When I started in 24SevenOffice at the age of ninteen back in 2000 we were four guys who tried to build a basic web-based crm and invoicing system for small businesses. Since then the strategy, product suite and company has grown into one of the two most advanced and comprehensive web-based erp-solution’s in the world. The company was listed on Oslo Stock Exchange last year and now has over fifty employees. Building a CRM-system and being one of the first products to use Ajax has been very interesting and I have enjoyed the years at 24SevenOffice. But seven years is a long time and I do not see myself as a programmer in ten og twenty years. I also prefer to work in a smaller company with more influence over the strategy.

I am confident in 24SevenOffice’s success in the future. I am nowhere near the sell-button in my stock portfolio. But I should say that my cravings to see the world and finding new challenges is not the only reasons why I am no longer with 24SevenOffice. Lack of international focus (specially US), choosing to build advanced and complex product modules instead of opting for easy and simple solutions, and little willingness to build cross-platform solutions were issues me and 24SevenOffice’s management disagreed on. Advanced is good but additional features should come in later versions and be less visible. 37Signals and Google may lack many features but it is the simple interface and workflow that makes them succesfull.

My plans for the future is to travel for at least six months, hopefully a year. As mentioned I am now in Iran. I flew out to Istanbul three weeks ago and spent two days there. Then by train to Tehran. I met two cool italian guys and we toured around the country: Yazd, Kerman, Bandar-Abbas, Minab, Qeshm Island, Shiraz, Esfehan. I am now in Kashan and will head north again to Terhan for snowboarding in Dizin. Snowboarding in Iran you might ask yourself. Yes, there are many high mountains here. Dizin is at 3000m and has fantastic powder snow. And it is cheap. For example the bus I took from Esfehan to Kashan took 3,5 hours and cost 1,5 dollar. And no I was not sitting next to a chicken. The buses here are modern Volvo’s and you get a small snack on the journey.

The rest of my very flexible travel itinerary is like this:
Dubai, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, China, Japan, Filliphines, Australia, Argentina, Brazil.

I will create a travel blog later. Internet is painfully slow here so I will wait until I go to Dubai so I can upload some photos.

1. Track campaigns from other advertising networks and see resuls in Analytics and preferably AdWords.
2. Track specific campaign internally in our system. This way I can see which specific campaigns our registration came from. Thus in 24SevenOffice I can use our CRM-module to get overall statics on sales opportunities to see which campaign that does not only lead to a conversion (registration) in AdWords but also the number of actual sales and how much $ we get out of each campaign. This will be a powerful solution to measure ROI on all internet advertising we do.

In AdWords you can set up cross-channel campaigns but for some reason you need to set up a specific landing page with javascript code, but I do not a specific landing page for all our campaigns (we are testing out various other advertising networks). Hopefully tagged url’s for Google Analytics will do the trick using the querystring values:

Campaign Source (utm_source)
Required. Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source.
Example: utm_source=google
Campaign Medium (utm_medium)
Required. Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click.
Example: utm_medium=cpc
Campaign Term (utm_term)
Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.
Example: utm_term=running+shoes
Campaign Content (utm_content)
Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.
Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
Campaign Name (utm_campaign)
Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.
Example: utm_campaign=spring_sale

Google adwords enables by default a similar tracking url but with a unique id which makes it hard to get which campaign the visitor actually clicked on. In AdWords I must manually add a campaign id to get this value on our site.

In 24SevenOffice I have set up each Google AdWords campaign as well as other internet advertising campaigns.

Technorati: Google

This is an old draft I wrote last year.

* Easy content updating for editors.
* Easy to create landing pages for advertising campaigns.
* Good template management, preferably using XSLT.
* Ability to control all aspects of SEO: Good url’s, comply to W3C-standards, easy to insert meta keywords, meta-description, document title and headings, generate sitemaps.

And please do not do like these guys: No demo and no prices published on their website. That probably means it is way overpriced and too hard to use without assistance. They lost me at their follow up phone-call (probably didn’t help that I was in a cranky mood this morning though). If you are a marketing manager who sells software without a demo on your website and no prices you deserve to be fired.

Please let me know if you have anything to recommend.

Technorati: CMS

Ryan Mitton nails it in his comment on my previous post:

in my opinion as a user, drop down menus and anything that ‘has to open’ leads me to the perception of cumbersome. if more checkboxes or simple ‘one click’ selections were made (as opposed to the ‘two click’ of dropping the menus, then choosing selection….the software would ‘feel’ less cumbersome. quick quick quick is the mantra of everything!

We have decided to change our UI guidelines to always include checkboxes in listviews. In fact we will support both checkboxes and normal ctrl/shift-click selection. So this is one small step for 24SevenOffice and one big step towards to ease of use for our users

Oh, and checkboxes is obviously not a word according to Blogger’s spellcheck..

Technorati: 24SevenOffice

Outside Oslo Stock Exhance

Ringing the opening bell

Technorati: 24SevenOffice

Technorati: 24SevenOffice, WebEx, SaaS

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Should we expect users to know how to select more than one item in a listview and also use a right-click menu instead of using a checkbox with a action button at the bottom?

Is using a combined solution a good idea? A listview with a checkbox on the right side. That way novice users can click the checkbox to select one or multiple items while it is also possible to click the entire item (row) and use click/shift to select a range of items.

Example in 24SevenOffice (contactlist):

Technorati: Web 2.0

Update: Full page article in Finansavisen today.

Technorati: 24SevenOffice, CRM, ERP, Web 2.0, Google, Salesforce, Ajax

And yes that is one of our company cars When we signed the sponsorship deal with Petter the obvious next step was to buy a rally car and pimp it up.

CEO Stian Rustad with Petter Solberg at Rally Sweden:

Technorati: 24SevenOffice

http://www.24sevenoffice.com/webpage/en/flash/flashdemo_uk.html

Technorati: 24SevenOffice