Events Archives - NiE Network it Easy, Inc.

20 Nov

Perpetually thankful for great customers and employees

05 Jun

Company outing – it’s good to have fun together

We believe that hard work and dedication are crucial in providing services to our customers. But we also believe that having fun as a team is important for building team spirit. We surely make a great team and we hope we can only get better and stronger as a company going forward. Last Saturday we visited iFLY Rosemont to make our dream of flying become a reality. Now we are going to take care of other dreams we have, because sky is the limit…

30 Apr

5 Reasons to Choose Dynamics 365 for Sales

According to Aberdeen’s most recent reports, 87% of best-in-class companies use CRM – because CRM works. The reason it works is because CRM does more than organize customer data for you, it also helps salespeople perform better and close more deals. Read today’s post to learn more about how Dynamics 365 CRM for Sales helps your hard-working salespeople maximize their opportunities and increase revenues companywide.

Don’t feel like reading? Get all the info and more when you join us and our partner QuantaCRM for an informative webinar on “7 Reasons You Need Dynamics 365 CRM Now,” happening May 16, 2017 at 11:00 PM CDT. Register here.

Get Information Anywhere and Any Time – By harnessing the power of the cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales helps your salespeople qualify leads, prepare quotes, and manage their pipeline – no matter where they are. Since the software is based on the cloud, it’s updated in real time and accessible and usable on a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device. That means your salespeople can close deals right on the spot.

Stay On Track with Sales Dashboards – your salespeople will have access to important information at a glance with the attractive graphical dashboards located in the CRM. The software organizes leads into easy-to-read funnels and charts that help your salespeople identify opportunity status, sales goals, and active leads (pre-built), or empowers them to customize their own dashboards quickly with a point-and-click editor.

Increase Competition with Interactive Reports – great salespeople not only compete with each other, they also compete with themselves, setting ever-higher standards for achievement. Interactive reports from Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for Sales help your salespeople target and track their important metrics with drill-down, easy-to-build reports that offer natural language Q&As. In addition to the reports in Dynamics 365 for Sales, your salespeople will also have access to a variety of pre-made report templates for Excel, so they can manage their leads and sales forecasts easily. They can also create their own Excel reports that reflect important data, and share them with anyone in your organization.

Find the Next Great Opportunity with Comprehensive Lists – it’s all about the next great opportunity for your salespeople, and when they have access to sortable, filterable, and searchable lists that come with the powerhouse CRM, and can even view, manipulate, and save their list data in familiar Excel without leaving Dynamics 365, they’ll always be on the lookout for more opportunities. Studies show that the more familiar new software is, the better and faster your adoption rate will be, and with a CRM from Microsoft, you can bet the interface will be familiar to all your employees.

Ensure Follow-Through with the Business Process Bar – when your salespeople access leads in the system, they’ll always see the business process bar at the top, an exciting feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for Sales. The bar tracks their progress as they develop an opportunity, outlining each step in the sales process and identifying clear, logical next steps for your busy salespeople. This will help them ensure follow-through and stay up to date with the latest developments in even the lengthiest sales cycles.

And There’s More…

From Skype integration for sales calls and collaboration, to OneNote integration for one-stop sales data collection (including audio notes!), to document collaboration for quotes or proposals, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales has even more tools to help your team close more leads and increase revenues – that’s a win-win for everyone.

We invite you to learn more at our partner webinar, “7 Reasons You Need Dynamics 365 CRM Now,” presented by QuantaCRM on May 16, 2017 at 11:00 AM CDT.

You’ll find out how you can maximize your growth and increase your revenues when you:

Centralize customer information
Automate marketing interactions
Provide business intelligence
Facilitate communications
Track sales opportunities
Analyze data
Enable responsive customer service

REGISTER HERE

26 Apr

Office 365 for Legal Industry

Here is a link to Quick Takes video shoot taken at the Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA). Our team member talks about Office 365 – the collaboration productivity software suite from Microsoft. Check out why Office 365 is your office in the cloud and start logging billable hours from anywhere on any device.

28 Sep

Microsoft Ignite 2016

This week we are in Atlanta, GA for the Microsoft Ignite 2016 and for those of you who do not quite understand what’s the whole fuss about it, let me explain. For IT people it’s like winning tickets to SuperBowl or going to New Orleans to celebrate the Madri Gras. Really we are that excited.

This 5-day event is loaded with so many information, workshops and panels that we find it hard to describe; obviously we are not able to take part in all 1425 sessions that are being offered. We’re really struggle to squeeze each day as a lemon, to get the most out of it, so we can share what we learn with you, so we can improve our services even further to your advantage.

Below is a short summary of only some of the sessions we chose to participate in, hoping that our customers will benefit from our enhanced knowledge.

Power IT transformation with Office 365

Since we know that O365 is the most complete, secure cloud productivity service, we want to learn about its new features, listen to real world customers and their IT transformation. We want to see demos that bring together experiences across mobility, collaboration, intelligence, and trust.

Dig into Advanced Security Management in Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Security Management is a new capability added to the service that gives enhanced visibility and control into Office 365 tenant by: identifying high-risk and abnormal usage; assigning a risk score and alerting us when a policy gets triggered. So with this session we want to go hands-on with policy config, investigation and reporting.

Protect your sensitive information with Office 365 Data Loss Prevention

Microsoft Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) enables us to detect, protect and monitor sensitive information in our organization. Here we’ll learn how the rich DLP functionality seamlessly integrates into different Office products and services and how we can easily start protecting our information. We also learn what steps are being taken to make the DLP solution even better to meet the needs of customers.

Hubtalk: moving forward with Office 365 and Skype for BusinessThomas Poett

Telephony is key to Skype for Business and Unified Communication. Cloud PBX now enables Enterprises delivering their PBX service directly from Microsoft Office 365. We’ll learn how to plan and setup an Enterprise Voice environment natively in Office 365 (Calling Service), Hybrid (with On-Premise SfB) or with the new Cloud Connector Edition.

Deploy Windows 10 for business – the future is closer than you think

Digital transformation has changed the face of enterprise computing, and the time for Windows 10 is now. We will dive into what Windows 10 is delivering for businesses and how it makes deployment easier than ever. This session covers the latest Windows enhancements in management, security, and productivity and how they are changing what is possible today, and are continuously improving for tomorrow.

Move all your communications to Skype for Business Online

We know that we can use Skype for Business Online around the world for all our business communication needs; from online meetings to telephone calls, Skype for Business Online can increase IT agility and reduce overhead with our meeting and voice services in Microsoft Office 365. During this session we will learn about the latest innovation in Skype for Business – “Project Rigel”.

Plan for Skype for Business cloud connectivity with Microsoft Office 365

This session will cover two types of connectivity with Cloud PBX, either using existing Skype for Business server pool or using Cloud Connector Edition. We are to get all the planning guidance we need to get started on our Cloud PBX deployment using our existing PSTN service and circuits with Cloud PBX

Disrupt cyber-threats with revolutionary security in Windows 10

We will take a look at the convergence in hardware and OS software innovations with Windows 10 and the revolutionary impact on malware and hacking threats.

Avoid the “gotchas” when migrating to Office 365 Cloud PBX

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud PBX enables enterprises to be more flexible and efficient with their communications. They’ll show us how to avoid the migration “gotchas” and make a seamless and secure transition that meets the needs of our end-users.

02 Sep

Run, NiE, Run!

Have you noticed that adults tend to forget how fun it can be to run through mud, jump over weird objects and just laugh out loud in the outdoors? We are so focused on being adults, parents or professionals that we simply forget that there is more to life than just work and everyday duties. Sure, as we approach yet another weekend we make some plans that involve different entertainment and/or rest scenarios. Some of us would go out for a drink, or two, with friends on a Friday night and then sleep in late on Saturday. Some would rather take their kids for a late breakfast or a movie. And nothing wrong in that, but this time we wanted to do something different, something wild… So we decided to take team building and social bonding to a whole new level on last August weekend.

Ever heard of RuggedManiac? No? Well, to be honest some of us haven’t either. In a nutshell, it is said to be the most fun and adventurous race in town! Our plan was simple: we go there as Network IT Easy team and we have fun, after all it is “only a 3.1 mile run” – how hard can it be, right? Not to mention, a free T-shirt and a beer afterwards. Well, we should have also assumed one more thing: 26 obstacles to overcome within 3 miles won’t be a piece of cake.

Now we can proudly announce that we did it! We survived, all of us in one piece with the biggest after-effort smiles you could ever imagine. What made us so happy? Was it the Shoe Catcher, Pipe Dream or maybe Napoleon Complex? Some would probably say that it was the Blobstacle or Ninja Escape. In any case, all this running (or I’d rather say swimming) through mud, climbing slippery objects and leaping over rows of flaming logs made us feel unstoppable (that feeling reached us quite a while after the race, though).

Below are some pics of us trying to survive and have our personal dignity unbruised while rocketing down on the 50-foot water slide, called the Accelerator or swinging in the air Tarzan style, hoping our grip strength is still there.

This was one amazing adventure, and we will surely try it some other time again. If you want to test your stamina, we will be more than happy to see you there next time!

Race_1 Race_2

Race_3 Race_4

15 Jul

Backup, Recovery and Business Continuity

If you are constantly on the go, if you manage multiple tasks and you put your company’s safety first, we want to invite you to sign up for our webinar on backup, recovery and business continuity. Here you can see a short comparison of traditional backup versus business continuity: Traditional_Backup_vs_Business_Continuity (NIE)

During our 1-hour long webinar you will learn about the best protection for a business’s mission critical data, delivered via the most robust and flexible information protection technology on the market. This new solution is not simply about backup, recovery, and business continuity; it allows for full recovery within seconds from the backup unit itself or from the cloud. This webinar will show you the advantages of this new technology, including quick full system restores, easy recovery of individual files, bare metal restores (BMR), and the ability to boot individual backups as virtual machines.

Pick a date and time here:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/814409738164522499

17 May

Business Trade Shows Part III: After the Event

So, you made it back home from the show. You’re exhausted and work has backed up in your absence. Here is where the entire investment in the show can go down the drain. Follow-up is critical. Every one of those prospects need to have follow-up. Lots of it. One contact isn’t going to be enough.

First, send out a short email drip that includes a ‘thanks for visiting us at the trade show.’ The second should be a ‘call to action’ email. Send an invitation to meet via phone or in person, and add something for them to download. The download can be a whitepaper, or even just your brochure, but it is always good to attach something.

Now comes the really hard work. Contacting prospects. No one is going to just mail you revenues. You need to actively market to your trade show visitors. If some seem uninterested, put their names in a tickler file to try back in 6 months. Just be sure not to just let them drop; the situation may change in the future.

In summary, look at a trade show as a marketing event that goes beyond the time spent at a booth in some convention center. It is just a stage in a lengthy and important marketing campaign. Make sure you prepare for the show and do active follow-up afterward. Otherwise a trade show is just an expensive few days meeting lots of people you will never see again.

16 May

Business Trade Shows Part II: During the Event

We’re back. In the last post, we talked about building momentum toward a trade show exhibition. Today, let’s look at your efforts during the show itself.

You already should have sent out a reminder the morning of the show in posts on all your social media accounts, an article on your website blog, and a general email that you’re exhibiting. Now it is time to work the booth.

First, recognize that your goal is to use this show to develop as large a list of prospects as possible. That means you not only want visitors at the booth, you need their contact information. The proven way to get attendees contact information is to offer them something for free, or run a contest for something worthwhile. Most booths will offer some giveway, coffee mug, etc. at the booth if visitors sign a contact info sheet. People can’t resist free stuff, no matter how muchthey don’t need another mug or could afford to buy them on their own by the caseload. Therefore, have giveaways.

You can also run a contest for those willing to take the time for a demo of your product or service. If they will take the extra step, enter them for a raffle for something of greater value, such as an iPad or tablet.

If anyone shows special interest, keep your non-exhibit hours open to schedule meetings for coffee or a demo.

Beyond getting prospects, use the show for broader networking. Work the other booths and introduce yourself to other exhibitors to get your name known. You can never do enough networking, and you never know when it might pay off. If the exhibitor entrance fee does not include entrance to other networking events such as meals and meet-and-greet-happy-hours, consider buying a ticket for access.These offer additional opportunities to network.

Finally, don’t forget social media. Throughout the show, post pics of yourself with clients or prospects who visited your booth. You can even use the event hashtag if they have one to help your business generate buzz!

Next time, let’s talk about what to do once you get back home.

15 May

Business Trade Shows Part I: Before the Event

Going to a tradeshow for the first time? Don’t make the mistake of viewing this as a 1-2 day discreet marketing event. Instead, view your exhibit at a tradeshow as the central feature of a much longer and holistic marketing plan that builds to the event, and then culminates in the successful postshow follow up that signs on new customers. In the next few posts, we are going to break down the tradeshow marketing plan into three bite size pieces. Today, the pre-show build up.

The goal of your preshow marketing is to attract visitors to your booth at the show. You want them to know about all about you before they take that first walk around the exhibit hall.

Take advantage of all the marketing opportunities that the show planner offers. This may include access to an attendees list. If so, use this to send out a few introductory emails prior to the show including your booth number. Send one the day of the show reminding the reader where you are.
Sponsorships are also an opportunity, if your budget allows it. This can be a small ad in the program or sponsoring an event or get-together during the conference. This is a bigger step and may be beyond the budget of a SMB.
Social Media: Use social media to introduce yourself before the show. This means an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Send a brief announcement of who you are and that you will be exhibiting at the show, and then a reminder the day of the show or the day before.
Website and blog: Post an invitation to the show on your website and your blog. This should go up about one week prior the to event.

These are just three simple steps you can take to build momentum before the actual exhibition. Next, we’ll talk about marketing during the show.

25 Sep

Microsoft Supports Greater Englewood CDC and Alderman Cochran to help build pathways to success

Digital skills have become not just an advantage but a necessity in every facet of life, from schoolwork to business development to personal life. Microsoft is partnering with Chicago’s Greater Englewood Community Development Corp. (CDC) to help the Englewood community get the necessary skills, tools and support to achieve digital literacy and create new personal and business opportunities.

Alderman Willie B. Cochran of the 20th Ward recently signed an agreement with Microsoft and Greater Englewood CDC to bring technological resources to Englewood Blue, a state-of-the-art technology hub and small-business accelerator managed by Greater Englewood CDC. Through this alliance, Microsoft will deliver four programs for the community:
• Digital literacy training that will offer essential computer skills for citizens to help them start computing with confidence, be more productive at work and at home, and open up new career opportunities. Self-directed and self-paced, courses at the basic, standard and advanced skill level will be available in more than 30 languages. Microsoft’s support includes a “train the trainer” program to help Englewood Blue continue training into the future.
• IT Academy curriculum and certifications that will be delivered in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. This curriculum is more advanced and paves the way to certifications and lesson plans to enable individualized tech education.
• BizSpark training sessions for local entrepreneurs and tech startups, providing free access to software and support to help businesses grow and succeed.
• Microsoft Community Connections, bringing businesses together with local Microsoft partners to provide technology solutions and support so businesses can operate more efficiently and effectively.

Microsoft’s goal is to support workforce development, individual career advancement and personal growth in the Englewood community. Through training and tools in schools, the workplace and daily life, Englewood residents will be able to take their businesses to the next level and pursue their goals and dreams.

Shelley Stern Grach will be joining Alderman Cochran and representatives of the Greater Englewood CDC, Englewood Blue and the local community at a lunch and learn event on September 25th, where the Microsoft team will share more details about the digital and civic alliance and the ways it will benefit members of the greater Englewood Community.

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