NetStandard Inc. | Kansas City Data Center Blog

John Leek, NetStandard’s Director of Operations, was recently asked why companies are choosing hosted applications.

Overview

Most small businesses (under 100 users) should not attempt to operate IT if they are not an IT-centric business.  Its not their competency and most of the time they spend significantly more money per employee  than the cost of hosted solutions.  In fact, on a pure business case basis there is no payback for doing solutions in-house vs. hosted/cloud based.

 The key benefits to this approach is:

1. Agility – add services or people rapidly with just a phone call or e-mail OR use our online portal.
2. Its our Business – NetStandard must deliver applications reliably and securely.  Our annual SAS70 audit guarantees that we do what we say we do.  See our SLA’s that provide credits if we fail to deliver.  We are celebrating 3 years of 100% application availability.
3. References – Call our references, they will talk about reliability, responsiveness and performance.
4. Breadth of Offerings – NetStandard offers 30 different integrated applications.  Integrated solutions maximize productivity.  Key applications provide e-mail, calendaring, scheduling, information management, process workflow, CRM, call management, dispatch, warehouse management, document imaging, executive information portal, general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, BlackBerry, e-mail archival, e-mail encryption, conference bridge, video conferencing, desktop sharing, instant messenger, secure access, 3^rdparty application hosting, retail management system and more.  We can consult with any business and assist them in how to leverage hosted applications to optimize their business.  We can establish a roadmap to address how these applications might be added as their company grows and scales.  

 These are my observations after meeting with customers in the Kansas City area.

1.  Most companies don’t see investing in core hardware and software as strategic or valuable to their business.  Many see it as a necessary evil.  Some actually leverage IT assets for extended periods of time (>4 years) in the hopes of lowering TCO and avoiding capital expenditures.
2. Most companies do not possess a core competency in IT (or accounting for that matter).  What they have is a core competency in their business.
3. Most companies cannot afford the diversity of talents to deliver solutions safely, reliably  and cost effectively.  They go months or years without protecting their resources by applying server and network patches.  Many have significant vulnerabilities and viruses and take risks with their environment, like not performing adequate back-ups.  Software patches and updates are a nuisance.  Many feel that they are held hostage by Microsoft and other vendors because of the need to pay to keep their environment modernized.
4. Many CFO’s complain that in-house IT staff are always asking for more servers and software.   With myappsanywhere, the company can greatly reduce their IT costs. 
5. With myappsanywhere, clients gain the ability to scale back costs in down economic times.  They cannot do that with solutions they purchase.  NOTE:  while they really don’t like to scale up, it can be argued that they should consider these costs as part of an employee’s “load”.  Its predictable and provides an easy path to stay on current technology.

To effectively utilize cloud-based services, like myappsanywhere, customers must have adequate bandwidth to provide a satisfactory user experience.  The happiest clients seem to have at least 100kbps of bandwidth per user.  So a T1 could support 15 users.

Your need is to go wherever your business takes you, and your information should be available to you where ever you are.

 Consider a few typical business situations:

• A Word document you need is on someone else’s laptop – and she’s on vacation.
• Each sales person’s PowerPoint presentation is slightly different because each person has customized some slides, resulting in inconsistent information being presented to your prospects.
• A project plan is updated by some, but not all, of the participants. Some leave comments in the document, but others don’t.

 Initially, this appears to be a technology issue. However, it’s actually an economic issue. How much money does your business waste because your staff is looking for the correct and up to date information?

• Knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information
• Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less
• 40% of corporate users reported that they cannot find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets

 Ideally, your business information should stay put. You and your staff can then access it from anywhere, and you would have the ability to search an information repository so you can easily find what you’re looking for. So, a true solution would solve each issue: location, access and retrieval.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) addresses these challenges by providing an integrated suite of server capabilities. These capabilities can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

 Keeping your information in a central location, and providing secure access no matter where you’re located, helps ensure your information is there when you need it. MOSS supports all intranet, extranet, and web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.

 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server seamlessly integrates with all Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics applications, which allows you to continue to work the way you’re used to, using familiar Microsoft applications.

 Here’s how Microsoft SharePoint can solve the situations described earlier:

• Word document on someone else’s laptop: SharePoint keeps the file in a single location, and its search capabilities help you find it the first time.
• Sales PowerPoint presentation: You can create a library that allows other users to pick specific slides for their own presentation. Also, you can receive notifications and updated versions when the slides have been modified.
• Project plan: SharePoint allows you to set up alerts to share new information to update everyone as your team collaborates.

 Capabilities

Collaboration: Help keep teams connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information users need to make more well-informed decisions within their jobs with a real time presence and communication.

• • Version Control
  • People and Group lists
  • Calendar and e-mail integration
  • Task coordination
• Portal: The portal components include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites. Standard portal templates (team site, document workspace, Blog, Wiki, meeting workspace)
• Search: Provides a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, and new functionalities along with improved scalability, manageability, and extensibility.
  • Search file shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Exchange Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases out of the box and easily extend search to third party sources and file types.
  • Index, search, and intelligently display information from line-of-business applications, relational databases, and other structured content using the Business Data Catalog.
  • Leverage “people search” capabilities to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests.
• Enterprise Content Management: Provides core document management functionality: major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the document library, folder, and individual document levels.
• Forms Driven Business Process: Streamline forms-driven business processes with easy-to-use, intelligent, XML-based electronic forms that integrate smoothly with existing systems. This security-enhanced, client/server platform provides rapid-solution creation and deployment, centralizes form management and maintenance, and helps to extend business processes to customers, partners, and suppliers.
• Business Intelligence: Provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control, and reuse business information in order to make better business decisions. The BI features of MOSS provide Web access to published Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets, reuse of critical line-of-business data, and easy development of Web-based BI dashboards that can incorporate rich, data-bound Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Web Parts, and published spreadsheets.

 Determining how you can benefit

A qualified technology services provider can help you determine if Microsoft SharePoint is right for you by analyzing your information needs and determining a solution that will work for you. For example, SharePoint may work best as software-only service. Or, you may benefit from the Microsoft SharePoint Server capabilities. Look for a provider that is certified in Microsoft SharePoint Server implementations.