Good eh?

• 55% used instant messaging
• 63% held conference calls
• 24% held online meetings
•  3000 hours of travel time was saved
• 25,000 tonnes of CO2 was saved
• 88% said they were as productive or more productive
• 79% want to mix home and office work more

Ironically they then went to work the following day as normal. The economic, social and environmental benefits of travel reduction policies all backed up by easy to use technologies cannot be under estimated.

When we think of the word data centre you likely think about a high cost, secure and safe environment with rows of servers whirring away. However we are discovering that some IT support companies in Leicestershire are charging high costs for environments I wouldn’t keep my itunes library in let alone precious company data.

So these are some of the questions you should be asking your IT provider and why:

1. How fast will my system be if it’s sat in their datacentre / what performance SLA’s are in place?

2. What uptime SLA’s are in place?

3. Should the worst happen to the data centre, how fast do they guarantee for getting my system fully/partially up and running?

4. Are my SLA’s financially backed?

5. If I delete something by accident, how far back can I go to have it recovered? How fast will it be recovered?

6. What scope does the data centre have for my business to grow?

7. Are there any restrictions to what systems we can install within the Data Centre / on our hosted desktop?

8. What guarantees do you give with regard to moving my system / data away from the Data Centre?

Microsoft, Google and Amazon spend millions of pounds to ensure that your data is kept in a safe, secure environment that provides incredible levels of disaster recovery. They are often cheaper than local IT companies services. So why risk your data to a small office in the middle of Leicester?

We have loads of new features coming out this year and we’re pleased to announce the latest facilities:

 1 – Line Monitoring You can now see if someone is available on your handset. By using the additional attendant console of spare keys on the 5 series phones you can see if the user is busy or on DND.

Even better this new feature is included for all Premium subscriptions.

2 – Reporting  You can now have basic call reporting on the system. The reports include:

• Calls answered
• Missed calls
• Time to answer
• Call volume by day/ week and inbound/outbound

Reports can be printed or saved as pdf files.

This is just the start of this project and we hope to add further contact centre functionality in the future. What reports would you like?

3 – Call Reminder This is a really neat feature that we don’t think anyone else provides. Want to remember a special date of someone in your call address book? Perhaps a birthday, anniversary or for clients running garages the date of the clients MOT?

Just select the category in the customer event diary and the phone system will remind you to call them

 4 – Shared Voicemail Boxes Another unique feature we think – You can now create and forward calls to a shared voicemail box – a great feature for teams.

Highly resilient – Clients want a system that simply won’t fail due it’s architecture.

Easy to use – You shouldn’t need a manual the size of war and peace to make and receive a phone call

Great Value for money – Feature rich and pricing that beats our competitors hands down

Control – A system that we can develop rather than a remote third party so that when our clients think of a feature we can, if it’s worth while, add it.

Integration to applications – The worlds of data and voice are now inseparable so we wanted a system that has a open API so that we can integrate into other great applications.

Now we have such a system and we have called it Connect. We will be adding content to the website to give you all the information you require as soon as we can. In the meantime if you’re looking for a new phone system speak to us first.

Two articles of note I would like to share with you:

Gartners view of how work is changing HERE

The way we interact and communicate with each other is fundamentally changing. Think about how friends and colloquies are now defined. Thanks to social media we’re meeting and collaborating with people we would never have met before. This has turned into shifts in the way the company works, what it offers and essentially how it needs to grow. Unitycomm is developing its strategy so we are focused on exceptional service to clients. Because we don’t have all the skills or the resource to cover all aspects of what we do then bringing in like minded companies and being the aggregator for the total service makes sense. The way we work enables that while providing the protection and single point of presence the client demands.

Workshifting.com says the 9 to 5 is dead HERE

Citrix CEO, Mark Templeton has said work is turning into “whatever, whenever, wherever.” I tend to agree. This poses massive implications for businesses. Older workers may resist the perceived interference between work time and life time. They will have a point if the business doesn’t offer a Quid pro quo and just expect the usual 9-5 and THEN more. So is your HR, IT and Management talking to each other about how work is changing and how the business can not only implement change but also benefit from the change?

Not only is cloud more cost effective it comes with lots of other benefits. For many businesses this is what is called a “no brainer”

So lets ask “What is the Cloud?” Basically if you have ever had a yahoo, gmail or microsoft email accountyou have already used “cloud” before. It isn’t new, in fact its almost as old as the internet itself. The difference is that a number of factors have now made it a practical solution for businesses.

The cloud is simply being provided with services such as email, backup and everyday applications like Sage, CRM and Office tools without the need of on site hardware such as servers. The hardware should be kept in state of the art multi million pound data centres. This removes a great deal of complexity and gives the issue of maintenance, patches and security to another provider. This is why our IT support services are so cost effective – we have Microsoft doing much of the work.

This means that a business who is looking to upgrade Small Business Server no longer need to pay for an expensive server and licenses and simply pay to migrate to the cloud and then the cloud subscriptions. Our next blog post will outline some cost comparisons.

As mentioned in previous blogs some IT companies talk about the “cloud” but the services they offer are often poor value for money (for you) or on infrastructure that leaves a lot to be desired. This is why we only offer cloud solutions from the biggest players like a Microsoft Cloud Solution or Google Apps for Business.

In some cases the cloud cannot host all the applications you need. This will change but in the meantime our total solution packages ensure you can take advantage of what the cloud with can do for your business while at the same time ensuring that any bespoke elements remain on the appropriate server and is maintained.

RIM has launched its Business Cloud Services for Blackberry. This is a free service that delivers email and other RIM services like BBM and basic device management.

With the free service you don’t get all the features normally associated with BES however it is easy to set up and allows users to work with Office 365.

You can read the technical specifications here