Posts Tagged 'productivity'

Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM)

Published July 13, 2010 Mobile Document Worker , New Features Leave a Comment
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As the title indicates, teams are a great productivity multiplier. You’ve probably heard this at some point in your business career. We firmly believe in teams at Soonr and spent a lot of time updating the new version of Soonr to make it easier to work with teams. In fact, the “TEAM” tab has appeared as a top level item in the Soonr UI. Click on this tab and you will see pictures of all your team members. You’ll also see them whenever it makes sense as you interact with them. It’s nice to put a face to the people you interact with as it makes the interaction more personal.

The Team tab shows all your fellow co-workers or collaborators.

You can quickly see your relationship to a user by clicking on their picture. In the example below, I click on Peter to see what we are working on together.

Clicking on an individual shows the unique activities they have been working on with you.

There are tabs for the Projects that we have shared with each other. In the “Latest Activity” tab I can see the most recent things that Peter has done. Also since I am the administrator for my team, I have a “Computer” tab so that I can monitor the backup status of Peter’s computers. Never has it been easier to understand your interactions with the people you work with.

The team also takes front and center when you are working on a project together. When you go to into a Project and click on the “recipients” button to see who has received invitations to collaborate on this project, a hierarchical list of team members will appear.

Inside a Project clicking on the recipients shows the individuals who are working on this project with you.

The top of the list includes the project owner as well as the administrators. The rest of the team members are below. Once again the focus is on the team you are collaborating with.

Finally, when team members leave you a comment or change a project, the desktop agent will pop up a message that now includes a photo of the team member. Even when members are half a world apart, we want them to feel as part of the team working to achieve more!

The Four Levels of Backup

Published May 18, 2010 Mobile Document Worker , New Features Leave a Comment
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Every 15 seconds a harddrive is lost! Protect your data!

Everyone knows that they should be backing up their data. A computer disk fails every 15 seconds. It could be years before yours fail, but when it does happen it’s a catastrophic event as all your accumulated information can be lost. If you are running a business, it could spell the end of the business as 70% of small businesses do not survive a data loss event. (See footnote for details).

There are four (4) distinct levels of backup available today. Let’s take a quick look at each one.

1. Manual Backup:

This is when you copy your data files onto a CD/DVD or an external harddrive. You got that 1TB drive for $100 and plugged it into your machine at some interval (when you have time) and then copy over the folders to the disk. This method is very inexpensive and rather time consuming as you have to monitor the progress and plan a block of time to take care of it. Problems? People have the best intentions, but often their backup frequency drops over time. It’s just such a drag to do this by hand. Of course if you don’t make time, nothing is backed up. Also, this method doesn’t cover physical damage to the hardware or business (fire, flood, theft).

2. Interval Based Backup:

Ok, maybe you leave the usb drive plugged in and have a program which will backup your disk at a given interval. Let’s say you are aggressive and tell the program to backup every day at midnight. This sounds good, but you can still lose a days work in a hard drive failure. Oh, and what happens if there’s an error and the backup didn’t complete? And you still have the physical damage problem. Interval based backups are one step above manual backup, but if you’ve tried this, you’ll notice that they still require lots of manual intervention and verification.

Also understand the risks of having a solution that is not offsite. No on-site solution can protect your data from fire, theft, or other physical damage to your hardware. Pick an offsite solution that utilizes Real Time and Active Backup.

3. Real Time Backup:

Now we are moving into a really effective system. A Real Time Backup system utilizes a program that runs in the background and will detect changes to your files and automatically backup the file when it detects a change. The more advanced systems will only backup the parts of the file that change instead of the whole file. This is important if you are working on a large file and saving often. It’s sometimes impossible for a large file to be saved before it’s changed again. Real Time Backup is the best way to protect you from disaster. Soonr is based on Real Time Backup.

One minute or one year, Soonr backup keeps you protected

4. Active Backup:

You might have seen this mentioned in the Soonr website. An Active Backup system allows you to use your backed up files while they are stored. The idea is that if your hardware fails, you can still continue using your files for business. You don’t have to go through the time consuming process of getting a new computer up and running and then downloading your backup set before you can use the files. Whether it’s to edit a document, send a proposal, fax an invoice, or print a presentation, an Active Backup system leverages online web services to accomplish what you need. Any changes that are made on the web are then synchronized when you get a new machine online.

Of course Soonr utilizes the most advanced Real-Time and Active Backup system. When you are considering a data protection solution for your company, consider the advantages of being able to be productive at all times no matter where you are or what happens to your computers.

Reference: Impact on U.S. Small Business on Natural and Made Made Disasters, 2007

Little Change, Big Impact!

Published January 13, 2010 New Features Leave a Comment
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Many of you have probably noticed that there was an update to the Soonr Desktop agent the other day. There were many updates to this agent, including the ability to handle large and constantly changing files. Data files like Outlook PST are very difficult to backup because they are always open and often locked. These files are skipped in many backup applications, but not in Soonr!

In addition to these “behind the scenes” improvements, there are little things that have a big impact on how quickly you can accomplish a task. For example, you may notice that when you bring up the Manage Backups dialog in the agent there are sometimes green boxes by some of your folder names. What does this mean?

The green box indicates that there is content inside the folder selected for backup

We have made it easier to identify folder which contain folders marked for backup. Instead of clicking through each folder to figure out which of the nested folders are being backed up, you can see a clear visual indication (aka the green box). If you expand folders with a greenbox, you’ll see a check mark next to folders marked for backup. If the folders are deeper in the folder structure, you’ll continue to see the green boxes until you reach the backup selection.

If you just backup everything in your “My Documents” folder, this may have little impact. But if you have explicitly chosen your folders to back up, this small update makes it easy navigte the folder tree and spot exactly where your backed files are located. It’s like having sign posts guiding the way as you navigate your folder tree.

You can also just click on the green box to select that entire folder and its subfolders for backup.

Mobile in Bed

Published October 12, 2007 Mobile Document Worker , New Features Leave a Comment
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When the term ‘mobile’ is used, it generally refers to being on the ‘go’, i.e. away from work or home. In this new connected age every second counts as we interface with businesses and customers around the world. As businesses and business people, we want to impress clients and compete with quicker response times. Customer needs, on-the-spot trouble-shooting and fast sales-cycle are examples of real time operations that can benefit from being always on. Yet, sometimes it can be a challenge to maintain a balance between our business and personal lives while being always on.

Personally, I have been experiencing this challenge the past few years as a founder and executive here at SoonR.  We have a company with offices in the US and Europe, and are engaged with customers on 3 continents. My phone rings a lot. Text messages come in at all times of day and my inbox grows like weeds. I think I have over 4 thousand messages in my inbox, but that’s another story.

One consequence of this is that I have to turn my smart-phone off when I go to bed, simply to get some quality sleep and not be woken up by constant ringing or other sounds from the phone throughout night. The down-side is that I have had to get a regular alarm clock instead of using my phone.  In the morning I prefer a gradual wake-up rather than jumping out of bed immediately. I have come up with a new ritual which I call ‘mobile in bed’.

The idea to use my Nokia N800 internet device, connected with SoonR from bed. The N800 is an amazing on-the-premise device with fast WiFi connectivity, a great browser (Opera) and scaled down Linux-based architecture. To me, the N800 is a great example of a light internet based device. I hope the UMPC manufacturers are paying attention to this device.

SoonR and the Nokia N800 are great companions; they act as the perfect remote control for my laptop and its applications which is left in my office. I get access to all my emails and attachments (no spam thanks to the spam filter in Outlook) from multiple email accounts (soonr, yahoo-mail and gmail) under one interface. I can easily forward documents and slide-shows as SoonR provides me with access to all my remote PC’s (including Mac’s) where the documents reside.  “Mobile in Bed” means I can have a nice slow awakening in bed where I handle the most urgent business matters before I get up. When I eventually get up and start working on my laptop; all the work I have been doing with SoonR is also synchronized back on my laptop automatically. I can see which emails were sent earlier, meetings scheduled etc. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my smart-phone and use it a lot, but I find myself using it more when I am mobile in the traditional sense: on the train, walking on the street etc.

Viewing the Desktop Folders on the Nokia phone

Viewing photo thumbnails on the Nokia phone

 

I think this is an example of how we will see work habits change over the years to come. The definition of mobile will expand to not only cover when we are physically away from our primary workplaces but also to when we away from the constantly changing digital content that is so critical in our jobs. Work is no longer 9-to-5, its more integrated into our life-style and it can take place anywhere and anytime. At SoonR, we are very focused on understanding the key use cases in this life-style and delivering meaningful solutions – even  in the bed.

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