Category: Digital

Industry pundits are pondering the scalability limits of enterprise applications delivered on-demand.

Case in point is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com has had great success in small to medium sized business (93 percent of Salesforce.com customers had fewer than 500 users). But can they scale to 10,000?

... in a May report based on data from 29 Salesforce.com customers, Nucleus Research raised questions about whether the vendor could support enterprises with more than 2,000 users. Noting that many large companies are Salesforce.com reference customers, the report found that most use the vendor "on a divisional or regional basis and did not have more than 1,000 users.

Cisco plans to scale to 10,000 Salesforce.com seats, but currently only has about 1,000 user live on the CRM.

Technology at that scale is one limiting factor:

Wettemann says it remains to be seen whether on-demand software is scalable enough for large customers. One issue, she says, is bandwidth, a concern when you have "lots of users hitting a remote database somewhere."

Perhaps even more challenging than the technical scalability challenges are the end user conversion issues. Change comes hard to many people. In Cisco's case:

...many sales people are simply reverting to their legacy nonhosted CRM applications, to which they still have access... 

Read full article at C|Net: On-demand applications face growing pains

MySQL makes some commercial inroads this week:

At the LinuxWorld conference this week in San Francisco, MySQL signed partners Novell and Dell to resell the upstart company's database and support service, making the product easier to procure. MySQL is also readying a release of its namesake database with features including stored procedures and distributed transactions, which large corporations often use.

Read more: Database start-ups bet on open source

Online ad sales to double in the next five years! 

Another sign that e-commerce has come of age appeared yesterday as JupiterResearch predicted online advertising would reach US$18.9 billion by 2010 -- almost double last year's gross of $9.6 billion.

Much of that revenue growth will be stoked by search engine advertising, which garnered 40 percent of online ad sales in 2004...

Read full article at the eCommerce Times. 

This great article from Information Week gives an overview of the benefits of using Wiki technology to enable collaboration within the enterprise: How To Use Wikis For Business.

But they fail to mention what I consider the best all-around Wiki software -- Dokuwiki.

Here is how the author of DokuWiki describes the software:

DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required.

DokuWiki is PHP based. It lets you include other PHP code or HTML pages on the fly, meaning you can embed an external web report in an intranet web page that you create on the fly. Very powerful!

I've used BillingOrchard for some time now to create and manage invoices online. Now there is a competing service called Blinksale offering many of the same features.

Which do you like best? I have to say BlinkSale has the edge in look and feel.

BlinkSale.com's Service

Thomas Smart, co-chair of the intellectual property and patent litigation group at Kaye Scholer explained that the courts ask four questions to determine if someone is making fair use of copyrighted material:

• What is the nature or purpose of the use?
• What is the nature of the work being copied?
• How much of the work was copied?
• How did the copying affect the market for the copyrighted work?

A must read for blog author's wanting to know guidelines on fair use. Read full article: Bloggers Cautioned About Being Copy Cats

The linkedin.com referral networking organization is quickly becoming a leading way to land your next opportunity.

This article tell you how to make the most of it: Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn

Blogs are the latest rage. The 'blogosphere' is almost a separate universe from the older search engine world. How can a blog drive traffic to your web site?

Post Compelling Content Frequently
Post a minimum of 3 articles a week or people won't keep coming to your site. The content must be good, relevant, and free of too much commercial 'buy my stuff' pitch. 5 times or more a week is even better.

Target Niche Groups
Less is more. Having a generic blog on 'Writing' will yield less traffic than having a very niche blog on 'Christian Fiction Writing' or 'How To Get Young Adult Fiction Published.'

Use Pictures
As with newspapers, seven times more people will read the article if it has a picture. Get a good blog tool that let's you upload photos easily and illustrate your articles.

'Ping' Your Posts
'Pinging' is the process of alerting the specialty blog search engines that you have just posted an article on your blog. Simply visit http://pingomatic.com and this tool will ping multiple blog search engines for you. As google.com and others spider the blog search engines, this will help the world find your content.

Use Search Engine Friendly URLs
Use a blog tool that let's you have keyword descriptions in the URLs. Note that this post URL for example is http://stanshinn.com/marketing/blogs-and-search-engines. Using categories in the URL will also help your ranking.

Get Listed in Blogrolls
Blogrolls are the list of favorite web sites often shown in the sidebar of personal blogs. Email a bunch of blogs authors that might be interested in your site and suggest you exchange links with each other.

Post to Discussion Groups
Ready to launch a new blog? Post 3 to 5 compelling articles, then go over to a few of your favorite discussion groups and post articles there mentioning your blog in conjunction with some compelling content that you post on the forum. This is the equivalent of starting a snowball rolling down the hill.

Remember, keep posting great content, and over a few months your readership and web traffic will grow!

Back in 1999, to get ranked in the search engines you'd need to go to each search engine directory, register your web site, and then optimize your metatags on your web page. Now that advice is no longer relevant. Most major search engines completely ignore the metatags of your page. Search engines 'crawl' the web and getting registered is as simple as having someone that is known to search engines link to your site. 

Now that the rules have changes, what can you do to improve your search engine ranking?

1) Register your site with DMOZ!
Register your site at dmoz.org, the "open directory" of the Internet, which Google spiders regularly. You have to spend some time inputing information about your business in order to classify your site correctly. This may possibly be the number one thing that Google uses to rank you site: DMOZ's classifications of your site.

2) Relevancy (Having Lots of Links to your Site) Is Key
Now, most search engines rank in searches based on relevancy, meaning mainly that:

1. You have lot's of sites (which they themselves rank high) linking to your site.
2. The content in your page matches the search keywords.

So you can have a nice domain name like that above, register it with the search engines, and start out with almost no hits at all. Once you have several other sites linking to your web site, then the traffic starts to pick up.

The relevancy of the site that links to you if really important. If CNN.com links to you once, that can rank you higher than having 50 smaller sites linking to you.

After you do a PPC (pay per click) campaign, your ranking goes up in search engines. Something out there 'notices' your site when you do lot's of PPCs.

3) Domain Name With Keywords Helps You Rank Higher
Having domains with the keywords in them can help you in search engine ranking. For some reason, having dashes in the keywords actually ranks you higher (i.e. doing www.medical-technology-experts.com would rank higher than www.medicaltechnologyexperts.com). See this article for details.

Even without the domain, things like www.mysite.com/23434322/medical-technology-experts  (where the keyword is later in the URL) can help you rank too.

4) Press releases, Articles, and Syndicated Content
Having press releases (that are published on other sites) or articles published on other sites that link back to your site is a great way to increase your ranking. Post press releases and get great coverage and distribution for free at http://prweb.com/.

5) Write A Blog
Blogs are the new, great way to do this, if you have time to write compelling content. More on this in a separate post later.

6) Be Realistic And Patient
Only about 7% of most sites’ traffic (even the most successful ones!) comes from free search engines listings -- the rest comes from referral URLs from articles, reviews, word of mouth, pay-per-clicks, banner ads, direct link (since they heard about it via an email, direct mail, phone call, etc.). So search engine optimization should only be a small component of your overall marketing strategy. But 7% is 7%!

Be patient: seeing your ranking go up  in the search engines can take months. It can take a month to six weeks after you perform the above items to see any impact in showing up in search engines.

Laptop users are increasingly having an issues due to ISPs disallowing SMTP servers besides the one they provide for security purposes. So laptop users end up needing to reconfigure their email settings every they switch networks. What a pain!

Here are some potential software solutions:

1) Use local (laptop based) SMTP software:

Free SMTP Server is a SMTP server program for Windows that lets you send email messages directly from your computer. If this works this will be the quickest fix to the laptop issue. http://www.softstack.com/freesmtp.html

Here is a commercial tool ($49) as alternative: http://www.getfreefile.com/localsrv.html

2) Use software to switch SMTP servers based on your current location:

Autoroute SMTP (ARS) is designed for automatic switching between SMTP servers depending on what network you are currently working in. http://www.mailutilities.com/ars/

Also, here is a list of other SMTP utilities with other software solutions to this problem: http://www.dirfile.com/freeware/smtp.htm