Once again, the PointStar family sees another joyous occasion in helping our client – Food Junction – to run on Google Apps. A dream comes true for us PointStar foodies!

With its F&B operations extending across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and China, Food Junction offer for your delectable palates both local and international cuisine your choice of themed food courts and high-end restaurants. Food Junction believes in having its food court tenants to serve good food while not being encumbered by costs and inventory management.

“We handle most of the details of our tenant’s businesses. In exchange, we share in their proceeds,” said Mr Mike Tan, General Manager of Development at Food Junction. “We’re far more involved and share the same level of risks and rewards. When our tenants succeed, we succeed.”

The management of food courts entails the coordination of up to 600 people as well as countless logistics. On top of that, there is the daily administrative function which includes extensive meetings, inventory and budget reviews and protocol drafting to ensure Food Junction’s smooth operation.

However, Food Junction’s previous office tools and email system began to fall short. In addition to the lack of product updates and patches, users were constrained to storing budgets and inventories on their own desktops. This restricts the accessibility of such files to others and created the confusion of attachment copies.

“The previous solution was unproductive and caused huge bottlenecks,” says Mike. “We had to ration inbox storage, struggle with versions, and had no support for archiving and backup.”

Hence, Food Junction began looking for a cost-effective communication and collaboration solution that would improve business processes. “Collaboration, knowledge-sharing, implementing policies and procedures and helping project team collaboration – these were all business processes we wanted to support,” he adds.

Finally in 2009, after considering both in-house and hosted solutions in the market, Food Junction consulted PointStar – a web, enterprise, and mobile solution provider – for the implementation of Google Apps.

The transition to Google Apps was seamless. Using Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook as the front-end with Gmail as the backend made the transition transparent for users. Remote users immediately moved to Gmail and Google Apps due to their easy access on laptops and mobiles.

Working with PointStar, Google Sites was also employed to develop Food Junction’s intranet with 12 sites for each department and one main corporate site. After the implementation of Google Apps, teamwork and collaboration have improved significantly. “Our team is now more effectively coordinated, especially with Gmail’s built-in voice, video, and text chat capabilities,” says Mike.

“With Google Apps, communication among peers is a click away, and it shows in our operations.”

—Mike Tan, General Manager of Development at Food Junction

Mike notes that Google Calendar‘s reminders are useful in keeping things organised when it comes to meetings and appointments. Google instant messaging lets people communicate interactively – and instantly. Google Docs lets everyone collaborate on inventories and budgets, making version control issues a thing of the past. The IT department can back up and archive emails through Google Postini, saving thousands of dollars that would otherwise be spent on local backup storage. To top it off, Google Sites now enables access to the latest templates, policies, and procedures – a must in the food service business. Food Junction has also integrated a collaborative project management solution with SmartSheet (Available from the Google Apps Marketplace) to helps the Food Junction team track projects with ease.

According to the Food Junction Team, they greatly appreciates the Google Apps’ flexibility to work on mobile devices. “There’s no longer a need to deploy mobile services and devices the conventional way,” says Mike. “It’s great to see users connecting easily with Google Apps for mobile email access.” Mike concludes that the implementation has created efficiencies for Food Junction.

“The up-front savings when compared to Microsoft were obvious,” he says. “Google constantly improves the design and features of Google Apps, which has a positive effect on our business. Whether updating a budget or changing up a menu, everything gets done faster and more efficiently since moving to Google Apps.”

For more information, you can check out Food Junction’s Customer Story here.

The PointStar family is proud to announce that our client – Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Singapore (ICPAS) – is now running on Google Apps and seeing new levels of IT efficiencies. How’s that for a win-win scenario?

As the national accountancy body that regulate the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Singapore profession since 1963, ICPAS supports over more than 21,000 CPAs in Singapore and around the world. In its strategic plan to further globally promote accountancy excellence, ICPAS had began to develop new infrastructures and capabilities. Of paramount importance to this will be the need to advance its existing IT systems.

Previously, ICPAS  was running on a legacy email system with only basic email services. Dr Ernest Kan, President of ICPAS, stated that ICPAS faced other challenges as well which involves security, data backup, ease of use, and service responsiveness. He also pointed that they needed a vendor with better SLAs (Service Level Agreement). Solving these issues would help reduce the burden of their IT staff and allow them to deliver greater value to the organisation. Living up to its brand repute,  ICPAS was very indeed thorough in evaluating choices for a solution. Security, data back-up procedures, demo comparisons of competing systems, contractual terms and SLAs, functionalities to increase staff productivity and checks for Open APIs were part of ICPAS’s extensive assessments for a suitable IT solution provider.

In August 2009, after evaluating most of the leading vendors of email and collaboration tools, ICPAS chose PointStar for its Google Apps implementation. “We engaged with Google and our implementation partner, PointStar, from day one,” says Dr Kan. Our PointStar engineers and consultants immediately went on-site to understand the specific requirements and needs of the organization itself. In just two months, close communication and rapid iterations are a few factors for a customized Google Apps implementation throughout ICPAS .

According to Dr Kan, staff readily adopted and preferred the features in Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Sites. “Our entire staff has responded positively to the switch to Google Apps,” says Dr Kan. Google Sites is well-accepted to help centralize documents as well as a virtual workspace for enhanced organization. “The ease of accessing files on Google Sites makes it easier for everyone to move projects forward and stay more informed for follow-up discussions,” says Dr Kan. For IT staff, Google Apps is easily managed and provide cost-effective security and backup. “This has resulted in substantial savings on maintenance costs. In addition to decreasing IT costs, our IT staff can now focus on deploying mission-critical applications and systems, leading to greater cost and operational efficiencies across the organisation.”

Our PointStar team will like to offer ICPAS our immense gratitude for being able to help ICPAS in its strategic development to “Go Google”.

“The Institute serves as the voice of the accountancy profession in Singapore and is involved in key areas of public education, advocacy, member development and standard-setting, among others. All of these efforts require substantial coordination and quick response time among staff members located in the main office and in satellite facilities across Singapore’s central business district.” “With Google’s 99.9% uptime guarantee, we no longer have to worry about having issues with our email server and the time it takes to resolve them. This has resulted in substantial savings on maintenance costs.”

—Dr Ernest Kan, President, ICPAS

For more information, you can check out ICPAS’s Customer Story here.

New features now allow Google Apps administrators to flexibly manage Google Apps within their organizations!

Google listed enhancements from over the past few months that include multi-domain support, new data migration tools, SSL enforcement capabilities, mobile device security controls, and Google Apps customizations with over a hundred applications at the new Google Apps Marketplace.

However, Google really did outdo itself this time with a new release of the much needed administrative feature for the organizational context- Google Apps user policy management.

Now Google Apps administrators can segment their users into organizational units and control the access to these applications for each group. For example, a particular firm might want to give their office workers access to Google Talk, but not their production line employees. ”We work with businesses with 100 to 20,000 employees moving from on-premise solutions to Google Apps. The new user policy management feature helps us tailor Google Apps and provide businesses with granular control for each department within their company”, noted Mayooran Rajan, CTO of Revevol Consulting.

The new controls also allows organizations to pilot test applications for a few specific groups before making them more widely available e.g. the use of Google Wave and its relevant policies. Transition to Google Apps from on-premise environments can be made more acceptable and adaptable. E.g. a business can just only enable collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google sites for users who are still handling old on-premise messaging clients/servers.

A snapshot of the simple Google Apps Admin Interface for managing user policies

To manage these settings , Administrators will simply need to access the ‘Organizations & users’ tab in the ‘Next generation’ control panel. Alternatively, organizations can mirror their existing LDAP organizational schema using Google Apps Directory Sync. Otherwise, they can program to assign users to organizational units using the Google Apps Provisioning API.

This new features will extend to Google Apps Premier and Education edition users for free. To learn more about user policy management on Google Apps, yo can visit the Google Help Center here.

Last year, we see Google Apps going mobile with new enhancements that help addresses the growing market for mobile productivity.

“In a world focused on improving business productivity, companies look to solutions like Google Apps to provide employees with seamless access to information regardless of location or device. With the rising adoption of Internet-enabled devices, employees increasingly seek access to their email, documents, and other corporate data from their mobile phone,” said Bryan Mawhinney, Google Mobile Software Engineer.

So what have we been seeing till now? Well, the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server was launched to cater to Blackberry users. New web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar, along with updates to Google Docs were also rolled out for Android users. Google Sync for iPhone, Nokia E series, and Windows Mobile devices were also released. Google Apps users can now access and sync their mails, calendars, and contacts from their mobile device from Google’s cloud.

Earlier this February, Google further enhanced Google Apps’ mobile potential by enabling new controls for administrators to ensure corporate policy enforcement across a wide range of mobile devices.

What does this imply? Without the need for additional software or to manage dedicated enterprise mobile servers, both Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can now manage their users’ iPhone, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices directly from the Google Apps administrative control panel.

The new management controls for mobile devices entails that administrators can now:

• Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices
• Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity
• Require a device password on each phone
• Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords
• Require passwords to include letters, numbers and punctuation

Access these features simply via the ‘Mobile’ tab under ‘Service Settings’ in the Google Apps control panel. Once a user starts syncing their devices with Google Apps, the domain administrator will be able to remotely wipe the one’s device data in the case of theft or loss.

Such policies will let employees conveniently access their documents and emails from their phone while allowing IT administrators to manage existing caches of corporate data on mobile devices.

But alas! Google would not just stop there. This month, Google Apps administrators will have even more options as follow to flexibly manage mobile devices from the admin control panel:

• Requiring devices to use data encryption
• Auto-wiping device after specified number of failed password attempts
• Disabling the phone’s camera
• Helping to ensure that old passwords are not reused
• Requiring passwords to be changed after specified time interval
• Disabling of data synchronization when roaming to help reduce wireless overage charges

Currently, the Google Apps editions that feature these new capabilities are the Premier and Education Editions. However, do note that in order to access these options, the Administrator Control Panel needs to be set to ‘Next generation (US English only)’ version under ‘Domain Settings’.

Such mobility of Google Apps will certainly be well-received in small businesses which are highly mobile in general. With the increasing benefits of convenience and pricing for the ubiquitous mobile device, Google is certainly seated at the forefront for implementing mobile management of corporate data security. It is without a doubt that we will see even more enhancements for the mobile in even data backup and monitoring.

Introducing the latest roll-out of the Google Mission- App Inventor for Android – a free web-based software tool meant for the masses or non-developers to realize their own Android applications. Yes, Google is bringing Android App development to the masses with the mobile platforms.

With the support of Google University Relations, the technology has been under development for a year, mainly involving educational organizations. User testing groups ranges from university undergraduates to even sixth graders, high school girls and nursing students. With the introduction of the Android ecosystem to the public as well as the classroom contexts, it may well be a boon for Google in the smartphone-software market. In contrary, Apple adopts a more tightly managed approach to app development for the iPhone via licensing and vetting.

App Inventor allows people to drag and drop blocks of code – displayed as graphical images that represents various app elements– and put them together, almost akin to building Lego blocks.The result is a mobile app made from scratch, making the idea of creating an app potentially well-received. As such, the App Inventor can be likened as a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) app development tool for Android, entailing a possible explosion of new mobile apps on the market. Disregarding the value of these ‘home-made’ apps, the App Inventor can help nurture and train a growing community of young content developers for the Android platform.

However, the App Inventor is currently limited to work only for phones that run on Android software. Being web-based, a sign-up with a Google Gmail account is required. A small software download is also needed to automatically syncs the programs created on a PC, connected to the application inventor website, with an Android smartphone.

New York Times quotes Mr Harold Ableson, both project leader and MIT computer scientist, “The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world.” A proponent of opening up intellectual and technological resources, Mr Abelson is also a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Creative Commons.

The business world today made it paramount to effectively utilize web metrics for ROI in Internet marketing. In response, I will recommend the webinar ”Top 5 Things Marketers Can Do Now“  by Avinash Kaushik to all marketers with regards to web analytics. Avinash Kaushik is well-known as the author of the recently published “Web Analytics 2.0” after his bestseller – “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day“. He is also touted as the Analytics Evangelist for Google in addition to Co-Founder/Chief Education Officer of Market Motive. “Top 5 Things Marketers Can Do Now” feature tips on employing data-driven insights for immediate strategic marketing decisions, improving marketing efficiency and generating greater returns on your marketing investments. Do pardon the lacking audio quality of the video below but be assured that the potential insights are certainly of much value for application in Internet marketing.

In the session, Kaushik started off  by quoting Jan Carlzon on the aggregation of marginal gains; “You cannot improve one thing by 1,000% but you can improve 1,000 little things by 1%” He emphasized the fixing of the many 1%s in order to build a foundation. Hence, with relevance to Internet marketing, the webinar will be focusing on the Company Website. He drew up 3 Outcomes to be expected of the Company Website:

1. Increase Revenue (Regardless of whether your business is a non-profit or for-profit)
2. Reduce Costs (Think about IT support costs, acquisition costs)
3. Improve Customer Satisfaction/Loyalty/Rentention

A web analytics tool such as Google Analytics usually has a built-in dashboard that displays a pie chart featuring the different demographics of your Company Website’s traffic e.g. Direct Traffic, Search Engines, Referring Sites and Others. This alone can sufficiently provide valuable information in measuring your marketing tactics. Kaushik also highlighted the Overall Conversion Rate – usually available in the Report on Google Analytics – which inform sthe user of traffic sources/websites/social streams that has gorwing value or profits. Meanwhile, data comparisons from website traffics and conversion rates also help in identifying potential market segments.

With a mere act of filling in your conversion, lead generation and franchisee application processes on Google Analytics and a ‘click’ on “Save Changes”, Google Analytics will collect the data in each step and you can see the results in the funnel visualization report, with constant updates by Google Analytics.

From more information, you may wish to check out the following video from Google Analytics.

An Example of a Conversion Funnel from Google Analytics

To further illustrate, the conversion funnel as seen above indicates that only about 17% of website traffic actually undergo conversion pinpointing either a potential website design flaw or process delay.

In the later segments of the webinar, Kaushik introduces the Customer Bounce Rate Metric as a helpful indicator of  number of visitors who leave your website entirely without making purchases. More tips on website design will be provided here as well.

Clearly, web analytics will pave the future in quantifying business investments in Internet marketing. Coupled with Google’s continuous drive to innovate new improvements, it is certainly worthwhile to apply Google Analytics free-of-charge!

They may not be able to see eye-to-eye when it comes to the Android and iPhone. But there is a twist in Google’s relationship with Apple around the new Apple iPad. To put it simply, the iPad frenzy has hit Google as well.

Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard had almost devoted  his entire lunch time on the 25th June with journalists in San Francisco to tout iPad’s success and how it will benefit Google. Apparently, Girouard has been attending more meetings with chief information officers who are eager to show their iPads, making it easier for him to demonstrate Google’s office tools bundle - Google Apps. ”Every CIO I meet is carrying an iPad these days,” he said.

Girouard described the iPad as “the ultimate statement of the consumerization of IT to date.” Past meetings with CIOs and IT managers traditionally revolved around queries on how Google Apps match up against Office features e.g. pivot tables, the data summarization tool in Excel. But the Apple iPad helped changed everything.

“Apple’s opened the minds of a lot of IT people” to think beyond the classic Office on a desktop PC model“, Girouard had added. Such enlightening effects of the mobile Apple iPad helps Google to demonstrate the business advantages of cloud-based Google Apps as an Office alternative.

While the iPad may seem lacking as a Google complement due to differences in nature between web-based Google Apps and Apple’s mostly downloadable native apps, Girouard highlighted the iPad as a promising class of devices that are “growing up in the world of the cloud.

Accumulating over a million users as of now, Google Voice - a web-based platform to manage your communications –  will soon revolutionize modern telephony by combining your regular phone service with the latest web technology, irregardless of what phone or carrier you use.

As seen in the figure and introduction video below, Google Voice allows one to communicate in much more ways than ever in telephony’s modern history.

To use Google Voice, you get the choice of using a Google number or non-Google number. Choosing to use a Google number while setting up Google Voice allows you to access a number of extra Google Voice features.  It is not possible to use your existing mobile number with all of Google Voice’s features at this time.

Choosing to use a non-Google number during Google Voice setup allows you to have access to Google voicemail and other select Google Voice features with your existing mobile number.

For more information, check out the Google Voice website to see the tabulated differences between using a Google number and non-Google number.

The revolutionary features of Google Voice include (For more information, you might want to check out Google Voice’s short but greatly informative and creative Feature Videos or http://www.youtube.com/googlevoice):

• Google Voice automatically transcribes your voicemails to text, allowing you to read your voicemail and search through past voicemails
• Use one number to selectively or ring all the phones at once
• Choose personalized voicemail greetings for different people
• Make international calls at very low rates (Calls can be initiated  from the web, your Google Voice number, or the Google Voice mobile app)
• Text messages sent to your Google Voice number can be configured to be sent to your email (You can reply on from your email account to save on outgoing fees)
• You can share voicemail messages with other people, just like emails
• You can also block unwanted callers
• You can now screen your callers before answering, listen in while the voicemail is being left, and ‘jump in’ to engage them
• Google Voice mobile app allows you to place calls featuring your Google Voice number as your outbound caller number, make cheap international calls, and VISUALLY ALTERNATE between voicemail messages.
• Conference calls are now easy with Google Voice on all phones (Just have the participants call your Google Voice number and you’ll be prompted to add them to the call)
• And more upcoming from the works (Sending SMS to multiple recipients, Google Chrome extension, send invites to friends, play voicemails within Gmail, receive & reply to SMS via email, Google Voice keyboard shortcuts to call & send SMS, changing your Google Voice number, etc)

However, Google Voice is currently only open to U.S. only but will be expanded to include other countries in the future, as seen in Google’s reply for a non-U.S. user.

Otherwise, sign in your Google account to experience this purported pinnacle of human communication.

Today, collaborative work can get even easier and manageable.

Google Docs recently made it easier for everyone to share their documents with colleagues and teams via a new simplified interface to control the access to your files.

To see the new interface, check out this video:

Now, documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Google Docs can be identified as “Private”, “Anyone with a link”, or “Public on the web” as settings for access. The earlier Google Docs have all documents start out as “Private” in default.

An example of how the interface looks like (from The Official Google Blog – “Easier sharing in Google Docs”)

The 3 Sharing Settings on Google DocsThese new visibility options will appear as a link next to the title of every Google Docs. Clicking this link or the “Share” button will display the new interface where you can easily see who has access, manage sharing access and invite others to share the Google Docs.

To know more about Google Docs‘s recent roll-outs and how users can share their documents easily within their organization, check out Google‘s post on the Enterprise Blog or  blog post on Technorati.

Today, while reloading the video for last year’s Business of Software conference in Sans Francisco, I found renewed interest in a particular session.

For your information, Business of Software is an annual conference run by Joel Spolsky (CEO, Fog Creek Software) & Neil Davidson (CEO Redgate Software) to impart to people about the business of software.

Paul Kenny, Ocean Learning & Speaker at Business of Software

Paul Kenny, one of UK’s top sales consultant, trainer and speakers, shared his rich experience from customers over 3 continents by speaking on the corporate sales function. Though the context is localized for an IT enterprise, there is a strong parallel and application in all other businesses.

Paul Kenny illustrated the “chasm of misunderstanding” between the sales people and the software/product managers, despite the inhabitation of the same space.

However, he pointed that out that everyone in the company has a sales function, whether you have a sales department or not. After all, both Sales and Software/Product managers do need to talk to their customers, be in over emails, Tweets and phone.

To bridge the gap between the two parties, Paul sees a need to shape the challenge to nurture/seek the Sales Entrepreneur who are both entrepreneurial and salesy.

He has several strong advantages:

• An unparalleled knowledge of the company’s products and technologies
• Market/customer insights
• Sensitivity to feedbacks

What are his/her weaknesses then? Well, they are his/her own strengths in fact. Quite the irony but there is an inherent logic about it. Firstly, a well-versed Sales Entrepreneur may lead to various talking points, regardless of relevancy and at risk of boring the discussion. A Sales Entrepreneur may also at times,  expect the Customers to see and know the way they do.  He/she may expect certain feedback, and due to their sensitivity, bristle when the customers felt otherwise.

Well, his/her own strengths in fact. Quite the irony but there is an inherent logic about it. Firstly, a well-versed Sales Entrepreneur may lead to various talking points, regardless of relevancy and at risk of boring the discussion. A Sales Entrepreneur may also at times,  expect the Customers to see and know the way they do.  He/she may expect certain feedback, and due to their sensitivity, bristle when the customers felt otherwise.

Paul continue to emphasize the shift from job to role to engage their customers beyond mere show and tell; to share while getting interested in the customer’s story as well. This will mark the change in sales focus to customer focus.

Learn to ask questions and tell stories like painting pictures, he said. Stories prove to be more comprehensible and engaging, as compared to circulation figures and demographics. Similarly our cultures also encompass series of stories over decades. Stories highlight what the customer hoped to hear e.g. what the product and service can achieve to help.

When people meet, they converse by sharing stories. Keeping this in mind, we do also need to listen to our customers’ stories. Paul also observed that there is over-reliance on quantification for Sales in medical companies, software and IT enterprise. Simply put, data explains while stories inspire e.g. a success change in one’s life due to a particular product.

To learn more, do catch the upcoming Business of Software 2010 conference, held in Boston from October 4th – 6th 2010.