Collaborative Working

Collaborative working is one of the major advantages of having your workstations connected to a server based network.  By utilising the services we provide and organising your documents onto the network, any authorised user can access the document without having to ask the author to email it to them or put it onto a memory stick.  It also prevents duplicate copies of the same document from being distributed around your computers and changes getting out of control.  When you try to open a file that is already open by another user, you are notified who has the file open and are not allowed to make changes to the file until that user closes it.

Collaborative working extends far beyond just files and folders.  There are a range of ways that various other services can be ‘shared’ such as calendars, mailboxes and contact lists.

A centralised company contact list would mean that all of your employees can update the same set of contact details instead of having an individual contact list for each user.  This can help you maintain a more complete and up to date set of contacts.  Multiple contact lists can also be used as required, for example, to maintain separate lists of suppliers and customers.

Calendars can be used in very similar ways.  A centralised calendar can work well for aiding staff holiday management allowing your staff members to see what periods have no holidays booked.  Another common use for such calendars is to manage the use of equipment such as reserving a company van for different people on different days.

Mailboxes are also very useful when used for collaborative purposes.  Multiple mailboxes can be created – one for each of your client’s maybe.  Then as emails are received by individuals within the company for a particular client, the message can be copied or moved to the central mailbox so that everyone can easily access it if required.  A centralised mailbox can also receive emails directly so you might have emails sent to sales@mycompany.com delivered directly into a shared mailbox that everyone (or selected users) can see.

So many of our customers that had never worked in these ways before now tell us that they would never go back to working the way they used to.