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Road realities—how to support your road warriors with tech
The road warrior travels from city to city, meets with potential clients and attends conferences and industry events. And their travel requirements don’t seem to be slowing down. According to the Global Business Travel Association, spending on business travel reached record-breaking levels of $1.2 trillion in 2015, and is expected to rise to $1.6 trillion by 2020.
Your road warriors bring your products and services into new markets, diversify clientele and strengthen existing relationships. They’re helping your business grow—now more than ever.
Doing their jobs from the road, however, can prove very difficult without the right productivity tools. So, how do you know if they have what they need?
Start by understanding the common challenges they face. Whether it is hosting meetings, collaborating with colleagues or meeting deadlines, you can make sure they are set up for success.
Here are four productivity fears that often strike business travelers while they’re on the road:
Did I forget to save files from the company server before traveling?
Secure file access shouldn’t be a privilege for in-office employees only. Being able to tap into the company server to access important resources is a basic requirement for most jobs. For employees who are on the move, it’s critical to have such access anywhere, anytime. Whether in a hotel lobby or a cafe, they should be able to connect to Wi-Fi and get their work done. When company documents are secured in the cloud, your employees can continue with business as usual, from virtually anywhere.
Will time away impact day-to-day communication?
For road warriors, productivity is dependent on seamless communication and collaboration with in-office teams. Without face-to-face interaction with colleagues, employees can sometimes feel disconnected—and the ability to connect in multiple ways can make all the difference. Secure video conferencing and messaging tools can bridge the communication gap, allowing business travelers to chat with team members and conduct online meetings on the fly.
Can we successfully collaborate while I’m in another location?
Teamwork is essential to business, whether your employees are on the road or huddled in a conference room. Business leaders must consider the value of technology that lets business travelers create, co-author and share documents in real-time. These abilities enable teams to accomplish tasks and meet deadlines together, from virtually anywhere. Now, with technology for sharing and collaborating remotely, it’s easier than ever.
What happens if I lose my connection to the internet?
Travel often happens during business hours. While on a train or 30,000 miles in the air, your road warrior still needs to email, build sales decks and meet deadlines. But sometimes technology falters and they could lose internet connectivity for minutes or even hours. At times like these, they can rely most on tools that save their work (documents, presentations and even email files) onto a hard-drive while offline and upload upon reconnection. While they’re offline, they can continue to read emails, compose drafts, edit files—and keep making work happen.
The productivity of your traveling employees is only as good as the technology that supports them. As a business leader, you have the power to provide technology that helps them do their jobs while on the road.
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5 keys to simplified mobile protection
Businesses today are reaping the benefits of mobile, like increased productivity, lower overhead, and happier employees. However, mobility can bring added risk, requiring greater focus on protecting data, enabling secure employee access, and managing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as personal devices are used for work. With the right tools, managing this risk doesn’t have to be complicated.
Here are five components of your business that Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), in conjunction with Office 365 addresses.
People - Give employees the access they need, when and where they need it
Mobile devices - Manage your company resources, regardless of device
Apps - A single platform to manage every app
Data - Protect data wherever it goes
Infrastructure - The foundation that enables mobility
Productivity is the goal of mobility. Security is the requirement. Enabling secure mobile productivity doesn’t need to be overly complicated or expensive. With Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and Office 365 working together, you ensure employee productivity while keeping your company protected in a mobile world.
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Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%
Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.
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Sharepoint is going mobile this year with a new app
By Blair Hanley Frank as written on cio.com
SharePoint is going mobile in a big way. Microsoft announced a new app for its content management and collaboration platform on Tuesday, which will give workers a way to access content from their smartphones and tablets on the go.
The app, called SharePoint Mobile, will be coming to iOS by the end of June, and is one of dozens of new features for the platform that Microsoft announced alongside the general availability of SharePoint Server 2016.
Other capabilities include redesigned team sites that make it easier to see relevant files that people are working on and a hybrid search functionality that works across cloud and on-premises versions of SharePoint.
After 15 years on the market, SharePoint is still going strong. The enterprise content management and collaboration platform software is getting a number of updates over the coming year, to benefit the more than 200,000 companies, 50,000 partners and one million developers working with it today.
The SharePoint Mobile app is aimed at helping people get quick access to four types of information from SharePoint: news from across the company, the sites that people use the most, quick links to important pages and a list of their coworkers. It will work both with SharePoint Online and some on-premises versions of SharePoint Server.
Using information from the machine learning-powered Microsoft Graph, the mobile app will be able to pick out who people work with the most and what SharePoint sites they use most frequently, and make those more readily available than less-used information. That same capability will also power functionality inside the app that shows users files relevant to them.
Microsoft said Android and Windows versions of the SharePoint Mobile app will be coming later this year.
OneDrive is also getting some updates enhanced by machine learning. This quarter, OneDrive mobile app users will be able to access their SharePoint Online document libraries, and get suggestions of useful documents shared with them both through OneDrive and SharePoint.
Those document suggestions are similar to what Microsoft has been doing with its Delve product, which also uses the Microsoft Graph to show users what other people in their organization are working on.
SharePoint's Web incarnation is also getting several major updates including a redesigned sites layout and a new Home page that gives users an at-a-glance look at the team sites they're a part of along with quick updates from those sites.
Companies that are concerned about securing their internal file sharing will also get access to new tools that both help them manage how their employees share data and provide more robust security capabilities that lock down SharePoint in its entirety.
This quarter, Microsoft will release dynamic conditional access policies that let administrators define levels of access based on a person's identity, what app or device they're using and their network location. That means an administrator could prevent users from accessing high-security files stored in SharePoint from a mobile device that the company doesn't control.
Later this year, customers will be able bring their own encryption keys to lock down data stored in SharePoint.
Finally, SharePoint developers will get a new set of tools to help them build on top of the service. This summer, Microsoft is going to release a new SharePoint Framework that lets developers use modern JavaScript and Web tempting frameworks across SharePoint in the cloud and on premises.
Anything that developers build with the Framework will by default integrate with SharePoint Mobile so that users can get access to it on the go. That only scratches the surface of the developer announcements, which also include new APIs and support for Webhooks.
That's only a small segment of what Microsoft has in store for the collaboration platform. There are plenty of more updates in the pipeline for 2016, including integration between Office 365 Groups and SharePoint sites and connections between SharePoint and Microsoft's new PowerApps and Flow citizen development tools.
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All the things that make Microsoft Surface devices attractive to consumers — lightweight design, ability to use both touch and keyboard, the ease and familiarity of Windows — make them appealing to enterprise users as well. But devices used in the workplace must also meet enterprise requirements for internal network security, industry-specific software functionality, and manageability across a large and often widely distributed workforce. Today, Microsoft announced a new Surface Enterprise Initiative, kicking off with an expanded partnership with Dell to deliver premium Windows 10 devices and word-class services and support to enterprise customers.
Under the expanded partnership, Dell will sell Surface Pro 3 devices and accessories and offer service and support through its commercial sales organization, making it easier for businesses to deploy Surface devices as part of their enterprisewide hardware mix. Microsoft also plans to leverage our longstanding relationships with HP, Accenture and Avanade to enable more customers to enjoy the benefits of Windows 10.
Many enterprise customers have already deployed Surface across a wide range of industries including healthcare, banks and financial services, manufacturing and more. In the airline industry, Austrian Airlines and Lufthansa are adopting Surface devices to help eliminate the use of paper in cockpit procedures — particularly during takeoff and landing, when laptops cannot be used. Automotive sales company Infiniti retail group UK has streamlined the car-buying experience by using Surface devices for every step of the process, replacing everything from brochures to the sales desk and creating a unique retail experience.
The Surface Enterprise Initiative will make it easier for even more companies to ensure individual employees have exactly the right devices for the job. Retail sales associates can use Surface to suggest related purchases, order additional stock and close sales right on the showroom floor. Manufacturing plant managers can respond to email, document equipment inspections and update production forecasts from a single device. And financial executives can monitor client accounts and prepare audit reports, secure in the knowledge that their devices and apps comply with industry regulations.
