Got a lot of paper flying around? Lots of people scratching their heads saying I didn’t know, I wasn’t told or can you train me? Yep, like most fast growing companies you are approaching a point or already at the point where compliance safety and training can no longer be handled in an adhoc manor… ahhh bring back the old days of when we were small and the lunches were long eh!

Business Control was originally developed for NCSS, a hardware maintenance company with 100 employees & 100 agents australia wide, dealing with multiple vendors like HP, Sony, Apple, all with their own rules and regulations that must be followed. Communicating this to the service providers nationally was darn near impossible the old way and there was certainly no visibility on who was up to date. “Not good enough” say the big boys.

Enter Simply with Business Contol!

Business Control is a compliance and elearning solution that provides managers with a true gauge of the employee’s understanding of policies and business procedures. It allows managers to identify areas of risk and act/train/communicate online -  proactively, before problems occur.

Business Control provides:

• centralised company documents on the internet or company intranet. Automating the effective distribution of policy and business procedure documentation to users inboxes
• a record of receipt and consumption per employee
• a score of their understanding of the policies
• assurance that all employees read policies within the time frame set
• measurement & understanding by means of an online multiple choice exams
• grades and records employee’s exam scores then reports them back to management
• email alerts to management of exceptions or employee failure to comply.

For a self paced demo go to - www.businesscontrol.com.au

By now, you would have probably heard great (and some bad) things about Google maps and the Street View Application. Not only is it a handy tool to find locations anywhere in the world, you can find sites where they’ve taken it to the next level, such as agent locations (TABMA Member Search) to providing detailed directions to your office for clients from any location (Our contact us page).

Make sure you have a Google Account, you’ll need one to get a Maps API key, and your API key will be connected to your Google Account. Next, get a Google Maps API that lets you ‘embed’ Google Maps in your own web pages. A Maps API key is valid for a single “directory” on your web server.

There is no limit on the number of page views you may generate per day using the Maps API till 500,000 page views per day and the Maps API does not include advertising.

Looking for examples of the maps in action? The example source code on the Examples Page on the Google Maps website, as well as the Econym Google Maps API Tutorial should give you in the right direction.

For trouble shooting issues, check out our Google Maps API discussion group, or have a look at the online documentation (more for people with a grasp on JavaScript programming and object-oriented programming concepts).

Happy Google Mapping!

here’s a good selection of online tools to help streamline your web-productivity.

web browser - firefox 3.0
word processor & document management - adobe buzzword
image editing - picnik
file sharing - drop.io
presentation - Sliderocket
survery and polls - PollDaddy
embedded video streaming - Vimeo or youtube
embedded documents - scribd
screen sharing & collaboration - adobe connectnow

any more? feel free to add them in the comments.

Slattery Auctions Australia is an independently owned Australian company specialising in the valuation and auction market. Their clients are considered to be blue chip, a number of large banks, finance companies, government agencies and liquidators.

Simply where engaged in order to stream line the communications between Slattery’s staff and these clients, known as vendors, so that the management of auction stock (consignments) was moved from a paper and phone based system online to the “vendor interface”.

The vendor interface is a secure login website that allows Slatterys vendors to do the following:

• Search and view all consignments that are in stock
• Allocate consignments to auctions
• View consignment History
• Approve Slattery’s valuation price as the reserve
• Approve any referral sales
• Easily contact Slattery’s about a consignment
• Arrange and manage consignment pickup requests
• View all remittance advises after sales
• View sales by month
• View a pre sales report (vehicles assigned to next auction)
• View a post sales report (results from completed auctions)
• Vehicle price search (historical sales prices in the system)

The system was built and enhanced over a period of 6 months and has help Slatterys reduce the time and overheads involved in managing the auction process from pickup to sale.

http://www.slatteryauctions.com.au