Building a strong online presence before you start product Promotion & Advertisement

Hi All!!
Before you go out and start marketing your product and services over the world wide web you should make sure that you already have good presence in there. Because when you first start posting or writing about your products or services, a large number of people start searching your name (company's) over the web. To let them know and understand about your brand, your organization, values, vision and products/services offered, you need to create an impression about your organization that helps build your brand.

Do you know where do they look in for you in the web, to know that you are something?!!

These are most probably prominent search engines, web directories, social media space, forums, blogs, wikipedia, criaglists... and the list goes on. Obviously they may land up in any of these above before taking one more step towards you.

But do not forget that, no matter the long this list may be but you need to be present in all these popular medias before you begin the real promotions and marketing for your brand.
After your presence is recognized at all these considerable channels of communication through which people usually connect and rely for trustworthy information you start leaving your competition behind. With this presence you are now ready for a solid head start, and now when your users learn about you through any of your advertisement say an email campaign they realize that this product or brand is well known and exist in most of the respectable digital world channels they know. You will realize that they are going to trust more on your brand rather than any other .

This little preparation which I call web-readiness will add great value to your efforts on web marketing and online promotions. Do remember to keep a track of all your channels through which you communicate with your users. Work out a metric which will help you to understand your customers that directly impacts your marketing efforts. Believe me that when you do an analysis out of all this valuable data you will get some really valuable feedback and insights into building, re-modelling and refining your business and marketing strategy which will propel you to greater heights much above you would have been!

Now your focus should be on building relationship with your customers and once you are able to do that, you experience a loyalty and trust following up for your brand among your customers. Once this is made they will be able to stick to you and wait for your products to hit the market.

This is a simple and solid way of developing a customer following for your brand. Only you need to be very careful in choosing the content and the channel for communication.

Performance Improvement of Sharepoint Sites

Anyone who is concerned with managing Sharepoint server/sites is well aware that performance management is major concern for Site administrators or managers. This is basically because all the data including the pages in sharepoint server is rendered from the database itself. Because of this each time a request is made more load on the system is incurred as the request is furnished by the database.
There are various suggestions from the Microsoft Sharepoint team. I have customized and used few which worked for me based on the demands of my current implementation and scope of sharepoint 2007.
Rather than going in much details of each workarounds I would like to present them in a simple and straightforward manner so that it becomes easier for all types of audiences to understand.

1. Reducing the size of the pages - This helps in reducing the load time of the pages especially when they are accessed over the Internet. This will involve working with the Master Pages.
2. Improving the Farm Architecture - Increasing the number of servers; web front servers, application servers and database servers for proper request response. Load balancing the web front servers in case when the more numbers of concurrent users in the site.
3. HTTP GZip Compression - Enabling the static (and dynamic as applicable) compression of the page sharepoint site pages using IIS HTTP GZip compression. This works like zipping of your usual office files. It compresses the files before getting released from the server and is then uncompressed at the users end so the response time of the pages becomes faster. You need to analyze the impact of CPU utilization in the concerned servers.
4. Site Output Caching Strategy - Decide and enable site level output cache which enables the repeated content of the of the pages from being accessed from the server.
5. Monitoring CPU and Server Logs and User Analytics - Properly managing the server by checking the sharepoint logs, event logs to fix the issues and avoid performance hiccups to the users will ensure proper functioning of the server.

After employing all these measures we experienced a considerable impact on the performance of the portal. The render time, response time and average latency reduced considerably.

I hope when you combine the above with proper backup strategy to backup you site configurations and valuable data timely you will be in a safer position.