A recent article about game-changing products got me thinking: What qualifies as a game changer in the tech world? Sure, there are universal game changers that are obvious. It's hard to argue that the first cell phone and the first PC made the world a different place in their wake. On the other hand, if you believe the marketing hype machine, there are "game changing" products released every few weeks. How is that possible? But really, I think that might be true in some sense. Because ultimately what is a game changer for me depends a lot on what my game is.
The last few months we've been doing a lot of consulting with our customers around Office 365 products. More precisely, in many cases we have been consulting them about improving their business processes while making use of Office 365 cloud technologies. For many of these organizations, the game is changing because of these technologies, and you can tell by their amazed reactions to some of the things we're showing them.
Some of the change is due to the things that are possible with Office 365 and cloud technology to be sure. But it's also true that Office 365 is a catalyst for re-examining long-standing business processes and figuring out ways to make them better. For some of our clients, Office 365 Groups are streamlining the way their teams are communicating, and an associated SharePoint Team Site is helping them organize and share files instead of emailing them around and dealing with attachments, and out-of-date versions. For another client, collecting notes, images, and documents into a OneNote notebook and collaborating on those notebooks using SharePoint, is saving them multiple man-hours of copying, distributing, and managing a (formerly) paper-intensive case-resolution process.
What's game-changing about this for these organizations boils down to three things:
- They have a platform that's designed to collaborate, not just to store information.
- They can make use of these platforms without any investment in infrastructure like new servers or data center hosting fees.
- They are either already paying for these features, or if not, they can add them to their existing Office 365 subscription for a relatively low marginal cost.
This is a further extension of Castema's mission statement from 14 years ago when I started the company: "To bring to smaller businesses the benefits of technology previously only available to large enterprises." I think this is one of the reasons we have so extensively embraced Office 365. It's not that platforms like SharePoint weren't around before Office 365, they were. But few companies other than large enterprises made use of SharePoint back then, because it required a significant investment in infrastructure and in consulting hours to get it configured the way you wanted to use it.
It's a great feeling when we introduce something new to our customers, and not only do they see the value, but they actively work to change the way they do things, to take advantage of the new capabilities. When someone you've worked with thanks you for making their job better, that's some good job satisfaction right there.
If your game needs changing, talk to us about how our Managed IT Services and Cloud Services can do just that.