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Embracing Digital Resources in your Enterprise

October 4th, 2011 by Devender Aerrabolu

In order for the enterprise to successfully incorporate digital channels into the overall business strategy, the marketing department must work with the IT department to bring and keep digital channels to the highest levels possible. If the planning and implementation of a digital strategy is not structured properly, then both the marketing department and the IT department can run into potential problems such as: inconsistent branding, wasted resources, and limited impact on the business goals and objectives.

Many companies today, especially those who sell directly to the end customer, have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and email-marketing campaigns. Retail enterprises also allocate a major portion of their marketing to digital channels and design and maintain e-commerce sites. However, often the efforts of the disparate departments of an enterprise yield disparate results that add no value to the customer experience.

When striving to keep branding consistent, the digital marketing initiatives complement the overall brand and “fill in the gaps” in the customer life cycle. Digital marketing can also actually reinvent the customer relationship by adding value to direct consumer connection to the brand.

It falls upon the chief marketing officer (CMO) of the enterprise to embrace and manage the key components of the digital strategy and ensure that all digital efforts align with the business goals and objectives. Several initiatives can be adopted:

•Digital marketing can be aligned around specific consumer groups instead of just audience demographics.
•The digital marketing campaigns can be synchronized around the life cycle of the consumer.
•The CMO can utilize measurable business intelligence analytics supplied by the chief information officer (CIO) to optimize direct consumer responses to the marketing efforts.

The CMO who designs and implements a successful enterprise-wide digital marketing strategy considers how digital will fit into each stage of the consumer life cycle, integrates the customer relationship into the branding operation, and transforms the customer experience.

Posted in Applications, Business Processes, Ecommerce, Internet Retail, Systems Integration, Web Development | No Comments »

Collaboration and Integration with Adobe Acrobat X and Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office

June 21st, 2011 by Devender Aerrabolu

Team collaboration and project review cycles can be enhanced and improved with the new integration of Adobe Acrobat X with two of Microsoft’s major enterprise software applications: SharePoint and Office.

Adobe has recently announced built-in support for SharePoint within Acrobat X; supported versions include SharePoint 2007 SharePoint 2010, Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010. Many IT departments already integrate SharePoint with Office, but the editing limitations of PDF documents limited the collaboration of PDF documents.

The PDF format is the defacto standard for the secure exchange of documents and the format is accepted around the globe because of the clarity of the various content types and the accessibility by anyone with the free Adobe Reader software. With the new integration of Acrobat X with SharePoint, enterprise teams can now collaborate with PDF documents as easily as with Office documents.

Forrester Consulting recently completed a study called “Building the Future of Collaboration”. Results of the study showed that fully two-thirds of knowledge workers in the United States and in Europe regularly collaborate with colleagues in other locations and different time zones. The most-often used collaboration tool has been email, but that has presented several challenges:

Documents must be sent as attachments to emails and must be opened, edited, and commented on other disparate operating systems.

Email attachments often have a size limit and consume a high amount of space on enterprise servers.

Email is often not secure after it leaves the corporate firewall.

The seamless integration of Adobe Acrobat X into the SharePoint and Office platforms overcome the deficiencies of email collaboration by creating a digital collaboration solution. The document owner first creates a PDF file using an ad-in called “PDFMaker” and prepares it for review by uploading it to the SharePoint Server with an automatic link to the document and invites reviewers to leave comments. The document owner automatically receives and compiles comments from the reviewers all in one document. Reviewers can see the review deadline, see who else has responded, and supplement the comments of others.

The final document can be password protected and archived on the SharePoint server for future reference. All reviewed and archived documents are searchable with the free Adobe PDF Filter.

Posted in Applications, Microsoft SharePoint, Web Development | No Comments »

Designing Secure Web Applications

June 7th, 2011 by Devender Aerrabolu

The professionals who design enterprise web applications must ensure that security issues are designed into the application from the ground up. Web architects, developers and designers follow specific guidelines to counteract potential points of application vulnerability. Key areas where web design may be vulnerable include: input validation, authentication, parameter manipulation, auditing, logging, configuration and session management, and cryptology; among others.

The application itself is responsible for the authentication and identification of the user; especially important since all subsequent authorization decisions are based on the initial authorization. The designers and developers of the web applications are responsible for the secure authentication and session management issues. Even if the company network is secure, much of the input and output of data occurs over public networks and therefore web applications must prevent parameter manipulation and avoid the disclosure of sensitive data.

Early in the design phase of the application, the team of web architects and designers take into consideration corporate deployment and security practices and policies as well as the existing infrastructure. In addition to the actual design of the enterprise application, all of the requirements from the different departments and divisions of the company must be considered and the design must be kept flexible enough to accommodate future security and support needs.

The application is continually evolving from the design phase through the maintenance, with ongoing internal and external development and security issues based on the limitations of the foundation platform.

Security design challenges are less likely to emerge when high quality work is completed up front making it easier to anticipate, easier to control costs, and easier to take care of any anticipated or unanticipated problems early in the installation and implementation stages.

Posted in Applications, Systems Integration, Web Development | No Comments »

SMB’s Still Need to Get Up-Close-and-Personal with the Web

April 29th, 2010 by Bill Martin

An amazing number of small and mid-size enterprises continue to avoid taking advantage of all the potential offered by establishing a robust Web presence. For businesses of all sizes, but particularly those that have seen their ability to grow constrained by the economic events of the past two years, harnessing the power of the Web and expanding their digital footprint is critical.

The question has to be asked: Why the reticence and/or complacency?

There are several schools of thought as to the core reason(s).

Establishing an e-commerce site is too expensive

Many companies will readily admit that they need to be on the Internet but fear the aggregated cost of getting there. Visions of $20,000 or $30,000 spent on a flashy Web site and e-commerce capability may create paralysis in even those business owners who perceive themselves as tech-savvy.

The truth is that those days of time consuming and expensive Web development projects are a thing of the past. The tools are better, the development platforms much more friendly and the service providers have matured their processes to the point that $1500 – $2000 can buy a state-of-the-art e-commerce solution.

It’s a generational thing

The SMB population has many 40, 50 and 60 year olds leading companies that didn’t grow up with the Internet and whose frame of reference when it comes to building the business is grounded in the traditional business models of their generation and marketplace. The digital channel, and even more so the social media channel, are foreign and uncomfortable enough that engagement and utilization is not nearly to the levels they should be.

While there may be more than a grain of truth here, fifteen years of experience, socialization, institutionalization and growth of the Internet as a cornerstone engine of commerce should have overwhelmed any negative sentiment harbored by the vast majority of that population of business leaders that are less than digital-centric.

No time and no bandwidth

Small and mid-size businesses tend to operate as lean as possible and allocating the human and time resources to build and constantly maintain a web presence that can remain beneficial to the enterprise over the long term remains, in too many cases, a non-starter.

Outsourcing non-core activities has become fundamental for senior management to provide successful stewardship of the business they are chartered to lead. Few small and mid-size businesses would or should consider web/e-commerce development as part of their core competencies. That is why there are so many companies that specialize in designing, developing and implementing the state-of-the-art in online presence for so many large enterprises as well as those in the SMB sector. You don’t have to do it yourself to harvest all the benefits of expanding the utility of your business online.

At this stage in the lifecycle of the digital business model, there is no good excuse for companies to sacrifice the growing opportunity offered by the online channel. No matter what industry they operate in and what constituencies they market to, the SMB enterprise risks either total or partial obsolescence if they fail to offer their customer base the multi-channel option that leverages online access.

Posted in Ecommerce, Outsourcing, SMB, Web Development | No Comments »