Snap - Technology is a Dancer

Are you dancing to the tune of Microsoft ? Office365, SharePoint and Lync, this fantastic trio are like Best, Charlton and Law, turning a good team in to a great team. It has been some time, since something has come along and presented businesses with an opportunity to improve themselves on so many fronts:

1. Efficiency, 2. Productivity, 3. Quality, 4. Service models 5. Revenue

In a three part series, starting with MS Lync, I am having a go at talking about how you might think about fitting these players in to your team and beginning that journey to your first win.

Snap - Technology is a Dancer

Combining Office365, SharePoint and Lync is a truly powerful mix but how can you leverage these three items to become truly productive business tools?

I am Lyncing it baby…

This short snippet discusses the possibilities of MS Lync in this trio of applications from Microsoft.

Well you may have heard how Microsoft did it? They ate their own dog food and avoided building a 6th building at Reading TVP and now have an occupancy rate of c.60% across the remaining buildings. And generate revenue from property assets. Is it true who knows or cares but it’s a great place for a story to start!

Can Lync really reduce your travel expenditure? And as a double whammy claw back those lost hours for yourself or team out on the road or on a train to do something more productive with the time?

Let’s take a simple example of you are travelling to a regional office for a meeting, it takes 2hrs there and 2hrs back, for a 2hr meeting. That’s pretty much the whole day written off with 4hrs stuck behind a wheel, or on a train where reading e-mails is about the only thing you might be able to do.

Imagine having those 4hrs back in your working day. How pleased would your boss be?

Imagine how pleased the Finance Director would become as your drive down the travel costs!

You can see it now, at last you and the FD are kind of friends? Imagine, no more queries about your mileage claim. You can just see it, the FD, “high fives” you in corridor because of all the savings you keep making on your travel budget. I, mean who doesn’t want to be best friends with finance.

Do the maths, you save 4hrs of time, could you may be fit in another 1 or 2 of those precious meetings in using Lync? Or get that proposal out or finish the presentation ahead of schedule.

Watch your popularity grow with your bosses and become the hate figure of colleagues, as you are regularly singled out for such great successes.

Think about how many meetings you are attending, where your physical presence wasn’t really necessary but the teleconference doesn’t cut the mustard either? What do you do?

Do you make that make that 4hr round trip or preserve with the teleconference? If only there was another way I hear you say!

Well, I say “could a MS Lync video conference be the answer”. If you have used Skype, then Lync is like Skype on steroids. Because not only can you use it to instant message, it can also be used to make video and audio calls and allow you to share PowerPoint presentations, work together on a proposal, even share your desktop when you stuck on how to do something, like add a printer.

It is pretty amazing what it can do!

Imagine, no more rolling your eyes in unison with others on teleconference, as Nigel the statistician, begins to read verbatim the report you all have in front of you, that for the last month the system was up for 99.9% of time. Nigel will share with you that dynamic presentation.

The downside of course, with video conferencing, is you need to brush your hair when you work from home and make sure there is nothing embarrassing behind you, like a Giraffe “How tall am I?” chart, which perfectly aligns to your seated position in the former nursery turned home office!

Let’s move it on, how else could you or your business turn an application in to a business application that drives value?

Think about, if you are in sales or relationship management, and your customers don’t mind having a Lync conference for that SLA meeting, that could be 4 virtual meetings a day with that all important face to face, body language meeting which is so much more personal than “Dave has joined the meeting”, oh hang on, “Dave has left the meeting” routine.

And the best part is the counterparty doesn’t need Lync – if you send an Outlook Lync meeting, the person on the other end simply clicks on the “url” in the invitation and it opens up Lync conference (audio and or video) in a browser. Just remember a webcam is needed.

So there is no real reason, once you have MS Lync why you and your teams need to spend some much time travelling, is there?

Oh wait, I have just perfect excuse not to use this technology thing – I don’t have a laptop, just an iPad and smart phone.

Well, unfortunately Sir, that isn’t an excuse any more, the Lync app is waiting for you to down load it and use the iPad for more than watching Netflix.

Next time on Technology is a Dancer…

How to woo the technophobe in your life with a little bit of Office365