Technology Blogs

Driving IT Improvements with an Intranet

2012-09-20T06:45:54Z

A modern Intranet is where content management meets social collaboration to provide a platform for innovation and problem solving that produces faster results using fewer resources.

We've all heard the knowledge story before. Knowledge capture and knowledge searching can produce large scale benefits for organizations. While a good Intranet is based on this concept, it is social collaboration that is driving the next generation of Intranet technology. We can take the power of social networking and apply it inside the private company domain to produce meaningful benefits that improve teamwork and foster innovation.

In the IT department, this concept can be applied to build an online help system that includes an FAQ, knowledge base, user discussion forum, IT news, IT procedures, and IT system links. The Intranet can provide all of these features, allowing IT staff to post content and distribute it to the entire company instantly. The Intranet can also build a sharing culture where users can help other users and contribute to solve problems. For example, if an IT staff member is busy working on a project or putting out a fire, another knowledgeable user could respond to a question and add a solution to an ongoing discussion. In this manner, the Intranet produces faster issue resolution and documents solutions in a way that allows other users to later find answers to questions that have already been solved.

A good deal of time can be saved with this technology. The Intranet can help free IT staff to work on new systems, new features, to provide better testing for OS and Office upgrades, or to provide higher quality support for users. Getting the right information to users at the right time is an issue that faces all IT departments. Not having enough time to complete important projects is another such issue. A modern Intranet can reshape your support process in a way that provides faster solutions to users and frees IT staff to work on more projects and better support the company.

Contact an eCorpSys consultant for a demo and evaluation to learn more about how an Intranet can help your organization.

Enterprise Portals Make Sense for IT Staff

2012-05-26T06:46:46Z

Portals are back! Or did they ever leave? Well, they have been around but have had limited use in your average company, until now. Today, with all our business applications going to the web, an Enterprise Portal makes a lot of sense; here's why...

Enterprise Portals offer a one stop shop for information and interaction between employees, staff, customers, and other partners. The ability to provide one location and one consistent user experience to access information from a variety of sources, places, or systems can prove to be very powerful for users. These portals also foster a collaborative environment by providing tools to manage discussions, capture feedback, and keep everyone up to speed. And when there's something you need that doesn't exist yet, portals provide a great platform for application development.

For IT staff, an Enterprise Portal can mean simplified system management by combining features and consolidating functionality within a single IT system. Portals offer flexibility to easily add capabilities such as CMS, DMS, Social, BI, and more inside the portal, without having to learn a new technology system. And when it comes to security, an Enterprise Portal offers comprehensive coverage with fine grained permission and role-based control over portal content, as well as application layer encryption of data transport over the network via HTTPS (SSL).

If you want to integrate with your current user management system, the portal can connect to your Directory Server or SSO server to reduce system administration. You can also integrate your document repository, or other IT systems such as your ERP, CRM, and Ops system to aggregate information and automate transactions. Even better, these portals can connect to your existing application server or database server to reduce your investment and learning curve for the software stack.

If you would like to learn more about portal technology, contact an eCorpSys consultant for more information.

Powerful and Flexible IP Telephony Systems

2012-05-26T06:46:14Z

IP Telephony systems offer powerful features, such as easy capacity planning and zero phone setup, as well as tremendous flexibility to build your own communications network and avoid product obsolescence (via software updates).

Easy Capacity Planning

When it comes to capacity planning, we all know it can be difficult to make the decision of how much extra to spend on phone lines and back-end phone numbers that we may never use. It is often a delicate balance of controlling costs versus handling those rare situations when you may receive an extraordinary amount of calls. IP telephony turns the capacity problem of lines and numbers into a single trunk bandwidth calculation with its ability to route an unlimited number of calls on a single trunk over a single phone number. When it comes to bandwidth, IP telephony has codec options that allow you to increase call capacity by a factor of 3 over analog service codecs. The time has come when we can finally cut costs on lines and numbers without sacrificing peak capacity.

Zero Phone Setup

Centralized provisioning adds "zero phone setup" features that allow you to never touch a phone again for programming. IP telephony servers, such as the eCorpSys Telephony Server, do most of the system deployment work for you. If you have never seen a hundred phones or so come up, get their own firmware and application updates, configure themselves and connect to your phone server, I assure you, it is a thing of beauty. Eliminating phone programming can save your IT staff large amounts of time and hassle, especially if we are talking about a large number of phones, or phones spread out over multiple offices.

Build Your Own Network

The time has come when we no longer need to route all our calls over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or a proprietary phone network setup by your service provider. You can now build your own IP based network to route office to office and other calls over a standard IP network, and you can do it without extra setup or fees from your service provider. The ability to build your own communications network is perhaps one of the most powerful features that IP telephony has to offer because it reduces our reliance on the PSTN and offers no fee, no tax calling capabilities.

Flexible Open Technology

Open technology phone servers offer loads of features like integrated voice mail, email message notification, cell phone user locator, call center management, video communications, robust firewall security, and more. These servers also offer expansion options for future needs to avoid the problem of having your server become obsolete shortly after you purchase it. Servers based on open technology can also be updated in the field to offer new and better features as the world evolves. Proprietary telephony servers often reserve new features for new products because they want you to buy a new system. With open technology, new features can be as simple as a software update.

If you would like to learn more about our IP Telephony systems, you can review features with this link, or equipment options with this link.