How to get the most value on mobile services for your SMB network: Tips and advice.
Ironically, many of the most important small business employees spend the least time inside the office. Small businesses need customers, and owners and managers must often hit the streets to find, persuade, sell, and service those customers.
Large companies have staff to handle the back end details for mobile workers, but small companies must do the same job with fewer support people and less technical training. Finding vendors who have taken lessons learned with their enterprise customers and modified their products to work well for small customers remains far too rare an occurrence.
Cell Phones
Just about everybody has one, yet most companies mismanage them. Deciding on an approach for cell phone management isn’t easy, but every small and medium company must commit to Managing Cell Phones .
Moving up from standard, dull talk-only cell phones to smart phones and PDAs like Palm, BlackBerry , and Pocket PC and their raft of imitators multiplies your back end requirements. Although TV commercials make tying your Palm display to your real-time inventory look like a snap and nearly free besides, the reality differs widely (and expensively).
One company mixed their online application service focused on sales people (tracking and managing sales leads with packages for a variety of vertical industries such as real estate, insurance, and automotive sales) with wireless PDAs of various kinds. They call it, and I agree, Better Tools for Mobile Users .
Mobile Calling Without Cell Phones
Another big trend for more flexible phoning is the emergence of WiFi phones, or those phones that connect over a data network rather than the cell phone network from the four major providers. While WiFi phones provided in-house flexibility since 2005, the combination of more WiFi hotspots and better WiFi phone service providers make it possible to make excellent quality WiFi phone calls from Starbucks. Any location that offers wireless access for laptops suddenly becomes your phone booth, if you have one of the new WiFi Phones Appearing recently.
Skype , the world’s most popular Voice over Internet Protocol (too often referred to by the ugly acronym VoIP), revolutionizes the intersection of communications and computing. If you’re in one of those coffee houses with free WiFi, and you have Skype on your laptop, you can annoy the other patrons with your Skype phone rather than your cell phone. The annoyance value remains the same, but the cost for the Skype service far undercuts cell phones. Read about Skype in PC-Powered Calls .
You can also make Skype calls from certain PDAs (check Skype.com for the latest list), so you don’t even need to carry a laptop. Carry your Grande Latte in one hand, your PDA in the other, and stick your Bluetooth headset on (and look as well as sound obnoxious).
Remote Data Protection
Even the largest companies struggle with keeping data on laptops and PDAs backed up properly, and they have technical staff to annoy you regularly. Small and medium business people have to learn to nag themselves about regular backups.
Now that just about everywhere a traveler goes with a laptop (hotels, coffee shops, other businesses) has broadband Internet access available, there’s no reason for forgetting to backup your data. There are many types of backup services, and I reported that Online Backups Win Converts . You’ve been officially nagged.
