Using Yammer to increase workflow and reduce dependency on email lists

Hello, everyone! I'm sorry about the lack of daily updates: it is because I've been writing a lot lately. Anyway, I'm excited to show you the article that just got approved: this one was written for Yammer through MediaPiston. For those who don't know, Yammer is company that sells integrated communication solutions to over 100,000 companies. No, I didn't get the number wrong. Check out their website. (By the way, I got 4 stars out of 5 for this article – pretty nice for a company this big, isn't it?)


Anyway, without further ado, here is the article.

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Do you know how old emails are? 10 years old? Of course not. 17 years old, dating back from 1994? No, not even close.

Believe it or not, emails are a technology dating back from 1962, when the first rudimentary electronic network was created. That would be... 49 years, considering it's 2011 right now! This means, of course, emails may be older than you ever imagined they were. In fact, they might be older than you are.

Since emails have been there for so long, you probably also know what email lists are: you setup a server, and then addresses may be added automatically (as people send emails through them) or manually (as you setup a private list. Setting up a mailing list also requires you to decide if you want them to be "announcement lists," (a type of list that only sends email), "discussion lists" (where everyone is free to join – not very suitable for internal communication, right?), and the subscribing model. Oh, let's not forget spam, which requires a lot of time and money to get rid of.

This is your typical 1962 computer – it's amazing how old emails
are and how they have evolved together
with technology, isn't it?

Another problem inherent to emails, as you might have already noticed, is their slow response time: if you need something solved now and you only have an email address – well, don't count on it. Having a phone number might help these times – but what if you need to send messages to everyone, quickly?

Right after that, corporate (and internal) communication tools were born. These you might already know: Windows came with one built-in in their earlier versions. However, they were still very limited. It was the release of tools like ICQ that changed everything: now you could interact with a co-worker or employee even if they were outside of work, and messages were sent instantly. Then, MSN, AOL, Yahoo Messenger, and many other tools were born. However, the many choices of a myriad of tools also meant co-worker communication could be very hard – very quickly. If you are old enough (and now you don't have to be that old), you can probably picture yourself as John, James, or both of them.

John (on the phone): Hey, James. Say, I need to discuss some company issues quickly and send you a report. Do you have an MSN account?

James: Sorry, buddy. I only have an ICQ account. I don't trust MSN. It just keeps crashing.

John (irritated): Well, can't you create one?

James: Ah, that stuff is too complicated. Can't we discuss this through email? You attach the report and I get it as soon as I can.

John: (*Sigh*.) Ok. Bye.

John and James after they traded emails. They don't look very happy
about  the outcome of their conversation, do they?

Not to your surprise, the issue that was so urgent took more time than the expected to be solved, right?

Attempting to solve all these problems, many other social media tools that were born just the last decade: Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Digg – even YouTube can be considered a form of social media, however visual. Now these were even better: no need to install software, friend searching, customizing applications: you could create an entire different world – your world – within your own account. Unfortunately, these tools lacked what the seriousness of the email and the sense of urgency of instant messaging.

Let's face it... can a company handle all this information? What to choose, among all of these tools? And why did I read up to here only to read about Yammer? What's so special about it?

The reason Yammer is unique is that it changed the whole corporate communication system: before 2008, the answer would be to deploy your own communication strategy, alternating between a myriad of tools. But no more. In 2008, Yammer was born – and now, 3 years later, it is even more powerful than before.

You see, with Yammer you don't need to choose between tools: Yammer can unify them all into a single solution for you, with no need for installing any software at all – that means no crashing, reduced maintenance needs and improved workflow! Key features include:

• Send long messages through email integration, or short, instant ones with Twitter (or Google Talk) integration.

• Connect everywhere, from nearly any phone: Yammer supports iPhones, BlackBerries, Androids, Windows Mobile – and even regular cell phones through SMS integration!

• Don't you like the official Yammer apps? Access Yammer through many third party apps: Gabble, OneLogin, itDuzzIt – even a Firefox extension is available!

• Is the flow of messages too large for you to handle? No problem – specify the keywords you need and Yammer will search relevant data for you!

Wait – you might protest – you haven't described how to reduce dependence on email lists!

Indeed, I haven't: that's because there's no need of setting up email lists when you use Yammer: after all, Yammer only allows connections from within your network. This is because, to sign up, all you need is an email address and your business contacts, and it also translates into no spam and a productivity increase of up to 60%.

After hearing to all this, it may seem Yammer is expensive: in fact, it isn't. Yammer is "Freemium": you can get access to the most basic services for free, and advanced services cost only $5 per user/month.

You don't trust us? Great. Skepticism is good! Trust the 100,000 companies and organizations that opted for our services instead. They include, but are not limited to: UNICEF, Fox International Channels, AMD, LG, eBay, PayPal – and so on.

Guess what all these companies have in common?

Yammer: THE Freemium integration social network.

Report and documentation software: an efficient way to save time and money

Picture this: you want to create an impressive presentation about your company's latest product, and, after you are done, maybe you'd like to send the ones who attended it some print material, or a website showing the same content, but formatted in HTML. However, when you start to create your Power Point presentation, you discover that it looks amateurish – not reflecting the excellent professional you are. To top it off, when you try to create your Word material, pictures go out of their place, and tables are simply tedious to create. HTML? Never mind that. And then, you get frustrated: isn't there anything that would do the dirty job for me?, you think.

Here comes the good news: there is software that does the dirty work for you, and this kind of software is generally categorized as report and documentation software.

How Does Report and Documentation Software work?

This kind of software offers you predefined layout: write your text, and it will choose size and fonts appropriately; insert table data, and it will be created, colored and positioned automatically; create graphs, and they'll be consistent everywhere. This is similar to what MS Word styles are, but better: this kind of software supports multiple document formats too, ensuring you can, for instance, create a wonderful, elegant presentation out of an ugly Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Beware, though: choosing the right software is not a task to be taken lightly.

What Is the Best Report and Documentation Software out There?

Mainly, we have 3 alternatives on the market: Crystal Reports, from SAP Crystal Solutions, SQL Reporting Services, from Microsoft, and Windward Reports, from Windward Studios.

Crystal Reports is, currently, among the most known software today. However, the learning curve is ridiculously high: as it can be seen here, Crystal Reports 2008 requires several tweaks to work right on Windows Vista. This flash demo, showing one of their presentation examples, isn't very impressive either: when you click the round button to do calculations dynamically, the mouse behaves in a weird way, making the button not to spin correctly. See here:


all this means you'll need to spend time fixing your install and presentations. Wasn't the whole point of this to save time and money?

SQL Reporting Services, on the other hand, is a popular Microsoft product. However, it manages to fare than Crystal Reports: sample reports are difficult to find, and you have to read a whole book just to know about what has changed when they released service pack 1 (I wish I was kidding. Look here: http://www.viciowarez.com/descargar-ebookz-15/microsoft-sql-server-2008-reporting-services-unleashed-858035/, right in the section "Understand How to").

Last, but actually the most surprising of all of them, is Windward Reports: of all three, this seems the best option to save time and money: their program can either run on .Net or Java, and integrates seamlessly with MS Office. This means that although there is a learning curve, it is negligible compared to what Crystal Reports – or worse, SQL Reporting Services – demands of you. And since you don't need to learn as much – not even how write a single line of code, in fact – you are saving a lot of time and money. This is the whole point of why you are buying reporting and documentation software, isn't it?

The Bottom Line

Among all of them, Windward Reports seems to be the most promising: it offers near-seamless workflow integration and it's extremely lightweight. And as mentioned before, no programming required! Frankly, leave programming to programmers and don't worry about getting a new book every time a new service pack of your software is released so you can learn "what's new." Do what you do best: talk about business and your latest products – and then, profit.

Publisher's site: http://www.windwardreports.com/

HTML vs. XML reports: how to choose what's best for you

We all know HTML reports are popular for displaying online content: being extremely flexible, they allow many different types of information to be displayed in a semi-automatic way. However, they are as easy to get wrong as they are to generate: tables can behave differently in different browsers; boxes may be out of place, or some of your text may even not show at all. Should this happen, your company may get a bad reputation it does not deserve.

So, is there a way out?

As a matter of fact, yes, there is: you can implement a XML reporting system. Similar to HTML, XML reports also use tags, but they have many additional points in their favor:

• XML reports are much cleaner than HTML reports are. 
• They can be customized to suit your needs, as you can create your own tags
• Like HTML reports, XML reports can be viewed in a browser, but, unlike them,  they can be used as the source for many formats of online and offline content. 
• Finally, should things go wrong, you usually can edit your XML reports by hand, as many programs generate clear, human-readable output. 

Let's be realistic: although HTML is here to stay, XML reporting tools are getting more and more promising by the hour: as you read this article, these programs are getting easier and easier to use, and supporting more and more formats. 

The bottom line is: if you were to choose, what should you choose? 

If you were to choose, certainly choosing a XML report system is the way to go: not only XML reports are more versatile than HTML, but this system can also generate HTML reports itself should you need them. Certainly, the cost of implementing this kind of system is much higher; however, if you can invest into it, affording the time, money and complexity required this is the way to go if you need your documents available in 10 different formats and then some. Although you will spend a while training yourself and your employees, opting for XML reports, in fact, will certainly save you money in the long run.

HTML vs PDF reports: which one should you choose?

Ever since the Internet was acknowledged as a commercial success, circa 1944-1995, it has been regarded as a near-universal online reading format: it is flexible and has a simple syntax and loose conventions, ever-allowing the expansion of its standards; therefore, it's no wonder it is being widely used and accepted since then.

As HTML is so flexible and so easy to understand, it is no wonder that HTML reporting has been created: HTML reports, combined with CSS, allow the display of your data in multiple ways, changing just a few lines of code. Don't like the fact that your tables have an orange header when they should have a blue one? No problem: just change the CSS, and done.

An HTML report, however, has many shortcomings: it is hard to print, there is no guarantee of consistency among different computers, and layout freedom is very limited compared to a PDF reporting. Long story short, HTML reporting is very good for what it is intended for, but were you to print them, you should have too many headaches.

Well, as it was briefly mentioned before, what about layout freedom? If you ever wanted your document to have an specific feel, making it more light-hearted and bubbly, serious, modern – be it as you wish – you know well what I am talking about: in HTML, fonts are restricted to a set of common widely-used fonts, as Arial, Tahoma, Verdana or Courier. Do you think you can easily use Helvetica as text easily when writing an HTML report? Think again. You can use it, that's for sure – but using them is very much of a hassle compared to PDF, and this can also bring legal issues. Let's not talk about object positioning either: using something as simple as MS Word, you can post a photo virtually anywhere in your document, something that cannot be guaranteed when you choose for HTML reporting.

So, which one should you choose? HTML reports or PDF reports? The answer is simple: choose both of them. HTML reports and PDF reports do not oppose each other: rather, they complement each other. And with a good conversion tool, you will surely generate terrific content both for online HTML reports and offline PDF reports.