This year we are honored to be selected as a finalist in 5 categories for the Channel Elite Awards 2013. Every year IT Solution Providers are recognized from the Canadian Dealer News (CDN) for their innovation, leadership and commitment to creating value for their customers.

WebSan Solutions Inc. is running as a finalist for the following 5 categories:

• Provider of the Year
• Best Small Business Solution
• Best Mid-Market Solution
• Best Enterprise Solution
• Best Service Organization

The winners of this year’s Channel Elite Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on September 11^th, 2013 in Woodbridge, Ontario.

We are proud of our team and the amazing work they do.

Wish Us Luck!

We have all heard about the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon in which employees bring their own computing devices to their work, such as their laptops, tablets or even smartphones to complete their job tasks more conveniently. Now Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is arising and reshaping the world of IT management.

Bring your own cloud is a concept about employees being allowed to use public or private third-party cloud services to perform certain job roles, according to techopedia. Many of the services are web based and cross-platform with Dropbox being probably the most famous among them. Other popular personal cloud services are iCloud, Google Drive and SkyDrive. Additionally, these private cloud services are free to use under a certain storage limit, usually between 2 and 5 GB which is enough for storing emails, documents and other raw data.

Therefore, these BYOC services offer an efficient option for storing files off-device for greater protection, automatic backup and constant availability. However, at the same time they provide an avenue for corporate users to compromise security by storing important data outside the company’s secure barriers. The concern here is not about the Bring Your Own Cloud trend taking over the Bring Your Own Device. The real question is:

How securely can the two concepts coexist in a corporate environment, where you cannot really stop users from using private cloud services when they bring their own devices?

Doriana Kote, Marketing Assistant, WebSan Solutions Inc., a Channel Elite Awards Finalist for 2013

Despite the weather conditions this week, summer is approaching its peak and while employees are taking their vacation leave time, many organizations find it difficult to capture time off. Managers are responsible for maintaining the accuracy of accrued vacation leave records and they also need to ensure that time is reported accurately in accordance with the respected policies regarding vacation leave.

So what if employees could request time-off via the internet and managers could approve these requests and view their department’s work schedules online? It is obvious that a time tracking software reduces the time required versus manual options and the savings accelerate quickly. Additionally, the costs of archiving paper documents will vanish.

WebSan Solutions offers a robust, out of the box Time and Expense Management System that keeps track of your employee’s time and expenses easily. Moreover, its unique project management features will monitor your projects and your costs efficiently.

For more information on our web-based Time & Expense Management System, register for our free webinar on July 11^th, at 11:00 am EST or contact us here.

Doriana Kote, Marketing Assistant, WebSan Solutions Inc., a Microsoft Dynamics Silver Partner

WebSan University officially opened its doors to the public and takes WebSan Solutions webinars to a whole new level. The program consists of a series of extensive Microsoft Dynamics GP courses, from Bank Reconciliation to Project Accounting and is making its debut on July 25^th, 2013 with its first course “Microsoft Dynamics GP Orientation”. In this introductory course new users will learn the basic principles of navigating and personalizing important areas of Dynamics GP as well as posting and integrating with other applications.

Why Online Training?

• Immediate, cost- effective and easily affordable
• Corporations save between 50-70% due to elimination of travel expenses according to Training Magazine
• ROI to the Max - Affordable online training can be up to 93% cheaper than classroom training
• Multimedia content, including dynamic video and graphics to efficiently illustrate key concepts
• A new, easy and interactive way to learn.
• Focus on the practical application of new approaches and tools
• Contains applied work assignments that put learning into action
• Ability to answer questions live

For more information on WebSan University Online Training and our upcoming courses, visit our website or contact us here.

Doriana Kote, Marketing Assistant, WebSan Solutions Inc.

Did you know you can receive up to $100K in government funding through IRAP Digital Technology Adoption Pilot Program(DTAPP)?

DTAPP is a component of the Government of Canada’s overall strategy to boost the productivity of small and medium – sized enterprises (SMEs) and improve Canada’s digital economy. The contribution acts a cost sharing mechanism and will be applicable to the expenses associated with the analysis, implementation and customization of new software or the direct labor and consulting components of implementing new digital technologies. If your proposal is accepted by the program, the government will also provide up to 80% of the payroll costs and 75% of the applicable sub-contractors fees for a project up to $100k contribution.

To be eligible for DTAPP services or funding, your firm must:

• have 500 employees or less
• be incorporated, for-profit and operate in Canada
• be growth oriented
• demonstrate plans to carry out a project designed to adopt digital technologies

WebSan Solutions Inc. will work with you and your company to find the best small-medium enterprise solution that will help your business grow and become more efficient. If you are considering implementing a new ERP project, contact us to learn more about the IRAP DTAPP funding opportunity.

Doriana Kote, Marketing Assistant, WebSan Solutions Inc.

You may think that tracking time and expenses to optimize your team and satisfy your clients is an easy, routine task. The truth is that tracking staff’s timing and expenses is about making insight-driven decisions a key part of your business culture and day-to-day activities.

Usually, a new company will start small by tracking employees’ hours in an Excel spreadsheet or even in traditional, handwritten records. As your client portfolio grows and your team gets larger, your time management needs to change. Whether you are an accounting firm, an IT consulting company or a bank, there will come a point where you will need to better take advantage of your resources and track your revenue and costs.

A lot of times, people consider buying a time management system an unnecessary expense. In fact, the effectiveness of it in tracking, analyzing and reporting on employee’s timekeeping, outweighs its cost. Today’s software options focus on web hosted portals with reporting and time tracking features, as well as various options for recording expenses towards clients and projects. You can also bill an employee’s time at various rates depending on the client and the tasks to be performed.

Therefore, a time and expense management system helps you to better leverage your employee time and keep track of how you utilize your resources. As you build an historical database, the better you plan and manage, thus the more revenue you generate

WebSan Solutions offers a robust, out of the box Time & Expense Management System that keeps track of your employee’s time and expenses easily. Moreover, its unique project management features will monitor your projects and your costs efficiently.

The most arguable myth about cloud ERP solutions refers to organizational data not being as secured as in an on-premise solution. In fact, SaaS security and privacy of data has proved to be customers’ biggest concern.

The top 4 most important issues about data security in the cloud are:

1. Your data storage location

This issue is related to the physical location of the data. When it comes to cloud ERP vendors, their data centers are housed in multimillion dollar facilities and have a 24/7 security all year long. After all, most cloud providers are actually better with physical security than an onsite solution vendor because they don’t have a lot of staff hanging around the facility. Thus, they are able to control physical access to various parts of the office space.

2. Who has access to your data and when

Yesterday 13,000 cyclists headed out on the two major Toronto highways, Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway, in this year’s Becel Heart & Stroke Ride for Heart.

Despite the bad weather, this year the event raised a record of $5.5 million, which is $500,000 more than it did in 2012.

Here at WebSan Solutions Inc., we strongly believe in the value of community and we were thrilled to take part in the Ride for Heart and help towards funding more research that extends and saves lives.

We had a great time and we are proud that we contributed to the eradication of heart disease and stroke.

See you all again next year!

Incrementing an integer in SQL is easy; all you have to do is + 1 to the value. However, incrementing a number that has padded zeros is a little trickier, since it is probably a string value and not a number. Luckily with some type conversions, it becomes just as easy as incrementing an integer.

First thing you want to do is to get the length of the string, so you know how many padded zeros to add. You can do this by using the LEN function:

1. SELECT @Length = LEN(RTRIM(LTRIM(@Num)))

It is also a good idea to trim the value just in case there are extra spaces.

Next we can increment the number.  Now we can't just do a + 1 to the value since it’s a string and doing a + 1 to a string would just concatenate the 1 to the end of the string.  So let’s convert the string to an integer:

Nowadays business professionals have access to a vast variety of technologies and sources of information. Big data is growing fast as organizations devote technology resources to tapping the terabytes of data flowing into their organizations and externally in social media. Thus, a major challenge has come up recently: how to leverage Big Data analytics and improve business performance by using current Business Intelligence (BI) practices?

The current thinking around big data and business intelligence tends to be built around a very simplistic model. You acquire lots of data, in all kind of formats, from a myriad of sources, apply some business intelligence and get your answer to the above question. However, executives thinking that a big data dive is all they need to exploit conclusions are mistaken. While big data might be getting ahead of itself in enterprise promises, you need to think about the skills you have in your company and develop the relevant data skills to adapt to this new model. At the same time, BI kills the need to develop, administer and analyze this huge amount of corporate data. Therefore, big data and BI can be integrated within the business context for better, faster decision making.

Keep in mind, though, big data can make or break a company. Integrating advanced analytics for big data with business intelligence systems is an important step toward gaining full return on investment. That is, BI systems and advanced analytics can be highly complementary; the latter ones can provide the deeper, exploratory perspective on the data, while BI systems provide a more structured user experience. In addition, BI systems’ richness in data visualization and reporting can be vital to making advanced analytics actionable.

The first step to understanding big data is collecting all of your data into powerful, integrated solutions. The second step is to identify correlations with your data to make improvements in your operations and find new opportunities. Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Intelligence (BI) module provides people with the insight they need to take quick action and pursue opportunities. What is more, using a single software solution, like Microsoft Dynamics GP, will make it easier for you to find and use the important business data you need to drive your business forward.  The more efficiently you use this data, the faster you can respond to new opportunities.

At the end of the day, while big data is a hot term, it doesn't mean much unless you can complement them with BI systems and expand their power. Thus, big data can be very helpful if you can wade through it to obtain meaning, i.e. they always have to make sense. It's not enough to gather accurate and timely data. Professionals need powerful and user friendly BI analysis tools to help them understand context and trends. You need to focus on evolving your BI approaches and integrate them with big data analytics to fuel faster and more accurate decision making. In this way, you will be able to gain a competitive advantage by understanding how big data can supplement the outcomes already achieved through “traditional” BI.

Today companies struggle with a volume of information that has the force of a tidal wave. You can either float or sink into that wave, depending on whether or not you can leverage the exponential growth of business data.

The current thinking around big data though, tends to be built around a very simplistic model. According to that, you acquire large amounts of data in lots of formats from various sources. Then apply some business intelligence into that mix and get your solution. However, this data has to make sense and be as simple as possible.

Organizations across all industries are increasingly looking to the cloud as a way to help boost their productivity, revenues, returns on technology investments and customer satisfaction. It is important to realize that cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are not easier to implement or use than on-premise systems. However, when implemented properly, cloud ERP system software can save organizations a lot of money. These cost savings come in the form of reduced IT staffing and reduced hardware expenditures. In general, these are the two most common benefits that organizations refer to as reasons for switching to the cloud.

Before your organization decides the transition to the cloud, it is vital to consider the amount of effort required for the implementation. Cloud ERP implementations are not easier than traditional ones. The most common problem is poor cost estimation and is likely related to the lack of an appropriate framework for enterprise-wide prepackaged software maintenance, which of course requires an ongoing relationship with the software vendor. Moreover, you should keep in mind that all typical issues, such as organizational change management, adoption and use of new business processes are always an obstacle, no matter what ERP solution you choose.

Therefore, whether you are implementing an on-premise or cloud-hosted ERP solution, operational improvement is achieved only through guidance from a highly experienced implementation partner, proper resource allocation and executive commitment. To realize cost savings from cloud ERP, organizations should also budget for all essential components, including everything from organizational change management to business process re-engineering (BPR).

Here are 3 tips for maximizing cost savings with cloud ERP software:

1. Know your Requirements – You should gather all the requirements and complete Business process mapping (BPM) before the implementation so that your organization can select the ERP solution that best fits your business.
2. Partner with the Right People – Cloud ERP software requires an IT Partner with unique skill sets. Look for a Vendor who has experience in your industry and has a number of references.
3. Understand the Costs – When evaluating ERP vendors, consider the total cost of ownership (TOC) and not just upfront costs. Remember that TOC is like an iceberg, which means a lot of the costs are usually hidden.

If you incorporate all of the above tips in your strategy, it will not only save money on upfront infrastructure costs but it will most definitely realize cost savings in IT staffing, licensing fees and annual maintenance. These fees only escalate the longer you wait, thus plan to engage in organization change management and business process re-engineering (BPR) early in the project.

WebSan Solutions Inc., a cloud Microsoft Dynamics Certified Partner and IT consulting and solutions provider, has been recognized as one of Canada’s top 100 Solution Providers in 2012 by Computer Dealer News (CDN). WebSan has over a decade of experience in Enterprise Software solutions, business as well as financial accounting software.

The list was announced April 16th, 2013 at the Top 100 Solution Providers Awards Gala. CDN is the voice of Canada's IT channel community for more than 25 years and defines an information technology solution provider as an organization that resells computer hardware, software or peripheral products along with providing IT related professional services, support services, consulting in a cloud or on-demand environment, on-premise fashion or as managed service.

“WebSan Solutions Inc. of Toronto makes the CDN Top 100 Solution Providers list this year and with that they join an exclusive club of the best technology minds in the country. WebSan really made a name for itself this year by offering cloud services based on Dynamics GP. They are part of a group of young and up-and-coming cloud specialists that CDN has noticed on the Top 100 list over the last few years,” said Paolo Del Nibletto, editor and associate publisher of CDN – Computer Dealer News, Canada’s No. 1 IT Channel Publication and Web site.

“We are very pleased to have made the list this year.” says Andrew King, Managing Director, WebSan Solutions Inc. “Our relentless focus on customer service and growth has enabled us to reach this milestone. More and more small to medium businesses our choosing our Cloud Dynamics GP Accounting solution for ease of use and cost every day.”

To view the list of the top 100 Solution Provider click here: https://www.computerdealernews.com/top-100-solution-providers/top-100