The Changing Face of Software

The right software can greatly enhance the productivity of business users. However, traditional tools are not always suited to the modern business landscape, where people may work from home or a local Starbucks as easily as a cubicle. Likewise, associations and nonprofits may have committees and boards who lack access to the same physical network, creating a barrier to collaboration.

Software as a Service

Fortunately, the last two years have seen a remarkable level of growth in decentralized, Web-based applications, often described by the term "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Because this type of software is accessed through a Web browser, it's available to anyone with an Internet connection. Even better, many of the most useful tools are available at no cost. When there are fees, SaaS applications have an additional (and significant) advantage over traditional offline software. Pricing usually takes the form of a subscription which can generally be changed or canceled at will, making the cost of commitment very low.

Alternatives to Existing Software

With a driving interest in technology (not to mention enormous resources), Google is a leader in providing excellent tools for free. One of its most notable offerings is a collection of applications called Google Docs. This system provides an online alternative for creating and editing text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It can open and save standard Microsoft Office documents and makes it very easy to share them with others for review and collaboration. Google provides a number of other tools (nearly all free) which provide Web-based alternatives for email, calendars, and even payment processing.

New Opportunities

Web-based software also offers new possibilities for accomplishing tasks that traditional office applications don't handle well. For example, many people resort to email for group communication when it's really better suited to one-on-one correspondence. Services such as our own GroupLoop.com, a committee management tool, aim to solve this problem by organizing discussions and providing specific features for certain kinds of communication like RSVPs and reminders. A business-oriented group chat application called Campfire provides an excellent way to hold a discussion in real time while maintaining a permanent, searchable archive. Blogs and email newsletters provide much more economical and timely methods of communicating with members than traditional printed mailings.

Integration

A common question when considering the adoption of new technologies is how well they may integrate with existing systems. Specifics vary, of course, but in general this is an area that SaaS vendors have worked hard to address. Many services provide open access for developers to write software that extends features or provides access to data so that systems can work together. New data standards are making exchanges of information easier than ever. For example, using Google Calendar to schedule events automatically makes a data feed available that can be used to display those events on a website.

Privacy and Security

Many business users are also concerned about the security of data hosted by Web-based applications. Working this way does mean giving up a certain amount of control. However, it's worth noting that the network-level protection offered by service providers like Google is typically far more robust than what an average business employs to protect its data. The same common-sense guidelines apply to Web applications as offline ones, such as choosing strong passwords. Many providers make their services available over encrypted connections for additional security. It's always a good idea to review a service provider's policies before trusting them with sensitive information, and when the Web browser becomes a platform for delivering software, it's also critical to keep up to date on patches.

The Bottom Line

The modern software landscape offers many new ways of delivering both existing and innovative services through the Web. Adopting SaaS technologies can be an excellent way to gain efficiency while reducing software costs. With a generally low cost of commitment, there's almost certainly at least one area where Web-based software can benefit your business. If you're able to identify such an area but can't find software to meet the need, CWS specializes in developing custom Web applications and we encourage you to contact us for a risk-free discussion.

RapidNewsletter Gets New Features

This morning we pushed out some enhancements and fixes to our RapidNewsletter service. In case you haven't heard, RapidNewsletter is our full-circle email marketing solution. It allows you to effectively reach those who matter the most to your business -- your customers. Research has shown that a quality email newsletter can be one of the most effective ways to maintain customer relationships.

With RapidNewsletter, you can design and execute an email marketing campaign from beginning to end -- build and edit email lists, create newsletters with articles and images, run detailed tracking reports, and much more! We designed RapidNewsletter to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, solidify customer retention, and strengthen customer relations.

Here are the changes we released today:

Better management of the address groups within your mailing list. When adding new addresses or editing existing ones, it's much easier to designate which groups the subscriber belongs to.

Any subscriber can now be marked to receive "Text Only" messages. Most RapidNewsletter mailings are sent in HTML (for formatted text and images), but for a variety of reasons, people prefer to receive all their email in plain text. For a long time, you've been able to send a RapidNewsletter mailing in text instead of HTML, but now you can manage this preference on a user-by-user basis as well.

New ways to edit the content of existing newsletters. It's much faster to make changes to your existing mailings. You can reorder articles by dragging and dropping, and click titles to edit in place. It's also easier now to remove an image from an article after you've loaded it.

Improved statistics displays. For large mailings, the statistics tables could get unwieldy. We've added paging and better handling of long URLs to make these charts easier to read.

You'll see these improvements immediately the next time you log into your account. If you haven't tried RapidNewsletter yet, now is the perfect time to set up a free account and give it a try! We're working on a number of other new features that you can expect to see in the near future as well. If you have any suggestions on features, improvements, or enhancements to RapidNewsletter be sure to let us know.

Site Launch: AllegroDanceMusic.com

Following the addition of music to their curriculum, Allegro School of Dance and Music approached CWS to redevelop their home on the web. With our goals set and ideas racing through our minds- we got right to work.

The project called for a simple, elegant, and easily navigatable layout that would not only cater to the needs of Allegro's varied demographic, but also organize everything in such a way that would save parents time, and help get children to their dance and music lessons right on schedule.

The result is a beautifully simple site that includes a class schedule, registration information, calendar of events, faculty information, photos and more!

We have enjoyed working with Lance and Janet from Allegro School of Dance and Music, and look forward to our continued relationship with them as we further expand their business online with our RapidNewsletter application.

Jim Fogarty Joins CWS

CWS is honored to have Jim Fogarty join CWS as Director of Business Development. Jim is a Rochester native, graduating from John Marshall and St. Cloud State University. He comes to CWS from Home Federal Savings Bank where he has been a Business Development Officer for the past 2 1/2 years.

Jim will be focusing on business development for our RapidNewsletter.com and GroupLoop.com product lines. Jim is currently an Ambassador with the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce and enjoys photography, hunting and the outdoors. He can be reached at 507-289-2229 x206.