The tried and true method of email marketing was yesterday’s promotional effort. KISS has published a newsletter since 2001, and every issue is available in the Archives on our web site. This month’s edition to our several thousand subscribers was an invitation to follow this blog as we progress to Version 1.0 release in less than two months.

We’re using Google Analytics to measure this site’s performance, and that gives us immediate feedback on visitor results following each of our promotional efforts. Here’s one screen shot of the Google visitor tracking just for this week’s efforts on StumbleUpon, Furl, Josiah’s blog, my blog, and yesterday’s newsletter . . . .

. . . . all of those gold dots on the map represent the locations from which our visitors came.

This site is less than two weeks old, and daily traffic to it is growing. Visitor penetration is also solid, with a Pages Viewed Per Visit of 4.25.

In our rounds of social PR we just posted a link on Looksmart’s Furl.net to the TSS home page. We’re not sure if this will pay off for us traffic/buzz wise as Furl is somewhat of a small competitor to others in the social arena like Digg/Reddit/Netscape etc., but it’s worth a shot as they are leading their class of secondary social bookmarks sites (second to the mighty del.icio.us)

Here’s a quick graph I whipped up using Compete to show Furl and some of it’s competitors traffic readings.

We reported last week that a press release had been prepared for distribution both online and off, and mentioned that PR Leap was one of the online resources we’d used for its distribution.  It’s release date was today, June 25, and here is an excerpt from it as it appeared on PR Leap:

“KISS Computing, Inc., is taking a new approach to the development of this new software designed to serve the team needs of small businesses. Through the sales site, KISS is inviting everyone to look over its shoulder during development and marketing to watch a new software product be created and promoted. Daily postings to its development blog on the site report progress and offer screen shots for each module completed. “We thought people would find the development process interesting, and we wanted lots of eyes on the site and software as part of our promotional efforts, too,” said company president, Michael McGrath.

The Team Solution Software will include a shared calendar, task and project management tools, time tracking tools, secure internal messaging among team members, file storage and file sharing for team-developed documents, and many more features. McGrath believes it is even more necessary for today’s and tomorrow’s company staffs, as the mix between in-house and external team members becomes more common. His own company, for instance, has almost an equal mix among its staff of a dozen team members. ”

We can tell you the Google robot visited the press release at 3:13 this morning, with Yahoo! Slurp taking it in at 8:38 am.  It’s also been passed along to over 100 other sources and sites since then.  Marketing and promotional efforts continue - - more coming tomorrow.

Progress continues at a brisk pace on Team Solution Software, a small/medium business system designed to keep all team members on the same page. Most of the system admin settings panels have been completed this week. Additionally, we’ve come close to finishing the individual account admin features - - the account owner will have a control panel to grant various levels of permissions to different aspects of the account for staff access. We want our account owners to be able to exercise system management authority in establishing chains of command as well as tiers of responsibility among team members. Here’s a sneak peak at some of those control settings at the “god-level” in each account:

The thought occurred to us that team captains might not want to delegate access to all company information to all team members, and so it just made sense to include the ability to control access. These features accomplish that goal - - whether it be for Messaging, File Sharing, Project/Task Tracking, Time Cards, Client/Contact Management, Reporting, Calendar, or some other feature we haven’t mentioned yet. If you want to know what those “other features” might be, you’ll just have to check back often.

* Just used the ClipMarks service to post this remotely, it’s actually a very slick system perfect for bloggers looking to “clip and publish” content quickly.  Only drawback is it didn’t pick a category.

Team Solution Software is an AJAX/Web 2.0 enhanced Rich Internet Application that allows small teams to coordinate online. Messaging, File Sharing, Project/Task Tracking, Time Cards, Client/Contact Management, Reporting, Calendar and more.

clipped from www.teamsolutionsoftware.com Team Up! with Team Solution Software Team Solution Software is the ultimate solution for any company who needs to: Allow team members to easily and securely communicate with each other, access and share all client information, store and share files, manage appointments and events on a shared calendar, and in all ways work within a Team-Oriented Environment

Today’s efforts for Team Solution Software promotion included a Press Release filed with a terrific online resource, PR Leap, for industry distribution, including Google News. The value of press releases is often under-appreciated in our business, but they are a terrific tool, as John Chow wrote about in his June 19 blog posting. If you’ve not included the use of press releases in promoting your online business, read his column - - a basic “how-to” and some excellent suggestions. We’ve also included some of the local media outlets here in eastern Massachusetts where our US office is located on the press release list.

We’ve also patted ourselves on the back, in a manner of speaking, by giving the Team Solution Software web site a thumbs up on Stumbleupon.com, another of our favored networking sites. With over 2.5 million members, there’s likely to be a few pairs of eyes stumbling upon the TSS sales site, and that is the point of the promotional exercise. Stumbleupon is among the top 100 most popular web sites in the United States today, as reported by Alexa, so it’s a good spot to be mentioned on. We’re hoping others will stumble upon TSS as a result.

Finally, we blogged about Team Solution Software on one of our network of online resources, Web WordMan Musings. We use this blog to offer advice and tips for web copy writing and search engine optimization, and it seemed an appropriate place to discuss our efforts in those regards for this site.

Development continues, and we’ll have more to tell you about that tomorrow. Please check back then.

As development proceeds and progress is posted here, efforts have begun to bring attention to Team Solution Software and its anticipated Version 1.0 release in August. The first step in those efforts was the filing of its profile with the web site, Tech Crunch. TC is an incredibly important and meaningful site for Web 2.0 companies, and its position in the industry is one all other industry professionals respect. We want Tech Crunch to recognize Team Solution Software for what it is - - a small/medium business system designed to keep all team members on the same page. It’s a CRM system and more, and it’s being designed for the current and future mixed office structure of inhouse and telecommuting teams.

So, we’ve submitted a TSS Profile to Tech Crunch and suggested a partial list of tags applicable to it and to us as its developer:

custom software development, web development, crm system development, web-based business management systems, hosted environment crm system, hosted environment company management system.

In the same way we’re reaching out to Beta Tester volunteers, we’re reaching out to Tech Crunch - - impartial industry professionals whose observations about TSS will be important in making it the very best company management system it can be.

Many other steps are being taken to get our word out about Team Solution Software, but Tech Crunch was a very important first step. We’ll be posting our further efforts as development continues.

Hey folks, this blog posting is intended to give everyone an update as to where we are in the Alpha stage of development

Completed:

The administrative back end where the TSS staff will manage new account sign ups, renewals as well as system settings, pricing packages and overall reporting was started first, and is roughly 90% complete (we will fill in the holes once we populate with data and make final tweaks)

Current Work:

As some of the work has shifted to the front end, common components such as the time card, and user status control are being programmed. The user signup process is being worked on and work continues on our newly launched sales and information/pr site (hint, it’s the site you’re on now).

Screenshot: This screenshot represents the development mockup made to guide our programming team. The data is bogus but should give you an idea on the components being worked on now and how they fit into the user interface.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Team Solution Software sales site. Team Solution Software is a robust and feature-rich tool available to small and medium businesses to help manage the company team, share all task and project data, share a common calendar, share documents, stay in touch through an internal messaging system, and so much more. Today’s workforce is becoming so much less office-centric, as team members telecommute or spend part of their week working from home, and this trend is likely to increase. Team Solution Software is designed to help that decentralized office stay in touch, and to foster that team concept by keeping all members on the same page.

Over the course of the next month, we’ll be posting our development progress on the system as it moves from Alpha to Beta, and those companies who have volunteered to be our Beta testers hammer on the platform and help us debug. As progress postings are made, we’ll be adding screen shots of the system to the site, and explaining more of the system’s features. This will lead to a longer list of FAQs, and more Release information, as we get ready to begin offering accounts in the system.

Please check back often to track our progress. Our entire team will be posting as we complete a task in the development process, so there will be programmer notes, production notes, copy writer notes and designer notes. We’re excited about giving you a peak over our shoulders into the development of rich Internet applications, and we’re going to maintain a two postings per week schedule over the next month for that peak.

Team Solution Software - - so much more than a CRM system.