Archive for April, 2009
More proof this week that ignoring those pesky details buried in contracts can get you into trouble. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial about New Mexico Attorney General Gary King is investigating a story about the ties between the AG’s office, a law firm, campaign contributions and a lapsed contract.
It seems a law firm was hired by the state to sue a pharmaceutical company. Of course, King denies any suggestion that the $50,000 in campaign contributions his office received from a lawyer at the firm had anything to do with that decision.
What is interesting is that the contract with the hired firm, Bailey Perrin, had actually expired on June 30, 2008 and wasn’t renewed until November 24, 2008. However, the lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company was initiated in July 2008. According to the WSJ:
“So we asked Mr. King about this five-month gap in which a private law firm was apparently representing the state without any legal authority to do so. “This is what I believe happened,” said Mr. King. “My contracts people didn’t notice that that contract had expired.” He added: “I have to talk to my lawyers about what happens when a contract expires in the middle of a lawsuit and somebody continues on [litigating]. But I think our laws probably cover that.”
The WSJ points out that the pharmaceutical company’s lawyers might see it differently. It will be interesting to see how the threads of this one get untangled. And whether a little lapse in a contract could be the thing that upsets the apple cart in the state’s case.
April 30th, 2009
Author: admin
In a move designed to give companies even better visibility into their business agreements, Mumboe released an update to our on-demand contract management application today. The latest release, available today, includes a news feed, similar to those found in social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as new agreement tracking features. Together, these new capabilities give users the ability to see at a glance any activity related to specific business agreements, tasks, milestones and other items stored in the Mumboe system.
Specifically, the new features include:
Activity news feed - allows users to view a stream of recent activity on their Mumboe dashboard, or home screen. The news feed can include any activity in the system, such as changes to an agreements status, new milestones created, tasks completed and more. The feature gives our customers the ability to stay informed of updates and changes to their business relationships, much as you keep up with friends on Facebook. You can configure the news feed to show only the information you want to see, such as new documents uploaded or tasks completed. The news feed can also be delivered in an email digest.
The new Mumboe dashboard features a Facebook-like news feed.
Agreement Tracking - With a single click, you can choose to track a specific agreement, ensuring that any activity related to that agreement is included in your news feed. This eliminates the often time-consuming process of manually tracking changes, revisions, updates and status changes to an agreement.
You can choose to track an agreement with a single click.
Agreement State – a new menu lets you see at a glance what stage of the contract lifecycle an agreement is currently in, such as “preparing”, “active” or “concluded”. The change came as a result of your requests for better visibility into each stage of the contract lifecycle, and makes it even easier for you to proactively manage your business agreements.
To read the full press release click here.
April 21st, 2009
Author: admin
“SEO should be the foundation for which the website is structured, so search engines can find it in the first place.”
I recently read this comment on a LinkedIn marketing discussion group about search engine optimization. From Mumboe’s point of view, we couldn’t disagree more. Too many sites get so carried away with SEO that they become virtually unusable. They dump lots and lots of keyword-rich content on their pages, and repeat those keywords often to improve their search engine rankings. And in many cases, it works. The web sites show up in the top listings on major search engines.
There’s just one problem with this approach: Search engines don’t buy products and services, people do. And people want web sites that make it easy to quickly find what they need, understand what you offer, and buy your product or service.
When we launched Mumboe, we had a good discussion about designing the web site for usability versus SEO. It was a pretty short discussion: usability won hands down. Fortunately we’ve got a couple of terrific UI professionals on staff here that keep pushing both the Mumboe application and the web site in the direction of better usability. If you were one of the early Mumboe users, you’ve seen the changes as they’ve evolved over the past year.
Our focus on usability is why you won’t find the long pages of text on the Mumboe web site that you do on so many sites today. We keep things fairly streamlined on purpose to make it easy for people to do what we want them to do: sign up for the free version of our product. We figure that making it easy for people to see the product for themselves, free, with no strings attached, is the best way to figure out whether or not they want to use it. Pages of features and benefits text can’t replace the actual experience of using the application.
Does that make it more challenging to drive traffic to the site? Certainly. But we don’t think that’s an excuse to abandon usability in favor of high traffic numbers. For a good perspective on the topic, check out this article titled “When is Usability More Important than SEO?”, written by a search engine marketing firm, no less.
April 2nd, 2009
Author: admin
That’s the conclusion Microsoft recently came to as a result of a new survey by the software company, highlighted in this CIO article. The survey, called the 2009 Microsoft SMB Insight Report, concludes that SaaS is growing rapidly in popularity with small and mid-sized businesses despite the economic recession. Or maybe because of it. As SMBs look for ways to cut costs, they are increasingly apt to look at SaaS business applications as viable alternatives to more expensive, complex on-premise solutions – such as Microsoft Office.
According to the article, Eduardo Rosini, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s worldwide small and midmarket solutions and partners group (there’s a mouthful), said “the survey shows that SaaS is at a “tipping point” and the recession could actually be contributing to the projected uptick in adoption.”
However, the growth of SaaS isn’t just about cutting costs. Hundreds of new SaaS applications are being developed to address many areas of business, and are getting more robust in features, reliability and security. For a listing of SaaS business applications, a good place to start is ThinkStrategies SaaS Showplace.
Of course, Rosini believes Microsoft is well-positioned to capitalize on the SaaS trend with the recent release of its Business Productivity Online Suite. It’s interesting to note, however, that Rosini also “stressed the importance of Microsoft’s VAR community to service SMBs, who often don’t have their own IT staff, or who have very few dedicated IT employees.”
The most innovative SaaS vendors, especially those targeting SMBs, don’t require an army of service consultants to install and support their applications. This is old-style enterprise software thinking wrapped in a SaaS package. New SaaS applications emphasize ease of use, minimal training and built-in support, among other key requirements. We’ll expand on this topic in a later post.
You can download the entire Microsoft survey report here.
April 1st, 2009
Author: admin
