Using SaaS for Business Development
Posted on | September 2, 2010 | No Comments
To help get a better idea of how the Odysen SaaS solution would work for specific people within a business or organization, we’ll be highlighting some specific examples or use cases. These being different roles within an organization, such as business development, design, marketing, and sales.
For this example, will go through business development, otherwise known as just biz dev, market research, strategic marketing, whichever one prefers the result is the same, collecting and organizing lots of information.
Using Odysen, here are few ways that someone in biz dev could help in that effort:
Folders Setup
Create a folder for business development, within that folder you can set up sub-folders, such as one for each market. This would leave you with one main folder, then maybe 5-6 or more sub-folders. Once the folders are setup, you can go through each and add content as needed.
News
Use the News application to add a bunch of RSS feeds for each market, helpful to quickly go through in the morning while you’re having that first cup of coffee & browse through for any updates. Maybe even put 6-9 news feeds on one page and create a page for news of each market. This way, you’ll be able to easily go through +30 news feeds of very relevant information, just by going through those 5-6 pages. For deciding which news feeds to add, if you know specific blogs and their RSS URLs, great, if not, just use the news search option. For example, you can type in the name of your market for the keyword news search, and you’ll have a news feed set-up for that specific market. You could also do the same for any key competitors, through just putting in the name of the competitor as a keyword.
Projects/Actions
Under each folder, or market for this example, you can click on the tab Actions, and list anything that you think needs to be done to better understand your markets. This could be things such as reading different research reports, market studies, ideas or actions from a recently read news item, and/or plans needed for any type of product specification.
Documents
Use for storing and sharing pdfs/research reports, presentations, word doc product specifications.
Websites
Use for storing any websites for the perspective markets, such as key potential customers, competitors, and partners.
Calendars/Events
You can use this application for scheduling or making note of any upcoming conferences or industry trade events, areas to start informally discussing your idea with others.
Pages
And for better viewing options, you can use Pages to integrate all your content from each folder or market onto one page. This is helpful to sort of be able to take a step back from all the details of each application, and see everything together in a little bit larger picture or viewpoint. Or, another way to do it is to start with the Pages application and use the default initial page called “Summary”. This page is already pre-loaded with widgets or applications from within the same folder. So, if you add content to a widget in the Pages application, the same content will also be added to its’ respective application. For example, if you add a website to the websites widget, it will also show up in the Websites tab.
Contacts
You can share any of the folders with other people within your same Odysen account by clicking on the Contacts tab. If you had set up the one folder for Business Development or Biz Dev, then the 5-6 sub-folders for each market, you can set up the same permissions for all of them by just adjusting the Biz Dev folder. When adding contacts, there is an option to Apply to Sub-Folders, and this will apply the same new permissions that you’re adding to all the sub-folders. Of course, you can edit each folder one by one if needed.
Screen shot of adding Contacts to all the Sub-Folders of the Biz Dev Folder
Those are a few examples for different functions within a business development role, will look into some others in later posts this week and next.
Tags: biz dev > business development > SaaS
Odysen Website Gets Demo’s
Posted on | September 1, 2010 | No Comments
To help present or display the applications, we’ve made a few improvements to the home site at Odysen.com. Besides the overall look, feel, and text, have also added demo videos for each of the applications. Here is a screen-shot of the Projects application:
We hope this will give anyone considering trying it out a better idea for how it works. Here are a few highlights that you’ll notice when playing the demo’s:
Speed
It’s fast. If there’s anything that irritates one when using a new web application, it’s waiting. When you go from one action to another at barely a snail’s pace, time enough to do other things on the side, it becomes a waste of time, and thus time to move on. Not so with the Odysen applications. You can add content, share it, move it to other folders, add widgets, all as fast as you can click or type.
Intuitive Interface
Flow of Information: You’ll notice a hierarchy or flow of the content going from left to right and from top to bottom. This makes it easy to go through various folders or topics as needed.
Integrated Applications: By making the applications all integrated into one folder or type of content, it forces all the applications to be as similar as possible and anything more than that becomes an obvious bottleneck. So, within each application you have the basic features of Create, Edit, Move, and Delete, and then a few extra variables as needed for the specific applications. Such as priorities with Actions, or recurring events with Events.
Easy Navigation
Wherever appropriate, there are links inserted to more easily get to the content you’re looking for. These are most prominently found in the applications Updates and Pages, but also in the first folder displayed, the All folder. The All folder allows you to view all the content that’s been shared with you for each application.
Going forward, will be going through some examples of using the applications. This being a walk-through of a typical product life cycle in a business, and how different roles can use the Odysen applications as are most appropriate.
Tags: easy navigation > intuititive interface > speed
Comments Collaboration
Posted on | August 27, 2010 | No Comments
The Comments feature is a helpful tool as it allows for easy feedback or collaboration. Comments are available in the applications that you could call the more content or collaboration-heavy applications, those being Projects/Actions, Documents, Notes, Calendar/Events, and Websites.
You can find comments on the far right of any one of these applications, following a natural left to right, top to bottom progression. This being from 1) starting on the left with the Folder chosen, 2) going to the center for selecting the application, 3) choosing a specific item to view the details on the right, and finally 4) viewing comments directly under the item details. You can see this below in the Projects/Actions example.
Adding, Editing, and Deleting
To add a comment, just click the Create button under any item detail and a dialog window will appear allowing you to add in the Name and the actual comment. Once you’ve added the comment, you will then have the option to Edit or Delete as needed (always helpful for typo’s, other mistakes when adding feedback). For sharing the comment and potentially getting more feedback, the comment is also posted within Updates.
Applications that don’t have comments are News, Updates, Pages, and Contacts. News isn’t included as we thought most of the focus is on the actual news feed/articles, and other content is likely created from the articles, such as adding a note, new website link, an event, or action (this happens frequently when including a News widget on Page with other apps). Contacts also doesn’t have comments as the intention of Contacts wasn’t so much of a social networking tool, but rather focused on just initial reference information, such as location, phone, email, other ways to potentially communicate with the person. For Pages and Updates, these didn’t feel that comments were appropriate as they are mostly integrating content from all the other applications and any comments needed would maybe be better applied to the specific application.
Tags: collaboration > comments > feedback > layout