Relax And Let Your Cloud Apps Manage Things While On Vacation
For the ‘always on, always connected’ society we find ourselves in, it’s hard to step away from updating our status on social media accounts (like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), looking up information on Google, or checking out email on smartphones from dawn to dusk. However, when you go on vacation, you need to unplug from it all for a while. Here are a couple simple ways we use cloud apps to look after things while we’re away:
Take Your RingCentral Business Phone On the Road
One of the advantages of being a RingCentral customer is that you can take your RingCentral Hosted PBX (or cloud based) business phone system with you wherever you go. Whether you’re based in Calgary, somewhere else in Canada or in the United States, you can take your business phone with you with you when you travel – saving your business money and helping you to stay connected. You can stay connected in one of three ways when you travel: via your IP desk phone, softphone, or smartphone/tablet. Here is a summary of the pros and cons of each option:
5 Ways to get to Inbox Zero with Gmail
We often get asked about best practices with email, especially if users are transitioning from Outlook to Gmail. The term “Inbox Zero” is largely attributed to Merlin Mann and his 5 components: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer & Do. The psychology of Inbox Zero and GTD (Getting Things Done) is important and best taught by productivity experts like Think Productive. Since we focus on the technology and not the psychology of inbox best practices, here are 5 ways to get to Inbox Zero using Gmail:
5 Ways to Share Contacts In Google Apps
Unfortunately, Google Apps doesn’t come with the contact sharing baked in as well as some users expect (especially if they are migrating from Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange). Directory users can be shared but external ones can’t unless you use the API. So for most small businesses what are your options? Here are 5 options for sharing external (contacts in your “My Contacts” group) with other users in your domain:
Life After Microsoft Outlook = Email in the Cloud?
A decade ago, the on-premise version of Microsoft Outlook was the longstanding benchmark email client for most businesses as the Windows PC dominated the marketplace . However, with the advent and massive growth of smartphone platforms (like iOS and Android), mobile email client use has surpassed desktop and even webmail clients. Since their iPhones and Galaxy S3s follow them everywhere they go, most users are often dealing with their email on a bus or a coffee shop just like they do in the office. As a result, being efficient with email and having access to it anywhere has never been more important. This is where cloud email comes in and is changing the IT landscape. These days, Google’s Gmail email app now serves almost half a billion users. Taking into account the popularity of Gmail, Microsoft is playing catch up with their rebranded entry into the cloud email market, Outlook.com (i.e. a replacement for Hotmail). Here are 5 reasons why Gmail makes life after Outlook seem pretty bright: