These days, a tough economic climate demands that costs are kept to a
minimum, but customers still want high quality products and services at lower
and lower prices. Small businesses have to work harder to squeeze every drop of
value from the resources they have available. Quite simply, small businesses are
struggling to do more with less:
Fewer people
Many companies can’t afford to hire new staff, so are looking for
ways to help their existing people be more efficient and make better use
of their time.
Better teamwork
Staff in small businesses need access to the tools and information
that enable them to work closely together on projects and seamlessly
hand over to colleagues when they are away from the office.
Effective delegation
Small business owners and managers need to get on with running the
business and delegate more of the day to day work to staff. They still
however want to retain control in critical areas like service quality
and customer relationships.
More control
Complying with an ever-increasing array of regulation means having
control of the use of information within the business. Small business
owners and managers need processes and systems that make this easier.
Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 is designed specifically to meet
the needs of small businesses. Based on the latest Microsoft Windows server
technologies, it delivers an integrated, easy to use server solution. It will
provide small businesses with the tools they need to make more effective use of
limited resources. It will enable:
Better access to information
Microsoft SharePoint Services enables the development of a secure,
structured, Intranet site which makes it easier for office-based and
remote staff to share documents and up to date information.
SharePoint lets you keep all the documents about a project in a single
location. Regardless of who or how many people are working on it, a single copy
is available to everyone.
Since you may have several documents being worked on at once, SharePoint
will save you the trouble of checking them all to see if more work has been done
on them by notifying you when a group of documents or lists has been changed.
Aside from project documents, the document library can also be used to house
information that needs to be centrally maintained, such as Health and Safety
procedures. Since SharePoint also has a survey function, when the procedures are
updated you can use this to get people to acknowledge that they have read and
understood the new processes.
Easily manage email, meetings and calendars
With Exchange Server 2003 you can enjoy the full functionality of
Microsoft Outlook. The new system enables greater levels of
collaboration as you can book meetings with colleagues while looking at
their diaries.
Managing actions and agendas around meetings is also much easier as an
automatic storage area is created on the SharePoint intranet that holds agendas,
actions and other documents from the meeting.
Easy collaboration on the move
Comprehensive mobile and remote access functionality means staff can
access these resources from almost anywhere, so effective team working
is not limited to office based staff.
For those users that are constantly mobile and need regular access to
Outlook data such as inbox, calendar and contacts, Exchange 2003 now allows you
to synchronize your data by connecting directly to the company server. This
means that users can update or access emails, contacts or calendar requests
throughout the day whilst mobile on their Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Every time
they synchronize, any changes on the device will automatically be sent back to
their business system and update the server. At the same time any new changes on
the company system, such as new emails and meeting requests will be sent to the
device.
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