Web Worker Daily |
| Zoho CRM: A Good Option for Web Workers Posted: 30 Mar 2009 04:00 PM PDT Written by Meryl Evans.
Zoho CRM comes with all the basic CRM functions you’d expect: You can manage campaigns and leads, view reports and dashboards and manage inventory. Getting Started It’s best to start at CRM.zoho.com, even if you have an existing Zoho account. At first glance, the application looks overwhelming, especially if it’s the first CRM package you’ve used. Zoho has a useful Getting Started video that gives you a quick overview of the application and makes it feel less threatening. Everything you need to access appears in the tabs at the top of the screen and the links below them. You can customize most of the reports and dashboards as well as the settings for every tab. The first thing you’ll want to do is add a second user as an administrator so you can access more features, including adding your company’s logo. Setup To start with, you need to import your business contacts. This will give you some content in your CRM to work with the rest of its features. You can import contacts from whatever application you use for business contacts, in comma-separated value (.csv), Excel (.xls) or vCard (.vcf) format. A tip: Before importing the data, open the file in Excel and make sure the first row contains headings, as you’ll need to match up Zoho’s fields with your data. If, like many web workers, you have a service-based business, it will take a little work to figure out how to set up Zoho CRM. It focuses on products and doesn’t work with hourly rates. For example, if you’re a writer creating a quote for some web content, you’ll need to treat the web content as a package and give it a flat project rate. If you charge by the hour, you can always make a note of it in the description field. Fields, Forms and Features Zoho CRM has a useful wiki-based Help section. Helpfully, it includes user questions and answers at the end of each page. You’ll need to refer to that Help section every now and again, because some of Zoho CRM’s field names take some figuring out. For example, the “Create Potential” form requires filling out the “Potential Name” and “Account Name” fields. Do they both take the company name? Or a contact person’s name? It takes a little digging into the Help section and even there, it’s not clear. Fortunately, the required fields are few. Zoho has plenty of non-required fields so you can keep track of as many details as you need. Its settings let you remove unneeded fields, but it won't let you change field names such as “Unit Price.” Tracking and Managing Leads The key reason businesses invest in CRM is for tracking and managing sales leads. The Leads tab lists all the active leads for easy reviewing and updating. After creating a new lead, you can return to that lead to update its page with information including attachments, products and activity tracking. You send emails straight from the application, with a record of the sent email added automatically to the lead’s page. If you need to track many leads, Zoho CRM keeps all the information in one place for easier management. Once a lead converts to a sale, Zoho CRM removes it from the Leads tab and moves it though the pipeline, automatically creating the account details. Customer Support Customer support is handled with the Cases feature, which provides tools to manage customer trouble tickets. Another useful feature is Solutions. Here you can keep track of common questions and answers. Then when a customer or a prospect has questions, and you can search Solutions to see if you or another person in your team has solved it before. As well as being able to search within specific categories, like Solutions, an account-wide search box is always available. The search results are sorted by category. Activities and Calendar You can keep track of key dates using the Calendar. You can also enter tasks and activities along with due dates in Activities. However, they don't show up on the Calendar, and they should. Price Zoho CRM is available in three different flavors. While most web workers should be able to get by with the free version, the Professional edition costs $12 per user per month, while the Enterprise edition costs $25 per user per month. Note that Zoho charges for some features on the free account, such as the Outlook plug-in, requests for importing all data and adding storage space. You can see some screen shots of the application in use and see also check out the online demos. Compared to other CRM solutions, Zoho’s CRM package is affordable and easier to learn. Web workers will more than likely find most of what they need in Zoho CRM for a great price. How do you track leads and manage client accounts?        |
| OldApps: For When Quick-In, Quick-Out Matters Most Posted: 30 Mar 2009 02:55 PM PDT Written by Samuel Dean. Most web workers are constantly adding new applications to their arsenals, and it’s common for our computers and mobile devices to become loaded with them over time. At the same time, many mobile devices these days can’t tolerate arrays of bloated applications. I’ve written before about PortableApps.com and MacLibre, both of which deliver bushels of free, open source applications for Windows and Mac users. They’re especially good for putting applications on a USB thumb drive, where the applications are stripped down into light, portable versions. These downloads are also popular among netbook users, who often have limited local storage. Another site to keep in mind if anti-bloatware is an attraction is OldApps.com.
While at first glance it may seem anti-evolutionary to seek out older versions of applications, don’t you favor some apps simply because of how quickly you can get in and out of them to get work done? One of my favorite examples of this type of application is IrfanView. IrfanView is a lightweight but very capable image editor, and I often prefer to go into it quickly to get work done rather than load a much more bloated program. The developers of IrfanView know that this is an attraction, and they smartly offer a link to OldApps.com for people who want previous versions. (You can also find many good light footprint apps at TinyApps.) According to the latest data from OldApps.com, you can now download 2,835 old versions of 193 applications for free. You can get lightweight, easily portable versions of ICQ Lite for instant messaging, less complex and bloated versions of image editors such as IrfanView and Paint.net, lighter versions of Adobe Reader, and much more. It is wise to keep security in mind when using older versions of applications, especially browsers and messaging-oriented ones. I primarily use OldApps.com for smaller, more portable versions of my favorite desktop applications that I can use on a USB thumb drive or netbook. These aren’t my primary devices, but they help me get mobile work done with portable applications. I’m not interested in bloatware for them. I keep them secure even as I use light and portable versions of applications, and if you’re increasingly using these types of totables too, look into OldApps.      |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2009 02:00 PM PDT Written by Imran Ali. Last summer, we cheekily covered the Macro-1, a kind of lockable and movable cubicle for coworkers and hotdeskers. A similar product, but perhaps stranger still, is the recently launched OfficePOD, a self-contained office space intended to create a high-quality office space for employees at home. The OfficePOD is intended to help companies minimize the need for centralized, serviced offices and for employees to have a discrete working space within their home property. Curiously, rather than a one-off capital purchase, the OfficePOD is being made available as a managed service to employers and workers. The pod is envisaged as being situated outdoors, with electricity and connectivity piped to it from the worker’s home. With just over six square feet of floor space, it’s certainly a cozy workspace! Though an interesting piece of product design, and bearing claim to some green credentials, the OfficePOD seems to be a slight oddity, providing a solution to a problem that most telecommuters and web workers simply don’t have. Increasingly, as families begin to accommodate multiple web workers and telecommuters within the home, house design will need to explicitly accommodate permanent working areas, rather than repurposing a dining area, spare bedroom or cramped study for work. I can’t help but think that the OfficePOD isn’t a good solution. If you have little space within the home to work, chances are your property doesn’t have a garden or yard that can accommodate a “parked office” outside! As a design study and exploration of the changing nature of work, the OfficePOD is interesting. As an option for working from home, it’s kinda gimmicky. And at £5,000 ($7,000) per year, it’s expensive. Other companies, such as IKEA, are probably providing more practical workspace solutions. Personally, I have a VIKA OLEBY tabletop and a couple office chairs at home (less than £150!) that provide me a with a ton of space for a pair of laptop users to work together. Read more at the official OfficePOD site and at TreeHugger’s The Home Office Shed Goes Big Business. What do you think of the OfficePOD?      |
| Collaborate on Design Revisions With redmark Posted: 30 Mar 2009 12:00 PM PDT Written by Eric Berlin.
This is where new web app redmark can help. Currently in limited private beta, the service aims for, and largely achieves, the difficult feat of making and tracking design notes a snap. Check out the nifty demo here. The first thing to notice is the strikingly slick and clean interface: There are blessedly few tools and features, and the tools and features that are at the user’s disposal are easy to understand and use. Playing around with the demo is fun, and it’s easy to see how redmark has created a valuable way to share notes about online documents, making for a powerful collaborative tool. The process of adding notes and attaching those notes to specific elements of the design document is made simple by way of a drag-and-drop interface. This mimics how people make notes on hard copies in “real life,” using circles and arrows to give designers direction quickly and efficiently. Meanwhile, a zoom in/zoom out bar on the left side of the interface lets you zoom into the document to concentrate on a particular area. For example, you might have seven things to say about a tiny corner of a button within a screenshot, so the zoom feature would be very helpful there. Perhaps the best feature of redmark is the easy ability to scroll through the various revisions of a design, with version-specific notes tied to each. This again mimics the common “real world” ritual of laying out multiple versions of a design on a table and having everyone hover over them to decide which one works best. I have one quibble about redmark, and it came when I logged into a private beta account (request your own here). Everything worked as the demo suggested, except that I wasn’t able to add comments and use the drag-and-drop functionality to create lines and arrows to point to various parts of the images I had uploaded. I’m not sure if this is a bug – which is totally acceptable in an early beta product – or if the expectation is that the “original uploader” of the document will not want to add notes to the document. That is, I’m guessing that it’s possible they expect that use of redmark will entail one person uploading a document, leaving it unmarked by notes and comments, and then sending it to clients and colleagues, who themselves will have the ability to be the first to comment and “mark up” the document. If this is the case, I would strongly recommend that all users of a document have both read and write privileges. For example, I can imagine plenty of situations where it would be useful to create a design, upload it to redmark, and then use the service’s great features to make initial notes to the people with which I’m sharing. For example, something like: “I added an extra module for user feedback in the upper right corner; what do you think?” What do you think of redmark – do you think you would find it useful for collaborating on online design and documents?      |
| Coworking 101: A Brief History Posted: 30 Mar 2009 09:00 AM PDT Written by Imran Ali.
At its heart, the concept of coworking is very attractive to many web workers. You get to work in a creative environment with other professionals, freed from unhappy workplaces, with the option to be as flexible as you choose. For those unfamiliar with the subject, we thought we’d take you on a brief tour of some highlights from our coworking archives. Aliza’s introduction to the world of coworking. A roundup of interesting developments in coworking, from large companies such as Timbuk2 giving up space for external coworkers, to the roving Jelly monthly “workathons” for coworkers without a permanent physical location to share. A handy “recipe book” of wiki-based guides to managing, establishing, marketing and operating coworking communities and spaces, Joseph Holstein’s “Patterns for Coworking” is an invaluable distillation of the collective knowledge of the global coworking community. An exploration of the downsides to telecommuting and coworking, focusing on the experiences of a coworking community founder. An interesting discussion on the potential of providing childcare facilities to coworkers – with the coworkers themselves dedicating a portion of their time to caring for the children of other community members. This post speculates on the potential to revitalize decaying and vacant urban centers with new creative areas, by replacing discount stores, vacant properties and unused public libraries with coworking facilities.. A look at the underlying value structure of coworking communities, how they’re evolving in different countries, and the issues existing coworking communities face as they outgrow the space available. I’ve chosen to focus on posts that are specifically about the mechanics of coworking. If you’re really interested, do delve into our full archive of coworking posts where we have also explored more philosophical issues, such as the design of cities and the impact of telecommuting on society. On a lighter note, please do bear in mind the immortal words of The Bugle…
Share your coworking experiences in the comments.      |
| Relocating Web Worker? Here’s What You Need to Consider Posted: 30 Mar 2009 07:00 AM PDT Written by Darrell Etherington.
Since I’m preparing for a move once again, and I’ve actually become much more aware of what it is I do and do not like about the places I’ve called my home office in the past, I thought I’d share a few tips for what to look for if you’re searching for a better space to work. Location, Location, Location? Is location important to web workers? Even just looking at the roll call of contributors to this site, we’re a far-flung bunch. Living in such varied circumstance, it hardly seems to matter where we decide to put up. But you will want to avoid just going for the cheapest possible area for a number of reasons, including some important professional ones. Maybe the best reason to stay relatively close to the beaten path is cost and availability of good connectivity. The further away from densely populated areas you get, the costlier it becomes to stay online, which, if you’re web working, is very important. Of course, the decreased cost of rent and other things might offset the connectivity costs, so you can strike a balance. You also should consider the cost of, and ease of access to, travel. If you plan on attending conferences and trade shows, or regularly need to travel to meet with clients, being in or close to a major hub might be worthwhile. Personally, I just like urban living, so I’m willing to accept the higher cost of living. Sometimes it just comes down to personal preference. You can’t maximize your productivity if you’re not happy where you are. The Space Itself Once you’ve picked a place, it’s time to get more specific. Choosing a house or condo, amenities, extras, space, etc. Of course, budget is likely your limiting factor, but you probably still have plenty of choices within your price range. What you decide on might have to do with the nature of your work, but it might also depend on your work habits and routine. Determine whether you’ll be working mostly from home or whether you’ll be out and about a lot. Remember that if you’re a full-time web worker, your office is also your home, and as such the lines are blurred between your professional and your personal lives. You may want to opt for a living solution that provides at least some distinction between work space and leisure/living space, as I do, or you might feel that you can accomplish more with the two conjoined. Again, it comes down to personal preference. Either way, you’re going to want to make sure you have a working space that is comfortable, light and pleasant to work in. Everything Else Those are the major considerations for me when I consider relocating, but that’s not all I think about. There are other things, like proximity to family and friends, entertainment and cultural activities available in the area, etc. They might not seem like they’re relevant to your professional life at the time, but when you can’t “leave it at the office” as easily as someone in a traditional workplace, they all become crucial to your working well-being. What factors do you consider when relocating?      |
Collaborating on design work is notoriously difficult. Deciding what the perfect shade of blue is, how rounded those rounded corners should be, and whether or not to make the logo bigger is all difficult enough when a discussion is happening between people in the same room. Add a virtual environment to the mix, and making clear and actionable design change notes can be nearly impossible.
Stretching all the way back to April of last year, 
I’m not a big fan of moving, but I tend to do it a lot. Once a year is a rare treat, and generally it’s much more frequent than that. And I’m not dashing off in the middle of the night, in case that’s what you think of me. I just grow restless, require a change, and move on. Usually, I’m lucky if I stay in the same city, but Toronto seems so have a little more lasting appeal. Now, I don’t want to claim that this is symptomatic of web working, but it has gotten worse since I started working from home.| You are subscribed to email updates from WebWorkerDaily To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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