There’s a lot not to like about the diminutive tyrant and usurper (according to his critics) that ruled over the French Empire from 1804 to 1815. The famous imperialist had a bad habit of ignoring treaties, emotionlessly sending thousands of young men to their deaths, and reinstated slavery in the French colonies across the Atlantic. But Napoleon also ended the disorder and lawlessness that characterized post-revolutionary France, and introduced the Napoleonic Code, influential in countless civil law jurisdictions around the world.

But perhaps the most important innovation of Emperor Napoleon, for modern small to mid-sized businesses anyway, was a way to tap into the expertise and talent of a nation of thinkers to achieve a common goal. At the time, Napoleon wanted a way to keep his troops well-fed during long campaigns. The result gave the world a new way to preserve food, and gave business an invaluable technique for streamlining creative tasks. We call this technique crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing For Small Businesses… And 19th Century Empires

The French have their fair share of innovations – King Louis XI owned one of the first indoor bar pool tables – but Napoleon took French innovation one step further with crowdsourcing. For those that are a little rusty in French history, we’ll begin with a quick rundown of Napoleon’s approach to crowdsourcing:

• 1795 – The French Government becomes alarmed at the difficulty of supplying edible food to French armies throughout Europe. Leaders offer people around the country a 14,000 franc prize to invent a way to preserve food for winter storage and long-distance shipping.
• 1804 – Napoleon assumes Emperorship of the French Empire, but continues the competition as no one has yet claimed the prize.
• 1811 – A French chef, confectioner, and distiller named Nicolas Appert publishes the Appert Method, a way of preserving food by sealing it in air-tight jars and boiling them in water for several hours.

So remember — every time you open a fresh can of soup or vegetables, you actually have Napoleon to thank. So what does all this have to do with small business?

Crowdsourcing With Microsoft Office 365

The idea of crowdsourcing is the innovation behind giant works like the Oxford English Dictionary and Wikipedia. In fact, you might be surprised to learn just how many major websites and businesses have been built through crowdsourcing. Just to name a few:

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Linux
• Human Genome Project
• Second Life
• Flickr

Crowdsourcing is a fantastic way to get your customers involved in the creative process behind your business, cut production costs for your staff, efficiently outsource common tasks, and microtask tedious tasks. But one of the key components of successful crowdsourcing is having a cloud solution that allows you to quickly connect with the people handling your assigned tasks. For example, Vorsite offers products like SharePoint Online, a remote collaboration and document sharing service that allows you to take control of your email and servers. Services like Lync can also help you streamline web conferencing and chat, which can improve your business’ ability to communicate with workers quickly and efficiently.

So while many of Napoleon’s management tactics will do more to harm your business, using crowdsourcing like the French Empire can help you take the pressure off your team by eliminating tedious tasks, cut down on payroll, and eliminate on-site server maintenance and security costs. For more information on how crowdsourcing and Microsoft Office 365 can revolutionize the way you do business, contact Vorsite today.

New healthcare initiatives seem to be the end of small business or a welcome boon to the ailing economy, depending on who you talk to. It’s clear from the law as written, that small businesses and insurance companies will be held more accountable for providing affordable health care to most Washington workers. Insurance companies will also be forbidden from:

• dropping coverage for sick patients
• enforcing lifetime caps on coverage amounts
• denying anyone coverage due to a pre-existing condition.

For small business owners, this means that insurance packages for employees could be more affordable than ever before. What are some of the other benefits to small business owners that could come from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?

Small Businesses With Very Few Employees Will Not Have to Provide Insurance…

Small businesses with less than 50 full-time equivalent employees will not be penalized for failing to provide health insurance for employees. Part-time employees are also considered when calculating full-time equivalent employees.

…But May Want To Consider Offering Insurance to Employees

Small business owners can qualify for a maximum 35 percent tax credit today to help offset the cost of employee insurance costs. On January 1st, 2014, the tax credit offered to small business owners will be increased to 50 percent.

More Young Adults Will Stay on Parents’ Plans

Small businesses that employ workers that are under the age of 26 could also get breaks on insurance costs as many young adults will be permitted to remain on their parents’ health insurance plan until they turn 26.

The Affordable Care Act May Reduce Premium Costs

Health insurance premiums have rapidly increased since 2009…

WashingtonPost.com

…something which the Affordable Care Act is designed to stop by requiring insurance companies to justify rate increases over 10 percent. White House health policy experts claim the average four-person family will save $2,300.00 on health insurance premiums by 2014, compared to estimated premiums without the Affordable Care Act.

Both Insurance Providers and Businesses Will Be Held Accountable

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will impose some fines on small business owners and insurance providers that disobey rules of the new health care initiative. Some include:

• $1,000.00 – The daily late fee the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will impose on insurance providers that fail to file their premium reports, on top of a $10,000.00 fine.
• $500,000.00 - The fine small businesses and corporations could receive for discriminatory health insurance practices under PPACA.

Mobilize Your Website

Is your website mobile friendly?   Just because you can see your website on a smartphone doesn’t mean that it’s usable for handhelds.  Do you have to pinch and zoom to read the site?  Is text large enough to press without hitting the wrong link?  Is it easy to navigate your site on a phone?

Why bother with mobile?

Almost half of all U.S. adults today use a smartphone, according to findings by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.  This means it is more important than ever that your website be optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices.

How to go mobile?

There are two strategies for to going mobile.  You can 1) create a mobile version of your site, or 2) create a responsive website.

What’s the difference?

A mobile site is a copy of your website that is converted to a smaller size.  When mobile users navigate to your site they are redirected to this separate mobile website. This is a good solution if you have recently designed your website and aren’t looking to rebuild anytime soon, but there are several downsides.  Since the mobile site is a second domain you will have to keep track of updating two sites and follow two sets of analytics.  Also, design isn’t flexible with a mobile site.  Your mobile site has only one design and one size, so no matter what mobile device you are using the site will look exactly the same.  Imagine using a tablet and seeing a website that is sized for a smartphone.

A more favorable solution is responsive design.  A responsive site uses code which allows your website to render differently on whatever sized screen it is viewed on.  On a smart phone your website will shrink, buttons and text will be larger, and the layout will be easy to navigate on a small screen.  The same site viewed on a desktop monitor will grow to fill your screen, have more images, and more navigation buttons.  Unlike a mobile site, a responsive site is just one website.

Other things you can do

Short of redesigning your site, here are a few things you can do right now to begin making information easier to find on a phone:

1)    Display your most important information at the top of your website.  Things like your phone number, contact email, and address should be very easy for your users to find.

2)    Don’t use Flash.  Flash takes a long time to load, uses a lot of data, and many devices just don’t support it.

3)    Keep content simple.  Users don’t want to dig through tons of text and images to find what they need.  This is true for your website on any platform, but particularly true on a small screen.

4)    Don’t make users download .pdfs.  Again, this can take a long time and eat up a lot of data.

No matter how careful you are preparing and implementing your business budget, there are always ays that your company can cut costs to prepare for an uncertain future. With Vorsite and Microsoft Cloud Solutions, you can find small ways to trim your annual budget, leaving more capital for expansion and new product development. Look for these three ways your business could be costing you money every day.

1. Email maintenance and servicing issues

Sometimes it takes managing a large staff to understand how critical email downtime to patches or maintenance can be. Microsoft Exchange Online helps companies manage email accessibility by offering:

• Mobile access and an easy-to-use Web interface for online environment management
• 24/7/365 live support
• Automated patching to eliminate maintenance tasks
• Continuous data backup

Along with built-in anti-virus and spam filters, Microsoft Exchange gives approved users access to community inboxes (up to 25 GB) to make information-sharing fast and simple.

2. Excessive overhead costs

If you don’t allow employees to telecommute for at least some of the time, you could be sacrificing a great deal of your profit to unnecessary overhead costs. By hosting business work applications on the cloud, you can encourage employees to work off-premises. Some of the Vorsite applications that make intelligent telecommuting possible include:

• Exchange Online: Email
• SharePoint Online: Document Sharing and Remote Collaboration
• Lync: Web conferencing, Chat
• vorApps: SharePoint Lists and Libraries

Not only does even occasional telecommuting cut down on space costs from the physical office, but it also helps cut down on energy costs.

3. Inflexible growth potential

One of the biggest advantages of running your business on the cloud is that its multifunctional services allow for a slew of capabilities. For example, very small businesses may only need a very small amount of data storage, perhaps 10MB. With the cloud, you only use and pay for this much space. But as your company grows, you’ll need more data storage. You can elect to pay for this increased data as necessary, not waste money on excess storage you don’t really need.

But the cloud’s rapid expansion in data storage capabilities isn’t just necessary for company’s growth over a long period of time. Many small businesses experience a “busy season” when a temporary increase in data storage is necessary (such as higher email volume), but the increased storage becomes unnecessary shortly after the season is over.

In addition to lower IT costs, reduced energy consumption, and better employee productivity, Vorsite is proud to offer Microsoft Cloud Solutions for small to medium businesses that don’t have the budget or need to host their servers directly on site. Virtual collaboration through software like Microsoft Office 365 empowers business owners with the technology necessary to help their businesses grow, not waste money on excessive and unnecessary costs.