What's Up @ LPF?
Office 365
LPF is in the process of moving to the cloud. Yes, we have decided to take the leap and make Office 365 our trusted system on the web. You will see our progress on this site and we will inform you of our experience.
Our initial goal is to make use Office 365 to create LPF's new website. The initial experience is quite pleasant. Judge for yourself whether Office 365 (and LPF) is doing a great job!
Yes, we have moved our emails (Exchange) and website now to Office 365 successfully. The Sharepoint/documents and collaboration side is still a work-in-progress. I think that would take a while to get use to and to populate our new trusted system with the necessary information.
At the moment I am very satisfied with overall speed and ease of use of Office 365.
CRM 2011
This piece of software is wonderful!
The most important part of CRM 2011 is the workflow facility. This helps you to automate tasks or to ensure that all the necessary steps are taken to complete a job properly. The ease of use and filtering and sorting options are really wonderfull to use.
This module is the MAIN and most important part of our trusted system. We are looking forward to the day when this is also integrated into Office 365 (latest is that it would be in Q4 2011 - can't wait!).
We are hosting our CRM 2011 information with Enterprise Cloud (www.enterprisecloud.co.za). They helped us to move our on-premises CRM 2011 on-line. I would definitely recommend them - so give them a try.
I am quite happy with the integration and speed it delivers in Outlook 2010.
The next step would be to link to our own Office 265 Sharepoint site as Document Manager. That would allow us to save related documents in Sharepoint. As soon as that has been resolved, we will open a portal for our customers to access their data in our system.
SharePoint 2010
Any company needs a mechanism of collaboration and communication between personnel. Once the information is in a system, everybody can use it to ensure swift and efficient service. This way of doing things will take some time to get used to, but it is definitely worth the effort.
Office 2010
If you understand 'better together', then you know exactly what Office 2010 will give you! Run, get a copy and start using it! Especially the new Outlook 2010 and its integration with CRM 2011. This is how software should work together to create your trusted system.
LPF AgriBusiness, our financial software for the farming industry, is in the process to move to the cloud as well! We will see you on your iPad, Windows Phone7/8 or wherever you are. I can't wait for this.
Windows Phone 7.5
I am fortunate to have a Nokia Lumia 800 mobile phone now. I stayed away form the iPhone because I support the 'better together' idea of Microsoft. It seems everybody else has an iPhone and are quite happy with it. I must say I love the Nokia Lumia 800 but the battery life is not acceptable. You need to switch-off all synchronising tools to go through a day. Fortunately I work mostly out of my office and don't need to duplicate my emails, etc on my phone.
The integration with Office 365 and Skydrive is magic! Dive into it immediately!!!
I can't wait for Windows 8 on an ARM phone (hopefully a Nokia). That should give us a much better battery life for starters. And then we expect a newer Office and Sharepoint later in 2012. Interesting times!