ReadyTalk will be implementing Drupal 7 for our new website, one of the most feature-rich and secure online content management systems available. Since ReadyTalk has been developing its new site on Drupal 6, we had to decide whether or not it would be worthwhile to move to the newest version. For anyone looking to move up, specifically if you are just beginning or are in mid-development, I’ll explore some of the considerations we made while making the jump.

Most of the modules that ReadyTalk needed were in development (and many are still in alpha or beta as I write this article). Before moving up, we looked at the modules we required and found any critical issues that had not been fixed. Some modules were no longer available but were integrated as standard in Drupal 7. Most notably is CCK. The Drupal team saw the ubiquitous implementation of this module in Drupal 6 and decided it was important enough to include in Drupal 7 core. Others also changed dependencies and as such did not require supporting modules. In most cases, we did not lose any functionality that we had originally planned for version 6, and in many cases we gained features.

We were fortunate enough that all of our required modules were well on their way to being ported. The one speed bump thus far has been migrations. Currently no graphical interface exists for moving data from WordPress or other databases into Drupal 7 (unlike in Drupal 6 with Migrate and Table Wizard), so migrations had to be written using the Migrate API. The Migrate module includes excellent examples for getting started, although at the writing of this article, formal documentation is lacking. Once the migrations were written we were able to pull data from our current website into nodes and taxonomies in Drupal.

While our new site is still under development, we look forward to many of the new features Drupal 7 has to offer. Most notably it offers greater simplicity over its predecessor, which will make it easy for our marketing department to offer quick updates and news to our users and prospects.

If you are looking to make the move to Drupal 7, or if you already have, let us know what you went through to get there. We look forward to showing you what we’re making, but want to hear about your projects as well!

By Melanie Turek, Industry Director, Frost & Sullivan

“An educated consumer is our best customer.”

That’s the tag line from a series of TV ads that ran on the local station when I was a kid in New York, for a mom-and-pop clothing store. It was a counter-intuitive message for the time, but it’s always stuck with me, because it’s always made sense. And it’s as true today as it was back then.

Using webinars for customer training can save you time and money.

As all sales managers know, it’s easier to get more business out of an existing customer than it is to land a new one. That means your sales efforts should focus on your customer base to drive revenues—and the best way to do that is to demonstrate the value of your products and services, day in and day out. If your customers know what makes your offering better than the competition’s—and are able to use them efficiently and effectively, whenever they need to—they will be much more likely to continue doing business with you in the future, and to look to you for new products and services as their needs arise.

Indeed, having a well trained customer base that understands your product delivers several clear benefits:

• Higher customer engagement. If your customers know how to use your products and services effectively, they’ll become much more engaged with your business and your brand. That makes it much more likely they will look to you to supply their future needs in your market area.
• Decreased customer attrition. When customers understand your business and your products, they are much more likely to stay loyal to your brand. This is especially true if they feel they are getting added value from interacting with your business. Educational sessions that highlight broad areas and issues of interest—which may be related to your products and services, but not directly about them—can go a long way toward cementing customer loyalty.
• Higher revenues per customer. When people know how to use your products effectively, they will get more value from them—and they will look to your business to supply new products and services as they need them. It’s much easier and more cost-effective to grow business with an existing customer than jump-start business with a new one.
• Lower overall support costs. By providing ongoing training to your customers, you are essentially nipping support and service issues in the bud. This will help you keep costs down, since you can address these needs for more people at one time, and on your schedule. Anytime you can lower the number of support calls into your business, you are lowering costs—and improving customer satisfaction in the process.

By keeping your customers educated on the market you operate in—offering them best practices advices, news they can use, and specific product information—you are ensuring they stay connected, invested and loyal to your business. For more on how web conferencing can help you stay in touch with your customers, regardless of where they’re located and without incurring enormous expenses—join me for a webinar on Wednesday, February 23, 2:00 p.m. EST entitled “Effective Online Training: Tips from the Experts” and learn the insider secrets to a successful online training program.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.

Work. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, right? That saying may be well suited for some industries, such as professional sports and knitting, but in the technically driven industry of software engineering it isn’t quite accurate. Instead, the saying would be something like “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…” This is the challenge of the work we engineers have self-selected for ourselves. There is always some aspect of the job that is dull and mundane, and overcoming this to still achieve great things is often a problem that software companies face. How do you keep your engineers happy and engaged? How do you provide them the freedom and autonomy to innovate, yet still meet business objectives and needs?

Taking a cue from Google and their 80/20 rule, we here at ReadyTalk implemented an R&D concept that we refer to as ReadyTalk Labs. In case you haven’t heard or have been living under a rock, Google’s 80/20 rule is where an engineer gets to essentially spend 20% of their time working on their own thing (but still company related) and 80% of their time working on Google things. Their 20% time could be spent on almost anything across the company that they are passionate about, but often it ends up having a direct impact on the product. Things like GMail, AdSense and Google News were born from the 80/20 concept.

Our implementation of Labs began as 20% of each iteration. Our scrum teams work in 2-week iterations, so 2 days of every iteration could be spent on ReadyTalk Labs work. This continued for several months, but what we found when we looked back at how it was progressing was that we had not appropriately solved the problem. The challenge we saw in our implementation came down to the basic human challenge of balancing one’s time. The engineers were challenged to be available to help work on production issues, or lend a hand to other engineers yet still carve out those 16 hours of Labs time. This usually resulted in engineers actually skipping that Labs time altogether.

So we dove into brainstorming this problem once more, and emerged with a much better implementation of RT Labs. What we chose to do was allow every scrum team to take every 5th iteration as a Labs iteration. It still boils down to 20% of their time, but what this allows is for the teams to really focus on something substantial in their Labs time. It also helps to set expectations with the Product team, so they know that a team that is on their Labs iteration will not be committing to any product driven work for that iteration, which solves the problem of forcing the team to prioritize their own innovation time against product requests. We originally staggered each teams Labs iteration so that at any given time only 1 team for a given product line was working on labs stuff. We have since modified this so that all teams Labs iterations align as much as possible, to allow for more cross-team labs work to occur. You can read more about our Labs time in a recent Denver Post article, “Labs” time elicits ideas at ReadyTalk.

In this day and age, when technology is advancing so quickly and every company is trying to find that next big thing that will launch them into the stratosphere, keeping your top talent happy and engaged should be priority number one. How are you or your company achieving this goal?

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.

The marketing department at ReadyTalk is participating in Telework week to promote ReadyTalk’s entrée into the Federal Government. Today is my scheduled day to telework. Coincidentally, I also got a last minute opportunity to stay up in our condo at Winter Park, CO and spend some time with my family. Turns out I can do both.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of teleworking, it is the act of working from home or from an alternative work place – really from anywhere. Today’s technology enables this possibility. With smart phones, corporate VPNs, web mail, instant messaging – and, ahem, audio and web conferencing – workers can be more productive, efficient, green – and get a little more time in with the family.

This morning I’ll be working from the condo. This afternoon I’ll step outside into the beautiful Colorado sunshine and enjoy my first ski day in seven years with my twin 6-year-old boys (who said they will go easy on me). Work/life balance at its very best.

ReadyTalk will be doing more in the next few months to support our efforts in the government market. Watch our webinar series for presentations on how to work with the government and more on telework practices. We’ll be attending Telework Town Hall and the GSA Expo in DC in April and May.

To learn more about how ReadyTalk’s technology enables teleworking for the Federal government and other companies visit www.readytalk.com/gov. ReadyTalk services are available through our GSA contract number GS-35F-0084X. Our services are also available on GSA Advantage! For more information, visit the GSA Advantage! site or contact our Government Sales team.