FinanceTechNews.com » road warriors

Case study: Web-hosted ‘workspace’

Valerie Helmbreck — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:28:30 +0000

We have a group of road warriors who rarely make it into the office.
When they needed to hand in reports to their manager or share a file, they had to send it through e-mail.
This setup often made it hard for the group to organize their work, and even harder for them to collaborate with each other.
I tried creating folders for them on a network server and giving them VPN access, but the connection was slow and there was always a problem.
I figured with all the Internet could do, maybe there was a Web-based solution that could help.
We used Microsoft Office for most of our documentation, so I did some research on sites that could host our Office files online.
I found out Microsoft has its own service that hosts Office files on the Web. And it was free.
I signed my road warriors up for Office Live Workspace, which allows them to work on documents, securely save them to their own “workspace,” and access them online from any computer anywhere.
They can also give other members of their group permission to read files or make changes.
It’s made their lives so much easier, and I was able to get rid of the costly, issue-prone VPN.
(Alex Borsh, IT manager, Polymeright, Inc., Fremont, CA)

Picking a hotel that’s connected

Valerie Helmbreck — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:03:53 +0000

It used to be, that just getting an Internet connection in your hotel room was a bonus. These days, however, it’s to be expected.

Still, road warriors in all organizations today are looking for better, easier ways to get their work done while traveling. And they’re finding that some hotels are better than others at keeping visitors wired.

That’s created a marketing opportunity, however, for one major U.S. chain.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc., which owns and operates Sheraton properties, is installingnew lounges in its properties with free Internet access, Webcams, televisions, daily newspapers and snacks.

To debut the new initiative, Starwood’s took over 34,000 square feet of New York’s Central Park on Sept. 15 to recreate the high-tech lounges it will introduce into the lobbies of Sheraton hotels and resorts.

The company’s also offering free Wi-Fi to the public through the rest of September in the park’s famous Sheep Meadow.

About 75% of Sheraton guests are business travelers and the new lounges are intended as a big draw for them.

The lounges — dubbed “The Link (at) Sheraton experienced with Microsoft” — are part of a $4 billion revitalization effort of the Sheraton brand that includes $1.3 billion in renovations to its guest rooms, bathrooms and lobbies.

The company expects to have “Links” in 300 lobbies, or about three-quarters of Sheraton brand hotels by the end of 2008.

Case study: Low-cost hosted PBX

Valerie Helmbreck — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:33:00 +0000

As our company grew, managing our telephone communications got harder and harder.

We knew about all the advantages of setting up a private branch exchange (PBX).

But we also knew about its main disadvantage: a huge investment in new infrastructure.

So we found a solution that let us access the type of phone system usually only huge companies can afford. We got a hosted PBX service.

Basically, it’s a big remote phone system that a service provider leases out to a bunch of companies.

Now when someone calls the company, the call gets answered at the service provider’s site and then gets routed to the right extension here.

We’re able to get all the advantages of using a PBX.

For example, adding extensions is quick and simple.

And call-forwarding is easy, which is great because we’ve got a lot of road warriors.

The best part: It costs just a fraction of what it would have if we’d set up our own PBX.

And since all the equipment is offsite, we don’t need to use any
of our resources and staff to do maintenance.

(Laura Hagler, co-owner, Exclusively RNs LLC, Colorado Springs, CO)

Rates for hosted e-mail services set to plummet

Valerie Helmbreck — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:00:33 +0000

When the time comes for your organization to take a hard look at how e-mail’s managed, there’s an alternative you might want to give a second look: Hosted e-mail services.

Today, these services have just a tiny fraction of the market, but analysts say that’s about to change.

Tech experts at Gartner predict the service-based offering will nab at least 20% of the e-mail business in the next four years.

Why? The price is expected to take a nose dive from an average of $10 per user per month to just $2 per user.

Also, most IT shops are less nervous about off-site e-mail storage these days. And with Software as a Service (SaaS) gaining popularity, many organizations are taking their operations — especially e-mail — to the Web, where they get rid of the storage/server headaches of in-house management.

Bonus: Remote users and road warriors have much more reliable and easy access to their mail when out of the office.