Industry news and bluLink buzz.

The bluLink Team Expands Sales
August 15, 2011 BELLEVUE, WA

Dedicated to the philosophy that business productivity and efficiency are direct benefits to the bottom line, John is eager to begin educating prospective clients exactly how SharePoint can help increase their business productivity and efficiency with the help of the bluLink Solutions team. As a visionary, John’s forward-thinking ideas and inspiration for success will inevitably help lead the way to increased company growth. bluLink Solutions is thrilled to have John onboard to drive extraordinary results as he takes the helm, Vice President Sales.

John’s background includes progressive levels of responsibility in the areas of Supply Chain Management, Sales Leadership, Marketing, and Product Management. Having moved through multiple leadership roles within complex products in biotech, chemicals, and services he understands the benefits of effective collaboration and brings an enabling approach to the success of bluLinks’s clients.

Being instrumental in the rapid growth of multiple organizations, John brings a history of continuously cultivating new markets and providing targeted solutions to clients. He doubled the revenue of a product line at Makhteshim-Agan year over year while maintaining profitability. At Natural Forces, a prior employer, John added a seven fold increase to the client base. Today he strives to seek out companies that would benefit from bluLink’s expertise to secure a viable pipeline of business for the company.

John holds a B.A. in Finance from the Foster School of Business Administration at The University of Washington.

Office 365 Launches, bluLink Solutions Deploys
July 5, 2011 BELLEVUE, WA

The next generation of office productivity software is here…Office 365 has launched! If you attended the local Puget Sound Microsoft company store launch-party last week you may have bumped elbows with a member or two of the bluLink Solutions team while reaching for those tasty hors d’oeuvres the Microsoft Online business provided.

bluLink Solutions is excited about this amazing cloud service and what it means for our clients. At the core it means greater productivity and money saved. As a registered reseller of the cloud service we have been busy for the past two years helping customers with the preceding release, Microsoft Online Services, BPOS .

With the advent of Office 365 our customers can enjoy many new capabilities including real-time coauthoring via integrated Office Web Apps , virtual meetings, presences, and VOIP communications via Lync Online (replacing OCS and Live Meeting), simple anywhere/anytime access to email and calendaring solutions with Exchange Online , a fully integrated cloud-based SharePoint Online platform managed and hosted by Microsoft, and Office for the client with Office Professional Plus for those desktop workers requiring full functionality of the Office suite.

Going beyond supporting deployments and building custom solutions on top of the service, bluLink Solutions not only consults across the cloud software but also uses the service.

With enterprise class capabilities, Office 365 is a must have for small businesses. I could not imagine trying to run a business without these tools readily available to me 24/7 with no maintenance required. I’ve witnessed a few brief downtimes while using BPOS but nothing that fell outside of the 99.9% availability acceptance window. You got to try it.
– Clint Skullerud; co-founder

Visit the Office 365 demo showcase for a quick look at how your business can begin to utilize the strengths of this cloud service. Learn more about tailoring the service to your needs; explore the power of MySites and rich Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. See what it means to connect not only your PCs but also your mobile devices to your business’s communication and collaboration infrastructure. Additionally, see how easy Intune makes it to manage the PCs of an organization within a hosted environment as well.

► Watch the Office 365 trailer .