Why NOT have a Dedicated Support Rep?

We have all been in a situation where we have had to call a support center. If you are anything like me, you are more surprised when you get great support than when you get mediocre support.  For some reason we have come to expect that chances are – our problem will not be solved, we will get someone on the other end that has no idea what they are talking about or maybe after about 40 minutes of grueling back and forth – your issue may get solved. (And this is after 20 minutes of being on hold!)

If you have ever had to call or email Central Desktop support – you should only be getting that surprise of great support. This is because of quite a few things such as our support staff being located right here at our headquarters in Pasadena, California, their absolute real world knowledge of the platform and their amazing customer service centric approach to working with our customers. Of course, having a product that doesn’t result in an overload of support requests helps quite a bit too!!

So why not take it up a notch by gaining access to not only our amazing Forum, Email and Phone Support – but also a Dedicated Support Rep?

With our Enterprise and Community Edition packages you get your own dedicated support representative, so anytime you need assistance you have someone to call, who knows you, who is familiar with your account and how you are using Central Desktop, who can get any issues or questions you have taken care of quickly.

Imagine a direct number and email address to your Dedicated Support Rep. How many companies do you get that kind of support from?

Want to increase your ROI with Central Desktop?

So you have taken the step towards better productivity, efficiency and communication in your office by implementing the Central Desktop solution. You are ready to go because you know that on average, companies realize a 30% increase in productivity using Central Desktop. You have an idea of what you want to do whether it is creating an employee intranet that is actually current and useful, creating extranet workspaces to manage post sales deployments with your clients, or creating a forum for your employees to discuss best practices and current topics. You are ready to start creating workspaces, add members, add files and add tasks. You are ready to get everyone in the office excited about the new solution that you brought to them that is going to make their lives easier while helping them perform their job better.

But have you completed one of the most important tasks of all? I mean, you’ve done your research, you’ve looked at all of your options, you’ve taken a test drive on the free trial – you know this solution is capable of doing everything that you need it to do, you’ve signed up for the paid plan – what else do you need? Have you taken advantage of Central Desktop’s implementation services that we offer through our Professional Services team? Utilizing our Professional Services team could be what you need to do to increase productivity from 10% to 30% – it could be what takes your office from being efficient to a well oiled efficiency machine!

Our Professional Services team is a top notch unit that knows the Central Desktop product inside and out. When you say I want to be able to collect information from our customers and have it fed into a database that triggers one of our sales staff to follow up – they know how to help you implement this in the best way. When you say I want to create a living employee manual that resides in a place that all of my employees can access – they are there to do what they know how to do best. Through training, on boarding, implementation, process creation and much more – our Professional Services team will help take your Central Desktop implementation to the next level.

They work with you closely in order to understand exactly what areas of your business you are trying to improve and through that work they help you make the magic happen. Do not sell yourself short in your Central Desktop usage by not taking advantage of this service.

Even if you have been using Central Desktop for years this is still incredibly valuable. Schedule a session to make sure that there are not features that may have slipped under your radar that could take your efficiency from 20% to 30%, make sure that your workspaces are as intuitive for your users as possible. Again, our Professional Services team has just about seen it all – and can help even the most seasoned user achieve more.

To schedule an implementation session, prepare for it and get more information on how it works – use this link.

When you sign up for a Company plan you receive 1 free hour of implementation, on boarding and training to be used with the first 90 days of your subscription. When you sign up for a Community or Enterprise Edition plan you receive 4 free hours of implementation, on boarding and training to be used with the first 90 days of your subscription. Additional implementation hours are available in 4 hour blocks.

If you send me a message – I will hook you up with the Master. The one and only Dustin Turner. Just let me know.

How much security do you need?

As you are already aware, Central Desktop is a leader in the SaaS arena when it comes to security. Central Desktop partners with Alchemy Communications, Latisys Data Center, Akamai, and McAfee to provide its customers and partners with state-of-the-art perimeter, network, server, application and data security to ensure privacy and availability. McAfee runs a daily security test on Central Desktop – you can read the results here anytime.

Our Security Page gives you an overview of the Perimeter, Physical, Network, Server, Application and Data Security that Central Desktop offers.

If you are working within a company, organization or market that demands the best security available – I highly recommend considering the following features that come standard with the Enterprise and Community Edition of Central Desktop.

Advanced Password Security Settings –

The Enterprise Edition adds an additional layer of Password Security by allowing the administrator to adjust a range of password options such as: enforcing a minimum password length, disabling the password save option, enabling password complexity and implementing password change frequency.

TLS Encryption and Trusted Email Domain Support –

The TLS (Transport Layer Security) Encryption and Trusted Email Domain feature allows you to control access and send encrypted emails to trusted users. Email domains that are listed as Trusted Domains will receive a TLS encrypted email with all of the contents of the discussion, comment or documents available for the user to read. Email domains that are NOT listed as a Trusted Email Domain will only receive a generic email notification with a direct link to login to Central Desktop.

Trusted IP Addresses -

The Trusted IP Address feature allows Administrators to restrict access to Central Desktop by IP Address or IP Range. Only listed IP addresses will be allowed access to Central Desktop. This is ideal for companies and organizations that need to restrict access to Central Desktop via a VPN or office location IP address. This feature can be configured at the Company level and at the individual User level.

Custom Terms of Service & Privacy Policy –

The Custom Terms of Service & Privacy Policy feature allows Administrators to force Internal Members and External Members to agree to custom Terms of Service and Privacy Policy when they register with Central Desktop. This feature enables companies to comply with certain confidentiality or terms of use required under certain corporate policies or statutory requirements.

Single Sign-On Redirect –

The Single Sign-On (SSO) Redirect features allows companies and organizations a secure way to create a Single Sign-On experience from Central Desktop to 3rd applications, so that users don’t have to login twice when clicking from Central Desktop to another application.

Heading towards WebDAV!

Central Desktop’s development team just can’t quit rocking!

They have just released some file and folder improvements to further support Central Desktop’s WebDAV initiative.

The release notes are located here: http://forum.centraldesktop.com/viewtopic.php?pid=23505#p23505

Thanks!

Yet another great release from the developers!

Today our development team release an improved WYSIWYG editor for Central Desktop Online Documents and Wiki Pages.

The new WYSIWYG editor has an “advanced” toolbar option where you can embed videos from places such as YouTube, Vimeo or powerpoint charts from Slideshare and alike (click on the Page icon with a Play button when in edit mode).   For all you programmers or developers out there, you can click the Code icon/button (Page icon with <> tags) and highlight code that you want to share via Online Docs or Wiki Pages.

Find/Replace, Super and Subscripting and Emoticons were also added.

You will also notice that we have elevated some of the icons such as New Page, Insert Link, Attach File to the top of the Toolbar.

Note: this WYSIWYG editor improvement came directly from our Hackathon from last month.

In addition, as we gear up for WebDAV support, we are now forcing unique folder names within the same level.  This means you cannot have 2 folders with the same folder name at the same level.  This follows most major operating system standards such as Windows, Mac, etc…

We continue to work on WebDAV support as well as our UI redesign for Sept/Oct.

Release Notes are here!

Quick Tip #6 – Best Practices for Document Management

A shared envionment. It is a nice place to be. It can also be like a bad roommate situation if there are not best practices put into place. We all have ways that we manage our Outlook inbox or the C drive on our computers. Some people make sure the inbox is kept clear at all times, others utilize rules and folders and others let it pile up. Some people use folders, sub-folders and sub-folders of sub-folders of sub-folders religiously – others may just dump everything into their “My Documents” folder. Each of us uses what works for us, some things are very effective for some people while it would create a virtual nightmare for others.

We have all created best practices for what works for us.

Now imagine every inbox and every C drive in your office being combined at once. Imagine the chaos. It would be like “The Odd Couple” times ten!

This is what could happen in any kind of shared environment without some best practices put in place. Some of you already share computers with signifigant others and understand this in a low scale, low pressure non professional environment. You have both had to compromise on the best place to store the family photos, when to delete email etc. Or – you are in constant battle with each other – no fun and not very productive at all!

The good thing is – it is never too late to put best practices into play!! Here are some hints to keep your Files & Discussions tabs from giving you flash backs to the days of your roommates pizza box laying on top of your nicely organized homework.

• Folders – Use folders as one way to organize your documents and files. This is a great way to keep your data in a structered and labeled format.
• Tagging – Use tag words to describe your documents and files. This is a great way to group your data. As an example, you might tag a Client Contract with words such as “contract”, “client ABC”, “PO#1122″ etc. You can then utilize the “Items by Tag” filter in Files and Documents, Tag Clouds and Tag Searches.
• Items by Status – Use the Status option on all of your documents. This is a great way to not only isolate and group data by their specific status, but to also run your documents through any workflow you may have. Note that you can create your own custom status options.
• Clean Up – Occasionally, go through and do a little clean up. Central Desktop really takes care of everything, but you may want to create Archive folders for last years documents to keep things more intuitive and organized.
• Think of others – Remember this is a shared environment, add some “Best Practice” rules to the homepage of your workspace or your intranet so that everyone can agree on how the documents and files should be organized.

Hope that this helps keep everything running smoothly!

Quick Tip #5: Google Maps and Central Desktop

As you may have read in our Hackathon blog post, we will soon have a Google Maps Mashup Application Block.

For those of you that may want maps sooner – I suggest this Widget.

Follow this path: In the Widget enter the address information and click on the “</>” button > Copy the HTML code > Go to a Wiki page or Online Document in Central Desktop > Click on the Edit button > Click on the HTML button > Paste the code and save!

Easy as that.

My Attempt at a Simple Overview of Project Management using Central Desktop

Trying to figure out the best way to create your projects in Central Desktop? As you know a workspace is an area inside of Central Desktop that you can use to manage a project (among many other things such as blogs, forums, intranets etc). I believe that the best way to manage projects within Central Desktop is to use the “Workspace = Project” layout.

Of course you can manage multiple projects within one workspace. However, using a Workspace to manage a single project has many benefits over managing multiple projects within a workspace. One of the first benefits you will realize is the depth of project management goes down an extra level and spreads out wider (allowing multiple milestones that can contain multiple task lists).

Instead of this scenario (Multiple project within a workspace)

• Workspace Group(s) = (examples: Departments, Clients, Intranets)
• > Workspace(s) = Department
• > > Milestone(s) = Project
• > > > Task List(s) = Larger Project Goals
• > > > > Tasks = Individual Deliver-ables

you would have (Workspace = Project):

• Workspace Group(s) = (examples: Client Projects, Engineering Projects)
• > Workspace(s) = Overall Project
• > > Milestone(s) = Larger Project Goal or Deadline
• > > > Task List(s) = Group of Individual Deliver-ables
• > > > > Tasks = Individual Deliver-ables

This allows you to segment your projects into their own areas allowing you deeper granularity when it comes to membership and permissions. This means you do not have to worry about External Users such as Clients seeing each others projects and also keeps the noise level down for those that might really only be part of one or two projects. It will keep your project calendars less cluttered and allow more control over incoming information with Workspace Digest Emails and Recent Activity lists.

You will also experience more granularity with Usage, User, Task, Milestone, Time Tracking and Activity reporting since this can be done at the project level. This makes isolating information much easier than it would be if you were using a workspace to manage multiple projects. You will also be able to track project properties such as start/end dates, owner, primary resource, beneficiary, status, priority, risk and comments. On the Enterprise and Community Editions you can create your own custom project properties using Workspace Field Extensions.

You can also take advantage of Workspace Backups and Archiving of Workspaces (Projects) at a more granular level. And on the Enterprise or Community Edition accounts you can also take advantage of the Shared Folders option to keep yourself from having to upload the same documents into many different workspaces when using this method.

Using the Search Engine, Tagging, Status Filters and Document Filters will become much more targeted this way as well.

I hope this is useful information for those that are trying to decide which way they want to set up projects. Remember, your users will only see workspaces they belong to. So if you end up with 50, 100 or 200 workspaces because you have that many projects – if you use Workspace Groups, Member Groups and Custom Reports in the Project Reports area – this will be a breeze. (I will talk more about those areas in my next post.)

To review and give you an example of this in action:

The hierarchy works as such:

Central Desktop Account
> Workspace Group
>> Workspace (project)
>>>Milestone (larger project goals)
>>>>Task List (grouped deliverables)
>>>>>Tasks (individual deliverables)

a deeper layout would be as such:

Central Desktop Account

> Workspace Group 1 (example: Client Projects)

>> Workspace 1 (example: ABC Company Deployment)

>>>Milestone 1 (example: Phase 1 rollout)

>>>>Task List 1 (example: Post Sales Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Review and Authorize Client Contract)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review and Authorize Client Scope of Work)

>>>>Task List 2 (example: Pre-Developement Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Complete Needs Assessment Form)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review Needs Assessment Form)
>>>>>Task 3 (example: Complete Pre-Development Form)
>>>>>Task 4 (example: Review Pre-Development Form)

>>>Milestone 2 (example: Phase 2 Rollout)

>>>>Task List 1 (example: Post Development Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Review and Authorize Needs Assessment Form)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review and Authorize Pre-Development Form)

>>>>Task List 2 (example: Development Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Draft Development Plans)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review Development Plans)
>>>>>Task 3 (example: Create Roadmap)

etc. etc. Having as Many Milestones that contain as many Task Lists that contain as many Tasks as you require.

>> Workspace 2 (example: DEF Company Deployment)

>>>Milestone 1 (example: Phase 1 rollout)

>>>>Task List 1 (example: Post Sales Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Review and Authorize Client Contract)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review and Authorize Client Scope of Work)

>>>>Task List 2 (example: Pre-Developement Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Complete Needs Assessment Form)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review Needs Assessment Form)
>>>>>Task 3 (example: Complete Pre-Development Form)
>>>>>Task 4 (example: Review Pre-Development Form)

>>>Milestone 2 (example: Phase 2 Rollout)

>>>>Task List 1 (example: Post Development Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Review and Authorize Needs Assessment Form)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review and Authorize Pre-Development Form)

>>>>Task List 2 (example: Development Check Points)
>>>>>Task 1 (example: Draft Development Plans)
>>>>>Task 2 (example: Review Development Plans)
>>>>>Task 3 (example: Create Roadmap)

etc. etc. Having as Many Milestones that contain as many Task Lists that contain as many Tasks as you require.

etc. Having as many Workspaces as you require or your account is set up for. Remember the the Enterprise Edition allows for an unlimited amount of workspaces.

Quick Tip #4 – Custom Workspace Field Extensions

If you are on a Company, Community or Enterprise Plan – then you are probably already using the Project Resource Reports to capture and report on important information related to workspaces that you have marked as projects. For Example, if you use a Workspace for every client project you are working on and you have more than say 20 client projects at any given time, you can assign Start and End Dates, Risks, Comments, Priorities, Statuses, Owners and Beneficiares to line your projects up against each other, allocate resources and get a good overview of what is going on across your projects.

If you are on a Community or Enterprise Edition account, you can now capture more attributes on your workspace and report on them.   Instead of the standard fields we give you can now create and define your own custom fields (think things like: Business Unit, Accounting Code, Has Ecommerce Component, etc…). You can use Text, drop down menus, multiple choice options, field calculations – the possiblities almost seem endless.

To take advantage of this feature please go to your Company Setup (you must be a Company Admin) and click on Custom Workspace Properties. Let me know how it works!

Discussions made Simple

Central Desktop Discussions are a feature that bridge the gap between using email and user forums.

As you know, email is a great way to communicate with people in your office or outside of your office, such as customers, clients and partners. It works much faster than snail mail and keeps a much better record of conversations than the phone or fax machines. Sometimes you want to pull in more than a few people into an email “thread” to discuss upcoming meeting plans, processes or a key account. Again, this is a great way to communicate, but some issues that you can run into are people getting left out the loop (when someone uses “reply” instead of “reply all”) or being unable to locate old email discussions that you want to reference again. If you are anything like me, you receive and respond to a lot of email everyday- and these can really start to build up after awhile if you like to save your correspondence to refer back to it.

User Forums are a great way to discuss topics within a web environment.  People can easily view information and discuss topics inside of various categories. Unlike Email the threads are easily referred back to and no one gets left out of the loop. The only problem is, people have to log in to them to take part in the discussed topics. This means replies can sometimes take a long time to be created because people may not remember to check in, or just not really have the time to do so.

So, as you can see here the gap that requires a bridge has a bunch of people looking for old emails or getting left out of the loop on one end and people trying to foster faster communication on the other end.

What if we went ahead and bridged that gap (I love saying that!) and gave you a tool that would allow you to take advantage of the best of both worlds? Let’s take a look at Central Desktop Discussions. This allows you to still have your discussions take place by email, just like you are used to doing – with the advantage of everything being logged into Central Desktop for easy searching and reference. This allows you to have your discussions assigned to a workspace or project, allows for greater transparency and makes sure that no one gets left out of the loop.

A question I get asked a lot is “When should I use a discussion instead of just creating an email?”. That is a great question. My general rule is that if the subject matter of the discussion is related to a project or a department and will need to have more than 3 people in the loop – always make it a Central Desktop discussion. Examples would be planning department meetings or discussing deployment plans related to a client project. You may want to reference those discussions again.  If the subject matter involves involves lunch plans or a notice that you are arriving late for a meeting – send it by regular email. Chances are you do not need to go back and look at what you chose for lunch last November 13th.

Alright – so now we know the benefits of using CD Discussions and we know when not to use CD Discussions. Now – let’s take a look at how EASY these are to use.

When you want to start a Discussion follow this path: Login > Workspace > Files & Discussions > go to the folder that you would like to house the discussion in > Click “Create New” > Choose Discussion > Add the Subject > Add your text and any attachments using the WYSIWYG editor > and then choose who you want to have take part in the Discussion > Click the “Start This Discussion” button and away it goes!

Each person that you chose to take part in the Discussion will receive an email of the Discussion. It is also now inside of Central Desktop. If you are already logged into Central Desktop you can always reply to the Discussion thread right inside of the workspace. However, most of us live inside of Outlook or other email client all of the time – for those of us – we can read and reply to the Discussion just by opening the email, clicking reply, adding the reply and clicking “Send”.   The reply will then be sent out to those taking part in the Discussion as well as logged in Central Desktop.

It is that easy! And once you dive in and start to use it and experiencing the benefits of being able to recall information quickly, have it tied to projects and not getting left out of the replies – you will look back at using standard email in the same way as we look at using the Telegraph or Fax Machine now.

Enjoy!