By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email
Sure, the economy seems to be picking up a bit but 2013 would still be a rotten year to get fired by your boss (or your customers).
To help you keep your job (or make more money), following is a short, 5-point checklist of what you need to be looking at in the area of "office communications technology".
Please run through this checklist as soon as you can because "unified communications" is getting cheaper and sticking with outdated technology is getting more expensive.
1. Connect Your Offices Better - The same connections that connect your computers together in your office are now inexpensively available to connect your offices together in a secure environment.
Ethernet & MPLS are two technologies that allow any business owner to use to connect the local area network (LAN) of each separate office over a single wide area network (WAN) to eliminate the perceived communications barrier of distance.
2. Bond Better Bandwidth - If the contracts for the bandwidth you're using to connect your offices together or to connect to the internet are more than twelve months old then you're either paying too much or you're missing out on needed diversity.
Most MPLS WANs that have been around for a while are creeping along at T-1 speeds of 1.54 megs at very high prices. If you're got a T-1 based MPLS, make sure you're getting the best price and check out how cheaply you can "bond" more and better bandwidth to or around your current WAN connections.
What constitutes "better"? Cheaper and faster. While an MPLS network is still viewed by many as the most secure way to communicate critical data between locations, not all of your business traffic needs to traverse over a gold-plated WAN. Take all your business "junk" data traffic off your MPLS and route it over low-cost data connections like cable, DSL or satellite using either equipment or software that shapes and prioritizes your business data traffic.
3. Unify Your Phone System in the Cloud - Seriously, why is your phone system still in your broom closet, server room or basement? While a reasonable argument can still be made that owning a phone system might be cheaper in the long run than "renting" one via many current "hosted VoIP" or "unified communications" business phone system solutions, even businesses that own their own phone systems are moving them to "the cloud".
If you're a business owner with multiple locations you already know how important it is to have your multiple locations all function as one. Just as you can connect your multiple local area network computers over a single wide area network you can now connect the desk and mobile phones of all your offices and remote employees over a single phone system.
If you own more than one phone system or callers to your main phone number can't be routed to any employee or any office then 2013 should be the year that you change that. The technology to accomplish this has been real world tested for over a decade and it's finally affordable.
4. Become Indestructible - How many single points of failure do you have engineered into your multi-location business critical voice and date systems? What happens if your basement floods? What happens if your main telecom carrier goes down? What happens if your employees can not physically be present in one or more of your offices for a week?
If you've already implemented the first three points on this list then you're already half-prepared to become an indestructible, fully-redundant, self-healing business. To become a fully indestructible business simply go through your wide area network diagram and start "breaking connections" and blowing up servers.
If one communication path is blocked, where's the re-route? If one application or data set is destroyed, where is the backup and how quickly is it moved from secondary to primary? You'll soon see that having multiple network service connections from multiple vendors that can also provide "managed services" like remote data backup and remote hosted applications can easily make you completely indestructible without your having to buy more in-house equipment or software.
5. Eliminate all Desk Chairs - By completing the first four items on this list you'll have prepared all your non-human business assets for increased profitability. To properly prepare your employees to take advantage of your office communication technology upgrades, eliminate all desk chairs.
Think about it. Can your employees shake hands with new prospects or current customers while sitting at their desk? Why are they sitting at their desks anyway? Probably because there's a chair there.
If your best employees insist that there are profit increasing activities that they can only engage in while parked at their desk, make a list of all those activities so you can find, migrate or create an office software application that can allow that activity to be completed using a smartphone or tablet computer while your best employees are visiting with customers or prospects or traveling between costumers and prospects.
Who Can Help You With These Checklist Items? Call Us!
Office communications technology is blurring the lines between phones, computers and "the cloud". It's also getting cheaper and more complicated every day.
To help you decide whether the business communication technology advances of 2012 mandate that you spend or move money around differently in 2013 talk to a business communication technology expert. Click here to find one near you.
Keywords: office communication technology, application, redundant, self-healing, business phone system, cloud, hosted voip, unified communications, MPLS, wan, cable, dsl, satellite, t-1, bandwidth, ethernet, lan, local area network, wide area network, checklist. Image: iStock
Comments