Let's talk business

Customer Story: Pipestone Veterinary Clinic

Can you guess what this is? Are you any wiser if I tell you it's a Baby Burdizzo? Probably not. Brace yourselves gentlemen because it's used for bloodless castration. Softalk hasn't decided to diversify it's actually one of the products sold by Pipestone Veterinary Clinic, the second in our occassional series of customer case studies.

Pipestone is a good example of the diversity of customers that we've got and if you want a break from looking at technology web sites full of software and PCs then take a look at Pipestone's site where you'll not only find the Baby Burdizzo but also emasculators, hoof shears and ram harnesses.

Pipestone Veterinary Clinic has a large base in South-western Minnesota and performs many traditional veterinary services and also manages several livestock producing companies. It has been in operation since 1943 and has 450 employees who are "helping the farmers of today, creating the farms of tomorrow." It also supplies a wide range of innovative products to livestock farmers including tools for docking and castrating as well as a 'LambCam' to remotely monitor sheep during lambing season by using a web cam.

With 450 employees and three different sites it became increasingly difficult for the staff to work as closely together as they had when Pipestone was still a small local business. One of the things they wanted to do to improve communication and save time was to share contacts and calendars. Pipestone initially looked at Microsoft Exchange Server.

"We outsource our email so it wasn't worthwhile for us to invest time and money in Microsoft Exchange Server. It was too expensive for our needs, both to initially buy it and the resources in time and hardware to configure it and keep it running," explained Terry Huber, Pipestone's Network Administrator.

"We initially found Softalk by using search engines. Installation was easy. I was up and running in less than an hour. We now have three servers that support fifty users that needed to be able to share contacts and calendars."

Softalk has built a solid reputation of excellent customer support and Terry has first-hand experience of this: "I had to call support one time and they were good to deal with. Helpful and friendly, they got to the bottom of the problem in no time at all."

"It's hard to express how truly easy this was to setup. My users immediately started using it so there was no 'learning curve' for them. I would recommend this product to any company looking to share contacts or calendars between users but that doesn't want to spend big money on Microsoft Exchange. By using WorkgroupShare we saved thousands of dollars."

Thank you but now who'll help us polish our trophy?

On behalf of everyone at Softalk I'd like to say a big thank you to YOU - our customers. You see in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Awards we've been ranked as the 138th fastest growing technology company in Europe.

We couldn't possibly have achieved this without the support of you our customers. These are exciting times as there is huge potential in the number of small and medium sized businesses and organisations who want to benefit from messaging, collaboration and contact management but simply can't afford the time and money needed to run Microsoft Exchange and other enterprise software solutions that are more suited to big businesses.

Incidentally the award also means we're officially the fastest growing messaging and collaboration software company headquarted in Europe.

US small businesses optimistic about 2006

Management Issues reports that US small businesses are kind of optimistic about their prospects in 2006 in that they expect to hire more workers and pay them more money.

More than two thirds - 68 per cent - expect to grow faster than they did in 2005.

Small businesses need to think about how they integrate new workers into the team. Big businesses have formal induction processes and expensive team building programmes to help them create productive teams. Small businesses often don't have the time or resources to create fancy handbooks but that doesn't mean they don't need to do some of the same things.

Collaboration software such as Softalk Collaboration Suite, OfficeTalk or Softalk Organizer is only part of the jigsaw of getting your team to work better together.

You don't need to spend a fortune on expensive team-building programmes. How about volunteering to do some useful in your local community? Get the team out of the office to help decorate a community room for older people. Or help some youngsters to clean-up the local park and maybe paint the railings.

Volunteering is great for helping your team bond and what better way than helping people in need? You get a kick out of it and so do the people you're helping. It doesn't need to cost a fortune and you could consider spending the money that normally goes on corporate holiday gifts and cards.

If you don't know how go about it then try contacting an organisation such as Business in the Community (UK) or United Way (USA).

OfficeTalk development in progress

I thought the blog site would be a good forum to keep existing OfficeTalk customers up to date with OfficeTalk developments taking place at Softalk. It would be fair to say that OfficeTalk has suffered from a few years of neglect, but now that we're back in control of the product direction, we're hoping to reverse that trend and breath new life into it over the next few months and years.

Our plan is to release two new versions over the next few months. The first one, version 4.5 is planned for the end of November. The next version, 4.6, is planned for the first half of 2006.

Version 4.5 will fix a few of the more irritating bugs (particularly surrounding email) that customers have reported and will also give OfficeTalk a much needed facelift. The facelift is a result of a study performed on new potential customers, whose first impression of the product was that it looked dated and as a result made them lose confidence in it. Some screen shots of what the new version looks like are shown below.

Calendar mode


Contact mode


Mail mode


Project mode

We've swapped the old top mode bar for the newer more familiar Office XP/Outlook shortcut bar, such that mode specific toolbars now default to the top of the screen. This toolbar can be dragged to wherever you like. It can even float. The blue theme and other colors are optional and you can change them in the profile. Let us know what you think. Feedback to this blog. We've nearly completed the facelift and we're about to tackle email related bugs, where OfficeTalk sometimes struggles to decode certain messages and in other cases crashes. If you've got some really annoying bugs that you really want to see fixed in 4.5, feedback the details to this blog and we'll see what we can do.

Version 4.6 will address many more of the issues that you have reported in your feedback to us.

We've also been busy training our support staff to handle OfficeTalk support. We're nearly there and hope to be able to offer support contracts very soon. We'll let you know as soon as we're ready.

Softalk Collaboration Suite now available

Hi, I'm Wayne Jones and I'm Softalk's global sales manager. Just wanted to let you know that our new Softalk Collaboration Suite is now available. It brings together three of our products to provide a complete messaging and collaboration solution for small and medium size businesses. It's been designed and built specifically for that market and isn't simply a restricted version of an enterprise system. Most businesses should be able to get the system up and running in less than hour, and if you do have difficulty then simply email our tech support department. They are friendly and eager to help, no really they are!

You can read the full launch news release  or why not just download it and try the 30 day free trial for yourself. Oh, and don't forget to let us know what you think by emailing feedback@softalkltd.com . I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Eighty working days lost to inefficient office practices

I'm currently drafting a series of news releases to announce the launch of Softalk Collaboration Suite. As part of my background research I came across this interesting news release from BACS Payment Schemes Limited, the organization that handles automated payments and related services for the UK banks.

It reveals that British employees are losing up to 80 working days every year as a result of inefficient office practices. Predictably the number one time wasting culprit is technology which can waste up to 48 minutes a day. However, the most interesting figure for me was the 34 minutes a day wasted in dealing with colleagues. Much of this is doing simple things such as trying to set up an internal meeting which without a product such as WorkgroupShare (part of Softalk Collaboration Suite) or OfficeTalk requires a lengthy game of email or telephone tag.