Archive for August, 2009

The green bar means security!

August 26th, 2009

TrackVia provides High-grade Encryption using AES-256 256 bit encryption.  This means TrackVia’s SSL encryption (protects your information as it travels through the internet) is so incredibly secure, there’s really not much more to say about it!

By default, all new TrackVia accounts have SSL enabled from the time they’re created.  Some existing TrackVia customers may not have SSL enabled.  If this is the case for your account, just email us at support@trackvia.com or call us at 800.673.3302 and we’ll get it enabled for your account, pronto!

Search TrackVia Help – On Google!

August 25th, 2009

Want to know a great way to find TrackVia help articles, and other TrackVia tips & tricks?  Search on Google!

Once you’re in the TrackVia forum after clicking a Google search result, be sure to click around and read other articles.  And please – leave some comments!

“Everything” backup CD

August 24th, 2009

Kind of like the everything bagel, our everything backup CD gives you something you can hold in your own hand (ok, but you shouldn’t eat it) to know that you have a copy of every single piece of information that’s in your TrackVia account, from the biggest file attachment to the smallest change note.

If you order a backup CD through TrackVia, you can tell all of those smarty pants who fret about the security of a cloud application like TrackVia that you get the best of both worlds – an elegant online service, plus a hard copy of all of your own data as often as you’d like.

Not only do you feel more secure once you have the CD in-hand, we make sure it’s a secure process to get the CD to you.  Here are some of the rules we enforce when someone orders a backup CD:

  • The order must come in writing via email from the email address of the account owner.
  • The CD can only be sent via Fedex, with signature required by the recipient.
  • The order may only be paid for by the same payment manner as the account.
    • The same credit card, a check from the same account, etc.
  • Each CD is inscribed with a unique identifier.

Ordering a backup CD includes a 1-time charge of $100 for each order, and this charge does include the Fedex delivery charge.  To order a CD, please have the account owner send an email to support@trackvia.com, and then we’ll reply to confirm the order.

Top 5 historical absurdities

August 24th, 2009

    

  • Smoking on an airplane
  • Kids riding loose in the “way back” of a station wagon
  • Baseball players with the same team for a career
  • Mobile phones the size of a suitcase
  • Waiting for IT to build a solution

Remember back before TrackVia, when you’d need to wait on IT to build an application to solve your department’s business problem?  Back when the IT group had to requisition hardware, install OSs, apply patches, write custom code, monitor uptime, etc.?

7-Eleven Shoulda Had TrackVia

August 18th, 2009

Yesterday came news that a hacker stole 130 million credit card numbers (no, that’s not a typo) from 7-Eleven, a supermarket chain, and a few other corporate victims. This is the latest in a series of data (in)security headlines, which seem to come along every couple of months. In fact this same hacker was in the news a few years ago, having stolen data from retailers TJ Maxx and Dave & Buster’s.

One thing I find interesting about these stories is that the victims are always traditional offline companies, not cloud software or software-as-a-service providers. There’s a reason for that. Cloud vendors like TrackVia, who make it their business to secure data, invest in and diligently follow security practices that too many non-tech companies overlook.

For example, does anyone think 7-Eleven was….
• Performing daily vulnerability scans provided by an independent security firm?
• Turning off all unnecessary software and services on externally facing servers?
• Closing every port on the firewall by default, and allowing access for individual services only on non-standard ports?
• Using strong passwords on every machine and rotating them regularly?

My guess is 7-Eleven wasn’t doing these things. But cloud software vendors with any heft, including TrackVia, perform all of those security practices and many more routinely. We do it because it’s our business to do so.

The analogy I often use is one of a bank. Businesses store their cash in banks, not on premises, because banks are experts at keeping cash secure. Doesn’t your data deserve the same? Stop storing your data under a mattress! Put it in TrackVia, the world’s safest place for data, and avoid being the 7-Eleven in next month’s headline.

Are you driving a K Car (application)?…

August 17th, 2009

Sitting at a stoplight this weekend, I was one lane over from a K Car.  I’d say that the K Car had seen its better days, but I’m not sure that any K Car had better days, even new.

Seeing that piece of machinery from a bygone era made me think about how the American automakers completely missed the dawn of a new era.  I’m not exactly going out on a limb by stating that those decisions have come to haunt the American auto industry.

It’s easy with hindsight to wonder how the American auto industry could miss such obvious signs that the smaller, more efficient and more reliable Japanese cars represented a strategic threat.  But, I’m sure that the automakers had board meetings where it was pointed out that they enjoyed higher profit margins on bigger, less reliable cars – or something like that.  So, that’s what they kept making.

So my question is, aren’t we at a point in the technology industry where the behemoth ERP, database, and systems integration providers are continuing to offer overpriced, unreliable systems even though this isn’t in the best interests of their customers?

Isn’t it clear that a cloud-based application like TrackVia, that doesn’t require you to purchase hardware, and that doesn’t require you to pay consultants to implement, is the future?

Set a recurring schedule for emailed views

August 14th, 2009

One of TrackVia’s great “work flow” features is our distribution schedule.  Distribution schedules allow you to set an automated, recurring schedule for TrackVia to auto-email a view to a person, or to a list of people.

For example, if your sales team uses TrackVia as a CRM to track its sales efforts with prospective customers, you can use a distribution schedule to send an email to the team if any sales leads go a day past their next scheduled follow-up action.  If no leads are overdue, then no email is sent.  But if one or more leads are overdue, TrackVia will automatically send an email at 8 am each weekday (or however you wish to schedule it) to all of the members of the sales team.  The email will contain the list of leads that weren’t followed-up with yesterday.

Be sure to try it with a calendar view – it’s very cool!  Also, you can set a distribution schedule to include an Excel attachment with the records from the view.

Another way to get value out of a distribution schedule is to use it as a “snapshot” generator.  In other words, the distribution schedule sends a static “point in time” view of the records as of that date and time.  If, in the future, you want to go back and see the list of sales leads that were overdue for follow-up on the morning of July 8th, you can do it!

Finally, you can use a distribution schedule as an automated back-up method so that you’ll always have a local copy of the information in any TrackVia database.  You can simply create a distribution schedule for a view that contains all records, all fields, and all history and change notes for a record, and have it sent to you via email every day, week, month, etc.

Read more, plus screenshots…

Change History! (aka, Who deleted that field?!)

August 14th, 2009

Want to see who made what changes to a database, when?  Just use our “change history” feature!  (”Change history” sounds pretty ambitious, but don’t worry, it’s just a short way of saying “see the history of what changed!”).

For better or worse, there’s no hiding or “fudging” about what happened if you inadvertently delete a field from the CRM.  Your little snafu is right there in the “change history” section for your boss and others to see.  (Although if that happens, don’t worry, we can restore the deleted field for you!)

Read more, plus a screenshot…

Nothing happens without an app

August 12th, 2009

If you can think of anything that any company does these days that doesn’t involve some kind of app to run it, I’d love to hear about it.  The fact is that every business initiative, no matter how big or small, has some underlying technology that helps the team keep track of progress.  An app could be as simple as a spreadsheet that’s emailed around.  Or it could be as sophisticated as an ERP.

Enter the browser, plus ubiquitous broadband access, i.e. the “cloud.”  These 2 factors allow you to leverage someone else’s equipment to build an app and to give others access to it.

Throw in some security, reliability, and ease-of-set-up, and now you’ve got everything you need to build a sophisticated app to run your business initiative.

Combine all of the above into a “horizontal” platform that’s flexible enough to build any app in any industry, and you’ve just disrupted the way business teams solve problems.  You’ve just provided a way for individual teams, no matter how big or small, to build their own apps to support their business initiatives.

This is no small disruption.  It allows business teams to bypass the traditional routes of getting an app built.  Forward-thinking IT departments are adopting and promoting this trend as an answer to their never-ending backlog of app requests.

At TrackVia, we’re leading this disruption.  We have conversations every day with business teams and IT departments that need to build apps immediately to capture business opportunities, or to solve business problems.  Want to learn more about these conversations?  Just keep reading our blog…

Gannett Healthcare Group – TrackVia Customer Story

August 11th, 2009

The Gannett Healthcare Group, division of $7B Gannett Company, is a nursing and healthcare communications company that educates tens of thousands of professionals per year. It has become one of the healthcare industry’s leading educational organizations by providing exceptional training content and customer service.

To continue its rapid growth, Gannett must continually improve customer satisfaction levels in order to benefit from positive word-of-mouth. The first step towards this goal was adding sales representatives and customer service agents to its nationwide team. In scaling the customer service organization, however, Gannett encountered the following challenges:

• Customer orders had grown to a rate of several hundred thousand per year

• The existing method for tracking service requests using Google Docs Spreadsheet created data inaccuracies due to its lack of relational capabilities and – this issue was compounded by the increasing order volume

• Lack of accurate data limited management’s ability to (1) monitor and improve the performance of individual service agents, (2) measure group performance to predict overall satisfaction levels and the time when additional staff would be needed, and (3) proactively address risks with certain accounts before they became major issues

• Insufficient IT resources to develop an in-house application

These challenges prompted Ken Ramirez, VP of Sales and Marketing, to search for a current generation solution that would be inexpensive to own, simple to deploy / maintain, and easy for nationally distributed team to use.

The Gannett Healthcare Group used TrackVia to increase its level of customer satisfaction by automating its service and support workflow and enabling its nationwide team to simply and securely share the status of customer requests. The result has been an unqualified success:

• Business Impact: Dramatic increase in management visibility resulting in commensurate increases in team performance and customer satisfaction

• Cost Savings: Approximately 90% cost savings versus CRM application

• Setup Time: 3 days

“The quality of our customer service has improved substantially since implementing TrackVia. Our ability to manage the quality of our customer follow-up has increased dramatically.”
– Ken Ramirez, VP of Sales & Marketing

Read the rest of this case study…