Changing the world, one community at a time.
Travel Tips from Alan’s Forums

Several years ago I approached international consultant, speaker and author, Alan Weiss, and presented him with the idea of putting together an online forum that will attract his followers, the brightest and the best minds of the world’s business community. We discussed the strategy, tactics and implementation plan and in less than 45 days we launched Alan’s Forums. The community we’ve created has been absolutely remarkable. People from all over the world, show up any time of day to read, participate in discussion of topics started by someone else, or start their own topic. The relationships created online and offline have been some of the greatest benefits of belonging to such a terrific community. I am honored to have initiated the idea, implement and moderate this forum. Below is an article created by members of the forum who have contributed to display this great brain power. Enjoy and ask yourself, what do you do to increase the community around your own products and services?

As most of you have heard, Microsoft recently officially released their latest version of their infamous operating system called Windows Vista. After the months of anticipation and beta testing, I finally got my hands on the final release.

My expectations coming in were rather low to begin with being that I wasn’t all that impressed with Vista when I first tested Beta 2 of the operating system. A few months ago I had the chance to download the image from Microsoft’s website as part of a customer preview program and I immediately installed it on my home desktop computer. At first glimpse I was almost immediately plagued with the lack of support for my hardware, random error messages, and overall slow performance. So, after taking a step back, I gave Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and attributed the problems to the fact that I was merely testing a stripped down base operating system.

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Although there are a number of these products out there, including GoToMeeting, PCAnywhere and WebEx, we really like LogMeIn. LogMeIn is an online service that allows you to control a host computer from any internet-connected computer in the world. This includes Windows, Mac, Linux or Pocket PC mobile devices. It offers a better free version and its 'LogMeIn Pro' version includes remote printing, file transfer and a secure file sharing service. If you need to log in to your home or work computer remotely and you want complete control of your host PC, just as if you were sitting in front of its monitor, LogMeIn unquestionably beats the competition.

For those of you in the distribution industry, Auto Quotes is probably a household name. For those that aren't, Auto Quotes is a pc based sales order and quote-building tool that enables a salesperson to quickly and easily put together an order including all the necessary specs and dimensions. The downside to Auto Quotes is that each AQ generated order or quote must then be rekeyed into the business system for processing. We felt that having to retype information was not only a waste of time but posed a major data integrity issue. So we wrote an interface to Auto Quotes that directly imports an Auto Quotes generated sales order or quote directly into our Distribusmart business software.

'Um - all of a sudden someone is driving a ton of traffic to our TicTacToe game and we're not sure who. All we know is that the free game has gone from about 100 visits a day to about 20,000 a day! That's nuts. Our version of tic-tac-toe is a hybrid in that you have to answer a trivia question to earn a move - in that way it's a bit like Hollywood Squares.'