Endless Solutions Inc – Susan R. Davis

Microsoft Office 2010 is coming very soon, and Microsoft is offering their usual deal again. If you make a qualifying purchase of Microsoft Office 2007 now, you can be eligible to get Office 2007 upgraded to Office 2010 for free.

If you purchase and activate qualifying Office 2007 products from Microsoft or a qualifying reseller between March 5th and September 30, 2010, you can receive a free download copy of the corresponding Office 2010 product when Office 2010 is released. You can also purchase a product disc for a fee. You will have until October 31, 2010 to request your product upgrade.

The new Office 2010 is chock full of performance-boosting features. To be honest, I didn’t think too much of the 2003 to 2007 upgrade, but I certainly think they’ve done an excellent job with the 2010 upgrade.

My Favorite Features in the new Office 2010:

1. Enhanced Ribbon feature:  the Ribbon is better than ever and it now works across all apps with special contextual features based on which application you are using.
2. Powerpoint will now allow you to do static graphic image editing and video editing right in the program so you’re not constantly flipping in and out of Powerpoint to get the job done. Adobe is going to hate this one!
3. Shared use on documents is finally here. Lightweight web-browser versions of Office Web Apps are here, and Microsoft says that formatting will be preserved in these documents. Now you can collaborate with others more easily. If you have a Windows Live SkyDrive account, it is integrated with Office Web Apps and you can view and edit documents through a web browser. Office doesn’t even have to be loaded on your computer – even on a Mac. This is going to give Google Docs a big run for their money.
4. Revamped Print Dialog box:  Now you can tweak settings like margins right in the Print Dialog box and see a preview copy of the changes side-by-side with the various settings. I absolutely love this one. It’s about time Microsoft did this.
5. PDF creation is now native to Office – no add-on required – another big Ouch for Adobe.
6. Screen Clips in all applications:   now you can take screenshot clips of things on your desktop and insert them into Office documents. No special screen capture program is required, and you don’t have to use the clunky Print-Screen option.
7. Paste Preview:  this cool little tool allows you to see what your resulting content will look like using different Paste options. Never have to “Paste Special” over and over until you find the one you want.
8. When you open an email message inside Outlook 2010, it will show you related information such as email attachments, pictures, meeting requests and all previous email messages that you may have exchanged with that person – neatly displayed in a preview pane below the message.
9. Outlook also has two other features to improve your workflow. QuickSteps in Outlook allows you to create a combination of steps bunched into one command (for example “Reply and Delete” or “Send and Archive”). And Outlook now has a cool feature that allows you to eliminate email noise in your workday. You can tell it to ignore past and future emails on a particular subject line, and the entire thread will no longer bother you. Vanished. Poof.

Microsoft has finally started concentrating on features that will improve user productivity and stopped fussing with “pretty” changes. One of the biggest problems I’ve always had with Office products is their tendency to be very rigid in terms of usability. I think that Office 2010 is going to break free of that particular problem.

Has anyone else used the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 yet? Share your experience here with the rest of us.

Tags: Microsoft Office 2010, New Office Features, Save on Office 2010

Yes, I know that everyone says the recession is getting better. Great. But I’m still operating under the premise that a recession mindset has positive effects on your business.

How can that be, you say? Recessions have a way of weeding out the unfit business practices. If it doesn’t do the job, it reduces the overall effectiveness of your business, and wastes time and money.

You want business practices that can beat a recession, that can stand the test of time and stress. Another phrase that this brings to mind is “Deep Roots.” When your business puts down deep roots, it has the base stability that allows you to ride out the storms of turbulent financial times, the challenges of other businesses in your industry, and the difficulties of the continual need to adapt or die.

Deep Roots in Business are Systems

You put down deep roots in your business when you create, test, and fine-tune the systems by which you operate your business. The deep roots of systems are what save you time and money and what allows you to outsource activities. That leads to growth and positive adaptation, both of which are essential to the health of your business. What kinds of systems am I talking about here?

1. Product Research systems: You want to create a standardized method of researching potential new products, determining the demand and current supply in the market, and prioritizing products for development.
2. Product Development systems: Once you know what to create, then you need a system, or systems, that standardize its development and preparation for marketing.
3. Market Research: You’ve got to know your market inside and out. You will have already done some of this with your product research, but to develop a marketing plan, you need to know your prospects better than they know themselves. You need a system in place for determining markets and evaluating them.
4. Marketing Plan: Once you have a product and a market, you need to decide on what marketing channels to use, prioritize your roll-out to different channels, and develop marketing materials for any offline and online promotion.
5. Traffic Development: You need eyeballs on your offers. How are you going to bring them in front of your product and service offers? Most businesses focus on a few marketing channels, and master them. Get your systems in place for automating this process. It’ll save you tons of time.
6. Sales and E-Commerce Funnel: Starting with your main page, lead generation pages, and sales pages, you’ve got to develop a path through your system to buy. How are you going to funnel them through to a sale? What kind of back-end process are you going to use to maximize sales? What about autoresponder follow-ups? And don’t forget your shopping-cart system. You want a seamless and effective system here. Without it, you have no sales!
7. Conversion Optimization: Once you have systems to create products and marketing materials and drive sales, you need to refine your system. Always be testing conversions driven by different areas of your systems. You are always looking to improve. To do this, you must test and test, over and over again. And yes, you should have a system for that, too.

What Do You Get From The Deep Roots of These Business Systems?

In a word – money.

Yes, that’s assets (brand development, products, mailing lists, and marketing materials), long-term viability (channels and traffic generation), sales (there’s your money), and long-term adaptability (that’s your conversion optimization and testing). That’s the essence of a successful long-term business model.

One last note: Notice that the systems above don’t mention specific techniques. Systems are procedures – do this and then this. They do use techniques. Each system is designed to support one or more concepts. How you do it is not as important as the model you choose. If you are successful at your procedures and techniques, then by all means use them. There is no right and wrong to those – just bad, good, better, and best (that’s where optimization comes in).

Have you got any good concepts or techniques to share? I’d love to hear them, and so would other readers. We can all learn from each other.

Tags: business systems, recession

Picking a solid web hosting provider is crucial for businesses online today.

If you want a professional website that can grow with you, doesn’t crash at the first sign of real traffic, and provides solid web hosting support in case of issues at all odd hours of the day or night (or weekends!) then you need to consider these features.

1. Plenty of bandwidth (GB), especially if you are high traffic or doing video
2. Plenty of storage (MB), especially for video
3. Cpanel with lots of features such as a script installer like Fantastico for installing blogs, help desk software, forums, and shopping carts.
4. Webmail
5. Lots of email addresses, MySQL databases, and the most recent PHP and PHP-MyAdmin software
6. Additional domains and websites allowed on one account
7. Setup help to transfer sites to their service
8. Email, live chat, and phone support 24/7/365
9. No contract required
10. Dedicated IP and Private SSL functionality available

If you don’t understand what’s on this list, just make sure that you get help in choosing a solid web hosting company. This is not something you want to over-economize on. You do get what you pay for on this one. Ask your website designer for help, or a professional friend who is technically-minded. Or, frankly, the 10-year-old down the street. It’s amazing what kids know these days.

I personally use HostGator web hosting. Their track record has been excellent and the few issues I had on setup were fixed very easily with their excellent technical support. They are also reasonably priced and scalable. Remember – just don’t skimp on the features. It’s worth a couple of extra bucks a month. If you need a domain name, I really like 1 and 1 Domains for domain registration. They have better base features than many, including free private domain registration, and are still very reasonably priced.

So, take the first step towards getting your website up on solid web hosting and check out HostGator web hosting.

Tags: domain registration, web hosting