Category: Office Tools

Digitization of the Workplace

Let’s face it: we’re accustomed to instant gratification in the Internet Age. With the expansion of technology, Amazon order confirmations arrive in email inboxes instantaneously, while hungry customers track the location of their much-awaited pizza delivery each step of the way.

Instant gratification is a sign of the times!

Likewise, if you want to run a sustainable, profitable business in 2019, then digitization is not only useful– it’s necessary. And it’s easier than you think.

Did you know that 30 percent of tasks involved in over half of all jobs could be automated using technology that exists right now?

According to McKinsey & Company, a global management consultancy firm, this number will grow even higher as technology develops–which is great news for your business, your employees, and your profits.

And no, we’re not talking about robots coming to take over your job (although some pretty cool robots exist). From automatic “Abandoned Cart!” emails to payroll and employee onboarding, automation is already a mainstay of modern organizations.

So, looking for inspiration? Here’s just a few of the amazing ways to automate your business.

AI Technologies

Artificial intelligence is taking over the world–and it should be taking over your daily processes. Machine- and deep-learning AI provides a cost-effective solution for both carrying out mundane day-to-day tasks and engaging with customers.

For example, AI-powered bots are revolutionizing customer service abilities by providing 24/7 assistance for regular inquiries and troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, SiriusDecisions, an industry analyst firm, found that sales reps spend only about one-quarter of their entire work week actually selling to customers. The rest of the time–approximately 27 hours each week–is spent on administrative tasks like data entry.

These duties tend to consume a lot of time and energy. Instead, by automating the process, employees could spend their time closing deals and making connections to new leads and investors.

Customer & Employee Relations

At its core, CRM, or customer relationship management, includes all the technologies and strategies involved in these relationships, like email marketing, telephone calls, mail, and social media marketing

If it sounds like a lot — well, that’s because it is. Manually logging all customer data (accurately) throughout the sales funnel is time-consuming and subject to human error. It’s also nearly impossible to maintain communications with every single lead. In those cases, both the business and the customer suffer.

Thanks to automated email responses, data collection, and communications, these problems are a relic of the past. According to a study by Enterprise Apps Today, over 60 percent of respondents believe that automation boosts customer experience. Digitization not only eases business processes, but it improves B2C ( business-to-consumer) relationships, too.

Boost Cybersecurity

Hackers and cybersecurity threats are growing more complex and common every day. Automating your data security systems with AI machine learning can provide a base level of protection while freeing up IT professionals to focus on progressing your business’ systems or confronting only the most complex of threats.

Read more about Cybersecurity here

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Reduce Setup Costs

According to McKinsey, digitizing data-heavy processes within businesses can cut costs by up to 90 percent. You can automate everything from employee and customer onboarding, legacy-system integration, data migration, and far more.

Although the initial implementation of automation can take time, effort and money, the payoff is well worth the investment.

Where Should You Start?

To figure out where to start digitizing your business, there are a few questions you should be asking yourself, like: what would improve my customer’s experience and, how can I better communicate with customers?

Further questions such as: which tasks can I automate to save time and cut costs; and finally, how you can ease the daily tasks of your employees in order to better utilize their skills (productivity) are also important points to consider.

Whether you begin with cybersecurity, automating payroll and onboarding, or equipping your site with AI-powered technology, digitizing your small business will lead to happier employees, satisfied customers and a profitable structure for the future.

30 August 2019
Cloud-hosted services square up

Running your business requires choosing the right tools for you and your employees. In order to streamline work-related productivity, many organizations are migrating to cloud-based office suites. Specifically, Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s GSuite (now known as Google Workspace).

Both products boast a variety of helpful productivity tools and the latest remote collaboration technologies. While it’s impossible to say which one is “better”. This head-to-head comparison can help you decide which office suite is a better fit for your business.

What is Workspace & Office 365?

Office 365 and Workspace (previously GSuite) are packages, of powerful business tools that facilitate your day-to-day tasks using the cloud. They even provide business emails along with apps for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, video conference calls, shared calendars, and notes.

In addition, storing information on Google or Microsoft servers, rather than your own via these suites, can also save your business a lot of money.

Plans and Pricing

First, let’s look at plans and prices. It’s important to note that Microsoft requires an annual commitment, while Google offers you the option to make monthly payments if you prefer.

Contact us to get a formal quote for your business

Cloud packages head-to-head

Email

While both Office 365 and Workspace offer web and mobile apps (Outlook and Gmail, respectively) for email. There are, however, some subtle differences.

One advantage to Office 365 is the desktop version of Outlook, which is incredibly feature-rich and lets you sort and group emails with ease. Gmail, on the other hand, is widely used throughout the world. For this reason, a variety of third-party app options (e.g. WordPress) can be linked to it to enhance its capabilities.

Cloud Data Storage

For the entry-level plans, Office 365 Business Essentials wins out with 1 TB (terabyte) of storage per user, while the Workspace ‘Basic’ plan only offers 30 GB. GSuite includes emails in this storage limit, whereas Office 365 provides extra storage for email files with added archiving.

However, Workspace’s upgraded plans beat out most of Microsoft’s storage offerings. So long as your business has more than five employees, Workspace Business and Enterprise provides unlimited cloud storage. Although, businesses with less than 5 employees on the “Business” plan are capped at 1 TB. Only Microsoft’s E3 plan and higher offer the same unlimited cloud storage.

Applications

Applications are the cornerstones of a suite’s functionality. Workspace and Office 365 offer you a variety of comparable apps for word processing, creating spreadsheets and presentations, all on the cloud!

This means every user gets a free desktop version of the Office suite (i.e. Microsoft Word, Excel) to download.

These feature-rich apps expand far beyond the capabilities of the mobile and online versions, and are available on every plan except the ‘Business Essentials’.

While both services offer mobile and online apps, one major benefit of Office 365 are its desktop applications.

Collaboration

These online applications make both suites ideal for remote collaboration. Microsoft Teams lets facilitate this with tools like real-time co-authoring, mentioning users by name and chat capabilities while working on OneDrive. Microsoft now lets you collaborate using its desktop apps, too, although the updates to shared files are a bit sluggish compared to its online apps.

Similarly, GSuite offers Hangouts for chats and Google Drive for real-time collaboration. Google’s online and mobile apps were created with cloud collaboration in mind, so some might find them a bit more user-friendly.

For remote meetings, GSuite and Office 365 both offer group video conference calls. If you plan on large-scale video conferences, then Office 365 offers far more for your money: most plans have a 250-participant limit, while the E3 plan increases to an astounding 10,000-person limit.

Meanwhile, GSuite’s Google Meet allows up to 25 participants on the “Basic” plan, 50 on the “Business” plan, and 100 on the “Enterprise” plan.

Security

Cloud services are running into a variety of security issues, and these suites are no exception.

A 2019 Barracuda Networks’ report found that a large percent of ATO (account takeover) attacks were targeted at Microsoft Office 365 accounts after businesses migrated emails to the service.

These attacks prompted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue a set of best practices. The aim was to help organizations migrate their email services while avoiding risks and vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, Google recently announced that a cloud storage feature for encrypted passwords on its “Enterprise” plans was faulty. As a result, some user passwords were stored in plaintext on Google’s servers!

While cloud computing has its risks, the two suites do have impressive security features. GSuite is comparable to Google’s own level of security and offers AI detection of suspicious activity, Two-Factor authentication, and data leak protection—in which admins can block outgoing communication determined by set keywords.

On the other hand, Office 365 has the option of Multiple Factor Authentication (MFA), along with the detection of malware, viruses, and suspicious activities. Microsoft also provides data loss protection, and admins can restrict access to company-issued devices only.

Ease of Use

So, which is easier to use? Well, it depends on who you are, and your ability to grasp software quickly.

If you’re accustomed to working with MS Word or Excel documents, and edit them for work on a regular basis, then Office 365 and its desktop-to-online formatting compatibility will probably be your best bet. This is especially true if your company solely computes with Windows PCs.

However, new users might find GSuite apps easier to learn, as the tools are a bit simpler and straightforward.

So, which is best for you?

Firstly, Office 365 offers feature-rich apps, and most of its plans come with a desktop version of MS Office applications. This is a definite advantage over its competitors.

Its entry-level plan is far more generous in terms of data storage than GSuite’s “Basic” plan. In addition, businesses that already exclusively use Windows technology are likely to find Office 365 better-suited for their needs.

With that said, GSuite was originally designed as a cloud collaborative productivity tool. Therefore, its features might be easier for collaboration and can be used among a wider variety of Windows and Mac devices. In addition, GSuite’s Business’ plans and above outdoes Microsoft when it comes to unlimited cloud file storage. <- This has changed since the article was first published.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you which of the two is “best.” But, with this knowledge in mind, you can make an informed decision to choose the best cloud suite for you.

3 June 2019
How would you like to be served?

The thought of “servers” and “hosting” are rarely things you consider on a daily basis. If you are not an IT or a software architect, then probably not at all.

For the mentioned professionals, however, these decisions are critical to the operations of a business however large or small.

There is a fine line between how (and where) your software systems are used. This line has become thinner because of evolving cloud technology and automation.

Sourcing and deploying the right IT architecture could therefore help your business stay afloat, or sink without.

Communication is key

The most effective mode of communication in any business (other than verbally or telephonically) is still electronic mail (E-mail).

It is effective because it helps you get a time-stamp and a reference point when it comes to the documentation of your conversations. This is important tool when it comes to your legal obligations and commitments.

Emails are, therefore, something that should not be taken for granted!
We consequently send, receive emails with attachments through various devices. All this without a second thought as to how this happens.

After all, this is the job of the IT-guys, right?

Well quite rightly so. They often clash with their management and board of directors for funds to keep this going without compromising operations. Emails are crucial not only from a daily functional point of view but from security but also the compliance facet.

Defining servers

Your company’s IT infrastructure: Emails; File-servers; Databases (CRMs and ERPs) and other communication tools are commonly managed on-site on systems referred to as ‘on-premise’ solutions.

These are managed by computer-like CPUs that look like the standard boxes that you plug your monitor and keyboards. They, however, have a lot more processing power and storage than your average desktop and are called Servers.

Your servers naturally must be kept cool because of the heat they generate from being on all the time. As you can imagine, built-in fans are far from being enough to cool them off!

There an array of server types. Each of them is designed to run the tasks of your mail exchanges, file storage, and the storing/deploying of remote PC operating systems. Others handle your databases and other dedicated functions.

You would need to have the licensed software to operate each server providing unique services. This makes it quite an expensive outlay if you have all of the abovementioned requirements!

Servers are not irreplaceable and can overheat, get corrupted, or crash like a hard-drive (or a NAS server system). You, therefore, need to be maintain them at a cost to your business via your IT department.

Depending on the amount of data and complexity, the maintenance is outsourced to specialized IT companies or software license providers.

Cloud-computing

In the early 2000s, ‘the cloud’ or ‘cloud computing’ became a new concept. It is basically a very large set of high-end servers equipped with software to manage all the tasks mentioned above. It is usually offered as a service under a single (monthly or annual) subscription.

So basically, you are renting the service of a server as opposed to owning it. Renting, just like with property or cars, relieves the user of all the costs of maintaining the product in question.

This sort of rental service offered by cloud service providers is now known as Software as a Service (SaaS). This also saves you from purchasing any hardware let alone paying for the extra electricity bill to cool a server room.

According to Quora.com, the main difference between a cloud and a datacenter is that a cloud is an ‘off-premise’ form of computing that stores data on the Internet.

A Datacenter, on the other hand, is an on-premise set of hardware that stores data within an organization’s local network.

As an IT professional, you constantly face the burning question of whether to go for a solution that will relieve you of mundane tasks – like server maintenance. Naturally, you would also want a solution that facilitates the daily administering of user-profiles, data archiving, and backups. But to what costs then?

Deciding on which to go for

There are many pros and cons when it comes to the hosting of your company’s data on a local server as opposed to having it run via the cloud. There is also a massive array of choices and bundles between the top cloud service providers.

Cloud service providers have several data centers used as backups. So your email hosting may have several servers in different locations to serve that function. This curbs the risk of your data getting lost, unavailable, or hacked.

Naturally, Datacenters are kept highly secure in undisclosed locations globally. Google is known to have one of its datacenters floating on a massive container ship somewhere over the Atlantic ocean.

Maintenance

Maintaining a server is expensive as you require massive cooling systems. Some smarter companies like Microsoft, are now taking to the deep oceans for that function.

When it comes to email hosting or the storage of your files in the cloud only five large multinational corporations’ names come to mind. Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM, and Amazon.

These companies however bear the burden of maintenance, while providing just the service you require on a subscription basis.

Setting up an on-premise solution, in contrast, can be a tedious exercise and an expensive one. This is more applicable to smaller companies that do not have large IT budgets.

Licensing your server is no child’s play either!

Having to decide on costs versus functionality will determine how to license your server. This would be either per-server, per virtual machine needed, or per processor core and then you need CALs). If you don’t believe it, just have a look at this licensing guide!

An example

To illustrate the difference, let’s say you have an outlay of a hundred thousand dollars to acquire the software licenses for three years. This compared to a cloud-hosted package that performs the same function over the same timeframe.

You can then piggy-back off companies like Amazon and Microsoft’s security services, which then costs eight thousand dollars monthly ($96k annually).

So, within three years of using the cloud, you would have reached the $100K cap that would be spent only for licenses. You would have also saved with an extra $188K in additional services.

This is a portion of what you would have been spent on maintenance, technical support, security, upgrades, and updates.

These figures are rudimentary, but the long-term savings are noticeable as cloud service providers tend to provide value-add solutions when pricing their bundles.

Microsoft recently launched its Microsoft 365 package which includes an upgrade to the latest operating system (Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise). This is something you would have had to source and pay for separately.

Stress relievers

Software deployment and the administration of user accounts is cloud-based. This means you can do this conveniently and remotely from your PC, laptop, tablet, or even your smartphone!

This means as an IT professional, you will now have more time to oversee more important issues like data security and overall IT policies. Better yet, you would have the time to investigate ways to automate and improve your systems.

This is possible without the inconvenience of running from PC-to-PC to install operating systems, Office software, or manage mailboxes.

Remote desktop services of an on-premise server were a step in this direction – but are a pain to set up. So, you can view the cloud as an evolution of remote-desktop services.

Infrastructural setbacks

The only (and potential) hindrance to using cloud services naturally would be the availability of good and cheap broadband (Internet connectivity).

Without both, the justification for running your business fully on the cloud would not stick. Some businesses, especially in developing countries, go endure desperates attempts to adopt the cloud.

They use what is known as hybrid-systems: a combination of cloud and on-premise solutions.

If you operate in a country without forward-thinking government officials that facilitate broadband availability, you will suffer the most.

Like an old, car, outdated hardware and software can lead to costly services (out-of-date and warranty solutions). This leads to you having heftier maintenance fees and support costs by third-party IT professionals.

The old rhetoric of ‘not trusting the cloud’ is now one of the past. Cloud services often outperform on-premise solutions when it comes to high-end security software and data protection. This is because of the obvious economies of scale involved in setting up expensive security software.

The level of security has to be the digital equivalent of Fort Knox. This especially if you are dealing with sensitive data such as financial, legal services, healthcare, and educational institutions.

Your company would need a system that will keep all such data secure and data compliant.

Data is now treated as a commodity. There is now a subsequent need to trade and value it. We now have Blockchain-based solutions like IOTA to facilitate your payments. This while keeping data encrypted, decentralized, and safe.

In the advent of the new GDPR laws, some companies will still opt to keep and maintain their servers internally. By doing this, however, you might lack the transparency and tools needed to show your consumers how you handle their sensitve data.

16 June 2018

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