Inside ASI-AP

The first week of June marked the beginning of Customer Briefings - the topic: iMIS 15.1 Maximise your Potential. So far we have presented in Perth and Wellington. Other capitals are being scheduled for the coming month.

The purpose of the briefing is to show a lot of the great new features of 15.1. Customers will see a lot of benefit in Site Designer, Content Designer, IQA Improvements and also SSRS support (SQL Server Reporting Services). There is real potential in 15.1 for every customer.

As part of the briefing we also recommend every customer review their iMIS usage regularly - get back to basics and make sure you are making the most of your current investment. We provide each attendee with a personalised iMIS Value Cycle profile for their organisation to help them have meaningful discussions with their Customer Sales Executive or other ASI Staff.

After being in cold London for a week, I arrived in DC Sunday evening and although the temperature was lower, it felt warmer – at least for the first day. The week started off cool (-2 to 1 C) then got cold (-4 to -1 C) and then by Sunday warmed up (-1 to 11 C) - completely different to Melbourne.

It was a busy week with meetings. I started Monday with Moji going through some process and other training items in using the Customer Care Dashboard and opportunity management. I met with Beau Harbin regarding iMIS Training as he is now managing the schedule in the US – we spent time discussing strategy for getting more customers to training, including courses, segmentation and promotion. The rest of the day was spent time catching up on emails.

Friday night I flew from Melbourne to London via Hong Kong. Although I have done this long flight before, it is normally on the way home to oz not towards work. I arrived in London to stay with a friend who is a school teacher there. The weather all week ranged from -2 to 5 degrees Celsius. Sunday we took the opportunity to walk around the city and even took a ride on a ‘duck’ boat on the Thames.

Monday I was in the London office meeting with Niroo Rad (ASI Europe MD) regarding our Customer Care staff meeting that week. In the afternoon I took the train to the Steyning office which is just over an hour train ride. The Steyning office is based in a small town with the office above a Butcher and Pet store.

Sunday I flew Brisbane to LA – a 14 hour flight with me only getting about 1-2 hours sleep. Not to be encouraged. I arrived in LA at 7am with almost 8 hours between flights. I was happy that David Riffle and Marilyn were coming to meet me at the airport so we could get breakfast on the Sunset Strip. It was funny going to a restaurant with Marilyn, David and Greg and feeling that Marilyn and I would be treated as Aussies – but then Marilyn does have a US accent so she was treated as a local again and I was the only foreigner. Pancakes as big as manholes were on the menu. Hmm, I am so glad that the waitress suggested Marilyn and I share a stack since we were both ordering plain stacks. HUGE. I have attached a picture of David’s.

Sept 10 – 16, 2007
Location - Alexandria VA USA

I will be in the US offices for 4 weeks until Oct 6. So the blog is started again!

Monday I started the long trip to the east coast of USA. Started at 10.20 am Melbourne time and finally got to sleep at 1.15am Tuesday Alexandria time (3.15pm Tuesday Melbourne time).

The flight was my first opportunity to really try out my new noise cancelling headphones. Well I don’t think you realise how noisy a 747 is until you put on these type of headphones. I think they cut out about 70-80% of the noise, but you can still hear a hum of the a/c or engines. It definitely helped in not having to have the volume of the movies up so loud.

Shortcuts to Applications
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Windows provides keyboard shortcut options to easily access preferred applications – this is similar to the quicklauch toolbar except that you can launch without the mouse. The shortcuts are CTRL+ALT+X = where X is a specific key for that application.

For example I use CTRL+ALT+W to open Word, CTRL+ALT+E to open Excel and CTRL+ALT+Q for Query Analyzer, CTRL+ALT+T for Terminal Server.

To create a shortcut of X for internet explorer:
1. Find the Internet Explorer on the Start>>Programs menu
2. Right Click (instead of Left Click) the application name on the start menu

I have been back in the Melbourne office for 2 weeks and some people have jokingly said they missed my weekly updates. Yes jokingly. However last week I accidentally started giving out daily Windows and Excel tips to some staff.

Well I don't know everything but it is like our customers - "you don't know what you don't know". If you already know all the following that is great!So here are some Windows tips I shared -

Windows Key (Win) shortcuts are enabled by holding the Win key while pressing another key. Some of the ones I know are below :)

Win+BREAK = Display the System Properties dialog box.

Week 13 – last week!

This was quiet week. Monday was travelling from Chicago (missed flight on weekend) and Wednesday was July 4th public holiday!

I met with John Benda to review what we had achieved in Customer Care setup in the previous 3 months, as well as going forward. Generally other items were just tidying up loose ends, and packing for the return home on Friday.

On Tuesday I went to the July 4 concert rehearsal with Carol and Randy and some of Carol’s friends – pictures attached. I spent most of July 4 packing up everything for the return trip. I did intend to ride the bike to the river and watch the fireworks, but it started raining and was windy just as I was about to leave. So I chickened out and watched the fireworks from the condo building roof (sundeck) – it was pretty amazing to see fireworks on a 360 degree view. Normally in Australia – fireworks are central thing – normally in the city area. In the case of July 4 – there are so many fireworks happening and from the building roof I was able see fireworks on the horizon everywhere!

Week 12

This week I was interstate visiting staff – Linda in Toronto and Fernando in Austin.

Visited three customers with Linda – Toronto Board of Trade, Purchasing Management Association of Canada and Deborah Hannah of NiUG & The Association of Municipalities of Ontario. Due to flight cancellations, I only managed to visit one customer with Fernando – The State Bar of Texas. All meetings were productive with the customers future direction the discussion topic, and mini Customer Care roadmaps to be produced by Linda for her meetings. I also had dinner with Linda and Andy Sherwin (Canada Country Manager) on Monday night (picture attached).

Week 11

This week there was a lot more iMIS 15 tasks including, attending the pricing committee meeting and working with Carol/Marty/Edward on the process for distribution and announcement.

Our current plan is to provide customers with an information sheet with their upgrade information. This information sheet will detail their iMIS10 licence, their proposed iMIS15 licence and any payment required to migrate this licence to Named Users. It is also proposed that we should develop a web page that the primary contact can view and also find out pricing for upgrading users. This would not be an invoice. A factor that will complicate this is the international currencies/pricing.

Week 10

More time this week with iMIS 15 pricing. We are now also reviewing the approach to deploy iMIS 15 and new Named User licences. This is important to ensure that customers are able to change to a Named User licence easily and make the most of iMIS15 as soon as possible. Customers will require a new code in the licence key in order for iMIS 15 GA to work – so it means distribution of new licenses to all active customers, and some payments (for additional casual/public users). Some of the options include online licence change form, or preparing forms for sending to customers with the iMIS 15 CD.

Week 9

I spent some time this week reviewing some concurrent user to named user migration scenarios for iMIS 15. Basically this involves take example customer licences and working out what this would convert to in iMIS 15 and any migration charge. I have been working with Marty to give feedback to the pricing committee. We had the monthly sales meeting with RMs on Tuesday which is a dinner on Monday night and a full day meeting in the Alexandria office on Tuesday. The purpose of the meeting is to review current sales opportunities and work towards getting a pipeline sufficient for targets.

Week 8

It was a short week with Monday being a public holiday.

I spent a fair bit of time this week going through some iMIS 15 pricing scenarios with Marty and Fred. This is working out the conversions from concurrent users to named users. I defined some guidelines for US Customer Care staff on when to talk to me for decisions and when an RM needs to be involved. As US Customer Care crosses regions, this is a new thing which did not present itself in the AP operation. ASI US is expanding its hosting operations – most notably taking over the ISG operations this week. So I wrote up some benefits/reasons a customer would want to host with us so that staff had some points of differentiation when talking with customers looking at other external hosting options in the US.

Week 7
This week started off slow but had a lot of busy spots. I held two Customer Care staff meetings – US and AP. I have not yet found the best way to intermingle the US/AP staff given the US staff all work from home without ASI Video Conferencing. Also with timezones it is hard since I was at the AP meeting from 7pm-9pm. Anyway the meetings were productive reviewing activities and forecasts, with some update on iMIS15.

Week 6

This week I did manage to get some of those things on my To Do list done :)

I continued discussing the current US Software Update Plan process, and tried to determine improvements in notice and follow-up by finance/customer care/marketing. I don’t think many changes are required, but it will hopefully involve naming the Customer Account Executive on invoices and informZ follow-up emails and hopefully sending Reminder Notice for SUP invoices. Since January I have wanted to get the process using the iMIS Billing module like we do in AP – and as it turns out Consulting are currently reviewing the process to get this working.