Month: September 2020

When we posted our last blog, we left you with the promise that we would add more apps to our existing line-up of integrations. Now, we are back with not one but 2000+ ways to connect Bigin with your favorite business applications. Yes, we are excited to announce that Bigin is now fully integrated with Zapier, the leading integration platform that lets you connect your apps and automate your workflows. Thanks to the growing popularity of the integration, we are now out of the beta phase and are ready to fully integrate with the Zapier platform to help users do more with less work.

Zapier is all about making automation easier and it strives to keep its users productive so that they don’t have to spend their valuable time connecting different apps to work together. It eliminates double entries from your work and automates the regular day-to-day tasks that you often find yourself spending the most time on.

How does the integration work?

While a CRM system is at the core of your day-to-day customer-centric operations, you still need to connect it with other apps that are part of your business ecosystem. The secret to building better customer relationships is having an integrated platform that maps the end-to-end journey of a customer so that it becomes easier for the stakeholders to track and manage customer activities at every step of the customer journey.

From capturing incoming leads from multiple channels to automatically alerting your team of deal closures, every action needs to be tied together for customer-facing teams to provide a coherent experience to their customers. That’s where an integration platform like Zapier can help by effortlessly combining the CRM system with other third-party apps without any coding or API integration involved. This also means that customer-facing teams can build their own processes much faster and no longer have to wait for developer help to automate some of their core activities.

Don’t know where to start? Take a look at some of our prebuilt Zaps.

Add new contacts from Bigin as customers in QuickBooks Online

If QuickBooks is your go-to accounting solution, you can now automatically send invoices or estimates to your customers by syncing your new Bigin contacts. Here’s a Zap that bridges the gap between your sales and finance teams.

Add new companies in Bigin as records in Salesforce.

You might often find yourself needing a more powerful CRM solution like Salesforce for your core sales operations and a simpler CRM solution like Bigin that’s designed for sales reps. With this Zap, you can ensure that all your Bigin entries like new company information are always synced to your main CRM application without needing to enter them again manually.

Send Slack channel messages for new deals in Bigin.

I’m sure you would agree that teamwork is the key to closing every successful deal. How about keeping your team abreast of every incoming deal in Bigin? That’s what this Zap does. It simply creates a new channel in Slack and notifies your team whenever a new deal is created in Bigin.

Add new leads in Facebook Lead Ads as contacts in Bigin.

Many small businesses rely on Facebook Lead Ads as their primary source for new leads and bringing those leads safely into their CRM system is crucially important to them. We’ve got a Zap that does exactly that. Now, you can automatically import your leads from Facebook Lead Ads to your CRM, follow up, and convert them much faster.

Create Trello cards from new tasks in Bigin.

Trello is a popular list-making application that helps individuals and teams organize and prioritize tasks with ease. With Zapier, you can now quickly create a Trello card for every new task that is assigned to you in Bigin.

Here’s a complete list of all our prebuilt Zaps.

Like we always say, #JustBigin!

What we just showed you is a glimpse of what you can achieve with this integration and it certainly does not end here. You can pick and choose any of your favorite apps on the Zapier platform and create a Zap to automate your process in minutes.

Head over to the integrations page to get started with your first Zap and tell us how it worked for you. You can also write to us at support[at]bigin[dot]com and let us know your preferred Zap templates so that we can create one for you as soon as we can.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn where we post about our recent product updates and announcements. We’d love to have you there.

Happy automating!

These days, hacking is more of an omnipresent threat than ever before. But rather than popup ads being the primary source of malware and digital malfeasance, your email account is now the most likely place you’ll encounter a computer virus or hacking attempt.

Even if you use antivirus software, your emails may not be as secure as you think. The conversations or information you put in them could put you at risk if they aren’t properly certified and encrypted.

What is S/MIME certification?

S/MIME (which stands for “secure multipurpose internet mail extension”) certification is a type of digital email signing protocol that combines encryption and time-stamped digital signatures. It’s somewhat similar to SSL certification–which you know more commonly as web addresses that begin with HTTPS instead of HTTP.

This encrypts traffic data to ensure that information on a website or server isn’t easily accessed by the public or a would-be hacker.

Although far too few people know what S/MIME certification even is, it’s crucial for both personal and business security. Educating yourself and your co-workers about S/MIME encryption is important for gaining an edge over industry competitors as well.

 

How does S/MIME work to protect emails?

Although it’s not as intuitive a concept as a spam filter, S/MIME certification is really quite simple when you boil down its processes:

• To start, the S/MIME protocol generates a unique digital signature by combining a private key that is attached to your IP address/username/profile with a public key
• The public key is sent with any email protected by S/MIME certification
• When you or someone else receives an S/MIME-certified email, the recipient can use their private key to decrypt the publicly encrypted message.
• In using a private key to decrypt or encrypt a message, the message sender or receiver uses their unique digital signature and ensures message integrity or trustworthiness

It all sounds a little technical, but the encryption process works because the public key can be accessed by a multitude of similar private keys that are nonetheless secure and very difficult to crack with brute force.

Your emails are kept secure since the encryption encodes the data inside the email (such as pictures and text) and only decrypts it when it reaches its target recipient. When emails are S/MIME certified in this manner, it helps to guard against phishing attacks, malware, social engineering hacks, and other email-related threats.

How do you use S/MIME certification?

In past years, S/MIME certification was only used by the few internet geeks who bothered learning the ins and outs of this type of encryption. But these days, S/MIME certification is included by default in most major desktop and mobile email platforms or clients.

In other words, you may not need to take any extra steps to benefit from S/MIME certification. Your provider is likely already using it to encrypt your emails and protect you from malware!

But if you use a special email client or platform for your business, or use another third-party company for your email communications, you should look into implementing S/MIME certification ASAP. You can install S/MIME certificates on every device individually by either hiring an IT company or assigning the task to your own IT department. Other S/MIME certification products and software can deliver S/MIME certificates to all the machines in your network for a fee.

Why S/MIME certification helps you individually

You and others can trust email communications

At its core, S/MIME certification creates a kind of trust you can’t easily get elsewhere in the digital world. In the days of handwritten letters or documents, you could easily tell whether a letter was genuine or a forgery based on a style of handwriting or a particular turn of phrase. This was also true for any letters you sent to other people or to important organizations, like the bank.

S/MIME certification serves the same basic purpose. As a kind of digital signature, this type of certification means you can trust that encrypted emails you receive really did come from the person marked on your screen. It helps others trust any emails you send out, as well.

It offers protection from malware

Did you know that about 92% of all malware is delivered by email? In short, if you’re ever going to be threatened by a malware attack, it’ll more than likely be from an email you receive and inadvertently open.

The trouble with protecting against this kind of attack is that it’s trivially easy for any second-rate hacker to make an adjustment to PHP code. They can craft an email containing a virus that looks like it’s coming from a legitimate sender. Thus, you can’t always trust your eyes or intuition to identify a malware-carrying email.

S/MIME certification goes a long way toward ensuring you don’t open any bad emails. If you rely on encrypted communications as much as possible, you’ll be much safer from malware attacks.

Your confidential information will stay protected

Identity theft is not a joke, and it happens to millions of Americans every year. It’s become even easier for hackers to get personal information since we voluntarily surrender it online all the time. When we sign up for services or purchase products from online marketplaces, we put our credit card information and other sensitive info out on the web for the taking.

The most secure email services available come with S/MIME encryption in addition to two-factor authentication, digital signatures, and built-in VPNs. These measures help ensure that in the event you ever accidentally include sensitive information in an email, such information can’t be retrieved by hackers.

How S/MIME certification can help your business

S/MIME certification is great for individual protection, but it also provides specific benefits for businesses.

S/MIME certification defends against business espionage/hacking

Many businesses in cutthroat industries have to be aware of potential business espionage or information gathering. IT and enterprise-level security are huge fields that are growing more complex and difficult to defend capably every year.

S/MIME certification is an easy way to lock down your company’s emails. This is especially important since employees, even in major industries such as the medical industry, often accidentally or innocently open spam or phishing emails and open their networks to attack.

S/MIME certification ensures compliance with privacy rules

Businesses’ compliance with consumer privacy laws is more important than ever, especially in light of legislation like the GDPR, which protects consumer data in Europe. Encrypting emails for your business will ensure that you don’t accidentally fall out of compliance with laws like the GDPR and compromise the sensitive information for your customers.

Having a digitally vulnerable business is bad not only for the legal ramifications, but also for the trustworthiness of your company at large. No one will want to shop at your online business if they think their information is at risk when they place an order!

Conclusion

All in all, S/MIME certification should be considered a requirement for both individuals and companies in this day and age. Consider swapping to an S/MIME-certified email platform if you haven’t already–there’s no replacement for good email security.

 

Author bio: Gary Stevens

Gary Stevens is the CTO of Hosting Canada, a website that provides expert reviews on hosting services and helps readers build online businesses and blogs.

We’re pleased to announce the most requested Notebook update yet. Now, you can share your thoughts with your coworkers and friends. No further need to send your notes through messages, email, or other means. With a Zoho Notebook account, you can securely share your notes with anyone in a single click.

Directly share your notes

You can now share notes with Notebook users who have registered accounts with Zoho—you just need to know the email address or mobile number associated with their account.

Here’s how to share a note:

 1. Open a note.

2. Click on the “Add User” icon placed on the action tool bar.

3. Click “Add Members.”

4. Enter the email address or mobile number of users you want to share the note with.

5. Select the user from the suggestion list or press “Enter.”

6. Click “Share.”

7. An email will be sent to selected users with a link to open the note.

Where to view the notes shared with you

Once a note is shared directly with you, you’ll receive an email or a message from the sender. Your Notebook mobile app will receive push notifications when notes are shared with you.

To view all notes shared with you in Notebook:

1. Open the Notebook app.

2. Tap “Shared with me” to view all notes shared to you.

3. Open a note and tap on the user icon to see who shared the note with you.

4. Overall search results in Notebook will also include notes shared with you.

Unshare notes shared with you

You can unshare a note if you do not wish to view it under “Shared with me.” Open the note shared with you, tap Menu, and then tap Unshare. If you open that note again using the shared note link, it will appear once more under “Shared with me.”

You can also remove users from the notes you’ve shared with others. Open the note, go to “Add User’, and click Delete from the user you would like to remove.

Share notes with your organization

If you are a part of an organization, you can now share your notes with all users in the organization at once. Simply select “Share with Organization” to share your note with everyone, rather than manually sharing with individual separately. Users in your organization will be able to see the note using the note URL.

Block users

You can choose not to receive any notes from others. You can block selected users when they first share a note with you. Once you’ve blocked a user, they will not be able to share any notes with you.

To block sharing from another user, open the shared note from that user, click the user icon, and then click Block Contact. This will unshare that note and ensure you don’t receive notes from that user in the future.

What can you do with notes shared with you?

When you receive a note from others, you can mark that note as a favorite and/or add a reminder to that note. These properties will be visible only for you and not for any other users with access to that note.

Limits to note

You always share a note in “read-only” mode. You can share a note with up to 50 users. You can share up to 50 notes with your organization. You can share up to 500 notes privately. You can receive a maximum of 250 notes.

We hope you find this update useful! Share your notes with your friends and colleagues to stay connected. As we mentioned before, we’re also working to add more capabilities to Notebook like edit shared notes, set permissions to shared notes, and more. Keep an eye out here for those updates!

In today’s hyper-competitive business world, organizations are heavily banking on technology. This is transforming IT from being merely a business enabler, to a key business differentiator. It’s become the key factor for helping businesses realize their strategic goals.

In this setting, it’s crucial for businesses globally to align their IT efforts with their business goals to propel their teams to achieve well-defined goals. The IT-Business Collaborative Framework is one such model that brings out the importance of striking an optimum balance between IT efforts and business goals—in order to avoid bottlenecks and sustain progress.

At many companies, it’s common for ongoing digitization efforts to take up a lot of bandwidth, shifting IT’s “circle” away from achieving strategic goals. This is why it’s imperative for organizations to maintain a balance between IT’s responsibilities and business goals.

In this blog, we’ll explain how organizations can align their IT metrics with their business KPIs using IT monitoring as an example. Of the many possibilities that exist, we’ve chosen three website monitoring metrics for demonstration purposes. All of these examples run on integrations between Zoho Analytics and Site24x7 (a full-stack IT monitoring platform). 

Performance

Any degradation in website performance will directly affect how end users perceive a brand. Plus, search engines use website page load time as a significant factor in determining a site’s search engine ranking. Just a 2-second delay during a sales transaction results in bounce rates of up to 87%.

Using the powerful combination of Site24x7 and Zoho Analytics, let’s learn how performance metrics need to be aligned with a business’ KPIs.

By blending the performance data from Site24x7 and bounce rate data from Google Analytics, IT managers and teams can assess the impact of website performance on bounce rates. These geo maps give you a granular understanding of your website’s performance and the corresponding bounce rates across multiple geographies. For an ecommerce website, high bounce rates can translate into substantial loss of sales.

These powerful visualizations can enable businesses to quickly understand and optimize their website performance from a particular location that has high response times to reduce bounce rates and improve customer experience.

Outages

Virtually every product and service has an alternative. In a flooded market, how do businesses retain customers and thrive? One of the many fundamental things they do is to ensure they meet their customers’ needs. In a technology-driven world, website outages are a death sentence. By optimizing to eliminate outages, IT teams can contribute less to churn and more to driving revenue.

Read on to learn how IT teams can align their outage metrics with their business goals.

By blending the outage data from Site24x7 and the subscriptions and cancellations data from a subscription service, IT managers and teams can assess the impact of website outages on subscriptions and cancellations. For the month of April 2020, this business has witnessed a dip in subscriptions and a spike in cancellations. There may be a plethora of reasons for this, but, from an IT perspective, one of the reasons could be a high outage count.

By visually analyzing these datasets, IT teams can be equipped with the necessary insights to optimize website outages and, in turn, play their part in maintaining healthy revenue for the organization they’re part of. 

Alarms

The phrase “expect the unexpected” is the mantra for IT teams around the world. To handle uncertainties effectively, it’s essential for IT teams to have end-to-end insights. They enable teams to systematically correlate multiple variables to drill into the problem—and responding to alarms calls for a similar approach.

The advanced analytical capabilities this integration brings to the table empower IT teams with end-to-end insights to respond to alarms effectively.

By blending the alarms data from Site24x7 and the support tickets data from an IT help desk service, IT managers and teams can access the impact of alarms on the flow of support tickets.

This visual analysis, in the form of heat maps, tells us that a good number of support tickets flow into the system during the 12th hour of the day. Though there may be multiple reasons for this, from an IT perspective, one of the reasons may be attributed to a higher alarms count. The heat map shows a higher concentration of alarms between 11am and 12pm every day. To find the reasons for the high alarm count, IT teams can instantly perform a drill down to spot the problem.

With similar analysis, businesses can be more prepared in responding to alarms. These insights can also help them optimize their IT resources.

Summary

Our ever-expanding technology boom is driving businesses to embrace IT as a key business differentiator. This has the paved way for IT monitoring to become an indispensable component of any business.

A robust IT monitoring platform can help businesses in end-to-end monitoring of their IT assets worldwide. However, in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world driven by incomprehensible market forces, it’s extremely important to align your IT efforts with your business goals, as described in the IT-Business Collaborative Framework.

A powerful BI application, when combined with a robust IT monitoring platform, can add a layer of mission-critical insights for organizations to give a business angle to their IT efforts. This combination can be one of several enablers to help you achieve your strategic business goals.

As one of the forerunners in offering integrations, Zoho Analytics currently integrates with several leading IT applications. Learn more about our integrations.

Sign up to explore how Zoho Analytics can help you align your IT monitoring metrics with business KPIs.

Or watch our webinar: “Align IT monitoring metrics and business KPIs using Advanced Analytics.”