Once again, we relied upon the old standby, the Press Release, and one of the new standby news carrier, the e-newsletter, to pass on the news that Team Solution Software is in Alpha Testing.  The traditional Press Release was sent to print media today, and the TSS e-newsletter announcing this was sent to every company, now over 20 in number, who has signed up on this site for notification.

At the moment, we’re testing the Message and Files features, along with the general Settings features, and our review is both on the functionality and on the user interface adequacy.  Now that functionality has been added to the screen mockups, we can see the process in action, and that is as crucial an evaluation process as the functionality.  Adjustments, tweaks and polishing are needed on the UIs, and we’re working at a feverish pace to get this down as we move toward public Beta testing.

We’ve sent the Alpha URL and login information to a few key external testers, people who have experience developing software, for first blush opinions, and some of the feedback has already been very helpful to us. That will continue for the rest of this week, and into next, and we still expect to have a public Beta in late July, or very early in August.

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.

* 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.