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Productivity apps: keep business hot during summer slowdown

Tech Trends · Aug 2, 2019

Suns out, team’s out of office

Summer is here. Along with the warm weather, sunburns and lovely, lovely mosquitos come the usual flurry of OOO messages popping up in your email that can slow things down during the summer heat. Hey, we all need vacations! They’re scientifically proven to make you more productive and happier in the long run. We already work so hard as it is, right? But before technology made mobile work possible, imagine all the countless vacations that were cut short by business emergencies. And maybe it’s not a vacation, but just a little time away from the office you need. In the summer, sometimes, it’s just nice to be able to work from home and enjoy the backyard and keep an eye on the kids while they toss water balloons at their friends, all while you’re taking care of business from a safe distance away from the splash zone.

So the question is, how can you make sure you or your workforce have the tools they need to strike that summer work/life balance and prevent the dreaded summer slowdown?

Here are three class-leading productivity tools that offer tremendous choice and freedom for collaboration and facilitate the efficient execution of business priorities anytime from anywhere with an internet connection. 

Microsoft Office 365

It almost feels unnecessary to give an introduction here since Microsoft Office and its cloud successor, Office 365 has become so ubiquitous. Microsoft, of course, has long been the reigning gold standard in office software for over a generation with Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel changing the business world with powerful word processing, email, presentations and spreadsheets abilities. Office 365, initially released in 2011, takes everything you know and love about their long-running applications and centralizes it into a cloud-based sharing platform. In 2017, O365 has since surpassed its predecessor line of products in terms of license sales as the demand for collaboration at a distance grows within the business community. 

With Office 365, you’ll get the all the power of your favourite Microsoft products all with the added ability to view, share, create, change, communicate and build with multiple collaborators in one place. Microsoft OneDrive keeps all your files - and the files of all your colleagues - in one, easy-to-access portal. Skype for Business allows easy teleconferencing, instant messages, and voice calls that can sync to your contacts. Applications are mobile and managed easily. Plus Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Planner make it easy to coordinate projects and share information within and across teams. Imagine you’re on vacation in, say, Tofino, but you know your company is launching a big project. You can stay in touch with no need to get you back on the next flight if things go sideways.

If you’re unsure about the technical aspects of making the switch from your current set-up, no worries! TELUS can deliver it for you, making the transition painless while benefiting from 24/7 support to keep your business running smoothly.

Google G Suite

It’s cliche, yet accurate, to say Google has been a game-changer in so many ways, but they can easily claim undeniable successes in transforming collaborative work applications and bringing them to the masses. One of the virtues of Google’s G Suite was the built-in familiarity for Microsoft users. They designed it with similar functionality to Microsoft Office’s core line of business products, (Docs is like Word, Sheets is like Excel, Slides is like PowerPoint, Gmail is like Outlook, etc.) but then make them all cloud-based, intuitively collaborative and put them all online for the low, low price of completely free. All you needed was a Gmail account. I mean, who can complain about free, right? Plus they added other innovations like not having to constantly press the save button. Instead it saved automatically, avoiding the catastrophic - yet all-too-familiar - loss of hours of work should your computer freeze, or power go out while working on a desktop.

Google launched G Suite tailored to businesses that want to scale Google’s easy, collaborative applications to the professional level. You get the same consumer-style applications with far greater cloud storage (anywhere from 1TB to unlimited) and increased security with Google Admin and Google Vault. Plus you can access thousands of third-party apps with the G Suite Marketplace, offering everything from fun quiz apps and GIF generators to Calendar and Sheets add-ons and everything in between to help give Google’s already flush array of applications a little extra oomph! And of course everything is mobile-friendly, meaning you can chip away on whatever it is you need to while sitting in the passenger seat of your car on a long road trip while blasting tunes. 

Cisco Webex

You’re far more likely to achieve success in business if you focus on one thing and do it very, very well. That’s the story of Webex. What started as an online video conferencing program in 1995, Cisco Webex has blossomed into the industry leader in teleconferencing with over 113 million meeting attendees per month. 

From the big things, like industry-leading security or the ability to host over 1000+ members in a single meeting, to the little things like AI supported background noise detection that will automatically scrub out the dog barking or snack packaging crinkling from the feed, Cisco Webex does business collaboration like no one else. Of course, Cisco Webex isn’t just for meetings, it’s just as useful for remote employee training or customer service calls. You can even host online events with up to 3000 attendees or webcast to over 40,000 viewers. 

75% of high-growth companies use video-enabled collaboration solutions as opposed to only 57% of low-growth companies. If you’re meeting someone for the first time, you don’t want to make a bad first impression with choppy video quality, garbled audio or dropped calls. Imagine being able to catch an earlier flight to your vacation destination by squeezing in that last meeting on your mobile device on airport WiFi without worrying about poor signal quality. It’s the perfect summer solution.

So no matter where this summer takes you and your team, make sure to enable your business to keep running in a seamless and flexible way using cloud collaboration while on Canada’s largest, fastest network with TELUS.

Learn more about Office 365Google G Suite  and Cisco Webex all delivered by TELUS, backed by our world-class management and extensive premium support. We’ll match you with the right solution for your business, helping you get the most from your technology while transitioning to the cloud and we’ll get your business up and running with our setup and email migration services, ensuring an effortless transition for employees.

Read more about the benefits of cloud collaboration or subscribe to our newsletter to get insights delivered straight to your inbox every month:

The new workplace: where collaboration is headed in 2019

VoIP,from A to Z and what it can do for you

Does your workplace fully optimize employee productivity?

A roadmap to adopting ‘unified’ communications & collaboration

Authored by:
Nicole Hylmar
Nicole Hylmar