Once, being out of the office meant being out of touch, with customers unable to contact you and colleagues unable to involve you in discussions. This meant decision making took longer and businesses could miss out on opportunities, simply because a key person couldn’t be reached.
With cloud services, and mobile communications this is changing, and organisations that embrace the opportunities provided by the cloud will create a flexible, productive working environment for staff, which delivers better customer service, better internal communications and generates more sales.
ActiveSync
Business email is vital to the way companies operate, and ActiveSync makes sure workers away from the office have complete access to their emails, contacts and calendars across mobile phones and tablets.
ActiveSync speeds up business communications, keeping you ahead of competitors and delivering quicker customer responses.
Webmail
With ActiveSync delivering email across all your devices it’s easy to forget about webmail. Whilst it lacks the immediacy of ActiveSync (since you have to login, rather than have a mobile device tell you mail is waiting) it is still useful in some situations.
For example, using a mobile device abroad can incur expensive data roaming charges, or downloading an email with large attachments may not be practical. In such situations webmail is the clear favourite, and all our customers can access their mail online using the links at the bottom of each page on our website (scroll down to see them).
Microsoft Lync
Lync takes business communications to a new level, providing secure instant messaging and web conferencing features that will speed up all aspects of your organisation’s decision making and save on travel time.
With instant messaging team members can ask questions and share information internally. Being a cloud service, Lync users can send and receive messages either in the office or when working at home, with all conversations stored as part of their Exchange archive, just like emails.
Web conferencing enables groups to work together without having to find a location everyone can get to. Discussions happen online, eliminating travel times and the associated costs, and non-Lync users can join in via the web browser, making it an ideal solution for customer conferences.
Microsoft SharePoint
One of the most common uses for the cloud is document storage. People working out of the office still need to read, and edit, company information and cloud storage is the easy way to give them access.
A general cloud storage solution provides an online folder where documents are placed. Whilst this does work it can lack security, with no control over who accesses and edits individual files.
Microsoft SharePoint provides a secure cloud storage area, with IT admin controlling access to individual files. For example a sales brochure can be made available to all employees, whereas budget spreadsheets would be limited only to those who need the information.
Cloud storage can shorten your sales pipeline (for example by producing revised quotes whilst sat with a customer, rather than waiting to go back to the office), keep employees updated on company procedures (by sharing the latest employee handbook), and protect your business from data loss due to an office break-in (as all documents are stored in the cloud).
SharePoint goes further than just cloud storage. With it companies can build a complete intranet, create a customer facing website, manage absence calendars or work rotas, and more. Remote workers access their workspace through the web browser and can use standard Microsoft Office desktop apps for editing documents.
In the modern work environment it’s important to equip employees with the tools to work just as effectively out of the office as in it. Our cloud services are designed to help you be quicker than your competitors and manage your IT expenditure.
To find out how we can help your business communicate better, email our sales team or use our live chat service.
Image credit: Victor1558
