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Welcome New Client: the IET
(Institution of Engineering and Technology)
We are highly pleased to welcome the IET to the Advantage family. The IET is a registered charity that is working to engineer a better world by inspiring, informing and influencing its members, engineers and technicians, and all those who are touched by, or touch, the work of engineers. It aims to inspire the next generation of engineers, and to promote engineering and the work of engineers to society. The IET is one of the world's largest engineering institutions with over 168,000 members in 150 countries.
IET products include journals, E&T Magazine, books, publications, webinars, job boards, videos and a vast digital library. They also provide services to the industry such as expert advice to the UK's Parliament, Government and other agencies on engineering-related policy issues. The IET also awards professional qualifications to safeguard standards, manages more than 1,500 events each year, awards more than £1,000,000 in awards and scholarships each year and works with education providers to help inspire young people's interest in engineering and engineering.
Implementation of Advantage is well underway, with much activity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Welcome IET!
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Promotions in Engineering
(L to R) Howard Brooks, Toby Hartman, Mike Hasey, John Moore, Paul Sauter, Ray Zick)
Howard Brooks has been named Director/Product Development and
Toby Hartman and
Paul Sauter have been promoted to Team Managers, reporting to Howard.
Mike Hasey and
John Moore have been promoted to Team Managers, reporting to
Matt Varblow, Vice President/Engineering Services.
In addition,
Ray Zick has been named Manager of the Cloud Services Team, responsible for provisioning and supporting Advantage SaaS (cloud hosted) environments and for continuing to evolve and architect the Advantage cloud solution.
While these changes do not represent dramatic shifts in responsibility, they do represent AdvantageCS's recognition of these individuals' increasing expertise, leadership and contribution to the critically important product development side of AdvantageCS.
Congratulations to all!
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What's your favorite thing about Advantage? Send your answer to
me and I'll add it to the list, found
here.
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Welcome New Employee Donal Cousino
We are pleased to welcome
Donal Cousino, the newest member of the Advantage Support Center, reporting to
Scott Ghormley. Donal is no stranger to software support, as he worked for 4 ½ years at ParishSOFT in Ann Arbor. There, he spent time in support and also performed data conversions.
Before that, he was a bookkeeper for various companies. Donal earned a degree in economics at Hillsdale College, with a minor in French.
Donal gets great satisfaction from digging into a complex problem, figuring it out and solving it. That makes him a great match for software support. His fluency in French is also beneficial.
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Customer Permissions (the GDPR way)
What's the state of your email junk folder? Mine is pretty active with various promotions for IT related products and services. Occasionally,
I've given out my contact information in order to download a white paper or view
a
demonstration, and although I haven't been asked if it was okay to forward my email address to other parties for their use, that certainly happened.
Such permissions---and lack of them---are addressed by the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR goes into effect in May 2018, and if you have any European customers, it does involve your operation.
One of GDPR's main principles is that even though you maintain perso
nal information for your customers, they retain ownership of it. Since the data isn't yours, you can only use it for purposes the customer has expressly permitted.
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Congratulations to Soon-to-Be Retiree
Bob Thornton
After 28 years at AdvantageCS,
Bob Thornton is retiring August 31st of this year. But while most retirees plan to take time to relax, Bob will be even busier. He may be leaving the business world, but he is jumping full-time into the non-profit arena. He will be working on partnership development and fund-raising for University Christian Outreach, a ministry serving students and young staff members at the University of Michigan. Bob and his wife, Rosemary have been supporting UCO for many years. In fact, Rosemary has worked for UCO in various capacities since they were married, 31 years ago.
And if that's not enough, Bob will be working on his Master's degree in Theology, one class at a time, at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.
Bob began his AdvantageCS career in support and then moved into implementations where he worked on installations for more than half a dozen clients. He then moved back to a support team.
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Advantage Integration with Salesforce.com
A growing trend involves companies purchasing different software packages for discrete functions in the organization, which necessitates effective and efficient integration between systems, working together inside a common eco-system.
Advantage offers a tight integration with Salesforce.com, a widely-used cloud-based application which supports many different business activities. A common use of Salesforce by publishers, content providers and membership organizations is for prospect relationship management, where sales teams are involved. These companies are selling into businesses, educational institutions, governmental entities, etc.--- essentially business-to-business sales efforts. Salesforce.com provides many tools to make it easier for reps to communicate with prospects, members and customers, as well as features to help manage sales activities.
An integration to Advantage provides a host of additional tools, including the capability of handling subscription-based products, membership, one-off products, and conferences and events. Advantage allows the different departments inside the organization to manage any or all of these activities in a streamlined way.
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What Languages Do You Speak?
by Paul DesRosiers
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English, French, Dutch, Portuguese? Accounting, Marketing, Finance, IT? Or maybe SQL, C#, XML, JSON?
In this digital age, most of us speak at least a small amount of technology language. It might be used when speaking to colleagues, or more casually at home when you attempt to describe certain technology to a family member (or when your children try to explain that same technology to you!). For example: when your father wants to know how exactly pictures from his smartphone are stored in the cloud and viewable on his TV and he asks you where the wire between those two devices is, you know you have a challenge ahead of you. Regardless of the context or purpose, "techspeak" is fully integrated into our daily lives.
In business, speaking this language is critical to ensure that products and services meet the needs of customers. Individuals who can speak fluently about technology but fail at describing the end-user experience will never get their bid accepted. On the other hand, a true visionary who has no technical aptitude will fail if their otherwise brilliant idea has no grounding in current technologies.
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Have you seen our videos?
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Congratulations to Bayard - 10 Years on Advantage
by Cindy Twiss
July marked the ten-year anniversary of Bayard Presse first going live on Advantage.
Tom Burbeck, Executive Vice President, was there from AdvantageCS to help them celebrate, which they did with a cake---complete with candles---and champagne.
Emmanuel Chevalier, Director, Business Information Systems, blew out the candles and the festivities commenced.
In the 10 years of being live on Advantage, Bayard has been able to implement many changes, including enabling extensive automation of its business processing, reorganizing various vendors for increased cost and service efficiency, and developing its digital content across numerous publications.
Today, Bayard and AdvantageCS are proud of the strong partnership they have built.
Bayard is one of the largest magazine publishers in France and they also publish newspapers (including the national daily La Croix), and books. The company is headquartered in Montrouge, near Paris.
Congratulations to all!
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Check out our blog for the most up-to-date news and information about Advantage. New posts weekly!
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Editor: Cindy Mikol Twiss
3850 Ranchero Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48108 USA
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