soul that telecommuting has made you a more productive, and hence valuable, employee.

But please consider this annoying-yet-true cliché: out of sight, out of mind. It’s human nature.”

So in times like these which is it for you? Would you rather save money and have the convenience of working from home? Or risk being the first to go if layoffs come?

I’m not saying that companies are going to start making layoffs or that telecommuters would definitely be the first to go if that happened — just thinking about all the potential benefits and disadvantages.

Government Website Trends

September 16, 2008 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Web Apps

The average adult in the United States reads at a 7th grade reading level.  Yet, all but a relative handful of government websites are written above the 7th grade reading level.  In fact, more than half (64%) of government websites are written at the 12th-grade reading level or higher.  

Sounds like some of those websites just go over the heads of the public they serve. 

These statistics on website reading levels come from the The Brookings Institution, which analyzed 1,537 state and federal government websites.  The Brookings Institution’s recent report on Governance Studies looked at a variety of factors to assess state and Federal websites.

The report, which updates from data collected in previous years, shows progress.  For one thing, it’s possible to see from the report that each year the state and Federal government websites keep adding functionality and getting more ”finished” and sophisticated.  However despite the progress, government websites have a ways to go.

Here are some of the more interesting findings:

• It seems even the government can’t get away from the ubiquity of ads. Two percent (2%) of government websites carry ads or paid sponsorships, up from 1% last year.
• Government websites are on their way to becoming profit centers — or at least deferring costs. Seven percent (7%) of government websites charge user fees.
• You can conduct more transactions with your government online.  Eighty-nine percent (89%) of state and federal websites have services that are fully executable online, compared with 86 percent in 2007.
• Government websites are going mobile.  Three percent (3%) of government websites are accessible through personal digital assistants (PDAs), pagers or mobile phones, up from 1 percent last year.
• Government websites are embracing multimedia, incorporating audio or video clips. Forty-one percent (41%) provide podcasts or audio clips (up from 24% in 2007).  And 48% offer video clips (up from 35% last year).

IBM Bluehouse Organizes Online Meetings (And the Before and After)

September 10, 2008 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Reviews

IBM’s Bluehouse is a set of business applications designed to organize your work. It’s software that enables teams to collaborate online and get work done.

At its core is a Web meeting application. But Bluehouse does a lot more than simply allow you to hold an online conference or meeting. Bluehouse aims to help you get prepared for online meetings or conferences, and helps you follow-up after the meeting.

Bluehouse includes the ability to store files, so that all your files relating to a project or team objective are available in one place. It organizes all your contacts needed for that project or piece of work. There is even a chart feature, to help you visualize your data. And it offers something called “Activities” which appears to be the framework under which you keep track of comments from team members, files and otherwise organize a variety of information sources that you need to conduct your work.

Bluehouse includes an instant messenger feature built in, and it will offer social networking features so you can connect with others.

Recently I spoke with Sean Poulley, who is Vice President of online collaboration services for IBM. Sean laid out the vision for Bluehouse, which is in managed Beta today but goes into open Beta this fall.

Bluehouse started from an internal IBM sandbox where certain tools are available inside the IBM firewall to employees. They’ve taken these tools and made them available as a product. Sean says a sizable team is working on Bluehouse because of the attractive potential and significant demand they see for such an offering.

Sean says, “Nobody works just within their company anymore. Yet, interacting with people outside your company is so difficult.” IBM’s mission is to simplify the process of working with people outside of your company.

“Beyond boundaries” you have email, phone and web conferencing traditionally. Bluehouse can be used for online meetings. But Bluehouse expands and goes beyond the definition of a meeting.

According to Sean, “Think of how many times people go to a meeting, but do no prep and no followup. Many activities make up the overall project. Bluehouse tools help you manage project activities beyond the definition of just holding a meeting. It encompass what you do before the meeting, what you do during the meeting, and what you do after the meeting.”

Bluehouse helps you manage the “continuum of work” — a set of tools that actually help you do the work, whether it’s in a meeting or before or after. “Meetings are important, but there’s work before and after,” says Sean.

Target Market

Originally, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) were the intended target market for Bluehouse. But IBM has come to realize that enterprises (those with 1,000 employees or more) also need similar functionality.

Pricing

Pricing has not yet been finalized, as Bluehouse is still in managed Beta. However, IBM intends to offer subscription based pricing on a per-user basis. You will be able to purchase as an individual or as a company.

The Promise

The promise of an application like Bluehouse is that it might just be able to get you out from under email. While email is good, it’s not the best way to manage your work. For someone like me, who works primarily with people outside my company, the dependence on email is huge. Yet, email is not an efficient way to work. It’s difficult to find what you need. You have to jump all around on your computer to locate related files

See also Bill Ives’ article from a few months ago about IBM’s Lotus Connections, a social software suite that includes blogs and bookmarking.

Cloud Computing - Get Used to the Term

August 31, 2008 at 10:02 pm · Filed under Web Apps

The term “cloud computing” seems to have come out of nowhere and exploded on the scene in the past year.  I wondered if it was just me, or if the term really was of such recent vintage.

To test my theory, I went out to Google Trends and checked to see how the term “cloud computing” was trending.  As it turns out “cloud computing” didn’t even appear on the Google Trends radar screen before October 2007.  But look at the spike since then:

And what does “cloud computing” really mean? It refers to everything from software-as-a-service, to hardware-as-a-service, to social apps like Facebook that we may use — anything where we are taking advantage of something in central data centers that you access over the Internet.  BusinessWeek had a decent explanation:

“The term ‘cloud computing’ encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.”

Cloud computing is a major, fast-growing trend. Even if you are just getting the feel for this term, expect to see it regularly.