I tried to compile twelve good productivity tools that I plan to use in 2012. All these tools are free and some of them have professional paid edition.

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OfficeClip is an all-in-one suite of Software that allows management of Employees Time and Expenses, keeping track of your Prospects, Customers, Opportunities and Issues . It also has feature to send Invoices and get paid on-line.

Many of our customers choose the installed version (where your install it on your own server) of the software as compared to the hosted version (on the cloud) because they want full control of their data. Some of our installed version customer wants to host OfficeClip on a shared hosting or dedicated hosting at a service provider. With OfficeClip 9.1 it has become easy to install in a shared or dedicated host using manual installation.

We looked around for cost effective hosting providers for our customers so that OfficeClip can be installed outside the firewall. the top 2 are given below:

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Many of our customers have requested to host their installed version of OfficeClip outside their company. In this article we present a simple way to host OfficeClip on the Amazon EC2 cloud. OfficeClip uses Windows 2008 Datacenter OS and Sql Express 2008 image on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Running OfficeClip on the amazon EC2 cloud will provide you with the following benefits:

• You can run the installed version of OfficeClip on a dedicated server.
• There is no need to install OfficeClip, the installation is already done for you and you can just configure and run it.
• You have the flexibility to increase or decrease the machine resources based on your needs.
• It is cheaper than many dedicated or virtual servers you can find in the market.

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Managing data in a remote office is often complex and challenging. Some tasks can be completed independently, but others require consolidation. Potential issues include the following:

• How are your employees billing their time?
• How are projects being implemented?
• Are problems communicated effectively between branch offices?
• Are internal issues and customer issues tracked efficiently?
• Are resources having special knowledge being used effectively by various organizations?
• Are these organizations securing all data?
• Are processes that can be tracked centrally (e.g., contacting leads via phone) be done more efficiently?

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Steve Pavent of Optimum Payments is a small-business owner who offers payment solutions to many other small businesses. Before using OfficeClip, the head office manually processed all business applications. Steve had the following requirements:

1. Each agent should be able to view and edit their assigned contacts and leads, because agents are geographically dispersed and earn commissions from their sales. They have to work on the contacts they acquire and manage.
2. The corporate office needs to look at all newly acquired leads and allocate them to various sales agents for further action.
3. Each agent's work hours, as well as the amount of work, need to be captured.
4. To maintain contact for better conversion and upselling, newsletters and periodic emails should be sent to all contacts and customers.
5. All documents associated with contacts and customers need to be connected within the system.
6. Careful records should be kept of all notes, events, and issues associated with any contacts.
7. Business forms should be sent directly to all prospects.

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As a small business, you can run your business more efficiently using many products that are delivered today via SaaS (Software as a service) or locally installed. For example, you may need to:

1. Manage your prospects, accounts opportunities and campaigns
2. Create and send regular campaigns for your prospects and customers
3. Manage customer support incidents and issues
4. Track Time worked on various projects
5. Track how your employees are spending time
6. Track employee and company expenses
7. Track internal issues
8. Share documents with your offsite employees and customers
9. Invoice customers
10. Share calendar events and meetings with customers, prospects etc.

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Many OfficeClip users have DSL or Cable Internet access in their Office. Although OfficeClip provides SaaS (Software as a Service) as a hosted solution, many small business users choose to install OfficeClip at their own server for various reasons. This article shows that it is not very hard to implement this in your own small office.

One way to do this is using a VPN connection when accessing the OfficeClip server from outside your company. Many Wi-Fi router today supports this mode. However, VPN is difficult to setup for average users.

Another easy way is to open port 80 (http port) on your router and direct all incoming request to your OfficeClip Server. Follow these steps:

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Keeping track of clients, appointments, old tax returns and receipts is sometimes difficult to manage in a conventional way. Different applications in OfficeClip provide a way for Accountants to be more productive. This avoids having to maintain bunch of spreadsheets and carry out manual merging.

In this article we show some ways how OfficeClip products can be used by Accountants and Financial Professionals to make various tasks more efficient.

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This week one of our customers called and asked us to provide some advise on whether to host OfficeClip Contact Manager to a Virtual Private Server (VPS), Dedicated Server or Cloud. This led me to look at various options on cloud computing as it exists today.

Is the Cloud Computing cheaper than Dedicated Host?

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