The basic WebOffice that you sign up for with Webex is an amazing online intranet to accomplish all of the things a busy office needs online from anywhere 24/7.

You can get a five minute very basic look at the main functions in this video.  However, for a really good understanding, take a tour of each of the modules below.  Once you get to the first one, you can use the links on the left instead of closing the window.

After you’ve seen what it does out of the box, take the tab for “Custom Databases” to see how we’ve super-charged it just for real estate.

Document Manager Share documents with anyone you authorize

Database Manager Provide access to information databases, or build your own database applications

Online Calendar Schedule meetings and share calendars with colleagues

Announcements Post announcements and share web links among all your colleagues

Task Manager Manage and delegate action items and project tasks

Contact Directories Maintain contact directories of all your employees, suppliers and customers

Discussion Forums Conduct discussions on everything from product ideas to your 401K

Opinion Polls Conduct opinion polls among your employees

Administration Tools Customize your site’s look and feel and set access permissions

Expense Reports Standardize your T&E management with expense reports application

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If you believe that your time is better spent in working with clients or networking with prospects, then a few dollars spent with a consultant that saves you hours of searching for answers is well worth it.  I’m also an expert in instruction online in using free and very low cost solutions to manage and market a small business.

There are business owners and managers who can tell you that the information I gave them saved them hundreds or thousands of dollars and a lot of time in getting their business operating efficiently and marketing on the Internet.

Email me now, or call me toll free at 866-289-8267 for help with your technology needs.  I’ll talk to you for 15 minutes at now charge to see if I can help you or steer you in the right direction.

Here’s how I charge for consulting, whether online collaboration or via telephone only.

Garbage in / Garbage out is also very true.  When you enter data into your CRM database, take the extra time to do it completely and accurately, correcting errors as you go.  Using the Google Forms I’ve written about here, you can do an easy import of the information into these databases.  However, if the site visitor has entered errors (likely), then correct them before or after the import.  I like to do it in the Google Spreadsheet before the export to .csv.

My real estate WordPress blogging clients are quite happy with the fast-track startup of their WordPress blogs for real estate. They are working toward retiring old static websites that never performed as lead generators.

I’m not a programmer, coder, CSS manipulator, or any of those background software type consultants. I do sometimes dip into the code of WordPress for simple fixes or addons, but it is rare that it’s necessary.

WordPress, with thousands of themes and tens of thousands of plugins, is capable of doing just about anything you want with a website. And, it doesn’t have to look like a blog at all. However, taking advantage of the content management power of the WordPress platform, as well as the love of blogs that is demonstrated by the search engines, is why I believe it’s the only way to go for any consulting, real estate, mortgage or other professional.

My “WordPress How To” posts here will help anyone to get a great start on their blogging with WordPress. I consult for independence of my clients, using online screen collaboration and training so that they are able to chart their own course quickly, ending up with a highly successful blog in a few short months.

Whether MyFax or another service, if you can send faxes out as attachments to emails, then you’ll want to do your first import into the CRM and Realtor/Vendor databases differently, and change a field.  Instead of a standard phone number format field for the fax number of a contact/prospect, make it an “email” format field.  Then put in the email address you use with your fax service.  With MyFax it looks like this:  “15555051212@myfax.com.”

Then, whenever you need to fax a contact, you can just click on this live link right out of their contact record in your database.  Just attach the PDF or other document just as you have always done it.  And, don’t forget to Cc your Gmail history address as well!

As far as this post’s title, what you’ll want to do if you’re about to import all of your contacts is to go ahead and open your .csv file in a spreadsheet.  Enter a new column, and do a concatenation of fields to end up with the complete email address.  Then you’ll get them all in at once.

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Email for History

I recently posted about using Gmail as an email history resource, and it works really well with a field in each contact/prospect record with the URL to the search.  However, some would immediately recoil, thinking about having to get that URL into every record in their CRM databases.

Well, it’s really easy, especially if you’re just getting started and about to import your records for the first time.  Once you have a .csv comma delimited export from your current system:

• Open the file as a spreadsheet
• Create a column and copy down all of the URL that’s common to every search, in Google it looks like this:  https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/
• After the last / is where the name of the contact is when you do a search as in:  https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/firstname+lastname
• You should have two columns for names of contacts, one for first name and one for last name.  If not, do a “text-to-column” data split to get them from the whole name.
• So, what you do is to create a column with a “+” replicated all the way down for every row.  Then you do a Concatenate command like this:  =concatenate(URL cell, FirstName cell, +Cell, LastName cell).  In other words, you’re telling this new cell and column to merge the data from four other columns, the URL common part, then first name, then the “+”, then last name.  You’ll end up with the complete URL for every record’s name in a column which you can then import right in with all of the rest of them.

You don’t even need to worry about whether you’ve ever traded emails with them, as the Gmail search will just turn up “nothing found” if that’s the case.  I got hundreds in all at once for one client.

Anyway, I wanted to be able to have a popup calendar in Excel sheets for fast date entry.  To get it, I had to buy an addon from a third party vendor.  Well, I just found that Google Spreadsheets has the feature for free.  First, the cell or column/row must be set up with date formatting.  Second, and the only tiny gripe I have, is that it must already have a date in it.  I’m not sure why that is, but it is.  So, I’ve set up the transaction task spreadsheets to load up for you with the current date in the date cells.

So, all you do is open a new sheet, enter the transaction name once, and the agent’s name once, pick the dates from a calendar for the tasks, and you’re ready to get it into the WebOffice system with six clicks and three minutes work.

Tech Tips for WebEx WebOffice

databases extend the funtionality in many ways.  It’s natural that users compare the system to what they’ve used before, are another vendor they’re considering.  Since many of the other vendors are custom software, there are things they can do that aren’t able to be accomplished with WebOffice…or at least not quite the same way.  Here’s a great example and the way we solved the challenge:

A user really only missed one thing about the way his previous Top Producer software tied his emails to the prospect/contact/client automatically.  Though you can email right from the contact’s record in your WebOffice, it doesn’t actually tie a copy of the email to that record.  So, we found a truly elegant solution, particularly because it uses the generous free storage and great search capability of Gmail.

If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can set one up for free, and get almost 7 Gigabytes of free email storage.  The power of Google search is also part of the package, for searching within your emails.  So, we combined these two features and came up with this procedure:

1. Use the new Gmail address as your return address in WebOffice, or forward a copy of all mail from your regular email address to the Gmail address.
2. When you email out from WebEx, always elect to “send yourself a copy.”
3. This copy will then end up in your Gmail account.
4. Do a search on a contact’s name or email address in Gmail and all emails between you, incoming or outgoing, will show up in reverse time order.
5. Look up in the URL address bar in your browser, and you’ll see that this search has its own URL, as in https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/firstname+lastname.
6. Copy  out that URL and place it into a new field in your Contacts Database.  This will be a “web address” type field, and you paste the URL into that field for the specific client.
7. From then on, anytime you’re in a client’s record in the CRM database, just click on that link to see every email the two of you have ever exchanged opened up in Gmail.

**NOTE:  The beauty of this solution is that you don’t even need to send the email from WebOffice.  Even if you send it from your Gmail account, or from your regular email with a Cc to Gmail, all of the emails will end up in this one place for instant recall later.

One of the things I do best is to find ways to get things done technologically at the lowest cost or free.  I believe that the power of the WebEx WebOffice with custom databases is huge, but you sometimes would like to do something more than looks possible.  Send me an email, as there’s probably a fast and easy way to get it done.