The Schipul office will be closed tomorrow, Friday September 12th, as our employees will be with their families preparing for the incoming Hurricane Ike.
We do not anticipate that this will affect your Web sites or email access. Our Core Team will physically be in the office, to make sure your sites and email are up and handle any situations that arise due to the inclement weather.
Should you have any immediate questions or issues during this time, you can reach us at (281) 497.6567 ext. 0. All training and general support needs will be responded to next week on Monday, September 15th.
Also, be sure to check out some of these Emergency and hurricane preparedness resources:
Stay safe! We’ll talk to you next week, but if you need some quality Tendenci time before then don’t forget to check out our upcoming Tendenci User Conference 2008 schedule!
We have added a lot of excited new dynamics for our second year and think it’s going to be a blast. Don’t forget… if you can’t make it out for the whole two day affair, you’re more than welcome to drop by for just a day or even just a session!
So without furthur ado…
Day One:
8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Come see us in the Tendenci Lounge! Members of the Programming and Support teams will be available for questions all day! The Lounge will be a great place for you to network with other Tendenci users, Schipul staff, or just drop in and check your email.
8:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.: Registration (a necessary evil)
8:45 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.: State of the Union Address with Ed Schipul, CEO… Lets talk about where Tendenci is going and how far we’ve come together (because we just couldn’t do it without you)!
10:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.: Breakout Sessions Room One: Tendenci Toddlers – Intro to Tendenci – A Quick Boot Camp Room Two: Tendenci Titans – Advanced Tendenci – Improve Your User’s Experience On Your Site
11:00 a.m – 11:45 a.m.: Understanding Site Analytics – From DeepMetrix to Google… We promise we’ll try to keep this as fun and as painless as possible! Rumor has it our SEM Director, Jason McElweenie has something cool up his sleeve (don’t tell!).
12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.: LUNCH (WOOHOO!)
1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.: Fireside Chat with Programming & Support Teams… You’ll have all morning to submit questions and get them answered. This will be a great opportunity to hear other people’s Tendenci experiences and use them yourself!
2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.: Breakout Sessions Room One: Organizing Your People Through Tendenci… How are you keeping track of your users?? Room Two: Maximizing the Calendar Events Module… Everyone loves a good event. How do you tell your members about yours?
3:45 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.: Fireside Chat with the Partners of Schipul–The Web Marketing Company. This will be a great opportunity to talk with the Partners and hear the real deal on Schipul and what we’re about.
***
Day Two:
8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Come see us in the Tendenci Lounge! Members of the Programming and Support teams will be available for questions all day! The Lounge will be a great place for you to network with other Tendenci users, Schipul staff, or just drop in and check your email.
8:00 a.m. – 8:30 am: Registration (in case you could only come for one day!)
8:45 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.: Keynote Speaker – How Tendenci Makes Companies Soar… This talk will focus on an extra special Tendenci superstar. Announcement soon!
10:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.: Breakout Sessions Room One: Tendenci Toddlers – Keep Your Members in the Know With Newsletters Room Two: Tendenci Titans – Driving Campaign Strategies Through Your Newsletters
11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.: Breakout Sessions Room One: What’s the Point of Social Media Anyway? Room Two: Little Known Facts About Tendenci – What Are You Missing?
12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.: LUNCH
1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.: Breakout Sessions Room One: Fireside Chat About Billing/Accounting Room Two: Hands-On Social Media Profile Creation… This will be a chance to really get your claws into the meat of Social Media. Schipulites and other Tendenci friends will be on hand to help!
2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.: Interactive Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Session… Another Jason McElweenie trick is expected for this panel. Lets make SEM fun! 3:45 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.: Closing Comments with Ed Schipul, CEO 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.: Closing Reception; Location TBD PAAAAAAAAAAAAARTY!
As you can see, it’s all about communication and enabling you to better address your communities!
Don’t forget:
1. Bring your laptop! University of Houston has free wireless and sessions will be interactive! 2. No spare change needed for parking – University of Houston has you covered! 3. Need a detailed list of presentations? You’ll find them here soon!
All articles in Tendenci are associated with a category and subcategory. A long awaited request has been the ability to rename (sub)categories. I’m happy to announce that we are working on this feature and you can expect it within the next couple of weeks.
Already we’re seeing some room for improvement, but can’t wait to show you what we have so far. Currently this feature will only allow you to rename. Other requests have come to mind while building this, such as: moving a subcategory to another category, removing (sub)categories, and human error detection/prevention.
While it’s not likely that the latter features will be available in this next update, we just want you to know that we do have them in mind.
So. You know what a blog is, and you’ve decided you want to join the roost. Since a blog is a fantastic way to dive right into the social media waters, you immediately get to typing. And typing. And typing. And typing. Phew! All that blood, sweat, and tears, poured out into a blogging template. Hooray! And yet, while you’re churning out scads of awesome blog posts, you’re beginning to think that no one is reading the results of your hard work and research.
The truth is, maybe they’re not.
Why? Because! Aside from writing stimulating content, you’ve also gotta participate in the community. That’s right. You’ve gotta turn the blogging community’s cheek your way.
Luckily, you wield the power.
“Well, how do I do that?” you ask. Don’t get exasperated already. It’s easier than you think! For starters, Chris Brogan offers a great list of nine ways to promote your blog posts, including (but not limited to!) social bookmarking, Twitter (of course!), and community-building plugins.
But the fun doesn’t end there! The discussion continues in the comments, with recommendations of claiming your blog in Technorati, posting a submission to Digg, and installing a widget on your blog, giving you insta-access to a blogging community.
The fact of the matter is that there are literally thousands of ways to promote your blog. And there’s no right or wrong way! It all boils down to the bottom line – build your community meaningfully, and they will come!
In the comments, tell us about your favorite ways to promote your blog, whether it be a corporate blog or your personal blog. We want to hear your stories!
We’re mixing things up a little this year thanks to all of your feedback, with a lot more Q&A and hands-on-training. No matter the subject or speaker, we want your input!
Day one will feature a crash course in Tendenci on both the beginner and advance levels. We’re going to show you how to best maximize the various Tendenci Tools and integrate Social Media applications to enable the community you already have and expand it. Day two will be packed with panels to really help you grow your story and captivate your audience.
We’ll also have a group from our production and programming team constantly available to you in our Tendenci User Conference Louge… feel free to pick their brains!
A list of presenters and panels will be coming soon. Check back here or on the Tendenci Blog for more info!
We know a lot of companies are into the whole green thing these days, and why not? It’s awesome for the environment. We at Schipul are a bunch of “green folks” at home, but are finding it hard to get things started in the office. We’ve decided to take our recycling issues to the interwebs and outline our journey to a greener office right here! Please feel free to leave suggestions in the comment box.
Here are some of the biggest issues we’re facing:
Our building does not offer recycling at this time… and apparently we are the only tenants interested in said recycling. We would gladly pay for this service and contract it ourselves, but we’d really like to start something building-wide so the movement is bigger than just Schipul. Thankfully, our building is working on the recycling issue with us and we will head up the coalition.
How exactly should we go about recycling paper when so many of the paper we get rid of needs to be shredded because of “sensitive information?” We could shred the paper and then recycle it, but a lot of recycling companies won’t pick up shredded paper. There are quite a few companies that will come out to the office and actually shred your paper for you (then recycle it), so that is a solution we’re thinking about too.
Getting everyone involved in the recycling issue could be tough too. Yes, everyone says they’re green, but in the office it’s too easy to throw that coke can in the trash or waste countless sheets of paper on a test print. This cool article by the California Integrated Waste Management Board suggests managers must be involved from the get go so that is something else we are exploring.
These are just our initial observations and it’s almost a given we’ll encounter more stumbling blocks along the way, which you can read about here!
In the mean time, here are some cool resources to help you go green:
Deepmetrix, the authors of the web statistic reporting software, has been acquired by Microsoft and they have announced the end of life for the product which will no longer be supported. We will continue to run the DeepMetrix software for as long as it is compatible with a fully patched and secure operating system although it could stop working without notice and data may or may not be retrievable. For those clients who use the Deepmetrix system, we would like to recommend using Google Analytics as a reporting tool if you are not already. The following steps must be done in order to begin use of Google Analytics.
Send Schipul the embed code given so we can add this to the template of your web site. The data will be tracked from the time the code is installed.
*Please check with the Schipul support team to see if you already have the Analytics code installed if you are unsure. Adding new code will start tracking over and all previous reports will be lost!
When using Google Analytics as your reporting tool, please note the difference in reports that you will be seeing compared to Deepmetrix. Deepmetrix tracks more information and bigger numbers because cookies aren’t necessary to create a statistic. The negative to that is bots and spiders are counted as traffic which will inflate your numbers, but if you’re looking at trends that won’t matter because bots and spiders are pretty consistent.
Google is closer to real user traffic though it could miss some valid site visitors. Again, if you look at over all trends the slight difference this missed traffic makes is minimal.
I hope this information is useful. If you have questions you can contact the Schipul Support team at 281.497.6567 ext.411.
If you have visited the Schipul office in the last five months, you’ve probably noticed all the construction around here. Thanks to an office flood in early March we have been tiptoeing around torn up walls and tape but FINALLY we are almost back to our old selves.
(Insert collective sigh of relief here…)
In typical Schipul fashion, we took this lemon of a situation and added some sugar. When the rebuilding began we decided to convert five offices into seven; which gives us more room to serve our awesome clients.
Thanks again for being with us through it all guys!
Everywhere you turn, someone else is