Category: Google for Work

Do you really want a server?

Peter Holloway

SERVER

The received wisdom for years, for the small business was: if you want to be a proper business, buy a server. Does that advice still hold true? The question really isn’t so much, about buying a server as about the services on offer. After all, a server is only there to serve up services that you, as a business need.

Way back, when, what you needed of a server was local file storage for all those Word documents, email, accounts and some line of business application that had to be installed on a ‘proper’ server. The wisdom of buying a server was that this was the only way to access the tools that you needed as a business.

The question today is, has that wisdom changed? The answer lies in the dramatic change in the business IT landscape. The internet has radically changed how business services can be offered. Today you can buy a server, install an email server, such as Exchange Server and run your business email from your own premises, or you can purchase the exact same software as a service through Microsoft’s Office 365 offering. Both do the same job, but with different pros and cons.

If you run your own server you are responsible for the hardware purchase, the licensing, the maintenance of both hardware and software, backup of everything that resides on the server. You probably aren’t an expert in any of this. If you license Office 365 or Google for Work or some other cloud hosted email service you pay monthly and don’t have the upfront hardware costs. You don’t have to think about backup or disaster recovery, you don’t have to maintain hardware or upgrade software – all this is done by the providers with more resources and expertise than you ever will have locally.

The million dollar question then is: can all my services be offered through the cloud? Think through the various services that are done locally:

  • Word processing
  • Accounts
  • Email
  • Line of business application

Can all of these be handled well outside of your office? Is your connectivity up to the job?

We are still in a period of rapid change and of transition. More business people are running at least part of that business through their smart phone or a tablet, on the move, at home, in the office. As the services become more and more sophisticated and delivered more and more efficiently through the cloud the need for a real, physical server in your own office will decrease but we do advice to get atleast a Cheap VPS for you office.

If you are a start up, or don’t yet have a server, my advice is: aim for the cloud, even if you have to make some adjustments to how you do business. The days of the monolithic server solution are numbered. Be at the leading edge and leverage cloud based services. They allow you, your business and your workers to be more agile and more secure.

If you already have invested in a local server solution. Don’t throw it away, but use the time until your next server refresh to investigate each service that you consume and see if there’s a cloud based alternative. Your line of business application is likely to be the most difficult to transition, but most providers are now offering cloud hosted alternatives, and will usually facilitate the move of your data to the new offering.

Remember, at the end of the day, it’s the services that matter, not the server.

Which direction to take?

Peter Holloway

WHICH DIRECTION

There’s never been more choice in how we do business, and there have never been more directions to take in order to make business IT work for you. So, how do you make those important decisions? For the startup it’s perhaps simpler, but for established businesses there come crunch points where an investment is needed or a step up is required to take the business to the next level. At these points it’s wise to re-evaluate all your options.

At it’s most basic the choice is between IT ecosystems or best business backpacks. For decades the choice was no choice, and therefore simple. Every business user had a PC with MS Windows and Office – it was essential. Today even the decision to have an Blockchain Centre office and a desk is up for grabs.

So, how do you make the decision on which ecosystem to choose. Today it’s not just about the choice of line of business software that you need to run. Often it’s about how portable the ecosystem is, how accessible it is out of the office, how easy it is to respond from a phone or a tablet or a web page. For many the choice will end up involving a mixture of both old style tech and new. But this will increasingly disappear as more and more line of business applications go online.

You can do most things online now, from email to invoicing. For the small business this puts the risk in terms of data security with an organisation that can do it properly, for the large business the economies of scale work in your favour, along with the ability to scale up or down quickly.

Whatever the size of your business – it’s worth asking the question: Which direction do you take?

For my business I took the decision several years ago to move away from the Microsoft platform to Google for Work. Initially I still used Outlook along with Google’s excellent sync tool, but within a very short space of time I found that Google’s interface offered more. I’ve never looked back. I confess that the link with Android was part of the charm. More business is done over a variety of devices these days. I use a Windows PC or a Chromebook or an Android device – and all of them have all my main business tools available.

I do have a preference, but both Google’s and Microsoft’s online products are now mature, stable and usable – which one will you use?

What if the box changes?

Peter Holloway

THE BOX

The conversation that sparked this was about Google Drive and how it syncs back to a desktop PC. I’ve always been impressed with Google’s sync tools, they have worked flawlessly for me for years, both with Outlook and Drive. What was new to me was that Google Drive, as with the Outlook sync tool for Google Mail uses tags, not folders. As a point of interest, I’ve long since stopped using Outlook, but the sync tool allowed me to make that transition naturally over a couple of months.

The problem that was the subject of the conversation was that a round trip of syncing a Google Drive folder from a PC to Drive and then downloading again to a freshly installed PC left some items not where the user expected them to be. The root cause appears to be the fact that although Drive presents files in folders, the folder names are in fact just tags, as you might expect from a company such as Google, the question is: why make the tags into pseudo folders? The answer to the question seems to be that folders are the box!

Let me just explain what I mean. We’re told to think outside the box, to be creative, to envisage things that aren’t normally done, or aren’t yet done. You would think that in the world of IT this would be the norm, not the exception. But, the IT business, just like every other business has vested interests in keeping you purchasing their products. The IBM PC was ground breaking, but would you have thought that nearly 37 years later we’d still be using the same file storage concept? The physical analogy of a file cabinet with folders is still at the heart of our PC file system. The PC has become so ubiquitous that it has actually begun to stifle innovation, it has become the box.

But what if the box changes? What if something else comes along to challenge that ubiquity? That happened with two things: the internet and the smartphone. The first made the stand alone PC a thing of the past and the second allowed new, innovative ways of working. Now we live in a world of tags or #hashtags. It seems absurd that we should only be able to classify a file as one thing rather than tagging it with all the relevant information.

As time has gone on I’ve learned with email to tag and search, not file. I’m beginning to do the same with files. The advent of internet storage and the myriad of devices that can connect to and work with those files means that the PC way of doing things is the anachronism, the constraint, the box.

As we consider our options for business IT we need not only to think outside the box, but we need to consider how the box is changing. IT doesn’t and shouldn’t stand still – it should grow and change, and as business users we should embrace this change – consumers certainly are! We need to be thinkers, watchers, embracers of change. One of the things that impresses me about Google as a company, and its products is that they will try new ideas, sometimes for a significant period of time, but, if it doesn’t work, or technology moves past it, they will drop the product and move on (anyone remember Google Reader?). This is how it should be.

As we move more and more to an online world, where our business and personal technology assets are separate from the tools used to access them we should embrace the changing box. Can you see a business user without a full Windows PC? Would you have thought that possible 10 years ago?

Getting back to the original conversation – it was the old fashioned file storage system on the PC that was the fly in the ointment. If all the files had been stored in the cloud and nowhere else the problem wouldn’t have arisen. If cloud tools had been used to access all the files, the problem wouldn’t have arisen. Often it’s the familiar that keeps us from moving to a better way of doing things. As business users it makes sense to ask ourselves if the box has changed from the one we are familiar with, and to ask how we will embrace the new.

 

If you’re interested to know more about Google for Work, take a look at my Google for Work page.

Google for Work – The Apps Show

Peter Holloway

Google for Work YouTube playlist

Whether you’re exploring the possibilities or have already started using Google for Work this playlist will help you to understand what Google for Work can do. One of the benefits of working in the cloud is the simple scalability, so it’s easy to get started with one or two users for a new business, while scaling effortlessly to the enterprise. Costs are low for the SME, and productivity is high, but a few lessons in what is possible always helps.

If you’re still not sure what Google for Work is, or how it might be a better solution for your business then take a look at some testimonials.

Getting into the Cloud

Peter Holloway

Getting into the Cloud

Do you remember when the Blackberry phone arrived? A phone that did email! It had a keyboard too, and, for the first time allowed the busy executive to instantly reply to an email without having to unpack the big slow laptop that was lurking in the boot of the car. Suddenly email was accessible, any time, anywhere – it was a huge boon to large companies, but this boon was denied to the smaller businesses simply due to the costs and technology involved, the barriers to entry were insurmountable.

In 1999 I was involved in the Microsoft Exchange Server email roll out to the EMEA entities of a multi national corporation. This was cutting edge stuff! For each business unit in every country there had to be a minimum of four servers to allow for Blackberry use. Even for large corporations this was a significant outlay in terms of up front costs and ongoing licensing, and not one that could always be justified even at this level.

Fast forward to today’s world. The barriers to entry have been blown away by the mobile and internet revolution, and yet far too many SMEs are still using mytradingname@btinternet.com as their email address. Want another email account? Add mytradingname2@btinternet.com! It doesn’t look good and it doesn’t work for your business either.

Because of the proliferation of free email accounts and the lack of awareness among the SME sector there is a huge under takeup of modern business collaboration tools. And yet cloud computing has not only come of age, but it has also come to the rescue of the SME. As a small business the purchase and maintenance of significant server hardware and software was prohibitive, but now getting your own corporate email is a simple as signing up with one of the cloud providers and setting up your domain name to connect to their servers.

The surprising thing is that the smaller the business the cheaper it is to get going. A freelancer can have corporate style email for between £3 and £5 per month. For a small business just multiply this by the number of users – this is much more accessible and affordable than setting up a low end Microsoft server in your broom cupboard! Instantly your business can share calendars, files, contacts across multiple devices, all for a small monthly fee.

What is lacking at this end of the market is simply a little bit of advice on how to go about setting it all up, and a knowledge of the benefits to the business. Which provider you choose may depend on what existing services you have and use. These range from a simple hosted Exchange product available from many sources. This provides corporate style email services provided using Microsoft’s email server software – this is what Outlook was primarily designed as a client for. If you are hooked on Microsoft you can sign up for a version of Office 365 which at base level provides email and online versions of its Office products. Pay more per month and get the full products for your desktop. If you’re not tied to Microsoft consider this Best SEO Company and Google Apps for Business – there’s the same low entry point and a similar range of features but designed to work better with the Chrome browser and Android tablets and phones. For a lower TCO you can even purchase Chromebooks or Surface tablets rather than full PCs for mainstream use by staff.

What does the SEO company London need to compete with the corporates? It needs access to business class collaboration and communication tools for all of their members of staff. It needs to be able to rely on these tools to be available 24/7, to add and remove users with ease, and most of all it needs to be able to do all of this without having to install and maintain costly hardware and software. Businesses must become more and more flexible to adapt to the modern working environment, and cloud collaboration and communications services allow the SME to do what they do best – adapt and grow while the larger corporates are still signing their approval forms.

If your business is at the small end of the SME sector then this is even more relevant as cloud services give you instant access to a wealth of high end resources that you just can’t afford otherwise. When the internet began to impinge on the business world one of the axioms was that ‘no-one knows how big you are on the web’ – this idea was founded on the growth of web sites as the shop window for your business. Nowadays the same is true in a much broader sense – there’s never been a better time to start or grow a small business or to take advantage of the incredible tools for communicating with customers, clients and business partners. With a few simple steps you can present your business as a modern collaborative organisation, no matter how small your business is.