Lazarus recognised as Trusted Expert by @ExpertsExchange

GL Computing is proud to announce that Mike Lazarus has achieved another honour unique to the Act! world.

Experts Exchange has recognised him as a Trusted Expert for 2019 in their new acknowledgement for Certified Professionals.

When a crisis strikes, you want help from experts you can trust. Experts Exchange’s Certified Professionals have real-world experience, maintain top certifications, demonstrate high levels of professionalism, are well-known and remain highly dedicated to sharing their knowledge with users like you.

As the second-highest level of recognition, Trusted Experts have proven to be trustworthy and knowledgeable through their continued professional interactions on site.

Experts Exchange encourages users like you to network with these vetted, passionate individuals who are committed to staying current with certifications and the industry’s latest best practices.

Meet the Certified Professionals - Trusted Experts 

See Mike Lazarus's Profile on Experts Exchange

Mike is also the world’s only Certified Act! Expert – Sanctioned by Swiftpage.

Act! Certified Expert – Sanctioned by Swiftpage #ActCRM

Over the years, Mike Lazarus has been the recipient of many unique awards and certifications related to his work in Act!, including:

• Certified ACT! Sage
• ACT! Community Development Partner
• Certified ACT! Genius
• Experts Exchange Titan Award – three times

In another first, Mike has just been sanctioned by Swiftpage as an
“Act! Certified Expert”

As indicated in this previous blog post, Working with Act! Again, Mike has been working with Swiftpage for some months to identify and resolve outstanding issues and to improve the stability and functionality of the product. Now he is connected with the QA and Development teams in testing some of the enhanced and new features expected in 2018 before they go to beta and then release.

Some important ones regarding Office integration have been announced in this December 2017 Letter from Swiftpage’s President, Lorcan Malone to registered Act! users.

Please respond in the comments with any areas or bugs you think need additional testing.

Working with Act! again

It has been a few months since I last posted on the status of where I am with Swiftpage and the direction of the product. In that time, I have received numerous requests for an update.

After a call back in March from John Oechsle, Swiftpage's CEO, and Rowan Koons, SVP and GM, followed by four months of detail discussions on how to continually improve the product and user experience, we have reached an agreement for how I can best continue to serve Act! and the broader Act! Community.

Swiftpage has recognised my expertise and passion, and as part of this working together, Swiftpage has endorsed me as an “Act! Certified Expert, sanctioned by Swiftpage” as at 1 August 2017.

I have also been fortunate, during these conversations, to have had a look at the future direction of roadmap for Act!. This has made me more excited to be working with them to try and bring these to market for you.

My Current Focus

It does have elements of the position of "P.O.P.E" as originally suggested as a comment in this LinkedIn thread from four years ago - https://www.linkedin.com/groups/49896/49896-214593198 by Paul Marentette, of Uptime Solutions in Canada, and seconded by many others including Bob Ogdon, Chairman and Founder of Swiftpage.

We have highlighted the following ways to work together:

1. Initially examining areas of the current build (19.2 Update 3), with a focus on MS-Office integration and other areas that users might suggest.

2. Become active again in the Act! Community Site and my Linkedin Act! Fanatics Group. Not just in supporting users, as I have done for many years, but also creating an analysis of the posts to identify the areas that users have the most issues with (usability or flaws).

3. Assist Swiftpage in updating and enhancing Act! Knowledgebase articles.

4. Alpha and Beta testing v20 as soon as it is available.

After this, I hope to assist Swiftpage in improving Act! eMarketing, WebAPI, Mobile Companion, and other areas. I also intend to help them enhance their relationships with the Act! Certified Consultants and other resellers channel.

Help Me To Help You

I have some requests for you, the Act! Fanatic community (users and the resale channel alike):

1. I would like to examine any systems where Act! v19 is having issues with Outlook integration. At this time, I would be happy to take on about three sites per week.
NOTE: This is a NO CHARGE offer - No charge to the user or reseller.

2. Could you please post, as a comment to this blog article, or in the LinkedIn Group, or via private communication to me, any bugs or areas where you think I should allocate additional time. If I do not understand your point, I may contact you to see it remotely on your system.

3. Please also comment in the forums above with any subjects that I could generate a blog article that you think could improve your use of Act!. I do have some ideas that I have not seen done before, but I would still value your opinions.

The Future

This agreement is a great opportunity for me, for the product and for the community of users who have been behind the product for up to 30 years.

Those of you who know me know that I will throw everything I have into testing every function I can - as a user. I will work with other users in the forums, via email or phone, to find the issues that matter most in keeping you productive. Then I will work to try and replicate the issues so that I can report them accurately to QA and Development so they can work on fixing them.

Once this is underway, I hope to also have a small say in helping them prioritise their resources so that they can deliver the best possible solution for us all and make Act! as great a product as we all know it can be.

About four years ago, a user asked me what I would do if the vendor put me in charge of the product. At that time, I described a roadmap over two-three years that I thought would be necessary without the funds of an Apple or Google. I still believe that, over a similar time-frame, we can have a leading solution again.

Please feel free to post any questions or comments you have on this.

Regards,

Mike Lazarus
Act! Evangelist

Who Is Mike Lazarus, the Act! Evangelist – A Bio

Mike Lazarus, the Act! Evangelist, was born and raised down-under in Sydney, Australia. He lives and breathes Act! CRM and has been involved with the software for nearly 30 years.

After going to NSW University to study Computer Science, he went into hardware engineering. First at IBM on 80xx series mainframes. Then at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he won an Engineer of the Year award. This was also when he moved over to the faster pace of the software side of the computing industry.

With personal computing taking off, he joined Sourceware as a Product Manager. Tasked with looking after the Australian and New Zealand marketing and support for a range of software products including the Australian-made, Tracker – one of the first Contact Managers.

In 1987, PC Extras, which had just picked up distribution of a new Contact Manager called ACT!, asked Mike to take over the Product Management role for it and other products. In the first year, sales went from four seats of Act! in the first month to a thousand in the twelfth. Thus began three decades of Mike’s association with Act!. It was also at this time that Mike Muhney (one of the co-founders of Act!) called him, what soon became his internationally recognised title, “Act! Evangelist”

In 1991, Mike got the urge to put into practise many of the ideas he’d been teaching Act! users to do. He started his own business, GL Computing, which specialised in small to medium business computing. Through his business, his love and passion for Act! continued to grow.

As part of his dedication to helping small to medium businesses reach their potential, Mike developed and added a range of skills to his own portfolio. He has helped a huge number of Act! users make the most of their customer data through training and support services. In addition, he’s supported many the Act! Certified Consultants to improve their skills. Mike also assisted a number of the Act! add-on developers with design input, quality assurance and beta testing for their products that provide a range of solutions for act! users. A special focus of his has been with products that enable Act! users to be mobile with smart phones, tablets and web browser access to their data.

On a personal note, he is very passionate about his family, friends, Rugby Union (a Life Member of the NSW Waratahs) and Blues music … Not necessarily in that order!

You can find links to other various on-line profiles here: About Mike Lazarus of GL Computing

Additional Achievements:

• One of the first ACCs to have a web site – 1995
• Selected to train Symantec’s technical staff when they purchased Contact Software International
• Served two terms on the Act! Advisory Board (the first member not from North America)
• Awarded the Community Contribution Award in 2002 – voted by all global ACCs
• Wrote the History of Act! and most of the content on Act! CRM Wikipedia page
• Is the most prolific Act! poster on on-line forums, since Symantec started them on CompuServe. This includes fourteen thousand posts on the Act! Community Site, alone
• Founded and administers the Act! Fanatics Group on LinkedIn, which has more members than the vendor's own group

 

Qualifications and Awards

• Swiftpage Act! Certified Consultant – 2014
• Certificate III in Micro Business Operations – 2014
• Experts-Exchange Certified ACT! Genius – 2012

• Sage – First ACT! Community Development Partner – 2011
• Experts-Exchange Titan Award – 2010
• Willy Award - Unsung CRM Hero – 2010
• Sage ACT! Community - Platinum Elite Contributor – 2010
• Experts-Exchange Titan Award – 2009
• itToolbox ACT! Top Contributor Gold Achievement – 2009
• itToolbox ACT! Enthusiast Gold Achievement – 2009
• Experts-Exchange Certified ACT! Sage – 2009
• Experts-Exchange Titan Award – 2008

• Sage ACT! Community Leader – 2008
• Experts-Exchange Certified ACT! Guru – 2008
• ACT! Certified Consultants - Community Contribution Award – 2002
• Symantec ACT! Certified Consultant – 1994
• Novell Certified Netware Engineer – 1994
• Contact Software International ACT! Authorised Trainer – 1992
• Digital Equipment Corp - Engineer of the Year 1986

 

Act! CRM Fanatic Links

If you’re interested, here are a few other Act! related feeds, forums and tools that I monitor:

• LinkedIn ACT! Fanatics - http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ACT-Fanatics-49896
• Twitter List - https://twitter.com/GLComputing/act-crm
• ACT! CRM Daily Paper - http://paper.li/GLComputing/actbysage
• Facebook Interest List - https://www.facebook.com/lists/10150654560093127
• Google+ ACT! Fanatics - https://plus.google.com/communities/109892208109008763279

 

Certified ACT! Genius @ExpertsExchange #SageACT

GL Computing’s Mike Lazarus has become the first Certified ACT! Genius at Experts-Exchange

Click image to see EE Profile or here to see PDF Certificate

Technorati Tags: ACT,Sage ACT!,GL Computing,Experts-Exchange

What I learned from my last blog post… and what would you like me to blog about?

Let me start by saying that, while I do like speaking, I don’t consider myself to be a good writer. This is the reason that my posts are largely bullet points or PowerPoint posts and tend to be mostly of a technical nature. Fortunately, blogs in the technical arena gain readerships according to the market they target.

As my blogs are targeted in a small niche of ACT! users who want to improve their technical understanding of the product, I don’t chase the volume hits of more professional bloggers. To put this in perspective, I have been typically achieving about 2000 hits per month on this blog (about the same as I get on the main GL Computing web site.

I try to post at least a couple of times a month and my posts do have a fair degree of text contact, which the search engines love to index.

I do promote my posts via Social Media:

• Twitterfeed automatically sends a Tweet on Twitter very soon after an update
• New posts are automatically added to the News section in the LinkedIN ACT! Fanatics Group 
• Networkblogs automatically posts them to the GL Computing Facebook page and to the streams of those who follow either the blog page or are fans of the GL page.
• I also find other similar blog posts and, where applicable, add a comment referencing my post
• Additionally, I use links to the posts when answering forum questions where I have covered the topic in a post.

Currently, about 50% of hits to the blog are from referring sites (mainly forums I post to and the social media links) and only 35% from search engines.

However, last week, I posted about Why I prefer Blackberry over iPhone for Businesses. This was picked up by a couple of journalists and professional bloggers like Neerav Bhatt on his blog: Introduction to RIM Blackberry Mobile Phones: Pros and Cons

Not only did this article receive a lot of nice comments, but it was highly re-tweeted and has so far received about 1000 hits in less than 2 weeks (500 in the first day).

This raises some questions that I’d like to pose to you:

1. What would you like to see me blog about?

   While I intend to keep targeting the ACT! user base, should I keep the focus on product technical posts? Or would you like to see more posts on other topics that might be of interest, such as: mobile computing, social media, general CRM, general sales/marketing or general IT?
   

2. Would it detract from the site if I added some Google Ads or sponsorships?

   As I provide the content of this blog for free, do you think it would be a problem to go down this path? Previously, I had not considered the hit rate to be high enough to make this worth-while and also reasoned that the technical people who read the site wouldn’t be interested in this.

To add one more thing – While I don’t sell to end-users, if anyone wishes to utilise my services for any work related to ACT! or IT, you just need to have your reseller contact me to book some time. I can be available remotely for work at any time of the day as we support (via our resellers) in all time-zones.

Please let me know via a comment to this article, a comment in the ACT! Fanatics Group or privately via our Web Site Contact Page if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see articles on or if there’s anything I can assist you with.

Technorati Tags: ACT!,ACT! by Sage,Blogs,CRM,SCRM,Social Media,support

GL Computing awarded Experts-Exchange Titan award – 2nd year in a row

The epic performance of GL computing in 2009 has earned a spot as a Top Expert in the 6th Annual Expert Awards.

From a competitive field of over 30,000 qualified experts worldwide, GL Computing has been awarded the:

Titan Award - 2009

From Experts-Exchange: “Thank you for sharing your unparalleled, inconceivable, and brilliant knowledge with the members of Experts Exchange, without you Experts Exchange would not be the #1 IT resource in the web.”

GL Computing also won the Titan Award – 2008 and is the only Experts-Exchange Certified ACT! Sage

Technorati Tags: ACT!,ACT! by Sage,CRM,Award,Experts-Exchange,GL Computing

Updated: New GL Computing ACT! Fanatics Toolbar

In our desire to further support and add value to the ACT! Community, we’ve added this new toolbar that you can install into Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Please click on this tool bar to add it to your browser:

We will be updating it with additional content over time, so please add Comments with anything you’d like added or changed.

Technorati Tags: ACT,ACT!,Toolbar,Browser,Explorer,Firefox