Increasing Employee Productivity:
A major roadblock to off-hour and out-of-office productivity is that employees who are out of the office have limited access to their corporate email, calendars, and contact lists. Having up to the minute access to these systems is an essential part of conducting business. In order to establish an advanced mobile workforce your employees will need the following: a smartphone, a stable internet connection and the lynchpin: an advanced mobile email suite that can synchronize calendars, contacts, and emails in real time.
Employee productivity has been harmed by inadequate internet access, blocked by spotty and unreliable WiFi hotspots, unreliable internet at Hotels and Coffee shops, lack of broadband service, forcing employees to use dial-up internet services, and cumbersome VPN clients riddled with errors.
It is fortunate that with a smartphone, the internet connectivity issues are answered and resolved. In order to use a smartphone, wireless providers require a reliable 3G or 4G internet connection to be bundled. A stable internet connection is included with every smartphone sold. Two birds with one stone.
Furthermore, smartphones are the leading edge of today’s advanced technology. While technological progress has largely stagnated with desktop and laptop computers, the rate that smartphones are gaining capabilities parallels the exponential growth of desktop computing technology in 90s and 00s.
How do you increase your employee’s productivity? Start a companywide smartphone program. Employees who have access to their email are more productive. Email access allows them to better plan their day and actions: Employees can access their synchronized task list, and calendar; they can reschedule events on the fly from their phones. They have the ability to react rapidly, critical for maintaining your success. Employees can remain productive on call, and can respond to emails, schedule meetings, and reach out to clients even while away from the office.
Smartphones are now are easier to use than even the simplest desktop operating system, ending the steep learning curve normally associated with computers and providing a positive experience. Leveraging these technologies it is a natural progression of a long-term corporate information technology strategy.
The Smartphone Ecosystem:
A typical smartphone has more raw processing power than your computer had in the 2000-2002 timeframe. Advanced power-saving CPUs, capacitive touchscreen displays, and intuitive graphical user interfaces have also lowered the learning curve of operating smartphones. What would have been a cumbersome operation five years ago is literally two gestures and a flick of your finger away on a smartphone utilizing today’s technology.
The smartphone marketplace today is a thriving ecosystem of several major operating systems, each with their own suite of applications which can add to essential business productivity. Perhaps the most well-known, is the iPhone running the iOS operating system. Apple has designed the iPhone from the ground-up for ease of use, and has resulted in a device that virtually does not have a learning curve. The iPhone is largely responsible for helping shape the essential functions of modern smartphones.
Apple has smartly integrated the latest Microsoft server technologies in iOS to allow it to synchronize with Microsoft Exchange servers, the leading corporate email platform. Apple’s careful and methodical integration of Microsoft’s “ActiveSync” standard has resulted in a fully secured mobile workstation, compliant with corporate IT policies.
Google’s Android smartphone operating system is currently the only major competition that iOS has in the smartphone market. The Android ecosystem is larger, offering a large number of different phones, each with differing capabilities. The Android operating system is also open source, which allows for virtually every smartphone manufacturer to customize various aspects of the system, and place their own front-end customizations. The differing capabilities also apply to the various functions supported by ActiveSync. While virtually every Android smartphone will offer some sort of ActiveSync functionality, not all devices are fully supported – not every function will work on all Android devices. As such, if a corporation were to sponsor Android phones, it would be its responsibility to ensure that the devices they are planning to equip their employees with are capable of the functions that are required.
Windows Phone 7 is the new player on the scene, with an innovative operating system that gives the iPhone a run for the money in the ‘ease of use’ department. As it is also a tightly controlled operating system, and designed by Microsoft, it is fully compliant with each function that ActiveSync offers.
BlackBerry is another option for a smartphone user. BlackBerry tends to be the operating system of choice for companies and governments that require high security. The BlackBerry is designed from the ground up with a focus on security, and as such can be more difficult to learn how to use. BlackBerry is the only major smartphone platform that does not utilize ActiveSync.
Technology that Brings your Phone to the Cloud
ActiveSync is a Microsoft developed technology, originally designed to be used with Windows CE, and early Windows Mobile revisions, and was first implemented by Microsoft in the Exchange Server 2003 advanced email suite. ActiveSync is a ‘push’ based delivery system, capable of synchronizing a mobile phone contact list, calendar, and email in real-time. As new email arrives at the mailbox, ActiveSync actively ‘pushes’ the email to the device that is connected to the server.
ActiveSync is only available with Microsoft Exchange Server. Microsoft Exchange Server is the premier business-oriented enterprise email system, the most fully featured and widely supported corporate mail system on the planet today. Exchange was originally designed for in-house closed networks, but has expanded to being one of the most mature Cloud Computing offerings for businesses to select today. A businesses’ entire in-house email system can be outsourced with tremendous cost savings, and yet still improving on the accessibility and feature set.
The ActiveSync standard has been refined and updated numerous times, adding much necessary Enterprise functionality, and bringing security to a level which was previously only available with proprietary closed email solutions (such as RIM’s Blackberry phones and service offering). System administrators can remotely set phones to require passwords, require passwords to be changed on a regular basis, encrypt phone memory, and in the event the phone is lost, the phone can be remotely wiped clean of all company data, and restored to its original factory state.
The only major ‘competitor’ to ActiveSync is the Blackberry service offering by Research in Motion. RIM’s Blackberry service is especially tailored for businesses where security is the top concern, above all other considerations. Much of RIM’s business is subsidized by governmental use in the United States, with RIM’s software and security solution the choice of the US Department of Defense for remote employees who need email, contact, and calendar synchronization on-the-go. Those who are away from the office have virtually the same functionality as ActiveSync – they can synchronize their emails, calendars, and contact lists in real-time, and offers more robust security than ActiveSync can offer.
The drawbacks of RIM’s solution are cost, and loss of ease of functionality. RIM’s operating system lacks the same panache that iOS or Android platforms are able to offer. The phones offer far fewer applications, can be more difficult to use, with a steeper learning curve – but offer superior security and reliability as compared to ActiveSync-based solutions. RIM’s platform is also adopted to be used on multiple corporate email solutions – it is not limited to Microsoft Exchange.
By switching your business email systems to a Cloud-based Microsoft Exchange hosting provider, your company gains the capability to field an efficient mobile workforce.
The Bottom Line
Modern smartphone technology can create a 24/7/365 workforce at your company, increasing the company’s flexibility and productivity. A ‘connected company’ strategy emphasizing smartphone use for employees can be financed by leveraging the Cloud – by moving your company’s in-house email systems to The Cloud, you can recognize a cost savings numbering hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly – which can pay for a significant chunk of the expenses required to adopt a smartphone strategy.
It’s the 21st century, we’re stepping further and further into the future each day – and giving your employees a 24/7/365 capability to respond to immediate business needs helps maintain your competitive advantage; helping you to build a faster, more connected company with anytime access to the business intelligence that adds to the bottom line. In a fast moving, information based economy – instantaneous information is a requirement to stay relevant. Fortunately, adopting these technologies is cheaper than ever before, with more options than at any point in the past to equip your mobile workforce.
Copyright © Daniel J. Serri, All Rights Reserved. July 17, 2011
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