razzaque's blog

Drupal 7 is probably one of the most anticipated releases of the Drupal platform ever.  For those in the Drupal community, the promise of improved usability can't come soon enough as we work to position Drupal against other, arguably more user-friendly platforms such as WordPress.  Since its inception, Drupal's biggest drawback has been obstacles with getting basic functionality in place, such as having a WYSIWYG editor for editing.

I'm excited to announce that I'm going to be interviewed tomorrow, July 4th, at 12pm EST on the WBAL show "The Real Estate Hour with Brandon Gaines".  My interviewer is going to be William Yerman, the CEO of The Strata Group, parent company of Yerman, Witman, Gaines, and Conklin Realty.  We'll be discussing various web technologies and their application to real estate.  Topics will include social media, including our own solution

Recently I wanted to link our VMT Facebook Fan Page to our company blog.  By extension, I thought it would probably not be a bad idea to link my personal blog postings to my personal page.  However, figuring out how to do this, especially after Facebook revamped its look again, was deceptively difficult.  So I thought I would share this process with everybody.

I've been giving some talks recently about how to leverage social networks to market your business, and the question came up regarding whether or not you could use Facebook for Business-to-Business marketing.  This is an interesting question with no clear answer at this point.  There are those who feel that B2B companies can skip social marketing, but I personally feel that there is merit in leveraging social networks, including Facebook

We recently had a few clients who were the unfortunate targets of negative articles in the area papers.  Every company goes through its ups and downs, but bad situations are made even worse when the media gets involved.  Bad publicity makes it even harder for businesses to recover or deal with whatever matters they are going through.

VMT recently signed up as a Google Apps Authorized Reseller. Google Apps allows businesses to implement powerful communication and collaboration tools cost-effectively, including the following services:

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Sites
• Google Video

Many of our customers use Gmail for personal use, and are surprised when they find out that the same service can be tied to their domain name in a way that is totally transparent.

This past week Google released the TipJar (http://www.google.com/tipjar), a community-driven web service designed to consolidate and share ideas on how to save money.  The site is broken down into categories, such  as home, work, finance, and food.  Users are able to submit their own unique ideas, and those ideas are voted on by the community.  This allows the most useful and beneficial ideas to rise to the top.

Did you see the recent movie on TNT "Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story"?  It stars Oscar® winner Cuba Gooding Jr. as local hero Dr. Benjamin Carson, world-renowned neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.  We hope you did, and we hope you liked it.  For almost 10 years VMT has been supporting Dr. Carson and his foundation, The Carson Scholars Fund.

VMT will be going to DrupalCon DC this coming March 4-7th.  We're proud to be individual sponsors of this fantastic event.  DrupalCon is generally held two times a year at locations all over the world.

This March we are fortunate to have the conference right in our backyard, and we're really excited about it!

Drupal can be readily configured to act as an Intranet or Extranet solution.  An Intranet is generally defined as an information system for posting and sharing information that functions in much the same way as the general Internet, except that the information is restricted for people within the organization: employees, managers, board of directors, etc.  An Extranet is simply an Intranet the allows select access to groups or individuals outside of the organization: vendors, partners, clients, etc.