During the early part of this year I had been contacted to demonstrate our Data-Stream solution for Cybertill. The response to our solution has been fantastic.

Despite the bad weather, travelling to the south coast and up to Scotland through the snow and freezing conditions one night at -15 and that was inside the Hotel!

During these presentations, one of the finest comments we received was 

"the solution was even better than they had expected and could open them to opportunities that they had not even considered"

Hearing comments like this are really pleasing for us, as it shows that our efforts over the past two years to provide a solution that not only resolves the SEO issue but offers new and exciting ways to grow and expand business on-line opportunities.

But it's not all been about Cybertill clients we have been engaged by an internet business to provide our managed Service' solution, becoming their designers, developers and general on-line IT providers.

Using our managed services, the business estimates that it will save over £30,000 in running costs, which naturally improves the business profitability overall. More to come on this story later.

So over the past few months, we have been engaged by four new clients, with a further three battling with their current providers, who despite not being able to provide the level of service they require are making the transition to Data-Stream more difficult than it really should be. Surely as a service provider you should be working in your client’s best interest!..or is that just my opinion?

As ever, would welcome any comments and feedback on our blogs, please feel free to post your comments below.

It's been a while since I have had the time to blog. The new year has seen enquiries about Data-Stream flowing in steadily and I've been busy working both with existing clients and presenting the system to new and prospective ones.

When I visit clients looking to use our Data-Stream solution for Cybertill two questions are always asked, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to address those questions on my blog.

These two key questions are:

1. What is my background?
2. What is Data-Stream For?

My Background

Some of my old Cybertill accounts will be aware of my background, but for those Cybertill clients that aren't I was an Account Manager at Cybertill between 2003 - 2007. My accounts were located across the U.K. from as far as Elgin in Scotland to St. Peter in Jersey, and across to Ballynahinch in Northern Ireland.

Prior to working for Cybertill I worked as a butcher for 20 years, running my own shop in Rainhill. During that time I spotted a gap in the market for good-quality, re-useable and hygenic ticketing for the food industry. I created my own range of tickets which I sold to other retailers, developing my I.T. skills along the way. Eventually I moved into developing software solutions.

With my technical understanding and previous experience as a retailer I was able to discuss issues across all levels within a business. I was able to identify problems within a business and offer solutions and suggestions to these problems.

Data-Stream

So what is Data-Stream for? Quite simply as a simple method to use Cybertill's SOAP service for third party development. Data-Stream makes it easy to host an external website linked to the clients EPoS system, without the need for expensive development to be undertaken, an alternative to the standard template offering from Cybertill.

The system is not limited to use in any one particular sector. In fact the spread of sectors Data-Stream has been used in is almost as wide and varied as the loactions of my account spread whilst at Cybertill!

Sectors include:

• Designer Fashion Clothing
• Furniture
• Cycling
• Motor Cycling
• Music
• Gifts and jewellery

Of course every business has different requirements and different priorities. But what all businesses with an online store need, without exception, is a web module that seamlessly integrates with their EPoS system and allows them the functionality and control they need to tailor their site to their specific needs.

And this is why Data-Stream was developed - to provide online retailers with the functionality, flexibility and control that other web module providers have been unable to offer.

I still travel the country meeting with my old accounts providing help & support were I can and would welcome the opportunity to show you what Data-Stream can do for your company, please contact me either on 07833208654, via email or use our contact form

It has been brought to our attention that we have a browser issue with IE7 displaying the page content properly.

We have noticed that when the page loads certain elements, notably the 3 centre div's, the white background colour is not filling correctly. This only occurs on the home page and does not affect the rest of the site. We are currently working on a fix for this issue and will update and re-post accordingly.

To experience the site as it should be we would recommend using Firefox or Safari browser in the meantime.

It's been a while since I posted my last blog, and I am glad to say that's because I've been extremely busy looking after our clients, adding new features and upgrades and speaking to new customers, who I look forward to welcoming onto Data-Stream.

What has become clear through my conversations with our existing and prospective customers is the need for us to offer a managed service.

One of the key issues with small business is dealing with a lack of time and HR pressures.

That is not to say that staff are reluctant to provide help and support, it is that they do not have the time to fit everything in.

Another frequent problem is that not every business can afford to employ specialists in every area of the business.

Having worked in retail over the years, I understand the demands of serving customers, who are the absolute priority, and day to day tasks such as re stocking, ordering, tidying, labelling, updating etc. They all take time out of your day, so where do you find the time to maintain a website?

Using a managed service allows you to free up your staff from dealing with additional tasks and leave it to professionals experienced in website management. This is a more efficient way of working and ensures you maximise your personnel in the roles they are responsible for.

With a managed service you also have a fixed cost to judge its suitability to your business.

The problem of utilising existing staff and putting them into these roles is that you cannot gauge their suitability to the job and it is more difficult to calculate the time and cost to your business. As an example, lets say you have a member of staff that is employed at a rate of £5.25 per hour. Assuming they were responsible to look after your website and worked, without missing a day for a full month (160 hours) it would cost your business £840, excluding any NI payments and anything else you would pay.

With services starting at less than £500 per month, including the hosting, maintenance upgrades, licences etc. managed services allow you to free up your staff and provide a quantifiable fixed cost to your business. Plus, as it is a business expense, it is allowable against tax!

Let me know your thoughts on this, feel free to post your comments below.
 

With the launch of our exclusive 'MPF' (Multi Portal Feed) tool I thought it was worth explaining our reasoning for the development of this tool and the benefits of using it.

The internet e-commerce arena is a huge 'virtual market'. Like markets in the real world the key to success is location and footfall. In the virtual arena

• Location = High ranking in search results
• Footfall = Number of visitors to a site

Currently you can use SEO (search engine optimisation) to improve your ‘location’ and key ad words to increase ‘footfall’ to your site.
Although these methods are good and have proved successful, they are means to try and force the market in your favour, which can be hard work and also expensive.

The Data-Stream concept of ‘MPF’ is to simply put your products in the best pitches.

Our MPF allows you to publish your products on other portals, already established in prime 'Location' with high volume 'Footfall'.

As on-line shoppers look more for their bargains having a dynamic product display on your home page is essential.

Using our 'Featured Products' repeater, the ability to show random products makes this a simple option selection.

This simple to use tool allows you to filter your products by:

• Public Status

• Internal Status

• Department

You can even specify the number of Random products to display per page.

The major benefit of this is the ability to feature a selection of products for different reasons and present them to your visitors in a random way. This promotes a more dynamic site, each visitor getting a different view of your products each time they visit rather than the same old home page.

This is just one of the many features available via the Data-Stream for Cybertill website
 
Data-Stream is a simple plug-in facility that connects directly to a Cybertill website and populates a new website with data directly form the Cybertill back office.

This is a question I am asked each and every visit I make.

To improve your search engine ranking, Data-Stream allows you to create Friendly URL's so when you need to create a unique URL for example for some marketing campaign, you can define a custom URL for every document that is independent on its position in the site structure.

For example, you could use

http://mydomain.com/nokia

instead of

http://mydomain.com/products/phones/nokia.

As you can see, the URL doesn't contain any extra parameters, such as ?tabid=7498 that might not be understood by the search engine robot.

The URL can be customised by changing the document alias. You can also choose which characters should be replaced in the URL and the replacement character - e.g. you can choose that spaces are replaced with dash (-) in the URL.

Using this process allows you to build search engine friendly web sites that can be easily indexed by Google and other search engines.

What are your thoughts on this?

As a complete slolution to intergrate a website into the Cybertill EPoS system Data-Stream is a fully loaded CMS (Content Management System)

For User
With the Data-Stream CMS, you can edit your web site content without any technical knowledge. If you know how to use Word, it will be easy for you to learn using Data-Stream CMS.

Your web site can contain more than words. Data-Stream CMS allows you to build on-line forms, perform surveys and create on-line communities using forums, blogs and newsletters.

For Developers
If you have already taken a look at the Cybertill SOAP services you will already understand the challenges ahead.

With the Data-Stream CMS, you can achieve better results with less effort and in shorter time than with traditional development by leveraging:

• Fast, browser-based development with minimum coding

• All Cybertill services are ready-to-use as web parts

• High flexibility and full control over rendered HTML code

• Open and extensible architecture

• Works with Visual Studio and Dreamweaver development app's

What used to require writing ADO.NET code, SQL queries and using databound controls, can be done with a few mouse-clicks in the Data-Stream CMS.