Many small businesses and consultants face a similar dilemma.  They work or partner with many companies and individuals that are scattered all over the country and even all over the world.  With small-company workforces spread out so far it becomes very difficult to maintain the synergy of the work force.

People often work in different time zones, they were different hours within those time zones, and they work with different lifestyles.  It becomes very easy for small-business organization to get severely out of sync with each other.  This is compounded when the people within that organization were all using different tools from Outlook to Google’s products such as Gmail to multiple types of voice over IP services in different contact management systems etc..

Many companies are finding the need to work on the same platform just to keep their culture in line with each other and stay connected with each other.  The challenges identifying the proper solution that everybody can work with any reasonable price and possibly even more important, finding one that has a reasonable learning curve.

I’ve just recently come out of the project myself with the collaboration of four different companies and the teams that comprise those different companies.  This particular project fell apart largely to the teams and ability to come together and work on a single system.  I’ve seen this happen before in large corporations.  Are many tools of their that can be used for this type of thing from salesforce.com to Microsoft Project to Outlook two various different CRM solutions and hybrids of CRM and project management solutions such as Basecamp.

The real challenge seems to be that companies especially groups of companies need to just make a decision, pick one and utilize it.

Today I was looking at a company that provides a small business software of this nature and it is called Catalyst Web.  Catalyst Web(I think its 2 words and not one combo name) provides enterprise grade e-mail services, document management services, CRM services, and enterprise grade chat services (a type of service that can log your chat so that you have full records of conversations with clients customers and partners).

Their service is new and it just launched over the Thanksgiving Day weekend from what I can tell.  That’s when I heard of them, and from the Catalyst launch blog, I think I am not too far off base with that assessment.

Their service pricing works on a model where you receive an UNLIMITED USER LICENSE, but pay a rate depending on the file storage space that you utilize.

After working with Salesforce.com in comparison (not apples to apples but a good example on pricing), you would pay a fee of $60 - $120 per user per month for their CRM and project management services.  If you have a growing sales force and if you run their services for several years, that totals up to a hefty bill.

Catalyst Web only charges you for the files you store on their servers.

It’s important recognize that they are providing enterprise level e-mail services.A small company can go out and purchase an exchange server to run Microsoft exchange and the total cost will come in and around $10,000 give or take.

That is the cause before you ever pay for an IT person to run a server and keep your e-mail humming along through updates and viruses and who knows what else.

Catalyst Web provides this level of e-mail service for $25 a month (for your whole company!), so you can get running out of the gate without having to make a big-ticket expenditure or hire an IT person.

What’s the catch?

The biggest issue I can see what the service is that the e-mail client it is all online.  So you have to utilize and read your e-mail in an Internet browser.

I am probably becoming a little bit old-fashioned, as I still prefer to use an e-mail client like Outlook  to manage my e-mail off-line.  There are a number of services that provide e-mail management online such as Gmail,and this trend is definitely growing number of users preferring  to access e-mail this way.

They do offer POP3 access on handhelds, so I suspect there might be an Outlook work around in there somewhere.

I personally am just not one of them and still like to have it on my desktop or laptop.  I suspect the day may come when I will embrace this new medium, but I’m not there yet.

For me the biggest reason for this is that I work in web design and work as a consultant for a number of companies.  Therefore, I have to juggle and manage about a half dozen email addresses, and so adding an email address to my mix that requires me to login to a browser to check my email just doesn’t work.

What Makes Catalyst Easy?

Well for starters they offer a free trial for their service.  This is not exceptional, I’d suggest that its par for the course for any company or software service that wants to be taken seriously. 

The reality is that users that want to try the service will not have to invest money up front, but time and effort.  Now budding entrepreneurs usually can boot strap and come up with a little extra time to figure these things out, especially when there is no out of pocket expense in cash to try it.

The challenge is that time does need to be spent on growing business, so that usually limits entrepreneurs from testing only 1 or 2 services at most.

With that in mind, I’d suggest that these days the service is less important than the commitment to make the service work and the culture of the existing organization or people.  If the culture clashes with the work flow process of the system, then it will probably not succeed.   After that, it only requires that everyone in the organization should make the commitment to make the software work.  If anyone in the company fails to try to use it, the software service, will surely fail for the company.

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Sometimes Dragon NaturallySpeaking works so well that you become overconfidence capabilities.  I get a ton of use of this product now, however on occasion the program seems to take a nap or maybe a daydream is a better descriptor.

Sometimes I think the program does live up to its claims of 99% accuracy.  However there seems to be a few circumstances where it falls far short of this claim.

1. If you hibernate a PC or don’t shut down and restart on a regular basis, over time the program will definitely become less accurate.  I’m sure this has a lot to do with RAM utilization and number of other aspects, but as a user that doesn’t matter to me all I know is that the program stops working as well as it used to work.  This is problematic because you build up trust in the program and expect it to work, and when it starts to make substitutions for words you don’t catch it is easily as you might have if you didn’t trust the program.
2. Another problem occurs when you run it with many other programs that are RAM hogs.  You get the same result of slow down performance, and the same problem of potentially not catching a mistake as your expectations have risen.
3. Another problem is that on occasion when you start to speak after you haven’t use the tool for a few minutes or after you’ve just turned on the microphone, there is sometimes a delay.  Now the weird part is that DeLay sometimes results in the words actually been transcribed, only say 40-60 seconds after the fact, and sometimes it doesn’t transcribe it all.  So when you first start talking you need to make sure that the transcription has started with you and that the program is actually ready to write.  You turn the program on and it’s almost like you have to ask your computer, “Are you really paying attention to me?”
4. you also have to be very careful in two circumstances that seem to come up with often enough for me to note them.  One of those is the situation where you’re composing an e-mail, and a strange noise in the background (my dog barking at home for example) apparently sounds to the computer just like the command to send an e-mail.  This results in the unfortunate sending of e-mail before it’s really ready to go.  Another problem that occurs, happens during the use of several different WYSIWYG HTML editors (DNS nine actually got those last three words correct on the first try!).  In some HTML editors something goes a little screwy with DNS nine sometimes.  What I’m trying to write text with the transcription program it sometimes rates it and it HTML portion without the appropriate tags and sometimes it doesn’t.  I see this happen on a regular basis in Windows live writer and on an occasional basis in Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. 
5. Finally DNS nine also sometimes forgets to make the appropriate distinction between simple words like ‘in’ and ‘and’ making what appears to be random substitutions of those words throughout a given discourse.  This is definitely problematic and not something that pops up on spellcheck, and due to the nature of some training that I’ve received in speed-reading I don’t always catch it when I approve the document.  It’s important to note all of these issues and try and remain cognizant of them so that you don’t develop and overconfidence in the software.

At the end of the day it’s a great tool and say the significant amount of time.  You have to be wary of becoming overconfident, picture that guy in the cheesy Viagra commercials who has just received a new boost of confidence.  You need to be aware of these limitations such that you can look out for them and avoid them.  If you can maintain that the tool will definitely increase your productivity and improve your computing experience.

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I’m working on my third day using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Today I’ve been getting better at using a digital recorder in conjunction with dragon.  I can record anything on my digital recorder, transfer the wave file over to my computer, and use the Dragon NaturallySpeaking transcription capability to convert it into text.

Keep The Recording Rate High Enough to Transcribe

I’ve used a digital recorder for quite a few years for lots of different purposes.  In the past, I always used the lowest compression method of proximally 16 kB per second.  This allowed me to maximize the amount of recording time I can get on a memory card.

The quality is just fine for my purposes at this recording rate.  However, recently after I’ve started use Dragon NaturallySpeaking I’ve learned that if I use a higher compression rate 43 kb or higher fat dragon can then transcribe the sound files I make with my digital recorder automatically.

This is extremely convenient now. I can take my voice notes transcribe them into text and they can be searched through various different search tools on my computer, such as Google desktop. 

Don’t Forget the Punctuation

The only downside is that if I want to utilize Dragon NaturallySpeaking I need to remember to make my voice notes with punctuation such as, saying the word ‘Period’ or ‘Coma’. 

I’m truthfully very amazed at just how well this system and software works with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  When I was attempting to do research on the product, several of the reviews led me to believe that the digital recorder device might not be compatible with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  It’s now my experience with one device, but as long as you’re wave compression rate is high enough to probably be okay.

Potential Usage

With this capability I can write a paper or an e-mail or dozens of e-mails.  I can read an e-mail that comes in on my phone and I can respond to it in full without having to type my thumbs into nubs.  I can respond by a voice file. 

I can then transfer it to my computer and convert it to transcribed text. Then I can copy paste it into e-mail and send it back.  This may not work for every short little e-mail.  However in those cases were an important e-mail comes in on my phone and a short response won’t work, I can give it a detailed response, while the topic is fresh in my mind.

Hands Free Phone Microphone

Now I just need to find a hands-free microphone for my phone, and I could write lengthy e-mails while driving.

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I have run out of patience with Outlook.  I have been using Outlook since about 1998 after being forced to convert from Eudora 3.0 or something.  I have been up and down and bugged out and torn and twisted and crashed and terrorized by flaky pst files for years.

I think enough is probably enough!

I have had it up to my eyeballs with problems relating to syncing up portable devices and even simple things like adding contacts in the right folder.

But the biggest reason is probably the spam.  Outlook just does not handle spam well at all.  Working on the web I get lots of spam as my email address gets circulated.  The spam manages to sneak through 2-3 levels of filters and still manages to slow Outlook down as it ‘filters’ a hundred spam messages a day.  It makes me want to try Thunderbird, and I am not referring to the wine!

I am referring to the Mozilla Thunderbird email program.  Thunderbird 1.5 comes as a free download.  It offers full featured email and solid junk email filters.  It also has anti-phishing protection. 

That all sounds like a lot of blather, but here is the main thing.  I love and trust FireFox and Thunderbird is made by the same people.  So that is a big selling point.

The other thing is that like FireFox you can add in a number of add ons and extensions to customize the experience.  So if the software can help me with the fundamentals then I can tweak it to cover the special things that I need it to do with the extensions.

Technorati tags: mozilla thunderbird, thunderbird, email programs, done with outlook

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