Office 365, Productivity, Mobile Employee | read
Efficient collaboration and communication are vital components in the success of every business. Luckily, Office 365 makes it easier than ever to work smarter, not harder, so you can do your best work. With Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as well as other productivity apps, you can redefine how you communicate and collaborate. Features such as co-authoring in real time, instant messaging (IM), video, and voice make it easier to create, share, and work together wherever you are, across your favorite devices
In this post we will learn how Office 365 can help support your employees to work anywhere, anytime using any device and help them get things done.
The world reached a new milestone in 2014, as mobile devices began to outnumber people for the first time. Mobile technology is now multiplying five times faster than the global population, at a rate of about 10 new devices every second.4 In addition, more than 260 million people who work in small businesses now telecommute or use cloud-based services. Meanwhile, the emerging global generation is mobile by nature. As mobile technology continues to redefine how and where people communicate and collaborate, businesses have the opportunity to tap into this developing market and to capitalize on the evolving mobile workforce as their business grows.
With Microsoft's offerings you can ensure your e-mails are with you wherever you go and that you can communicate with anyone at your company using Instant Messaging or Audio/Video conferencing. Furthermore,Office 2016 offers you and your team full-fidelity viewing and editing of Office documents across Windows, Android, and Apple devices. That means you and your team can review, edit, analyses, and present with a consistent, familiar user experience optimized for your preferred devices. You can also switch easily from one device to the next without missing a beat. With the integration with Microsoft OneDrive for Business, you can access documents from anywhere, pick up where you left off on whatever device you were working on last, and even co-author with others when you are on the go
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Originally published Nov 13, 2016 8:21:07 AM, updated September 30, 2019
Topics: Office 365 Productivity Mobile Employee
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Over the years, we noticed that businesses initially choose solutions that tick all the technical boxes or ones that are least costly. However, emphasis should always be placed on tools that are simple to use, efficient, & that provide a good user experience. We urge our customers to pay close attention to the user experience, especially when it comes to having a return on their investment in remote working.
Not doing so will put your business at a risk of increased support costs as employees become less productive while trying to figure out how to utilise the business’s technology.
On the operational side, there are 3 categories of platforms that we believe are essential:
Foundations of remote working
Systems of record
Systems of engagement
Laptops
Internet Access
VPN: A Virtual Private Network is imperative to remote working as it creates a secure, reliable, & safe connection between the employee & the organization’s resources.
Storage Platform: Every organization needs a cloud storage platform such as TechnAdopt to enable file sharing and easy access for all employees.
Productivity apps: Teamwork is the number 1 pillar of business in which it involves using shared assets like documents, reports, infographics, & structured & unstructured data. These assets can be created with the likes of the popular office suites like Microsoft Office365 in addition to document management systems, corporate intranet, HR Systems, CRM, & ERP to name a few.
Simple Strata: With this shift in work norms, companies might not have the instant visibility on the efforts taken by an employee to complete a certain job, & consequently might not know what to improve first. Our systems will detect causality and based on that, will analyze and provide reports to identify the employees who are facing difficulties in performing their jobs in comparison to others. With this visibility, the company will be able to adjust its new processes or provide support for employees who are facing challenges in the most suitable way.
ESP: The Enterprise Submission Platform is a linear workflow that enables function owners to automate their business processes without reliance on IT personnel. This platform will allow users to create requests and approvers to approve them from any location with the use of the web or the app. It is necessary especially in remote working situations as operations need to keep moving regardless of the whereabouts of users.
Engagement Pro: Engagement Pro is an application that helps you plan, organize, & track projects - all in one visual, collaborative space - to increase visibility & alignment within team members. This tool facilitates remote collaboration on projects.
Opportunity Pro: Every company with a sales department surely should use a CRM platform. Opportunity Pro enables the sales team to improve their winning rates by having accurate forecasts, details about customers & their needs, & keeping track of all actions taken & planned in order to close a deal. Rather than managing each sales team member individually, managers will be able to have top view visibility on all the pipeline remotely and will be able to review team members accordingly.
Mobile Apps:
As we live in the age of a “smart phone take-over”, it is essential that our work is accessible from the number one tool we use constantly. Whether at home or outside, employees should have the option to interact with team members via their phone.
Similarly, employers should expect their employees to have access to their work from anywhere, especially given the remote working situation. For that reason, all of our recommended products are available as mobile apps in addition to web as we have anticipated that a time will come where reliance will be solely on smart phones. We like to think we are pioneers in this field. 😉
Emails
Idenedi: A communication tool that provides an enjoyable user experience is one that sticks. Idenedi is a tool that has proven to be one of the most requested platforms as it combines ease of access with ability to deliver critical information. While emails remain the number one tool for exchanging work-related documents, they are lacking in the push notification department.
With Idenedi, managers will be able to pass important announcements regarding changes in the work environment with absolute assurance that employees will be notified. This is crucial especially in remote working as managers can track to check if important messages have reached everyone. They can even create a space for team members to interact in the comments section, and soon via chat.
As we have provided our recommendations for the infrastructure on the operational side, we also believe that there are steps to be taken to prepare teams mentally for this sudden shift in our work space.
Check out here our tips on how to adapt in the time of a global pandemic.
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Every sales manager knows that taking proper care of the sales team is an unwritten rule of a business to achieve greater heights.
Every business owner dreams of a sales team that is 100% motivated all the time. Unfortunately, this dream is often not a practical reality.
As the pressure of digitisation on sales functions has grown in the past couple of years, companies are looking for new approaches to optimise sales enablement.
In some ways, empowering a a sales team simply means giving them greater autonomy of decision making and thereby brings better outputs. Sales managers seek out for better ways to do so because no marketing mixture is going to be everlastingly successful!
Training is one of the core elements in empowering any workforce. This is also true for a sales team. There are always new technological developments happening in a company's environment. If they are more technical in nature, giving proper training to the team members is a proactive approach.
The overall skill developed by the sales team is depending upon the quality of the training they receive. It is very important to pay attention to each member and shape them as equally trained and skilled.
Nobody needs to tell you that communication and collaboration are the keys to have a healthy sales campaign. It is all about having up-to-date information and keeping everyone on the same page.
Uninterrupted communication through relentless collaboration enables greater dynamism. Authorities should make sure that there is no communication gap and no one in the team is left behind.
Though sales persons are perceived as the smart ones, there needs to be constant empowerment. They should be more customer-centric for the most part. To have greater customer focus, it is important to have strong back up and this can be provided by the manager who offers ultimate support with solid marketing campaigns.
These campaigns should have the essence that attract and keep the customers hooked. In a way, the management is providing them ultimate authority to do more things which is aimed at bringing more fulfilling outcomes.
Offering more money, time off or a great gift is another great way to give employees a goal to work toward. A recent Aberdeen study shows that non-cash incentives are usually more effective than financial compensation, with top performers 31% more likely to prefer non-cash options.
Your best bet of getting the right incentive for your employees is by giving choices and let them vote on what incentive they’d most prefer. It will give your employees a greater sense of involvement, kickstarting a refreshed sense of excitement.
This should be cited as the most important point because, without the contribution of IT, organisations cannot dream of making it big. These days, marketing success needs smart technology solutions. If the sales team needs to be out in the field, why don’t they have a smart sales application?
We must agree that a sales application can do a lot of automation tasks which have been actually pestering the hapless sales team. It is going to be a great remedy as the features are most advanced and help to sort out several sales issues.
Enabling self-service for B2B buyers isn’t the only benefit of digital commerce. By bringing the sales team into the digital channel, B2B merchants can target the most complex parts of the purchasing experience and turn them into opportunities to retain and grow each account.
The competition in B2B commerce is growing, and the increasing expectations for great digital experiences mean that even long-time industry leaders will need to evolve in order to stay ahead. Empowering the sales channel to provide insightful, consultative selling across all their accounts will resolve the channel conflict that many companies struggle with, accelerating growth for years to come.
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As businesses continue to supercharge their application life-cycle and rapid app development becomes glued to modern IT frameworks, these shifts are disrupting the way that we think about IT contribution. In the past, development and operations have both been measured by the effort that they put forward on a specific project. The more hours and successful code or operations that you bake into a particular project, the more successful you seem. But, can progressive frameworks as agile development survive in this mentality?
This question has been bounced around for a few years. If the goal of modern development frameworks is to spread responsibility and increase collaboration, does it really make sense to standardize success based on individual contributions? Better yet, is the success of an app measured by metrics that track time contributions and individual efficiencies? Or, is it measured by the value of the end product?
While agile shifts the app cycle left, businesses have to adjust the mentality driving their culture to base success on value, not projects. In 2019, we're seeing thousands of companies change their outlook and culture surrounding the software development life-cycle. Here's why companies are switching from project-based development to product-based development.
"There are both business products and IT products. A product is simply something that has a customer base that it delivers value to." - Carmen DeArdo, former DevOps tech director at Nationwide Insurance [InfoQ]
Before we discuss how product vs. project-based design impacts IT managers, who typically are one of the first to on board the new mentality, we need to understand the differences between products and projects (in terms of the dev life-cycle).
A product is something that satisfies a business or market need. So, that latest automated security software — that's a product. One of the main distinctions between products and projects is that products exist in a life-cycle. From inception to market introductions to continuous updates, products typically last until customers no longer have a need for the solution.
A project is a temporal venture that's undertaken to develop a product. So, instead of being viewed from a lens of semi-permanence, projects are purposefully set to a time-frame.
At first, it may seem like products are the spawn of projects. That's completely correct. So, what does it mean to reframe your dev life-cycle to product-focused instead of project-focused if projects created products?
Now that we know what a product and a project are, let's talk about them in terms of the software development life-cycle.
Project-based development involves thinking of the development and operation of an app as temporary. Employees are typically measured by the effort put forward towards a specific project, and each project could use temporary workers, unique processes, and hyper-specific strategies. This means that projects are often ad-hoc.
Product-based development is a more permanent way of thinking about applications. So, employees are judged on their contribution rather than their individual metrics. This means that product-based development can be thought of as a complementary mindset to agile frameworks. In product-based development, apps are viewed from a perspective of whole-life-cycle-development as opposed to temporary app pipelines.
Let's look at why so many businesses are choosing to move towards product-based design.
One of the key benefits of agile frameworks is the ability to use automated practices throughout the software development life-cycle. But, if development cycles are thought of as temporal, finding ways to justify the expense of automation is difficult. What's the point of automation if it isn't really a core part of your life-cycle? If your business is simply using automation ad-hoc to deal with project-by-project needs, the time and costs associated with automation adoption are likely unnecessary.
But, thinking of the development life-cycle as product-based gives you the flexibility to create business-wide processes that lean on automation to eliminate redundancies. Of course, this saves time and money — which was the point in the first place.
When you think about apps in the light of temporary, it's difficult to glue customer-centricity to your Dev and Ops thought processes. The ultimate goal of any good app is to deliver value to the user. But, if the incentives behind the project are based solely on metrics and individual contributions, convincing devs and op managers to focus on value is difficult.
The project-based design makes this easy. Since value is glued to the project-based design framework, providing value is the goal — not the app itself.
Another significant benefit of product-based development is the ability to spread collaboration. Everyone becomes responsible for the entire app, which means that everyone is invested in the success of the whole application, not just "their" part.
With the product-based design, value is placed on collaboration, not employee-by-employee contributions. Trying to build an agile framework under the microscope of project-based design devalues the entire architecture that makes agile so powerful.
Again, responsibility-spread is an intrinsic benefit of product-based design. Remember, value is coming from app success — not employee success. This means that Dev and Ops don't share separate responsibilities, they share the same one. All that matters is how the app satisfies customers. That's the be-all-end-all of product-based design.
Hiring employees by the project forces fractured dev environments. Even further, basing employee performance on specific projects — which often require role-switches and different metrics — creates bubbles in the development cycle. Goals aren't viewed as long-term, because the app is viewed from the perspective of temporary.
With the product-based design, employees are responsible for the app throughout its lifecycle, which includes post-launch continuation. Of course, the product-based design requires a more temporary outlook on employee roles, which means that employees can focus on the roles that they excel at.
One of the most significant challenges facing Dev and Ops teams in the current agile environment is their mentality towards app development. In the past, the software development life-cycle has been thought of as a group of temporary projects that push out applications. Instead, try thinking about apps as more permanent products. Of course, you can still plan projects. This isn't about a specific process or strategy; it's a complete change in mentality and culture.
To be fair, this isn't a new concept (see Apple and Amazon). But, we've witnessed product-based design explode over the last few years due to the necessity of automation and extreme agility.
If you enjoyed this article click through to read our Ebook on Product based vs project based development: IT Manager's guide to product development in 2019 hope you enjoy the read!