The numbers are in. I’ve thought about this thoroughly and in keeping with ArcStone’s nerdy roots, created an algorithm.  I added up productivity gains subtracted employee gripes and moans and then divided by hours logged.

(Gains – Gripes) / Hours = X

The clear winner for best technology investment in 2008?

Our switch to Google Apps for our company email, calendar and documentation platform.

Google Apps has five elements that you need to know about…

1. User Management – to secure access and set permissions for your team.
2. Email – in this case Gmail, which is Google’s fantastic web mail service.  Users can also use mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird if they wish.
3. Calendar – An online personal calendar which may be shared with your colleagues.
4. Sites - An easy to edit wiki system.  Need a quick wiki to organize a project, or documentation?  It literally takes a non-technical user 5 minutes to create a new site and start adding content.  You can then restrict content to certain users or publish to the web at large.
5. Docs – an online productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and data collection application.   These have become very important tools in the tool box for us at ArcStone.  We use Docs for tracking basic spreadsheet information centrally like employee phone extensions and incoming leads, to collaborating on our 2009 business plan.  Google Docs also includes a slick form generation tool, enabling non-technical users to easily create online forms for surveys and similar data collection projects.  Google is clearly targeting Microsoft Office users, but I have to confess Google Docs still has a ways to go before replacing Office – don’t plan on using it exclusively.

And how much $$ for all these goodies?  If you have fewer than one hundred employees, the price is truly right. You pay them $0.  All it took for us was a DNS update so that Gmail started getting our our email and then some configuration / internal communication / training to make the transition.

Before you ask, no I’m not working for Google.  I just want to share something that’s working well for us.

If you’re an ArcStone client and you’re interested in making the transition to Google Apps, drop me a line.  If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to schedule a group Webinar demonstrating how we use Google Apps and help you decide whether or not to make the move.

The iphone has revolutionized mobile phone technology not only in the United States but also in the world. Now with the 3G available in 57 countries and coming soon to 23 countries, the iphone is increasingly becoming a mobile phone of international acclaim.  The benefits and advantages of the phone are available for your reading pleasure on the Apple website.

But the iphone is more than just a phone. It is a tool for effectively and efficiently managing the complex demands that span every facet of our hectic lives. It’s a way of life. That’s right, a culture – the iculture.

At ArcStone, we have embraced the iculture and bask in its glory on a daily basis. Almost half of the employees have iphones and they constantly rave about them.

Nick Longtin, a connoisseur of Indian cuisine once commented, “I love Tandori chicken. I bet you can even Tandori a shoe and it would taste great.” The idea Mr. Longtin is espousing here is that anything (edible or not) preceded by Tandori gives it major credibility. This same analogy carries over to the letter “i.” Placing i in front of mundane words like phone and culture give these words a whole new meaning. To illustrate this concept, let’s delve deeper into the linguistic significance of the letter i.

I  is the ninth letter of the greek alphabet, called iota. As we all know, the word iota in modern English is a noun meaning the smallest amount or part imaginable. It stands to reason that the idea behind the iphone was to enable users to achieve maximum efficiency with the smallest amount of effort.  It is no surprise that then that it combines three products in one: a phone, an ipod and a breakthrough internet device.

In the fast paced society and culture we live in, where time is of the essence, we expect everything microwaved and ready for consumption or use with minimal effort. The iphone helps to achieve this delicate balance between speed and accuracy which results in huge time savings.

The next time you hear the words iphone, iway or iculture remember that it’s an invitation to live life by design and not from crisis to crisis.

One of the things many of us like about ArcStone is the flexible work environment. Flexible means (at least to me) a recognition that to be most productive and effective you need to have a sensible work / life balance. Sometimes people will be more productive at night, want to work in the early morning, need to take a half-day with little warning, take a two-hour lunch to fit in a work out, etc.

This “flexibility” has been an ongoing experiment. Despite my best intentions and knowing that it benefits everyone from employee to customer – it still occasionally annoys me.

As a manager I frequently need to have short status / update conversations with my fellow ArcStonians. The flexible work schedule sometimes gets in my way and forces me/us to be slower to respond than I would like. I think this is a common feeling for those in management roles over here.

A couple of days ago my frustration level hit a peak and I sent a long, whiney email to the entire office, ranting about needing better communication and consistency so that we can work together more efficiently.

I asked for feedback and help from people and yea, verily yea, I got it.

Over the last few days I’ve been able to reflect, collect, and review the responses from my coworkers. I’ve compiled a partial list below and thought I’d share our efforts with the world. Hopefully they will be of use…

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In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example – the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

Behind the glitz and glamor of a few Web 2.0 brands are some truly terrible work environments. Workspaces even coal miners wouldn’t care for. Valleywag has been collecting photos and horror stories from some of the most egregious offenders here.

To be fair, I will admit that even at ArcStone we occasionally force employees to work in less than ideal situations. Take for instance, the above photo showing an ArcStone blogger diligently writing without a chair or table.

We have a whiteboard hanging on the wall near the front desk at ArcStone’s Minneapolis office. The intent is to keep track of who is offsite, telecommuting, or out on an errand. In reality, most of us never use it properly. We forget to erase our names when we arrive at the office, forget to put our names up the day before if we plan to telecommute, or neglect to ask someone else to write our status on the board if we’re out sick. And, since it’s hanging on the wall at the office, you can’t read it if you’re working offsite.

In response to the shortcomings of the community whiteboard, ArcStonians have turned to email. We often see messages to the office distribution list, announcing when a team member will be available and where they’ll be during the course of the day. I’ve never liked it; I somehow manage to miss the notifications from members of my project teams.

But, as always, there was a better solution. We recently subscribed to Google Apps, a set of productivity tools offered by Google that includes calendaring. It’s allowed us to have company-wide shared calendars without the hassle and expense of using Zimbra or Microsoft Exchange Server for our email. Google offers an API for their calendar service; you can quickly write web application code that reads data from a Google Calendar and manipulates it. And the idea for the virtual in/out board was born!

The virtual in/out board is nothing more than a ColdFusion page that reads data from a shared calendar. When someone wants put their availability up on the board, they create an event on their own calendar and invite the in/out board as an attendee. The page checks the calendar for updates every five minutes or so, and refreshes the display (which is an otherwise unused PC at our front desk). We even have the data available in the ArcWeb, our custom time tracking and business management application, for viewing by offsite staff.

I’ll never have dry-erase marker on my hands again!

Nick Longtin, our most productive blogger, has recently been complaining about not being to read his email on his 19 inch widescreen external monitor. Couple that with his 30th birthday just a few days ago and he felt the need to get a bigger monitor for his aging eyes. Bigger to Nick isn’t 22 or 24 inches – IT’S 38 INCHES!!!

With this new monitor we expect Nick to be 8 times more productive. See for you own eyes how Nick is using monitor size to be more productive!

If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

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Are you guilty of writing florid, lengthy emails in your work life? It might be time to meditate on the five-sentences-or-less philosophy espoused in the signatures of some people’s emails. I’m not sure I can totally jump on this bandwagon, but maybe that’s just my love of my own words getting in the way.

The website appropriately details the philosophy in five sentences (not including the footer).

If you’re a believer, add it to your sig: http://five.sentenc.es/

Great strides in the brain / computer interface domain recently. Researchers at the Wadsworth Center (apparently affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh) have created a brain/computer interface which enables severely disabled people (completely unable to move their limbs) to do complex computing tasks like writing Word documents and sending email.

They have even taught a monkey how to control a robotic arm to grab food and feed itself. All with the power of the mind.

Read the original article.

It gives me hope that I might see the day where I can toss out my keyboard and mouse and simply put on my thinking cap…