We are excited to announce that our new Centralized Symantec Server has been up and running for a number of weeks now. This new server adds another level of centralized control and simplifies management of the Symantec EndPoint Protection software used at our various client sites to protect from viruses and spyware. As we continue to build our managed services offering this next step gives us greater control and visibility across all the networks that we manage.

In the past each client site would have had a Symantec Management Console application installed on a local server. As new releases came out, or anytime client policies needed to be updated, we would have to log into each site to make the required changes. Reporting also would have to be emailed to our staff for each individual site, creating a fair bit of work as the client list continues to grow. With our new server, all computers are told to speak directly with our PCM Symantec Server which will then push out updates and policies.

So is this new change mainly for our benefit only? Absolutely not! Now all clients will be immediately updated with any best practices or policies gained from experiences at different sites. This means all client workstations and servers will be automatically configured in the exact same secure way and we don’t have to worry about different settings at different sites. This also means that when we upgrade the central server each client will gain from this immediately, rather than waiting for their turn to be upgraded, or having to decide if this is something they want to invest funds into.

In addition to greater control, this new service also means that there is one less application running on your local servers. As we move clients over to this new central server we are seeing performance improvements on the local servers after the Symantec Management Console software is removed.

Another benefit is that the computers now are updated even when they are away from the office. So for those of you with laptops that frequently leave the office, these will now still be able to get virus definition updates and other changes whenever they have access to the internet.

Some of you may be wondering about bandwidth implications, especially larger sites as all computers now report regularly with our external Symantec Server. We have worked with Symantec to ensure that the “heartbeat” signal is so minor that we aren’t seeing any major impact to internet performance or overall network performance. For our rural clients with slower internet connections we also have the ability to customize the polling intervals so that these slower connections are not noticeably affected either.

All in all it’s an exciting process as we already have seen the benefits of more visibility and greater control of this critical protection software. Not part of our Sentinel network monitoring program? Contact our office and find out how we can remove the stress of managing technology while at the same time increasing the security and stability of your computer networks.

As you may be aware earlier this year we launched a Customer Satisfaction Survey through an outside agency.  This was a completely new thing for us and while we may think we have a good relationship with our clients, would they really take the time to fill out a survey?  With telephone, internet and email it seems that everyone is conducting surveys these days.  Everyone has a busy day and often surveys are seen as an interruption and perhaps even an annoyance.

For this year we decided to send the survey only to clients on the general computer side of the business.  We felt it wasn’t appropriate at this point to include the clients for which we only support software products.  The survey had approximately 30 questions and went out to 150 people.  A big thank you to those who took the time to complete the survey, we really value your feedback.  The survey is optionally anonymous and we are able to see final scores in comparison to other partners.

We were happy to see that overall we scored higher than the average partner in North America with a Net Satisfaction score of 185 compared to the average of 168.

Based on the results some areas of strength are:

• Ease of Doing Business
• Quality of Support
• Ability to Meet Clients Specific Needs
• Cares About Your Business

To be quite honest we were a little surprised that we received almost no negative feedback.  Perhaps with this being the first survey people may not have understood the purpose of this exercise.

In addition to the results of the survey questions, as staff we also discussed that in some cases clients weren’t sure who to contact about a support issue.  To simplify things we have setup a central support email queue that is constantly monitored by someone in the office during regular business hours.  Rather than emailing 3 different people and hoping that one of them will respond in time, the support@pcm.ca email address should make things easier for our clients and allow us to be more focussed.  Our goal is to increase response times which should also help to increase the value received for our clients.

Overall the satisfaction survey was a good exercise for us to go through and allowed us to raise the bar a bit moving forward.  While we received almost no negative feedback not all responses were a 9 out of 9 either.  As a result we are committed to working diligently throughout 2010 in an effort to increase the satisfaction score in future years.

The Level Platforms Comeback of the Year Award recognizes a Level Platforms Partner who has overcome challenges in deploying managed services and succeeded with Managed Workplace.

Hamilton, ON, February 5, 2010 – Professional Computer Management announced today that it has been recognized by leading remote monitoring and management software provider, Level Platforms, as their Partner Comeback of the Year. The award recognizes Ed VanderLaan of Professional Computer Management for overcoming business, infrastructure, technology or economy-related challenges to realize success in their deployment of Level Platforms Managed Workplace and the delivery of superior IT services to their small and medium-sized business customers over the last 12 months.

Professional Computer Management was one of only six award winners announced at the Level Platforms’ All Partner Event on February 4, 2010. The Level Platforms Partner Awards include Community Partner of the Year, Comeback of the Year, Innovator of the Year, Rookie of the Year, and Partner of the Year. These awards acknowledge Level Platforms Partners for their success, as well as their commitment and contributions that they have made over the years, both in their partnership with Level Platforms and in the MSP community. A list of nominees and winners can be found at http://www.levelplatforms.com/partner-awards.aspx

A list of over 3000 Partners was compiled and analyzed by the Level Platforms Executive team. Between four and six Partners were nominated for each of the five award categories, and the winners were chosen based on careful evaluation of these top contenders. “Adopting and implementing new technologies and business delivery methods to better service the IT needs of customers is no small task for any business and occasionally requires a step back before taking two leaps forward. Despite some early challenges, Professional Computer Management persevered in 2009, resulting in a true success story.  Today their customers and their business are reaping the rewards of their efforts,” said Dan Wensley, Vice President Partner Development and Marketing, Level Platforms.

About Professional Computer Management

PCM is an IT and computer network support company based in Hamilton, Ontario, providing a variety of computer consulting services to small and medium-sized businesses in the Golden Horseshoe area. Established in 1993, PCM has seen the development of technologies, recognizes the evolving needs of their clients, and seeks to address these needs and help companies grow and expand with the times. http://www.pcm.ca

About Level Platforms

With thousands of Partners in 30 countries, Level Platforms is the leading provider of managed services software for IT solution providers servicing small and midsized end customers through its award-winning agentless remote monitoring and management software, Managed Workplace. http://www.levelplatforms.com

Last post I discussed how ACT! 2010 integrates with various social media technologies. For part 3, I’ll be discussing the third marketed feature coined as “Generate Actionable Demand with End-to-End E-marketing”. If you look at the features in ACT! 2010, you won’t see one referenced by that name, so what do they mean by End-to-End marketing? ACT! 2010 has a new feature built-in called ACT! E-Marketing. The official website for this new feature is http://www.act.com/products/businessservices/emarketing/.

It used to be that ACT! was unable to send out HTML e-mail messages (the fancy graphical e-mails you’ve seen from others). In the current times, marketing through e-mail is becoming a much bigger feature. It allows companies to dramatically cut down on their marketing costs. To fit this need many online newsletter programs became available. One such program actually integrated itself directly inside ACT! to allow users to send HTML e-mails. This program was made by Swiftpage. Since then they’ve turned this program into a full-featured mail house even including the option to perform marketing campaigns. Additionally, Sage has now partnered with them and they’ve rebranded the offering for ACT! as “ACT! E-Marketing”. The bulk of the requests we’ve had from our clients have been related to e-mail marketing so today we’ll focus on that area, just don’t forget that ACT! E-marketing offers a lot more than just e-mail marketing. You can see more on the other features by visiting the link above.

Let me guess, you’re like most users and aren’t a programmer? When I mention the acronym HTML, you don’t know what that is? That’s been the biggest problem for most users. Graphical e-mails are typically made in HTML which would mean you’d have to be a programmer or some sort of web designer to understand it and to create nice looking e-mails through it. Now I’m not suggesting we’re getting rid of HTML, we’re not. The ACT! E-marketing feature however, includes a template designer allowing you to create nice graphical e-mails all without having to touch a line of programming (or understand it for that matter). So that’s the first step, in order to send any e-mail out, you have to create the e-mail first. ACT! E-marketing has the following options for creating e-mails:

1. Create the template yourself through their easy to use designer
2. Have the template created by your marketing person (or consultant) and import it
3. Hire it out to Bright Peak (a company that specializes in making templates for ACT! E-Marketing)

So great, now you’ve got a template created (or imported), how do you go about sending this? Oh, and you’d like to send it only to a specific group of individuals inside your ACT! database. No probem, ACT! E-marketing builds itself inside ACT! so you can easily send the e-mail from inside ACT! and can choose to send it to one of your existing ACT! groups!

Not only does it send out the e-mails for you, but it will create a history entry under each of the contacts with the date it was sent, subject and title of the template you sent to them. This way, months later you can look back on this and find out whether or not this contact was sent that particular e-mail.

One of the other features I like about ACT! E-marketing is that it records who has opened your e-mail messages and whether or not they clicked on any of the links inside the e-mail. This allows you to view the results of the different e-mails you’ve sent to see such metrics as what was your “open ratio”. This can be handy to determine which e-mails tend to have better open ratios and which subject lines catch peoples attention.

Included in the reports is the ability to see how many people opened your e-mail more than one.

One of the other issues that typically come up when marketing through e-mail is dealing with bounced messages. ACT! E-marketing also has reports that show you which messages bounced back and what the reason was for their return.

In summary, ACT! 2010 has taken one of my favourite e-mailing applications (Swiftpage Email) and made it part of the product for your use. While the feature does require paying a monthly fee, I think you’ll find the benefits of the feature far outway the costs. I have yet to see another mass e-mailing/drip marketing application integrate itself as tightly as Sage has done it with ACT! E-Marketing. It’s yet another winning feature in my books!

If you’d like to learn more about the new ACT! E-marketing feature click here for more information. Otherwise, join me next post as I discuss the fourth feature of ACT! 2010 coined as “Tailor Opportunities to Fit Your Selling Model”.