One of the most powerful and popular capabilities of a Joomla website is the ability to deliver robust ecommerce solutions. While there are a growing number of options for ecommerce in Joomla, the pioneer and still the most popular shopping cart option is the Virtuemart shopping cart extension. It has been exciting to watch how a great basket of ideas has grown to become one of the most popular engines for ecommerce on the web.

Small businesses like it because it is FREE to download, it is easy to implement and maintain and it is scalable to meet the needs of their business as it grows. Shoppers like it because it looks great, is intuitive to use and is secure for handling their transactions. Developers like it because there are many extensions, accounting systems integrations and it is open source code so they can deliver real world business results and be the hero. Yippie everybody wins!

Let’s start with a quick overview of the core features and then I will get to some real exciting stuff that I like about this solution.

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Let’s talk about Value Building

In our quest to refine our own organization and to enhance our value add to customers we are actually leveraging the same principles that we have integrated into our consulting practice. The saying “reap what you sew” holds true and is something that you can duplicate in your organization to pass greater value on to your customers.

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Let me take a minute to tell you about and welcome Matt Zimmerman and the Value Builder Program to CNP Integrations . Here is a guy with years of experience delivering CRM solutions to large enterprises and small businesses alike. He worked in the world of IBM solutions and built sales organizations of 100+. When we started talking about having him work with our relatively small company that had a great bunch of technologies and significant expertise with them, we quickly realized his Value Builder Program was a missing link for bringing our great technology platform to companies and driving real success. It is one thing to sell software and associated services but what we wanted to achieve began with our mantra "Your Success is our Success". What we found is that when small businesses looked at our solutions they went WOW look at all of these features and hey I can actually afford this. However, without taking the step of careful planning and identifying where these solutions add the greatest value to your organization, this can cause significant frustration and often times failure once deployed.

Cost of Entry and Open Source

Unlike the big company enterprise solutions with huge R&D departments and proprietary code that drive expensive cost of entry and required maintenance contracts, we work with solutions that are based on open source code. In some ways this is a double edged sword and when you do not plan carefuly this too can slice into your pocket book painfully if you are not cautious in your implementation strategy. Open source projects offer two distinct advantages; one is you have the freedom to customize the framework if needed since the code is open source and two, the cost of entry if often free or very low. Along with this though you have to make sure your expectations are realistic and while you get in with a lower cost of entry you must also plan to reserve enough resources to get the greatest value out of this approach. The greatest value from open source is achieved when you can invest significantly in building and aligning your strategy with extended training and support.

The gap and the need

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This week CNP Integrations launched three new programs to help small businesses grow and prosper. Over the past few months we have been listening to the chatter in the blogosphere and comments by our customers and prospects. After all we are here to fill the needs of our current and future customers so they can in turn

respond to their customers. The programs are designed to meet the needs for a range of small business owners that we typically support. Our Joomla expertise and programming team combined with our turnkey business solutions, training and support services makes us an ideal partner to help you grow your business through smart use of web technologies.

The Joomla Kick Start program: (download PDF)

The Joomla Kick start program is designed to help micro-small businesses or entrepreneurs quickly launch a Joomla CMS portal to showcase their products or services. This 10 hour consulting and support package offers one on one mentoring to take you through all of the steps required for installation and configuration of a Joomla CMS . We install and brand a rockettheme.com template with sample content and walk you through how to jump start your web business with Joomla content management system. This Joomla CMS system features over 4600 extensions . If you want to explore the capabilities of Joomla and build your site with hands on mentoring this introductory service is a great way to get started.

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This initial IAH 6.0 release came out in January but after a bit of a rocky start there are some final touches just released this morning with IAH 6.0.3.6127 that clear up any of the minor hiccups that have been identified. We are also excited about the new features in the 6.1.0 release currently in beta testing. For a full road map as of today look below the release. This release is really a milestone in our 3 year history of working with info@hand. It is a lot of software (bang for the buck) and when used and deployed with careful thought this really levels the playing field by offering an affordable solution for SMB's. This can be a big enabler to improve competitiveness with larger companies. Much of our consulting services are centered around helping you get the best value from this software and to help your people use the system features effectively. If you do it right you can future proof you business by building it around processes and tracking it for real time business intelligence. This can allow you to respond quickly to your customers and trends in the marketplace.

 

Long Reach Releases Version 6.0 of Flagship info@hand
Customer Relationship and Business Management System (CRBM):

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