Partner Events

As you will be aware from previous Newsletters, the Online50 team have hosted two Partner Events in London in 2007 and mid 2008. For our third event we decided to head north to Manchester and on the 26^th & 27^th November we hosted another successful event at the Britannia Hotel. We were delighted to welcome partners from London, Newcastle, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Liverpool and of course our hosts in Manchester and Stockport. Once again it was a pleasure to meet with everyone and to share both ideas and a rather delicious curry!

On this occasion our Partner Event was spread over two days beginning with our Service Proposition Workshop on Wednesday afternoon. Thursday was a full day beginning with an Online50 service update in the morning and then a software comparison workshop in the afternoon.

In This Issue:

Service Proposition Workshop

Our partner event was kicked off on Wednesday afternoon with the SPW.  This was a chance for our partners to share ideas in a workshop environment led by Online50 founder and Chief Executive Rob Lambden (shown left chatting during a break with Online50 partner accountant Jan Szczepanski from Sanders Geeson in Wakefield).  During the SPW we explored ways in which a firm could identify value added services they would provide using the Online50 platform and build an effective Service Proposition to use when promoting their services.  It presents an opportunity to look at where your strengths and weakness are and where you feel you need to concentrate more resources or effort in exploiting the services provided to your clients.

The SPW is not a lecture.  Partners are encouraged to participate in the discussion forum and to share ideas.  The feedback from partners regarding the SPW is always positive and a number of partners felt that they had gained a lot from the experience.  The Service Proposition Workshop is something we at Online50 have designed in response to requests from our accountancy partners for assistance with identifying how they as a practice can get the most out of the Online50 service.

We would be very happy to discuss taking this workshop to your office and presenting to your colleagues and partners. Please contact your account manager for more details and perhaps to arrange a visit.

Online50 Partner Briefing

We always have feedback from our partners at our partner briefings.  In addition to hearing how the Online50 service has helped firms provide services to their clients, this time we were treated to a very interesting presentation on the uses of MS Excel with Sage 50 reporting.  Peter Guinn of Alliotts shared with us his immense experience of Excel reporting tools, including pivot tables and the ODBC driver.  Excel integrates very well with Sage 50 and the Online50 service, we can provided Microsoft Office for use on the Online50 platform allowing seamless integration.  This is a very cost-effective way of having access not only to Excel, but to the whole of Microsoft Office, anywhere, anytime.

After coffee there was an opportunity for our Online50 team members to showcase some of the new features available to partners.  Included in this presentation were Hosted Microsoft Exchange, the SFX (Secure File eXchange) and an Infrastructure update.  The Secure File eXchange provides a way to not only share files through use of secure online folders, but also to have tracked discussions.  Feedback from partners on their experience with alternative online folder systems at the event confirmed that the added features of the SFX will make it very useful to our partner accountants.

This was also an opportunity to announce the launch of the new ‘Ambition’ brand. Ambition is a new branded series of products from IT Inside Out Ltd, the company that provides the Online50 service.  Products that were shown on the day were Ambition Accounting (various levels) and Ambition Backup, an online backup facility that provides a single point of backup and restore for all customers including on-premise data and data hosted on the Online50 platform.  All products were received warmly and much interest was shown in using the wider Online50 facilities.

As the information presented in the section was vast, it would be impossible to include it all here. So please do call your account manager or the service delivery manager for much more information.

Software Features Workshop

We introduced a new format event in Manchester - the Software Features Workshop.  Here we explored the needs of a growing business and how both Sage 50 and Ambition accounts would serve those needs.  We were very pleased to welcome two guest speakers, Jonathan Harris (right) from Accounting Office, the software behind Ambition Accounting, and Richard Shelton (centre) from Sage.

The workshop, which generated a lively debate, was compered by Rob Lambden (left) who encouraged our partners to pose questions and scenarios to our guest speakers who were then able to show how either Sage 50 or Ambition Accounting would deal with the various tasks.  Rarely do we have the opportunity to quiz such experts in their fields and so the workshop was hugely popular and proved very useful in showing our partners how different software products on the Online50 platfrom compare.  At Online50 we have always been vendor neutral when it comes to software.  We provide different software packages allowing our partners to choose which package suits the needs of their clients.  And so not only do we host Sage 50, but also Sage 200 and Ambition accounting as well.  Online50 partner accountants attending the Software Features Workshop were able to understand the strengths and limitations of different packages and how their clients would benefit from these.