Collaborate …

Save time and money by escaping the email treadmill and viscous circle of phone tag by sharing contacts, calendars and documents with your people.

Get Connected …

Save time and money by accessing your business information from any computer and being able to book meetings, sales calls and service calls without having to track people down.

Go Mobile! …

Save time and money by using smart phones – like the iPhone and Blackberry – that are connected to all of your information to do more than just email and phone conversations while you’re on the move.

Collaborate … Why & How …

Effective collaboration is all about sharing information. Most people think of collaboration as working on a project together, but there are simpler forms of collaboration that can save you immense amounts of time.

How many times have you had to call somebody else for a simple piece of information like another person’s contact details only to be caught in what seemed like an endless loop of phone tag?

Have you ever wanted to book a meeting, or a service call, but you had to track down the participants and confirm availability with each of them? Did that process involve the email treadmill, or the aforementioned never ending phone tag where it seemed to take an immense amount of effort to simply organize a meeting? How handy would it be to have the ability to add events to other people’s calendars and allow them to do the same to yours? Also, when you’re trying to find somebody wouldn’t it be convenient to be able to glance at their calendar and see where they are?

Have you ever had to wait for a co-worker to email a document to you, but it took hours, or even days to get a hold of them just to make the request? If you were lucky enough to find the document on your own did you later find out you were working off an older revision and now you need to merge two documents?

If you stop and think – how much time do you and your co-workers spend looking for other people’s contact information, trying to schedule sales calls and service appointments, locating co-workers and hunting through reams of documents looking for the right one? In most cases the answer is a lot – especially when you add it up for multiple people. Wouldn’t it be nice to save all that time by having immediate access to the information you seek on a routine basis?

There are many tools on the market that allow you to share contacts, calendars and documents while still providing control over who can see and/or alter specific pieces of information. My favorite tool that provides all of the above plus email and instant messaging is the outstanding Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which is the platform that I recommend to my clients.

Get Connected … Why & How …

Once you decide it’s a good idea to collaborate on the small, but repetitive and time consuming aspects of your business it then becomes imperative that you and your people are connected.

What exactly does that mean? Well, if your information is only accessible from a desktop computer in your office what do you do when you’re out of the office because you’re on the road, or working from home and somebody wants you to add your comments to a calendar entry, or update a document or client’s contact information? They have to wait for you to return, which means more wasted time. What if you’re at the office, but at somebody’s else’s desk? Same thing, they have to wait for you to get back to your desk if you’re using heavy desktop applications.

Being connected in this day and age means providing access over the network to any system through a Web interface, so regardless of where somebody is they can continue to collaborate and communicate. That includes working in remote offices, on somebody else’s computer, or from home on a personal system.

Do you check your Yahoo!, Hotmail, or Google mail from multiple systems? The concept I am describing is the same, but with greater access to shared contacts, calendars and documents.

Go Mobile … Why & How …

Do you have an iPhone, or a Blackberry? Having a smart phone doesn’t automatically mean you’re fully mobile. If you don’t store your information in a central location as described above and access it over the network then your smart phone isn’t living up to its full potential. You may be able to answer phone calls and email, view your own contacts and calendar and perhaps access a few documents you have saved on your phone, but you are disconnected from the rest of your team.

How many times have you told somebody you will get back to them when you get in front of your computer? Wouldn’t it be easier to answer their question, or help them on the spot instead of putting them off and consuming more of your time and theirs at some point in the future? Of course it would and that’s what being truly mobile is all about.

Going mobile means you still have access to the same information you work with at your desktop, or on your laptop in the palm of your hand at all times. Think of the potential to be in more than one spot at the same time. Once again how much time could this save you and your people? Significant amounts of time – that’s how much.

Since time is money the value of deploying a collaboration suite to save that precious time and provide more effective communication should be evident to anybody reading this article.

However, leveraging the full potential of collaboration systems requires planning, defining what data is going to be stored, what format it is going to be stored in, how it is going to be backed up, who has access to what information and providing training to everybody who is going to use the system. That’s where I come in. I have worked with every type of company from small businesses to educational institutions to large enterprises over the past decade planning and deploying their communication systems.

Contact me today for guidance on how you can start saving time and money in your organization by using my professional services to collaborate, get connected and go mobile!

Cheers,

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