Cut 10% or More From Your Business Budget in 3 Easy Steps

The Cloud has earned a great deal of attention in 2012, most recently when the U.S. General Services Administration, or GSA, saved more than 90 percent in energy costs after moving from physical IT servers to cloud-based systems. Through both email and collaboration cloud migration from Vorsite, you can cut 10% or more from your business budget in only a few simple steps.

Step 1: Make a List of Your Current Document Management Issues

Whether you feel like you spend your entire day in your email inbox (when you’re not micro-managing team meetings), feel locked in your office, or don’t like paying high energy bills every month, there are ways you can save money, save time, and help your business grow to new heights. Vorsite encourages all business owners to objectively list all of the ways that document management sucks up the work day. Some of the common issues our customers cite include:

  • Large on-site servers make for high energy bills and wasted space.
  • Multiple IT employees suck up payroll, but are necessary for security.
  • Your email inbox quickly fills with needlessly CC’d emails.
  • Your customers complain about not having enough access to invoices and other important documents.
  • Employees can’t work from home, prohibiting you from cutting overhead without losing profit.
If your business suffers from any of these problems (or many more), Microsoft cloud-based strategies are the cheapest, fastest, and most-reliable option.

Step 2: Test New Software Before You Buy, Free of Charge

Vorsite understands how hesitant some small to mid-sized businesses can be to embrace the cloud. Thankfully, business owners can try Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Windows Intune, two of our most popular products, free of charge for a full 30-days. Vorsite recently assisted Suquamish Tribe with cloud consulting services, with dramatically positive results you can read about here.

Step 3: Contact Vorsite for Cloud Consulting Services

Even small businesses can handle an enormous amount of online documents, such as email or employee records. Those that don’t regularly utilize digital paperwork may be wasting valuable time and resources attempting to manage a staff and business offline. Cloud Consulting Services are performed with a detailed five-step approach:

  1. Assess: The cloud assessment methodology addresses all potential barriers to your successful Microsoft Cloud migration, whether they’re financial, technical, or functional.
  2. Prove: You receive a full measurable plan for growth focusing on initial investments and a proof of concept on your chosen solutions selected during the assessment phase.
  3. Deploy: Flexibility, consistency, and speed are important during the actual deployment phase, which is why Vorsite leverages a Microsoft deployment methodology.
  4. Customize: Vorsite offers a host of customizable options for cloud customers, including apps like SharePoint, Windows Azure, and SQL Azure
  5. Manage: Never worry about your PC health again — Vorsite uses Windows Intune to manage your security, software updates, and network maintenance for you.

Vorsite is skilled in working with small to mid-sized businesses that want to cut overhead and operating costs to help their businesses grow. With a dedicated Microsoft partnership, you can be sure that cloud-based solutions for your business or organization will revolutionize the way you handle the digital side of your company, something from which your customers and employees will immediately benefit.

A New Mobile Workforce Means New Collaboration Strategies

New collaboration strategies are needed in order to match the rise in need for a mobile workforce. According to Insight Research, 67% of all workers used mobile and wireless computing. Forrester verifies the claim with a slightly smaller number, coming in at 62% of the information workforce working in multiple locations during a typical workweek.

Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q1 2011

Source: Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q1 2011

A mobile workforce has many benefits for business. It’s not only a way to maintain production levels during inclement weather and increased performance during the family flu season, but it also means employees who are on the road or on an important project can access and provide feedback on pertinent and timely information and data.

Many new collaboration technologies are just surfacing; so many of us do not have plans in place to accommodate the growing mobile workforce needs. We can often be overwhelmed in considering the right solution to address the needs of our employees.

The first step in building a mobile collaboration strategy is to identify areas of need for your employees.

We recognize every business has different needs, so we encourage everyone to perform their own assessment of their workforce against their business needs. However, Forrester Research determined there were five important groups to focus on when building your collaboration strategy.

Forrester Research Mobile Workforce Personas

Forrester Research Mobile Workforce Personas

 

The second step is identifying the primary needs. What typically occurs with remote workers is a mental disconnection from what is going on at headquarters and adjusting to changes as they happen. This can be circumvented with current technologies that enhance teamwork. Sharing is an integral part of teamwork and the more connected the experience, the more opportunities you give your employees to move as a cohesive unit and build shared meanings, making the work environment more efficient and effective.  You may come up with more primary needs, but we find this is typically the first thing most businesses want to address.

After determining the type of employees and the business needs that are enhanced by better collaboration strategies, the final step is deciding on the technology. We know that smartphones are on the rise and the mainstreaming of tablets in business is just around the corner. By the by, according to Nielsen, 77% of tablets users report using their tablet for actions they would have used a laptop or desktop. It appears inevitable that delivering a plan with a solid mobile collaboration strategy will not only help the business move forward and assist employees who may need more access to their teams, but also distribute needed information in a more dynamic and on-demand manner.

Collaboration Technology Map

Business Need Solution Microsoft Technology
Internal 

Collaboration

Internal communication Email, Telephone Exchange, Lync
Meetings Calendar, Email Exchange
Team meetings Audio & Video conferencing Lync
Status updates Microblogging SharePoint
Project sharing Intranet site SharePoint
Company-wide information Intranet site, Email SharePoint, Exchange
Relationship building Instant messenger Lync
External Collaboration Client communication Extranet, Email, Instant Messenger, Conferencing SharePoint, Exchange, Lync
Customer service Intranet, Email, Telephone SharePoint, Exchange, Lync

Table A – Collaboration map

 

4 Ways Start-Ups Benefit From Office 365 / Cloud Services

You’re an innovator, focused on driving your idea into the market. You have personally selected your staff and find yourself relying on developers and other technical employees on your staff to help manage IT.  Now it is time to focus their collective knowledge and experience through cloud services that increases efficiency as your grow.

  • Anywhere Access: Fast-growing businesses will run more efficiently with Office 365. Not only is the data hosted offsite and accessed anywhere, but someone else worries about the upkeep of hardware and other server management duties. The anywhere access is one of the biggest benefits of the whole cloud experience: Imagine sending and receiving email from all your devices: mobile phone, laptop and tablet. Imagine having an enterprise-level VOIP system for client calls and webinars. Imagine having access to top of the line collaboration tools that are fully integrated with your desktop software.
  • Simple To Manage: Start-ups are the future. If you are successful you will be dealing with the eventual dilemma of figuring out the process behind mergers and acquisitions, if you haven’t already. IT is an important part of the integration planning and execution process as you merge. But, becoming one company can tax your team and focus employees on the merger, rather than innovation and revenue. With Office 365, it’s simple to add more people to your existing domain in a short time period, making the technology work for you.
  • Information Sharing: Once everyone is altogether and permissions are set, Office 365’s collaboration tools, information, data and processes are internally available to each employee. People can now really work together, regardless of location and more easily slip into defined processes.

Cloud services have changed the way we work. Gone are the days of the revolving door of software packages that were inexpensive and quickly outmoded. Having enterprise-level collaboration tools means the design department and marketing can walk hand-in-hand even though they are on separate floors. Development and project managers can communicate remotely, even though they are just next-door. It’s these tiny moves that create a spontaneous eruption of creativity and move your product to the next level.

  • Reduced Cost: In the past, there was only one thing holding you back from having this streamlined, business-focused approach: the limited IT expertise on your team. You could hire someone or you could simply save yourself some money and push your IT to the cloud with a trusted vendor and move on with your life.

Simply put, the concept of the cloud is to take the worry out of IT – to let the experts deal with the process of moving data from A to B.  There may be a few people clanging garbage can lids in the air claiming the cloud is the end of the world. We think the opposite. We think the cloud will be a catalyst for innovation and change the way we work for generations to come.

Collaboration and Communication In the Cloud or On-Premise?

If you are in the process of understanding the Microsoft Online Services offering BPOS(email, shared calendars, online meetings, messaging, document management etc…), this is a good starting point. Microsoft has recently published a whitepaper that discusses the business value of online services and a cost analysis for hosting your services on-premise or “in the clouds”.
Below is an excerpt from that recent Microsoft Whitepaper.

“When you add Microsoft Online Services to your IT investment mix, you gain potential added value for your business in four main areas:

• Finance: Reduced capital and operating expenses.
• Process: Enterprise-class availability and highly secure operations.
• Technology: Faster deployment of new services with access anywhere for your staff.
• People: Simplified and more secure user and administrator access to services so that your staff can focus on the core business.”

To read the full article go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=9061e5e6-ea23-45c0-8389-0dfd63674356#tm