On Monday, June 25, we added a sign up window for anyone interested in helping us test the beta version of Team Solution Software.  We’ll be using TSS ourselves, of course, in the management of our team at KISS Computing, Inc., but we hoped others would want to play along with us – - quicker feedback, and likely to be more comprehensive than if it were just us geeks.  After all, it would not be new to us, and we wanted fresh and untainted observation and use.

In the two full work weeks since the sign up window appeared, we’ve had 14 companies volunteer, including a private, non-profit organization with 9 users; a CPA firm of 15 at three different locations within Massachusetts; a company with offices in Germany, the UK and the US; an Internet marketing company with offices in the US (Texas) and Canada (Calgary); and other smaller companies like ours.

We thank them all, and look forward to working with them shortly when the beta becomes available for testing.  There’s always room for more, though, so if you are interested, we’d love to have you join us.  There will be special introductory benefits for those who beta test with us, so signing up helps you, too.

As we’ve reported here, this Team Solution Software web site was launched on Friday, June 8. Our blogging and promotional efforts, however, did not begin in earnest until the week of June 18, as you’ll see from previous posts. Today, we want to share with you the saturation results from just those first two weeks of search engine optimization work.

We submitted the URL to the major search engines beginning that week, June 18. We did so for five consecutive days, and then backed off to weekly thereafter. We’ve added content to the site each day since then, also, in the form of blog postings. We’ve maintained that frequency of content growth, making sure the appropriate keywords were included in the copy, and we’ve watched for the search engine robots to visit the site and index its content.

According to www.pagerank.net, one of the online research resources we use for our SEO work, Team Solution Software has 31 pages indexed in Google’s data base; 10 pages indexed in Yahoo!’s; and a few each in MSN, Alta Vista and AOL. We’re very encouraged that it took only two weeks for this web site to make it to the search engine DBs, and we’ll begin refining our efforts now for keyword density and rank positions for the keywords that will result in increased visitorship.

We will not be expecting such quick results there, as the competition is very keen for rank position no matter the keywords. This site is young, also, and search engines do favor maturity. Our networking promotional efforts will fill in the gap here, as it has over the last two weeks, and we’re happy to report, also, our traffic continues to grow. Our pages viewed per visit over the last 10 days is approaching 5, suggesting visitors are finding something of interest here.

Efforts continue, and we’ll be reporting results again in another week.

Although we’ve concentrated so far on discussing the commercial version of Team Solution Software for the small business market, we do have a second version being developed concurrently – - for municipalities. We’ve been calling it CRMunicipal, and in this instance the CRM stands for, among other things, “constituent relations management.”

Some of a Town Manager’s or Town Administrator’s time is spent each day assigning citizen complaints to various department heads for resolution, and the municipal version of Team Solution Software will include a tracking mechanism for those tasks as they make their way down the chain of command for resolution, and then back up again to be marked as resolved.

Not all town agencies and departments work out of the same building, and many of a town’s agencies are part-time or volunteer. It’s not dissimilar to a small business composition of in-house and telecommuting staff members. Team Solution Software’s municipal version will enable everyone to stay in touch and remain current on projects and tasks.

The file/document storage and sharing component is perfect for budget development as it is passed from department to department for everyone’s contribution. Project and task management becomes that much easier with the centralized and shared features of TSS, along with the shared Calendar feature. It’s just as important for all town agencies and departments to be on the same page as it is for small businesses, and Team Solution Software is that perfect tool for inter-departmental communication and accountability.

When completed, the municipal version of TSS will be the first of its kind, designed specifically for towns in any state. We’ll continue reporting on progress and features of this version as it moves to release shortly after the small business version.

A furious pace continues on Team Solution Software as our PHP developers race to finish the Alpha and soon-t0-be-released Beta for internal testing. This week we’re focusing on the client and contact detail pages, as well as putting the finishing touches on the entire messaging system.

Here’s a sneak peek at a design mockup screen for the client details section:

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.