"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                 March, 2003

In this issue: "This use of the Internet as an intranet
gives a small, distributed business the same flexibility
and integration as a large business. Instead of a secure
internal network, it employs secure sites or pages on
the public network."

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Most of our clients are traditional "brick and mortar" businesses
or services seeking to advertise, to sell, and to communicate
with clients via the web. Increasingly however we are setting up
"pure" web businesses such as 'BidsOnJobs.Com' which has created
a web site that lets contractors bid on home improvement jobs
posted by visitors. In such cases, the web site is the business.

As the internet continues to become the backbone of business
communications however, there is a third kind of business site to
be considered, and that is the business integration site. Large
businesses for quite some time have used 'intranets', that is,
local, private networks that operate like the internet and are
often connected to it. They use these to integrate activities of
staff, provide access to resources, disseminate news and
information, and allow shared work.

With the advance of the internet age, small businesses as well as
large ones are beginning to be distributed nationally or
globally, and to require a convenient means of integrating their
activities. We ourselves are an example; we are headquartered in
Maryland in the USA, but our clients are as far afield as
Mongolia, and our designers, coders, and other staff are situated
from Kiev in the Ukraine to the Australian outback. Nonetheless,
we work in close daily communication.

What makes this possible, in addition to the obvious use of
email, internet-based digital fax, and 'IM' connections, is the
creation of private web sites that we can access with passcodes
and use to coordinate our activities. These are complicated sites
with on-site databases and special programs to run them and to
format or accept data from them via web pages. The concept
however is pretty simple.

For example, if a visitor comes to our web site and fills out a
request for a contact, that is turned into an email with their
information which comes to the main mailbox on our site. This is
scanned by the person reading the mail who then logs into our
private business site and pastes the mail into a form. A program
then takes the email data, formats it, and puts it up on a page
of 'waiting' contacts which is accessed by the project managers
who use it, from wherever they are, to see who to call next.

When a contact becomes a client, the project manager can open a
different page on the business site and through it assign the
job to whatever collection of coders, designers, and graphic
artists are required. These specialists in turn can view and
update information and indicate progress or problems from
whatever point on the globe they're at. Finally when the job is
complete, the business manager can load the relevant information
directly from the site into programs such as 'QuickBooks' to
handle the billing.

This system does not provide for the daily run of detailed
questions and comments between people working on the site; that's
done by email, fax, and IM, but major facts and milestones about
the project are available to all in a common location, and the
database provides a final common record of the project in a
centralized manner. We are still discovering all the ways to use
such a system efficiently, and are in the process of expanding
the system and adding new functionality.

One lesson we learned early-on is that you need to have automated
programs which not only back up your database regularly (hourly
for some things) but also transmit a copy of it to a remote
location from which the database can be restored in case of a
disaster. With that precaution our internet-housed data is
probably actually more secure than the data on the average small
business's in-house machines (when was the last time you backed
up your hard drive?)

This use of the Internet as an intranet gives a small, globally
distributed business the same flexibility and integration as a
large business. Instead of a secure internal network, it employs
secure sites or pages on the public network. In particular it
enables a small business to take advantage of a labor pool far
beyond its local area, or on the other hand to allow
work-from-home for a local staff to reduce expenses associated
with maintaining office facilities.

We are particularly interested in hearing from you about novel
ideas you may have concerning ways in which such a distributed
work approach might extend your business. It may turn out to be
easier than you thought. We expect to see increasing demand for
this kind of coding as small businesses adjust to the idea that
geography is no longer a boundary, and we are developing modular
approaches to implementing it.


Thanks for reading this month's edition!

Ernie Kent

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"Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of
or pertaining to the stars, the heavens, etc."

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Sidereal Designs, Inc.               "Putting your business on the web"
http://siderealdesigns.com    301-916-5702