What the boss uses to improve productivity...
26th June 2013
As the owner of a Small Business myself, and of course running an IT Business, I'm often asked "what do I do for..." in various scenarios.
I thought I'd share with you what I do use - although I should warn you, most of this post is going to talk about our products simply because the reality is I use our technology myself - I wouldn't sell it to my customers if I wouldn't trust it myself!
Getting connected to the Internet
In the office I rely on our Resilient Bonded Broadband, like all the staff to keep us connected. Internet Access is particularly important to us since a lot of our work involves "Remote Access" support to help existing customers, respond to HelpDesk Tickets and so on, let alone Sales Activities of sending many e-mails each day handling new orders, arranging installation with clients and so on. All of these make connectivity hugely important. We use our resilient bonded broadband because we need reliability (so the resilient bonding keeps us connected even if one of the multiple lines we have fail). Fibre sadly isn't an option where we are (despite being right next to a Fibre cabinet (I blogged about this once before), so the bonded solution is really helpful with giving us better speed too.
Keeping up to date on e-mail
I get a ridiculously high amount of e-mail each day. Whilst almost all of our office use Agility Mail, I'm the exception to the rule - a combination of history and some pretty specific requirements. Instead my e-mail comes through our systems but my messages are sent to another of our e-mail platforms - right now it's actually going to a new system which we are looking at rolling out to more customers soon. It gives me the flexibility to do some pretty advanced handling and splitting of my e-mail right down to ensuring I only receive a fraction of all messages sent to me on my Blackberry Z10.
Accessing Files, Documents and Quotes
There's no contest on this. I use our Agility Desktop service for more and more things. Right now we've still got some documents and data in historical systems, all of which are slowly being removed - but all the project planning, quotes and audits I do are edited and saved on the Agility Desktop platform. I also use Agility Desktop Web Files so I can get older content to/from that setup with ease. For me too, I love having the latest Office 2013 on the platform as I'm something of a power user of Office. I honestly can't express how much easier life is with Agility Desktop - having the ability to just log in from home, or another customers office and pull off and work on documents without needing to e-mail them to myself or save them on a USB key makes my life so much easier.
Backups, Backups, Backups...
If don't you know who "Steve Balmer" is, he's the boss of Microsoft and famously did a dance on stage one day saying "Developers, Developers, Developers" to show his enthusiasm for the programmers that write great software using Microsoft Technology. If I was doing that dance, it would be "Backups, Backups, Backups". Why? Because backups matter. We spend huge amounts of time helping customers with this - sadly most of the time it's trying to help them recover because they haven't got backups, shortly followed by the realisation they should have had and finally let us put proper backups in place.
With that in mind, there's zero excuse at VPW HQ - and I personally couldn't imagine not having my backups in order, so all my data is saved on our servers - and backed up either using our Enterprise Backup Service (for both our "On Premises" servers and those we hold in various Datacentres running much of our Cloud Technology systems - services like Agility Mail, Desktop and Web Hosting. For some data, I also use our Remote Backup for Small Business product too. All of those systems ensure data is backed up over and over again. You'll find I've blogged about Backups many times - it's just so important.
Ring Ring... Gotta dash, that's my phone...
When talking to customers I use either my Blackberry or Samsung Note 2 if I'm out and about using the amazingly fast network Three provide as I use a lot of data "out and about" too making them the natural choice. In the office, we use Agility Voice - the same one we sell to customers of course.
The Takeaway:
I love Dominos. OK, not that sort of takeaway, but the "moral of the story" type... I'm really passionate about great IT services, and the services we sell to our customers is the same technology we use. We do this wherever it makes sense and is something we need ourselves. By doing this we both demonstrate that we trust and believe in the technology at every level ourselves as well as giving us extra incentive to constantly improve our services - and of course means if there is a problem, we know about it fast, and couldn't have any more reason to get it fixed than we already do!
Why not see how we can help you with smart, affordable and productive IT Services? Give our team a call on 01392 950 950 today.
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