Which services do you offer?
What are they? How do you deliver, charge and support them?
Content Management Services
Content management is a phrase to describe how you store, update and present the text, images, video and documents on you website. Often the system allows you to change the menu structure, where things appear on the screen and control who changes what, when and how.
There is a good trend towards separation of information and presentation of information which really makes communicating ideas simpler and faster. Once presentation of information is structured, such as how many columns of text, how to photos fit in, what fonts and sizes are to be used, and what type of information goes where, the adding of information itself becomes much easier.
This removes the need to use website designers to update or even add content, they are used where they can be of most benefit, in the design of how information is presented. This saves your business money, time and improves the delivery of information to your customers. It means information can be presented according to the device or medium you are using. Which makes it more transferable, dynamic and ultimately more useful to your business operations.
There are of course many flavours of content management systems available for use both open source and proprietary. We generally use one of three open source solutions, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla although there are more we can offer such as SimpleCMS, MediaWiki and many others.
If you thought WordPress was a blogging tool then you are right, but it has also evolved considerably beyond that.
For most small businesses WordPress will provide much of the functionality of other larger CMS approaches in a simple and clean way that means they can use it themselves to great effect. The OpenSure site you are reading now is based on WordPress.
With plugins, themes, a solid core application and massive user-base we think you can depend on WordPress to provide the perfect platform for simple dynamic approach to the web, even web 2.0 
Drupal is perhaps the big iron of open source CMS systems and is designed to cope with a wide range of demands and powers some large powerful sites and parts of sites. For example www.symantec.com/connect/ or http://www.observer.com/ or http://www.mtv.co.uk/ or http://www.warnerbrosrecords.com/frontpage or http://www.nowpublic.com/ or even http://www.economist.com/ or the WWF http://www.adaptationportal.org/.
Sites don’t need to be that scale to use Drupal but it is sometimes nice to realise quite how capable it can be. Our local Linux User Group (HLUG) use it for their community site http://www.herefordshire.lug.org.uk/.
It has lots of great people involved in the development and a very helpful and diverse community supporting it so if you want to use it then you won’t be alone when it comes to getting terrific support.
Joomla is another great CMS in the open source world. We have customers using it to deliver all sorts of sites and services from retail shops, galleries to magazines. It often fits between WordPress and Drupal in the landscape but as with all of these brilliant CMS options the edges are blurred and the boundaries wide.
Joomla has themes and modules that allow you to have the bits you need and to remove that which you don’t. It is great for web designers to create and use a range of themes and modules to completely change the experience of the visitor to suit the site.
There have been many progressive versions of Joomla and the community around it is vibrant and helpful so once again its strength is in its users and the help they give to developers to direct its continuing improvement.
Email Services
We provide a fully managed open source version of Zimbra so you get a full collaboration service in one. We set it up for you so you can use your domain email addresses and as many aliases and distribution lists as you need.
Zimbra provides a complete shareable business grade service for collaboration offering email, contacts, calendars, tasks and documents in a controlled feature rich but web based way. You can use Zimbra in the same way you use old email solutions using simple IMAP email client which works well and allows you to synchronize emails across many different devices and email clients but none will quite give you the full on experience of Zimbra using the web. Closest is the free open source Zimbra Desktop that allows your Mac, Windows or Linux PC to work offline with dozens of different accounts simultaneously.
So with Zimbra you can control, use and share multiple calendars, contacts, mailboxes, tasks and document libraries simply and easily from any device with a web browser, even your mobile phone.
From OpenSure’s point of view email services are any service that is involved in the presentation, storage and movement of email.
This can include handling the setting up the DNS to allow for incoming email on servers, providing the servers to send or receive email on the Internet or storing and delivering the email to you. It may also include anti-spam filters, anti-malware filters, spam prevention and more.
OpenSure need to ensure that you have safe and consistent access to your email services so we ensure things can be encrypted, are compliant to Internet standards and flexible. Email is thesedays often bundled and connected to other related functions and processes such as calendars, contact lists, tasks etc. These are generally in fact part of our collaboration services but the two terms email and collaboration services often become combined and imply each other.
Accounting services
Using Frontaccounting web based accounts service you can get proper accounting on line. That means a full ledger based accounting system with invoicing, stock control, etc all available anytime you need it whether at home, on the road or in the office.
What’s great about OpenSure’s service is it is based on completely open source software so at any time, if you like, you can run it yourself on your own server not on ours. No data conversion or paying for software would be required, the software is free and the data is yours alone. What you get from us is a managed service and one that you can walk away from without loosing years of online data.
Safety is a good thing to consider, especially with accounting systems. Our services are regularly updated to meet the best security available for applications and operating systems. We have perimeter security systems that check what people are trying to access. We backup all systems at least nightly and our services run on equipment that is redundantly backed up too.
In fact, being cheeky, the weakest point in most modern IT security is people using weak passwords and/or recording them on post-it notes stuck on the monitor in case they forget them. Much of the ‘Is it safe?’ question is about the risk of access being given. When it is in your office, in one location, only someone in your office or connected to it can gain access. If it is on the web where you can access it online anytime… so could anyone with your login details. So perhaps one part of the answer to ‘Is it safe? might be, ‘Can you keep a secret?’
FrontAccounting is an open source accounts system that is accessed by a web browser and offers full ledger based accounts. It is the initial choice for OpenSure accounts services as it is well established with wide user-base and we have confidence in the project developing it.
It is a great and powerful package that can run a small to medium sized business and provides good reporting and options to pull out data to other reporting systems if required.
Customer Relationship Management
CRM is a way of storing and retrieving information about your customers and potential customers. It helps track what communication has happened in the past and with whom, recall how they found you, what their interests are and what business they may have already done with you.
It helps keep you in touch, retain their interest by appropriate follow up to requests, complaints or support calls. It will also allow you to manage campaigns along with ensuring information is updated accurate and more profitably used.
vTiger is an open source CRM system that OpenSure offer as one of our CRM services. It was once related to SugarCRM but using the power of open source it was ‘forked’ to develop into a version to better suit a group of users that had a different focus.
It is a hugely powerful system and will suit many businesses needs especially if you have out-grown bending a collaboration system like Zimbra alone to meet your needs. It does have a learning curve and does use terminology that will make more sense if you have used CRM before and understand terms relating to contacts, prospects, customers and funnels and campaigns. There are some great resources on the web to help you get started and of course you can ask us for help and other OpenSure users.
vTiger can be used in a variety of situations such as simply a new full service, replacing a variety of other fragmented systems or in part to augment existing systems. Like all our services they are a great way to help nit new parts of a business together or perhaps provide low cost ways for interim management to leverage the best from a businesses data.
As usual we can help with configuration, setup and import of data for you as you need.
