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5 Tools for Remote Team Success

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One of the challenges we face with nearly everybody working remotely or from home, is how to manage teams.  In particular, customer-facing teams and teams whose members normally work together in person require more adaptation.  here are

Managed Live Chat for Web Sites

If done well, Live Chat on your web site improves your ability to engage and service your current and prospective customers. In addition to providing real-time connections to site visitors, robust live chat systems let you classify operators, message between operators, and hand off responsibility for chats. Leveraging live chat, your customer facing teams — sales and service — can work more effectively and with greater coordination.  Contact us to discuss how we can broker tools like Olark, and get you up, running, and trained quickly.

Managed Shared Inboxes for G Suite

Customer facing teams often share an inbox to managing incoming messages.  When the team is remote, tracking who is responsible for each email thread becomes even more difficult.  Tools like Hiver let you manage, route, and track shared inbox messages across your teams.  Contact us for more info and check out this webcast and demo.

Team Planning Tools

Tracking tasks, projects, and dependencies among teams requires some organization.  In Office 365, the Planner app provides a simple format for tracking team members, assigned tasks, and basic dependencies.  As part of the Office 365 suite, Planner integrates with users’ inboxes and calendars, and with personal and shared storage.  Planner can also be added to Teams channels as a Tab.

In the G Suite environment, we recommend Hive as an affordable, easy to use, planning and task management tool.  It is similar in functionality to Planner and other tools, like Trello, and integrates well with your G Suite identity, Drive, and more.

Contact us for help and guidance getting your project tools in place.

Bookings in MS Office 365

Designed for use by appointment-based businesses, Bookings is an Office 365 app that lets individuals schedule appointments themselves.  Customers can select the time, a particular person, or the first available when scheduling. You control available times, available staff, and appointment defaults. If you are reaching out to your customers, Bookings is way to speed up the appointment setting process.

Intranet Sites

With teams working remotely, access to files on in-house services may be limited, difficult, or slow.  Remote access tools like desktop sharing and VPNs add complexity and increase users’ frustration.  Moving files into Intranet sites can provide fast, secure, reliable access.

    • In G Suite, you can turn Drive folders and hierarchies into Intranets in a matter of minutes with OverDRIVE.  The software lets you create and manage web sites quickly and efficiently, using Drive as the content repository.
    • In Office 365, Sharepoint sites provide an easy mechanism to share files and other content relevant to teams.  You can connect Sharepoint to Teams and Groups, giving users secure access to files and resources vai the methods easiest for them.

As you assess your operations and your needs, we are here to help.  Please contact us for a Cloud Advisor Session.  Our assessment and recommendations are free and without obligation.

SBS End of Life: Microsoft Punishes Small Businesses

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Don’t get me wrong.  Companies retire products all the time; New product road maps are a necessary and valuable part of the technology ecosystem.  How a vendor decides to retire a product, however, can be very telling with respect to how they view and treat their customers.  Let’s talk about Microsoft.

Last week, Microsoft announced it’s server options for MS Windows Server 2012, due out sometime later this year.  The announcement included three major components that, while they seem to be unrelated, both impact small and mid-size businesses.  With Windows Server 2012, Microsoft is:

  • Switching from per server to per CPU licensing.
  • Eliminating Small Business Server
  • Restricting which Server licenses can run on virtualized hardware.

In press interviews and its announcements, Microsoft is very clear that businesses running SBS must either now purchase separate Exchange and Sharepoint licenses or must move to the cloud (hopefully Office 365).   The impact, however,  is actually much greater for businesses with fewer than 75 users.

  • Companies with 25 or fewer users can get the new “Essentials” edition of Server 2012.  This version cannot, however, run in a virtual environment.  Small businesses cannot, therefore, buy one server and run Windows, Exchange, and Sharepoint servers virtually without licensing the more expensive Server 2012 Standard Edition.
  • The move to processor-based licensing will also push cost increases on small businesses.  Many SMBs have purchased quad processor boxes to deliver performance and support virtualization.  With a 2 processor limit on Server 2012 Standard Edition, many customers will need to double the number of paid Windows Server licenses.

Microsoft has made it clear that they expect SMBs to switch from SBS to a file server and run Exchange and Sharepoint in the cloud.  This option, too, will represent significant cost increases for SMBs given Microsoft’s pricing model for Office 365 and the need to upgrade specific Office 2010 versions for full functionality.

If this move seems coercive, it just may be.  As reported in PC World, Office 365 has not been the smash hit Microsoft predicted.  The company is not releasing sales or usage numbers.  As a Microsoft spokewoman quoted in the article stated:

“We’re not breaking out customer, user, or revenue numbers at this time”

And according to IDC Analyst Melissa Webster, “They’ll give metrics when the metrics are meaningful, demonstrating scale and depth.”

So with lackluster performance, Microsoft releases a licensing and pricing model that “encourages” SMBs to move into the cloud or pay a heavy hardware and licensing penalty for upgrading in-house systems.

Fortunately, small and mid-size businesses have alternatives.  Google Apps for Business and other services offer more cost effective solutions for email, communication, and collaboration than Office 365. Beyond moving the Exchange and Sharepoint components of SBS to Google Apps, businesses can deploy secure cloud-based file services with full drive letter mapping and network place integration; access from PCs, MACs, and mobile devices; and integrated security and backup/recovery services.

Microsoft BPOS Outages: Cloud vs. Hosted Server

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Last week, Microsoft experienced several outages of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).   As ZDNet noted, with so few users, nobody really noticed (as opposed to every Google performance  or service issue making headlines).

In our opinion, the outage tells a much more important story — the difference between a hosted server and a cloud-based solution.  MS BPOS runs as hosted servers on shared physical servers.  In effect, Microsoft is installing their servers on hardware the same way you would install them as virtual servers on shared hardware.  Microsoft is honest in that none of the services run in a replicated or redundant way.  With the exception of email, for which users should be able to send, receive and access 30 days history, if your virtual server or physical server has troubles, you are out of luck.

The implications are serious.  Without redundant services or data, any failure puts you, the customer, at risk for data loss.  Imagine a server failure that corrupts an underlying SharePoint database.  Access to documents, wiki’s, and other content can easily be lost.  As Microsoft offers no clear mechanism for backing up data, data you place in BPOS is likely at greater risk than keeping it on in-house systems.

Granted, Microsoft’s big customers (like Coca Cola) can negotiate for special services.  For the rest of the user community, at $120 per user per year, you would just be out of luck.

Here is a blog posting praising the virtues of BPOS and possible backup strategies.  Clearly, the author does not get it.  Why would you trust your data on a service, like Sharepoint, where after a disaster impacting your servers hosted by Microsoft, you are likely to wait 6 days to get data that is 7 days old from the point of failure?  That is effectively a 13 day gap in information.

Fundamentally, MS BPOS misses the mark.  Either Microsoft doesn’t understand the needs of businesses or they are unable of providing the level of service smart businesses require.