Riverbank It management

Web conferencing is set to become a mainstream business tool, and soon. There are a lot of pressures driving us towards it:
• rising fuel costs
• volcanic ash reducing the opportunity and desire to travel (“will I get back?”)
• climate change pressures encouraging us to reduce travel • economic pressures to keep costs down
• the feeling that whatever changes the new government makes will not be good news

These pressures mean that change could come much faster than we anticipate. If you want to be in a position of leadership with your customers you need to be able to offer them virtual meetings over the web. The technology is all there, but there is a bewildering array of options and prices.

You can start simply and cheaply. All you need is a computer connected to the Internet, a headset and optionally a webcam. You can of course spend as much as you like, and £20,000 would buy you a very nice video conferencing suite.

Many businesses are seriously under-powered when it comes to home broadband. Our experience in the small business market is that many firms expect their staff to work from home and just assume that any cheap broadband connection is fine. Staff then have a poor experience working remotely on their office network and everyone is unhappy.

What these businesses forget is that working from home often means that a lot of data is going upstream from home to office. Staff are quite naturally expected to be productive. So the information they produce has to go from home to the office network  - when a user saves a document for example. 

This is the reverse of the way that ADSL broadband was designed, which was on the basis of much more information coming downstream from web sites (like a video) than going back upstream (like "next page please"). With ADSL it doesn't matter how fast the promised and much-hyped downstream  performance is; almost every ADSL connection has a very dreary upload speed. Because of this it's vital to squeeze every bit of performance you can from your home ADSL line.

To get that performance you need high quality broadband. Cheap broadband means crowded broadband which means poor performance. You are in the queue with all your neighbours and every school student chatting to their friends online. The result for someone working from home is that they wait for an age while their computer tries to save a document. It is not a good use of expensive employee time.

The January snow meant that many people were working from home. Some fared better than others, and the calls to our help desk revealed where employers and employees were struggling. Here are Riverbank’s top tips for keeping your business running when the unexpected happens.

1.    Top of the list by far is preparation. Have a plan and rehearse it. Then you know how you will do it. Waiting until you are cut off by a foot of snow is not a good way to discover the flaw in your plan.
2.    In at number 2 is to make sure you have good instructions. If working from home is something you won’t be doing very often you will need written instructions. Don’t wait until you can’t log on to ask for instructions.
3.    Third on the list is that you need an understanding of the technology. Working from home means that you will probably have a relatively slow link to the office network and one that could get disconnected. You need to work accordingly; keeping a file open for hours while you work on it without saving your changes is a recipe for disaster.
4.    Coming in at numbers four and five is capacity. If you usually have two or three people working remotely how will your broadband line perform when 20 or 30 people are trying to work remotely?

 

In this prolonged period of icy weather are you still slipping and sliding to work? Many Riverbank clients are working comfortably at home. Thanks to good remote access to their office networks they can remain productive and safe.

If you are thinking that maybe you should do better in enabling your people to work anywhere make a new year's resolution to speak to Riverbank about it. We can tell you more about the cost-effective options available and how other firms are getting the benefits of being able to work flexibly.

And remember, a white Christmas is what we've all been dreaming of. We just don't want to commute to work in it.

 

E-mail keeps piling into your business, and your e-mail database keeps on growing. There is a hidden cost to this, which only reveals itself when the database hits its limit or your disk is full. At that point you wish you had been managing your e-mail all along. You realise that even a large server system needs management, and that as new data comes into your organisation so old data must move out of it. E-mail archiving is the solution.

 

 

I recently overheard someone lamenting the demands of e-mail, that people now expected an immediate reply. A few years ago, they said, a reply next day was what was expected. We have become a "now, now, now" society.

One reason for this feeling is that e-mail can now follow you around on your mobile phone, whether it's a BlackBerry, an iPhone or a Windows phone. That leads to another strongly expressed view from some people that they don't want to be hounded by their e-mail - "it's bad enough in the office" is their view.

We are pleased to announce that Riverbank has been appointed as the Oxfordshire O2 technology partner.

We have chosen to work with O2 because they have shown a genuine interest in the small and medium business sector. This means that we will be able to deliver better products and better support to our customers.

Firms that need between ten and 50 mobile connections can have mobile phones (with next day replacement), USB modems for mobile data connections, and their landlines all with one supplier. Not only does this reduce administration effort it also reduces costs, because all calls within the O2 network are free.

A survey of 2,000 adults by Citrix GotoMyPC reveals that UK commuters waste 4.6 million hours every day. Not surprisingly nearly two-thirds of the people interviewed want to reduce the time they spend commuting, mainly by working from home or by using technology to enable flexible and remote working.

And the most common reason why they don't do this already? 46% blamed their boss, who won't let them work from home or work flexible hours.

The easy bit is the technology - nearly 70% of Riverbank clients have enabled flexible working. The difficult part is the attitude of employers who think "if I can't see you how do I know you are working?". They have yet to understand that you have to trust your employees. Do they really employ people who aren't trustworthy and committed? If so, why?

Is your business prepared? Winter is just around the corner and influenza (swine or otherwise) still looms. You need to know that your business can continue if staff can't get into the office. And you know that it's no good waiting until there is a foot of snow on the ground before you take action.

If you don't have secure remote access to your network it's time to look at a SonicWALL SSL-VPN device; over 40 Riverbank clients use one.

If you do have remote access, are you sure you have sufficient licences to cover all your needs? The good folks at SonicWALL are currently offering a discount on additional licences purchased before the end of December.

Do you have a different charger for each mobile device you own? One for the phone, one for the iPod, one for the camera, and so on. The lack of standardisation is very tiresome. 

Powermat could be about to change that. It's a new product that charges portable devices by induction. Just lay your BlackBerry (or other mobile device) on the mat and it will recharge.

But don't get too excited just yet. The lack of standards means that you have to buy a special Powermat back for your device, and that will limit its appeal. But at least it's a start.