O'Neil Blog

To Blog or not to Blog?

toblogornotAs we left the first quarter of 2012 behind us I couldn't help notice that I hadn't blogged since the end of January.  Two months had passed, in the blink of an eye, and the blogosphere had not received an update from me.  Well that is not strictly true.  After all, almost every day I check for industry specific news and broadcast to all who follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.  Our marketing department also ensures that we post to Facebook on an (almost) daily basis to share with you the going on's at O'Neil Software. On top of those, I do write the monthly eNewsletter and, as a group, we contribute to conferences and magazines.

So do we need to blog on top of all of that?  Some recent statistics say yes, and also imply that we are not alone in having a company blog. In fact, Technorati claims that some 70% of businesses are blogging, but according to a recent analysis of websites and blogs by Percussion only 20.5% of mid market companies have an active blog. It is that inactivity that is the trap to avoid as nothing looks worse than an out-of-date blog.

All this begs the question: how important is a blog to your business?  I thought I would take a look at our read statistics and found the following:

  • The average "reads" was 660 per blog entry;
  • The highest was over 1200;
  • The simpler the title to understand, the more reads the article got (so don't be too clever with the title);
  • Educational blogs were the most read.

 

I think any effort that I can do that reaches out to an average of 660 people is an effort well spent.  If I can focus that effort onto educational pieces, about our products and services, then that is even better, especially as the statistics show that these are the best read articles. 

Although blogging may not be too regular, I will keep it on the list of things to do. 

How about you?  Do you blog to your clients?  What do you find successful?  Go to our user forum at http://www.oneilsoft.com/user-forum/topic?id=1297 and let us know what you think.

 

My New Years’ Resolution: Making Sure I understand my Activity Levels

WalkingIt was New Years’ Resolution time and my wife was on my case to get more activity into my daily life.  With my new pedometer (not the best Christmas present I had ever received) strapped to my hip I was sure I would be up to the 10,000 steps a day challenge, but was disappointed to find that, on a typical day behind the desk, I was lucky if I walked 2,500 steps... and most of those were to get a cup of tea!! 

Clearly something had to be done to make sure that I recorded more activity on a daily basis.

Now, that got me thinking about how we record activity in RS-SQL and how you can maximize the use of its Activity Sets.  So the first question has to be: what are Activity Sets?  Here’s the manual explanation:

In order for you to illustrate the value of your work for a client, you must first capture all the work that you have done.  Activity Sets provide a way for you to tailor how you capture the detailed history of the services you provide a client.

Essentially, this means you can select the Actions associated with the work you are doing and place them into groups (Activity Sets) that will be automatically recorded when the activity happens.  Actions are things, such as PULL, DELIVER, PICKUP, DESTROY, etc...

Read more...

Welcome Home

Posted on 16 Nov, 2011 by Ian Thomas

On January 11, 2011 we were forced to evacuate our Brisbane Office due to torrential floods. Ten months later we were finally we able to welcome all the people who helped us during the recovery from the floods, as well as our customers, to our new office at Oxley House, 25 Donkin Street, South Brisbane, Australia.

It's been quite a while since the flood destroyed our original building on the site, forcing us to take refuge at our accountants offices while we worked on getting our office back in shape. Due to their kindness, we were able to be fully functioning within days, and have not missed a single support call throughout the entire drama.

We wanted to take the opportunity to show off our new home and thank everyone for their help. It was also a great opportunity to hold a mini-user forum for our customers, allowing us to show some of the presentations from the recent Strategic Partner Conference.

Below are some photographs from the Re-Open Day, as we like to call it, which should give everyone a glimpse of the new office.

Read more...

Moving oneilsoft.com to a new hosting platform

The O'Neil website and especially the User Forum, have proven to be very popular additions to our channels of communications with our customers and partners.  People have come to rely on these resources and, when performance is not what is expected, it can be frustrating.   When we initially set this up we used a shared-hosting platform at Go-Daddy.com.  After working with the technical support group at Go-Daddy, we believe that this platform (now described as a legacy platform) is causing some latency issues, which are being seen as performance delays.  As such, its time to move up...

Go-Daddy has a new offering, known as 4GH® (Fourth-Generation Hosting).  This is a flexible hosting platform that matches performance with demand. If our site's traffic spikes, 4GH responds by allocating more resources and keeping our site live.  As our site is growing, 4GH will grow with it so we shouldn't have to manually upgrade in the future and experience any unnecessary downtime.  4GH "pools" the resources of many servers and our site's content resides on multiple servers. This networked system helps achieve a high reliability—beyond 99.9%—for our website because if one server shuts down, only a fraction of the total resources are lost.

This Friday we will commence the upgrade and there may be some short periods of outages, but we hope to keep these to a minimum.   Thanks for your patience as we work to upgrade the website.

UPDATE:  The move is complete and went very smoothly.  Please let us know if you experience anything "unusual" but we think everything is just fine. Laughing

Dashboards and Metrics

RS-Stats dashboardIt seems like hardly a day goes by that I am not asked about dashboards, especially after running the recent RS-SQL Statistics program for the second year. This term is not new but has certainly gained popularity, possibly due to the proliferation of web-based dashboards available today. To be clear, dashboards are just ways to view data in a more meaningful way, usually graphical, so that the raw data becomes useful information. Who doesn’t want to gain a greater knowledge of their business, but this can seem challenging for smaller businesses, especially as capturing data can be time-consuming and expensive.

This is where one of the hidden benefits of RS-SQL comes in. You will be amazed at the amount of operational data that is captured every day, simply by using the software. Every workorder created, barcode scanned, and delivery made creates many activity records to be recorded in the database. This data could be the secret ingredient for learning more about your business. Read more...

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