With VME's ongoing upgrade of IntelliStore onto newer Microsoft .Net technologies, the improvements in design and technology have allowed us to greatly increase the rate of new functionality offered into our systems, whilst at the same time allowing us to offer functionality that was previously impossible to achieve.

It sounds obvious, but it's often overlooked. The internet is overflowing with review sites, and although most of them are about either hotels or online shops, I'm noticing more and more 'bricks and mortar' businesses are getting reviews. The wide spread adoption of Google places will certainly be contributing to this, and with its prominence in google searches, online reviews by your customers are only going to become more widespread.

This can work for and against you. Clearly you need to be aware of the possibility, in order to respond where appropriate to any negative reviews. One of the best ways to do this is to setup Google alerts. This allows you to be emailed, either immediately, or daily when your search phrase (for example, your company name) appears in a new google search.

This morning Google+ finally launched their branded pages, which allows businesses and brands to create their own google+ identity pages. I've just created VME's page here. Facebook has had this concept for a while, so google are finally catching up, but being google, this has potential to be a lot more important.

When customers search for your company on the internet (and they will - even if they are only looking up your address or opening hours) then a google+ page is going to appear at the front. It gives you a tremendous opportunity to reach out to your customers, both present and potential. That's just the beginning though - as more and more people use social media tools such as google+ and facebook, encouraging them to connect to your 'page' gives you a route to immediately communicate with them.

For the enterprise, IntelliStore v2 works on a pretty tried and tested communications model.  Each till communicates with its back office server, and each back office server communicates with a central head office server. This model works pretty well, but lacks the ability for the tills to communicate with their head office directly in order to get centralized, real-time information. Information had to be trickled from head office to back office, then onto the tills. A reliable model, but it is certainly not without its limitations.

With the advent of always on broadband connections between stores and head office (MPLS, DSL, etc), and the investment into the moving the IntelliStore POS kernel onto Microsoft .Net technologies, one of the many new options open to us was the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This powerful library has allowed us to build direct, real-time communication with head office, opening the door for a plethora of functionality previously unavailable in IntelliStore.