Managing data in a remote office is often complex and challenging. Some tasks can be completed independently, but others require consolidation. Potential issues include the following:

• How are your employees billing their time?
• How are projects being implemented?
• Are problems communicated effectively between branch offices?
• Are internal issues and customer issues tracked efficiently?
• Are resources having special knowledge being used effectively by various organizations?
• Are these organizations securing all data?
• Are processes that can be tracked centrally (e.g., contacting leads via phone) be done more efficiently?

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Steve Pavent of Optimum Payments is a small-business owner who offers payment solutions to many other small businesses. Before using OfficeClip, the head office manually processed all business applications. Steve had the following requirements:

1. Each agent should be able to view and edit their assigned contacts and leads, because agents are geographically dispersed and earn commissions from their sales. They have to work on the contacts they acquire and manage.
2. The corporate office needs to look at all newly acquired leads and allocate them to various sales agents for further action.
3. Each agent's work hours, as well as the amount of work, need to be captured.
4. To maintain contact for better conversion and upselling, newsletters and periodic emails should be sent to all contacts and customers.
5. All documents associated with contacts and customers need to be connected within the system.
6. Careful records should be kept of all notes, events, and issues associated with any contacts.
7. Business forms should be sent directly to all prospects.

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As a small business, you can run your business more efficiently using many products that are delivered today via SaaS (Software as a service) or locally installed. For example, you may need to:

1. Manage your prospects, accounts opportunities and campaigns
2. Create and send regular campaigns for your prospects and customers
3. Manage customer support incidents and issues
4. Track Time worked on various projects
5. Track how your employees are spending time
6. Track employee and company expenses
7. Track internal issues
8. Share documents with your offsite employees and customers
9. Invoice customers
10. Share calendar events and meetings with customers, prospects etc.

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Many OfficeClip users have DSL or Cable Internet access in their Office. Although OfficeClip provides SaaS (Software as a Service) as a hosted solution, many small business users choose to install OfficeClip at their own server for various reasons. This article shows that it is not very hard to implement this in your own small office.

One way to do this is using a VPN connection when accessing the OfficeClip server from outside your company. Many Wi-Fi router today supports this mode. However, VPN is difficult to setup for average users.

Another easy way is to open port 80 (http port) on your router and direct all incoming request to your OfficeClip Server. Follow these steps:

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Keeping track of clients, appointments, old tax returns and receipts is sometimes difficult to manage in a conventional way. Different applications in OfficeClip provide a way for Accountants to be more productive. This avoids having to maintain bunch of spreadsheets and carry out manual merging.

In this article we show some ways how OfficeClip products can be used by Accountants and Financial Professionals to make various tasks more efficient.

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This week one of our customers called and asked us to provide some advise on whether to host OfficeClip Contact Manager to a Virtual Private Server (VPS), Dedicated Server or Cloud. This led me to look at various options on cloud computing as it exists today.

Is the Cloud Computing cheaper than Dedicated Host?

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Here is a list of my top 10 productivity tools that a small business can use. Although these tools are most suited for IT professionals, they are valuable resources for any small business. Although I use them in Windows environment, some of these works in other environments like Unix, Mac etc.

Given below are some of my thoughts on these tools. What is your most favorite tool?

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Some of you have asked how we have created our video presentation on Extranet. We use Camtasia 6 to create our videos. I will provide the steps here with a sample video. I will not go into detail in Camtasia operations as they can be found from the Techsmith website. Any comments on this blog or any ideas for improvement will be appreciated.

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When working with different customers on projects and vendors on issues it is always useful to be able to keep the information together in your intranet. OfficeClip has released the new edition of its extranet software that allows users to work with their customers, vendors and service providers. Following are some of the highlights:

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